With a few Caucusists from various tendencies working together alongside the unaffiliated, it could be fractious. The activists had to whisper their tea-break debates.

Ori spooned broth into bowls. He recognised the faces of many of the outcasts; he knew some of their names. Many were Remade. A woman whose eyes had been taken in punishment, her face a skin seal from nose to hairline, shuffled past holding the rag-coat of her companion. Mostly human but not all, there were other races too, on hard times. An ancient cactus-man, his spines withered and brittle. Men and women scarred. There were some whose minds were gone, who sang hymns or yammered nonsense words, or asked questions that made no sense. “Are you a doubler?” a lank-haired oldster asked everyone who passed, the ancient remains of some accent still audible. “Are you a doubler? Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler, son?”

“Ori. Come for absolution?” Ladia was the full-timer on duty. She teased all the volunteers that they came only to unload guilt. She was not stupid-she knew their allegiances. When Ori took a break, she joined him and poured liquor in his tea. He knew their conversation could not be heard over the table manners of the starving.

“You’re like Toro,” he told her. “You’re the only ones doing anything, making changes here, now.”

“I knew it. I knew you was here because you felt guilty,” she said. She made it light. “Doing your bit.”

He finished his shift, and kept his patience. Ori muttered to those momentarily in his care. Some smiled and spoke back to him; some cussed him with alcohol or very-tea on their breath. “Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” the insistent old man said to him. Ori took his bowl away.

“You are,” the old man said. “You are a doubler. You’re a doubler, you little terror.” The man smiled like a saint and was pointing at Ori’s midriff, where his shirt had fallen forward and exposed his belt, and tucked into it a folded copy of Runagate Rampant, Double-R.

Ori tucked his shirt back in, careful not to be furtive. He washed the bowls at the pump (the man chuckling and pulling at his beard, and saying you are, you doubler at Ori’s back). He did another round of the room, made it slow, offering last dabs of bread, and came back to the laughing man.

“I am,” he said, conversational and quiet. “I’m a doubler, but it’s best you keep that down, mate. I’d rather not everyone knows, understand? Keep it secret, eh?”

“Oh yes.” The man’s manner changed quite suddenly. The cunning of madness came over him, and he lowered his voice. “Oh yes, we can do that, isn’t it? Good people them doublers. You doublers. And them excessive, and free and proscribed.”

The Excess Faction, the Free Union, the League of the Proscribed-it was not just Runagate Rampant; the old man was itemising groups in the Caucus.

“Good people but blather, ” he said and snapped his hand open and shut like a talkative mouth. “All a bit blatheration.” Ori smiled and nodded. “They like talking. And you know, that’s all right, talking’s good. Ain’t always… blather.”

“Who’s the old boy?” Ori said to Ladia.

“Spiral Jacobs,” she said. “Poor old mad sod. Has he found someone to talk to? Has he decided he likes you, Ori? Decided you’re proscribed, or free, a doubler?” Ori stared at her, could not tell if she knew what she was saying. “Has he started on at you about arms or tongues?” She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral!” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’ “

As Ori left that evening, another of the volunteers met him at the door, a kind and stupid man. “Saw you talking to Ladia about Spiral Jacobs,” he said. He grinned. He whispered, “Heard what they say about him? What he used to do? He was with Jack Half-a-Prayer! Swear to Jabber. He was in Jack’s crew, and he knew Scarface, and he got away.”

CHAPTER NINE

The next night Spiral Jacobs was not at the shelter, nor the next. The pleasure and surprise with which Ladia greeted Ori began to change. He saw her watch him to make sure he was not dealing drugs or contraband, but he worked hard, and she could only be puzzled.

On Skullday, as Ori swept the shelter floor, he heard, “Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” Spiral Jacobs saw him and smiled and said, “There’s the boy. There you are, ain’t you, you-” and he blinked and raised one finger and winked. He leaned in and whispered “You doubler.”

One try, thought Ori. He made himself sceptical. One piece of indulgence for this casualty. Only when the food was all distributed and the first homeless families were coming in from begging or thievery to doss down did Ori idle to Spiral’s side.

“Buy you a drink sometime?” Ori said. “Sounds like you and me’ve interests in common. Could chat about stuff. About doubling. About our friend Jack.”

“Our friend, yes. Jack.”

The man lay down in a blanket. Ori’s patience diminished. Spiral Jacobs was digging something out, a bit of paper, dirt ground into its cross of folds. He showed Ori, with a child’s grin.

It was cool when Ori walked home. He traced the route of the railway, by tracks carried over the slates on loops of brick, arches like a sea-snake. Light like gaslight or candlelight spilt from a train’s dirty windows and sent shadows convulsing over the angled roofscape to hide, darkness creeping out again from behind chimneys in the engine’s wake.

Ori walked fast with his head down and hands in pockets when he passed militia. He felt their eyes on him. They were difficult to see, their uniforms woven through with trow yarns that ate what light there was and excreted darkness. At night the clearest thing about them was their weaponry: they were armed, it seemed, at random, and in the dim he could see their batons or stingboxes, their dirks, rotating pistols.

He remembered twelve years ago, before the slump, to the Construct War, when for the first time in a century the militia tradition of covert policing-networks of spies, informants, plainclothes officers and decentralised fear-had become inadequate, and they had gone unhidden and uniformed. Ori did not remember the roots of the crisis. A child among others, with his boisterous gang he had mounted the roofs of Petty Coil and Brock Marsh on the Tar’s north shore, and watched the militia barrage the Griss Twist dumps.

With children’s aggression they had joined in the purge of the city’s constructs, the panicked hounding of the clockwork and steam-powered cleaners suddenly deemed enemy. Mobs cornered and destroyed the welded, soldered things. Most of the constructs could only stand patient while they were torn apart, their glass trod into dust, their cables ripped.

There were some few that fought. The reason for the war. Infected with viral consciousness, programmes that should not be, that had infected New Crobuzon’s constructs, the gears of their analytical engines turning in heretic combinations to spin a cold machine sentience. Thinking motors for which self-preservation was a predicate, that raised their metal, wood and pipework limbs against their erstwhile owners. Ori never saw it.

The militia had levelled Griss Twist’s jungle of trash. They shelled it, rinsing it with fire, advancing in wrecking teams through the melt and ash-scape. There had been some kind of factory there for the pernicious programmes, and it and the monstrous mind behind it were destroyed. It had been a demon or something, or a council of the aware constructs and their flesh followers.

There were still constructs and difference engines in the city, but far fewer, strictly licenced. An economy of golems had half replaced them, making a few thaumaturges rich. Griss Twist’s dumps were still bone-white and blackened wreckage. They were out of bounds, and New Crobuzon’s children would climb or creep in and take souvenirs, and tell each other that the dumps were haunted by the ghosts of the machines. But the most lasting result of the crisis, Ori thought, was that the militia still went unhidden. It was only months after the Construct War that the recession riots had begun, and few of the militia had ever afterward gone back to plainclothes disguise.