I saw enough Westerns in my last life to know that you don’t want to be the guy arriving on a train at the beginning of a movie. The tough hero-types who save the day always rock up on horses or limp into town after getting ambushed, head straight for the saloon, and order a stiff drink. Dudes who roll into town on the train are the soft city types who can’t figure out which end of their shiny new gun to point at the bad guys.

That said, after a week of gang wars, running for my life from the small-time outfit indenturing me, and just barely surviving a gang riot, the bullet train through the Wilderness Territories was a pretty chill way to cross the six hundred and fifty miles from Jade City to the Bogland. We were able to kick back and read or watch stuff on our HUDs, get snacks from the dining car, and nap on and off. And I got to hang out with Kest.

“Check this out,” she said, leaning over the armrest between us and holding her HUD out to me.

Normally, people wore their HUDs on one wrist and typed or swiped with their opposite hand, but Kest had lost her HUD arm in the tournament. Now that limb ended just below her shoulder, the black script-healing tattoos where it’d been torn off still vivid and dark against her tan skin. To compensate, she usually squeezed her HUD between her knees while she worked on it or propped it against something.

“If I have the hand flip down,” she said, “I could build a revolver to pop up from the back of the wrist. That would come in useful in gang war and other combat situations.”

I took the HUD from her to stabilize it against the shaking of the train and looked down at the blue and white wireframe schematic rotating on the screen.

“That would look really cool,” I said, because I knew exactly zero about this biotech stuff. Then I remembered her magnetic slag trick from the tournament. “But what if they have a Metal affinity on their side, too? Couldn’t they just melt your bullets like you did to the Bailiff’s?”

“If I don’t put a protective layer on them as they’re being fired, they could,” she said, taking the HUD back. She pinched the band between her knees and started swiping at the screen, the black lace in her opal eyes shifting. “Same for the arm. This is still the brainstorming phase, though. It’s hard to say how much of this—if any—will make it into the build. Or how much of what I think will be useful will actually come in handy once I’ve accepted a position with the Technols. I’ll upgrade as needed. I considered having multiple arms to switch between, but that wouldn’t be ideal.”

“You could just store them in your ring,” I said, nodding to the thin metal band around her finger. It didn’t look like much with the naked eye, but once you switched to Ki-sight, you could see the Black Hole Spirit artificery that allowed objects to be stored inside.

“Even if the storage ring came with infinite space, there are going to be lots of situations where calling the arm I needed out, detaching the old one, and attaching the new one would take time I might not have. Given the touch-and-go state of most criminal activity, I’d rather be as prepared as possible ahead of time.”

She paused typing and took a drink from my Coffee Drank. That surprised me for a second. But Kest got that way when she was working on a build, not really attentive to the outside world. And to be fair, the can had been sitting in the cupholder in the arm rest between us, so she could’ve forgotten that hers was in the cupholder on her left side.

I didn’t point it out. Drinking after Kest didn’t bother me. It was kind of cool that her lips had been where my mouth was not that long ago.

“Of course the ideal arm would conceal any illegal components in case I got stopped by the Confederated Planetary Authorities,” she said, half talking to herself. “I should take another look at Warcry’s leg when they get back. No one would suspect a piece of junk like that.”

“You’re really embracing this criminal activity thing,” I said. When I’d met Kest and her twin brother, they’d been scavenging from dead bodies because it was the only way they could support themselves on Van Diemann without joining one of the gangs that ran the planet.

“Not overtly.” She shrugged. “I’ve been messaging with the Technol who made that offer at the bazaar, making sure I can keep my clean record if I accept. She said they have special positions for third-genners as go-betweens with the non-prison planets, jobs where you’re not technically breaking any law, even if you’re helping someone else break it. There are ways to use CPA law against itself if you look hard enough. Sort of like me selling to Naph even though he’s a smuggler.”

I nodded. Kest and Rali had been born on Van Diemann, the children of the child of a political prisoner from their family’s home planet, so they’d had a lot of time to figure out how to get around the restrictions that would keep them from someday buying a ticket to somewhere else in the galaxy.

“Besides,” she went on when I didn’t say anything, “I was never going to get us off this trash heap scavenging. Doing it for sixteen years, I barely saved enough for one ticket. Sixteen more…” She sighed. “That would be a long time to wait.”

She sounded defeated, which I’d never heard from her before. I wanted to make her feel better, but before I could think of anything to say, Rali and Warcry came back from the dining car. Their arms were full of brightly colored cellophane baggies.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“We got food,” Warcry said, kicking the fold-down table so that it dropped into place between the four of our seats. He dumped his bags, then dropped into his seat.

Rali did the same with his armload. A couple bags slid off the mountain, and I caught the ones that dropped off my side.

“That’s a lot of food.” I turned one over and inspecting the picture on the label. Looked like neon green shoestring potatos. AlgaeFrize! the hot pink lettering screamed.

“A little for now, a little for the road.” Rali flicked his long hair out of his face with a jerk of his head and shoved another bag between his sister’s nose and her HUD screen until she grabbed it.

Kest frowned at the bag. “I thought you hated this mass-produced junk food stuff.”

“Yeah, because it’s full of impurities that can slow down or even impede your kishotenketsu advancement, and it tastes like an armpit,” Rali said. He squeezed his bulk past Warcry to the window seat.

“Don’t get him started, yeah?” Warcry said. “He complained about it the whole time we were picking stuff out.”

