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Piper lands on the roof but accidentally clutches one of the sharpened defense darts and cuts her hand badly. Gee flies down to carry her away, but the two are netted by another glider and brought down to the ground. The bandits offer to make a deal. They will allow Gee to return to the train to get it to stop, but they will hold Piper hostage.
The chamelin grudgingly agrees and flies off while bandits surround Piper with crossbows. Her rage and despair rise to the surface, and her magic unexpectedly makes the crossbows explode. The bandits are terrified and on the verge of killing Piper when Gee returns. Taking them by surprise, he is able to dispatch the group and fly back to the train with Piper.
With yet another glider in pursuit, Gee tosses Piper onto the roof of the observation deck where Anna is waiting. Gee goes back to battle with the aircraft until he and the pilot have tumbled back onto the observation deck too. The bandit tries to attack Gee with a knife, but Anna and Piper pin his arms. He shakes Piper off and slashes Anna’s arm from shoulder to elbow before being thrown off the train by Gee. Fearing for Anna’s safety, Piper passes out from shock.
The synergist awakens hours later in Gee’s room, where her bloodied clothing has been changed, and her hand has been bandaged. He explains that the bandits weren’t only after the cargo. Some were acting on Doloman’s orders to abduct the girls. When Piper asks about Anna, Gee says she will be all right, but his tone alerts Piper to danger. She demands to see her friend immediately.
Anna is asleep in Trimble’s room, and the fireman shows Piper her injury. Piper realizes that Anna is part machine because the wound in her arm reveals wires: “Beneath the surface wound, where deeper layers of skin and tissue should have been, was instead a mass of metal—machine parts, interwoven gears and wires that were more complex than anything she’d ever seen before” (311-12). Trimble says that Anna’s sole hope of recovery is Piper. The girl’s synergist abilities may be the only thing able to heal her.
Trimble and Piper work all night to mend the complex web of tissue and mechanical parts in Anna’s arm. In the process, they discover that Anna has a separate power source in addition to her human heart. This energy center is located under the scar on the back of her neck. By dawn, they succeed in the complex task of repairing her.
Afterward, Piper tells Jeyne that it isn’t safe for them to go all the way to Noveen with Doloman waiting for them there. Instead, Jeyne proposes to drop them off in a small town until more permanent arrangements can be made. With this assurance, Piper goes to get some rest and manages to sleep for an entire day. She is abruptly awakened by Jeyne to learn that Anna has left the train on her own.
Piper learns Anna slipped off the train at its last stop before Noveen. She left a note for Piper stating that she intended to find Doloman at the big house on the hill that the seer showed them in her vision. Anna believes Doloman won’t harm her, and she wants to bargain with him so that he will stop hunting Piper. Rather than trying to intercept Anna before she reaches Doloman’s house, Piper plans to take him by surprise. He doesn’t know that she is a synergist, which might work in her favor.
When the train reaches Noveen, Gee flies Piper to the gardens adjoining the mansion on the hill. He promises to return when she finds Anna. Then, Piper finds one of Doloman’s guards and uses some slaver dust to force him to give her access to the house. Piper searches frantically until she finds an upstairs sitting room where Anna is lying unconscious on the sofa. Doloman enters and greets her, unsurprised by Piper’s appearance.
Piper demands to know why Anna won’t wake up. Doloman says that this is Piper’s doing. Anna can’t return to consciousness unless Piper is nearby. Doloman admits that he realized how essential Piper is to Anna’s survival from the very start. He says he first acquired her from a trader in Scrap Town Eighteen, who said she had fallen to earth with some other meteor debris. Once Doloman determined what she was, he worked for a year trying to bring her back to consciousness with no success. He returned to the scrap towns, hoping to find the trader who sold Anna to him, which was how he and Anna were caught outside during the storm. Doloman realized Piper’s magical gift with machines was the only reason Anna woke up. If she is separated from Piper for too long, she will lapse back into unconscious stasis.
Doloman admits that he is working for the Merrow Kingdom against the interests of the Dragonfly territories and that mechanical humans could be a great advantage. He says everyone will be better off once Merrow takes over, even the scrappers. Doloman offers Piper and Anna a life of luxury as his adopted daughters, but Piper refuses to let him experiment on Anna any further. She believes neither kingdom should have complete power and flatly turns down Doloman’s offer.
On hearing Piper’s voice, Anna awakens. She also tells Doloman that she wants to go away with Piper. At this point, Doloman declares that neither one will be leaving. Planning ahead, Piper has brought a diversion in the form of one of Trimble’s vials of fire, which she slips to Anna. The girl hurls it at Doloman, setting his clothes ablaze. Piper then takes a bronze statue, hurls it through one of the large windows, and pushes Anna out on the balcony. Piper orders Anna to jump where Gee is waiting to catch her and fly her to safety. Meanwhile, a contingent of the king’s guards comes crashing into the room to arrest Doloman for treason. Gee returns to rescue Piper, but Doloman manages to grab hold of her. She tells the chamelin to go back to the train and find another way to rescue her.
