jumble of overturned furniture.
Amaranthe skittered backward and yanked her crossbow off her back. The soldier’s glare seared her like flames, but he didn’t rise from his one-knee crouch. Surprised he didn’t lunge at her, she aimed the bow between his eyes.
“Stay,” she said.
Beyond the soldier, the shouts and clashes of steel had grown less frenzied. The knockout gas, Amaranthe realized. It was working. Good. All they had to do was-
Fierce bangs sounded behind her, and she jumped. On the other side of the door, armed soldiers crowded the balcony. More men waited on the balcony of the car behind them.
One soldier smashed the butt of his rifle against the door’s window. Amaranthe expected the glass to shatter into pieces, but the thick material held, at least under this first assault.
Amaranthe spun, thinking to find Maldynado and get his smoke grenade. The less those soldiers outside could see the better.
She almost tripped over her first attacker-he’d collapsed onto the carpet. A step past him, Maldynado knelt over a prone soldier, seemingly having the upper hand, but he was gripping a chair for support. His mask hung askew, leaving his nose exposed to the air.
Amaranthe adjusted it for him while keeping an eye on the action-even as she watched, a body flew through the air, landing hard against a bank of windows before sliding down onto a sofa. The smoke made it impossible to see who was where, but she was relieved that the numerous inert figures sprawled on the floor or draped over furniture were all wearing uniforms.
“No falling asleep,” Amaranthe told Maldynado, yelling to be heard over the shouts and bangs coming from without as well as lingering ones from within. She tightened the strap around his head and added, “You’re too heavy for anyone to carry out of here.”
Maldynado blinked at her with glassy eyes, but he managed to lever himself to his feet. “What, only the emperor gets a free ride?”
He pointed toward the left side of the car, and Amaranthe was tempted to head in that direction, but glass broke behind her. Someone was going to have to fight off the soldiers trying to get in on her end. She swapped the crossbow for the blowtorch and handed the tool to Maldynado, then took a smoke grenade clipped to his belt.
“Let’s trade,” she said. “Find the others, and as soon as they have Sespian, cut a hole in the ceiling so we can get out that way.” Amaranthe didn’t like the vision she had of leaping from rooftop to rooftop with soldiers shooting at them from each balcony, but now that they’d been forced to move before the landslide distraction, she didn’t see that they had another choice, not if they wanted to get back to the locomotive.
More glass cracked behind her. Amaranthe grabbed her crossbow and strode back to the door, only to find the glass hadn’t yet broken under the soldiers’ assault.
She spun around, looking for what had shattered.
A weapon fired, and a bullet whizzed past her ear, stealing a tuft of hair. She lunged behind an upturned table, her heart thundering in her chest, and tried to see where the shot had come from.
There. A soldier was hanging from the roof by one hand and knocking broken shards of glass away from one of the side windows, trying to make a hole large enough to crawl through. He’d discarded the one shot pistol, but the determined fury on his face said he’d have no trouble strangling Amaranthe with his bare hands once he got inside.
Amaranthe thumbed the tab open on the smoke grenade and set it where it’d cloud the air between her and the soldier and also between her and the door. Crossbow in hand, she jumped onto a chair near the intruder. He saw her coming, but he couldn’t stop her when he was dangling from one hand outside the train.
“Go back to the other car,” Amaranthe said, trying to look like a crazy woman who would love shooting him, as she aimed the crossbow at his face.
Thanks to the smoke wafting everywhere, her bloodshot eyes probably were crazy looking, but there was no fear on the soldier’s face. Lips curled into a ferocious snarl, he thrust his arm through the window, grabbing for the crossbow. The length of his reach surprised Amaranthe, but she pulled the weapon back, evading him. The soldier let go of the roof and gripped the glass-filled frame of the window with both hands. Blood streamed down the broken pane, but he didn’t seem to notice. He pulled himself forward, trying to thrust his broad shoulders through the window, even as his legs dangled outside, thumping where they bumped against the train wall.
Amaranthe’s finger tightened on the trigger. She couldn’t let him in, not when more would follow, but if she shot him, if they shot anyone…
Bashes continued at the door she’d come through, and the chair she’d used to add strength to the lock fell away. A crack sounded, the thick glass finally giving.
Amaranthe flipped the crossbow around, gripping it by the lathe. She swung the weapon at the soldier’s face like a club. He couldn’t dodge, not when he was wedged part way through the window, and it cracked against his skull. Reverberations coursed up Amaranthe’s arm. She gritted her teeth and swung again.
It wasn’t a good solution, but it was the best she could come up with. If he was forced to let go and fell, he might still live. If she had to shoot him…
The man roared in pain, but hung on with the tenacity of a tick. She refined her attack and aimed for his hands instead of his head. Despite battered, broken fingers, he refused to let go.
Footsteps beat against the roof. Amaranthe glanced over her shoulder, hoping Maldynado had burned an escape hatch and that was the sound of her men climbing out, but that wasn’t the case. Maldynado and Basilard were standing in the middle of the aisle, pointing upward and arguing. She didn’t see Sicarius, but smoke obscured the back half of the car. Either way, that wasn’t him up there. There was far more than one pair of feet making those thumps.
Another window broke on the other side of the train. In the seconds she’d been distracted, Amaranthe’s soldier had crawled farther inside. Her swings grew harder and more desperate. He knew she wasn’t trying to kill him, and he wasn’t going to give up.
Frustration burned Amaranthe’s eyes almost as must as the smoke. They weren’t going to be able to get out of this. If soldiers were on the roof and on either end of the car, where could her team go to escape?
“Let go, curse your ancestors,” Amaranthe growled at the soldier.
“Die, bitch,” he spat back.
Something in his tone made her pause. Defeat? The soldier had stopped pushing through, and he was glaring at her and breathing heavily, but his eyes had a glassy mien. Maybe he’d sucked in enough knockout gas to dull his senses. Or maybe he’d lost enough blood to do the same. He’d probably done more damage to himself crawling through the glass than he’d received from her beating.
Something brushed Amaranthe’s shoulder, and she spun, crossbow clenched in her hands.
Sicarius stood in the aisle with Sespian slung over his shoulder and a pistol in his hand. His eyes were grim above his mask, and blood spattered his hands and face. Sespian wasn’t moving.
“They’re on the roof,” Sicarius said, his voice distorted by the mask. “We’ll have to start shooting people if we hope to escape.”
“No,” Amaranthe said.
A slam sounded at the door, and more glass cracked. Smoke hid the window, but she knew it was weakening.
“Then we’ll be captured,” Sicarius said.
“No, give me another option.”
Maldynado and Basilard joined them. Maldynado waved the torch. “I stopped trying to cut through the roof when people started climbing around up there. There’s all sorts of wood in here. I could light the place on fire.”
“With us inside?” Amaranthe asked. “That’s not the option I had in mind.”
A window broke in the middle of the car, and shards of glass flew inward. Basilard ran to take care of the intruder.
“Everyone in here is down, but there’s a man in the corner that was trying to get up,” Maldynado said. “I think this stuff is already wearing off.”
Amaranthe stood, eyes searching the car, seeking inspiration. If they couldn’t go out the windows, through