“But he still bought it,” I said.

“Technically Warcry handled the disgusting affair of exchanging fiat currency,” Rali said. “But it was all they had left in the dining car, and given that the two most reckless members of our little band—” he eyed me and Warcry—“until yesterday had a healing script tattoo that would repair anything not immediately lethal, I thought it would be a good idea for me to infuse a bunch of whatever we could get our hands on with Healing Restoration.”

Kest blinked her lacy eyes. “Rali, were you planning ahead for once?”

“If you call attention to it, I’ll stop forever,” he said.

“Because it sounds like you were using logic and identifying patterns of behavior to plan for eventualities,” she teased. “It’s very Metal of you.”

He grinned and pointed at the bag in her hand. “Eat your lunch. I hunted and gathered myself to the bone for that.”

Things quieted down a little as we all dug into a bag. The AlgaeFrize weren’t quite as bad as Rali made them out to be, but they did have that extra-intense-fake-flavoring taste, and they left green residue on my fingertips like neon Cheetos.

“We’re almost the last passengers on the train,” Rali said, picking up another bag and closing his eyes. When I switched over to Ki-sight, his hands and chest glowed orange with Warm Heart Spirit. He was infusing the AlgaeFrize with his Healing Restoration ability. “I tried to strike up a conversation with the only guy besides us in the dining car, but he wasn’t interested.”

“Mantids never want to talk, do they.” Warcry tipped up his bag and dumped the last bits into his mouth. “I’ve done fights on their planet before. Dead silent, even during the big upsets. The only ones who ever say a word are their females, and only when they’re trying to talk you into fertilizing their eggs, then letting them eat your brains outta your skull.”

“You’ve been hit on by giant insects?” I asked, wiping some of the green AlgaeFrize dust on my jeans.

“Jealous, grav? Win a couple dozen Intergalactic Fighting Tourneys and they’ll be clickin’ in your ear, too. They probably won’t even care about your face,” he said, gesturing at me.

After taking a couple poisoned thorn-whips to the face at the tournament, I was kind of scarred up, pale barbwire-looking slashes across my left cheek. Could’ve been worse, though. Without the healing from the OSS script tattoo, my face might’ve still been scabbed over and festering with that thorny poison.

My first instinct was to bring up the pair of glass bombs Warcry had taken below the belt at the tournament and how the ladies would feel about that, but since I was working on thinking before I spouted off to friends I wanted to keep, I just laughed.

“Mating with mantids? No wonder you’re braindead.”

Warcry pointed at me. “Oi, I got the offers, but I never agreed.”

“Guess it’s an honor just to be nominated,” I said, which none of them got because Earth humor.

“Female mantids eat the entire head,” Kest said absently, her nose already back in her HUD. “They don’t leave half-braindead mates walking around.”

“I don’t know,” Rali said. “That male in the dining car looked like he was wearing that hat to hide something.”

“Didn’t seem quite right, did he, big man?” Warcry said, swiping neon green crumbs from his mouth. “Maybe he got away quick-like after the first bite.”

My Winchester’s alarm started buzzing. I shut it off.

“How much time do we have left?” Kest asked, taking another sip from my Coffee Drank.

“Eighty-four hours,” I said.

We had three and a half days left to get to Heartchamber 4 before Warcry and I got dropped from the Eight-Legged Dragons, but I was still paranoid we’d miss the deadline, so I had set up an alarm on my HUD to go off every twelve hours and keep us on track.

“That should be plenty of time.” Kest swiped out of her schematics and pulled up a map. “We’re only two stops away from the Bogland Station, and from there, it’s just a day’s walk to the coordinates Biggerstaff sent you guys.”

I nodded. “It just seems like that’s probably misleading, though. He wouldn’t give us four days to get somewhere if it was easy. Especially not if this is the Eight-Legged Dragons’ test to see whether we’re worth investing in.”

“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we,” Warcry said, kicking his seat back and putting his boots up on the table. His metal prosthetic grated against the wood as he shoved bags of AlgaeFrize out of the way to make room.

Kest started to take another drink of my Coffee Drank, then stopped.

“This is yours,” she said, shifting in her seat to face me. “Sorry. I think I’ve been drinking out of it this whole time.”

I shrugged. “No big deal.”

“I’ll get you a new one out of the storage ring,” she said.

“Really, it doesn’t bother me.” I took the can from her and drank some to prove it. A little thrill shot through the pit of my stomach at drinking after her. I sat the can back in the armrest. “I’m just sorry you had to drink after my slobber.”

She snorted. “That’s a really gross way to say that. And it wasn’t slobbery. I would’ve noticed.”

“I don’t think you would have,” I joked. “I mean, you didn’t even notice that your can was in the other arm rest.”

She elbowed me, trying not to smile, then went back to researching components for her biotech arm.

Warcry’s idea for a nap looked like a pretty good one, so I leaned my seat back and shut my eyes. With the excitement from surviving the OSS’s attack at the tournament and getting an affiliation with the Eight-Legged Dragons, none of us had felt like sleeping the night before, and that all-nighter was catching up to me.

Instead of dozing off, though, I mostly thought about Kest. Her picking the seat next to mine when we got on the train. Laughing about drinking out of my Coffee Drank can instead of being grossed out. Showing me her plans for a new arm when she hadn’t shown anybody else yet.

Maybe she just did all that stuff because we were friends, but it would’ve been cool if she liked me, like more than a friend.