The king’s guard takes both Doloman and Piper into custody. Anna has also been captured. Doloman is led off in shackles, but the girls are shown into a room to await an audience with the king. Luckily, he doesn’t know why Doloman was pursuing them. Anna smoothly explains that she was a chambermaid on the train who accidentally came across some of Doloman’s treasonous correspondence with the Merrow Kingdom. Not knowing what to do, she showed the letter to Piper, and Doloman has been pursuing them ever since. Satisfied with this explanation, the king allows them to return to the 401. He says that Doloman will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Back on the train, the girls are offered jobs by Jeyne, and both are overjoyed to accept new work and a new home. Later, Piper tells Anna that she is part machine, which the latter already knew, and that the two of them need to stay together or Anna will return to permanent stasis. Anna is philosophical about the situation and says she always wants to stay near Piper.
Gee is pleased that Piper will remain aboard, and the two seem to be on the verge of a budding romance. Piper concludes the story happily by saying,
Here she was—a scrapper, a machinist, a synergist. A chamelin walked next to her, holding her hand. Her sister was half human, half machine. Miles and miles of track, and the whole world spread out before them, waiting (386).
The book’s final segment sees the resolution of the troublesome theme of Hybrid Identities. Throughout the novel, Piper struggles with her synergist abilities because they make her different. As an orphan, she was already disturbed by her outsider status, and her magical abilities only further emphasize her separation from normal people. Her dislike of singularity is put to the ultimate test when Anna’s arm wound reveals her to be part machine. Fortunately, Piper can embrace Anna’s uniqueness. She says, “But machine wasn’t the right word for Anna. She might have machine parts running the show under her skin, but her mind and her heart were just like any other human’s—and better than most” (331).
In addition to demonstrating Piper’s growing attachment to Anna, these chapters also indicate the degree to which the entire crew of the 401 has become attached to one other. After Anna and Piper are able to help cure Gee, a grateful Jeyne declares that she will defend them because they are now part of her found family too:
‘I talked to Jeyne earlier,’ Trimble said, ‘while I was mixing the treatment. I’ll tell her that Gee’s going to be all right, thank the goddess. But she wanted me to tell both of you that if Doloman wants you, he’ll have to come through her, me, and our whole crew first’ (248).
For her part, Anna also wants to protect Piper and the rest of the 401 crew. She does this by running away and surrendering herself to Doloman for their sake. As might be expected, no one will allow her to make that sacrifice on their behalf, so Gee and Piper fly to her rescue. Piper’s pivotal confrontation with Doloman revisits the theme of The Competition for Resources and its associated symbol of money. Doloman has thrown his support behind the Merrow Kingdom because he sees a more advantageous financial position for himself by doing so. He offers Piper and Anna a splendid deal if they cooperate with him:
Doloman would take Piper and Anna into his care, make them the richest two girls in Solace, and provide for their every need while he studied Anna. On top of everything, he’d have a synergist around to make sure his war machines were in the best shape possible for Merrow to take over the world (359).
Since Piper’s Achilles heel has always been money, this offer might be her greatest temptation. In an earlier chapter, she stops herself from stealing Anna’s money belt and abandoning her friend, but Doloman is offering her everything she ever wanted by agreeing to adopt both girls. Piper would have wealth, a home, and a family. Her earlier years of poverty make her realize the full value of these advantages. However, she recognizes the limits of material gain too. For all intents and purposes, Anna has become her sister, and the pull of family reasserts itself. A few chapters earlier, in a conversation with Jeyne and Gee, Piper says:
I never wanted to be a burden on you or anyone else. I was just so tired of being poor, of being nothing but a scrapper in a tiny little town in one corner of the world. But it’s different now. I always wanted to earn my place. Now I know there’s more to it than that. I need to look out for more than just myself (328-29).
Piper feels compelled to look after Anna because she regards her as family. Thus, when Doloman makes an attractive monetary offer, she turns him down. Doloman represents the lure of a false home. Superficially, he can meet all the material needs of the girls. However, he offers no emotional connection. Exploitation lies at the core of his offer. In contrast, Piper recognizes that the 401 is her real home and its crew is her real family. She concludes that this is all she needs to be happy:
She’d dreamed about escaping aboard the 401, but she never thought she’d be calling it her home. Yet here she was—a scrapper, a machinist, a synergist. A chamelin walked next to her, holding her hand. Her sister was half human, half machine. Miles and miles of track, and the whole world spread out before them, waiting (386).