The job went like clockwork for the most part, except the guards at the switchyard started to get lippy and Budd had to shoot one of them to prove they were serious. Wasn’t always the way it went, but it happened often enough that Tits Akimbo wasn’t any too worked up about it. Casualties to a minimum, she’d told them, but situation like that you either shoot one idiot early or all of them later. His own damn fault: it’s one of god’s own fools who acts big at a woman holding a semiautomatic on him.

It’s a new town, so no one knows her. Normally she’s happy to keep close to home, but every so often Tits misses the old days when she had more to prove, where she couldn’t put the fear of god into anyone just by showing up. So she gets a crew together and they go knock some place over, clear it out soup to nuts. Company towns, usually; private equity means private security instead of the cops, means workers who are happy to see the company getting fucked instead of doing the fucking for a change, means more loose money and more cowards.

She tags the walkie talkie. “You into that safe yet?”

“Just about,” says Jemisin, standing guard. There’s a whump she can feel even six blocks away, and Russo is cackling in the background when the walkie talkie squawks again.

“Alright,” she tells the remaining guards, “you all stay calm and you’ll come out of this alive yet.”