– This is only the edge, Judah says, looks at the sky, -of the cacotopic stain. We’re only at the outskirts. But he can feel the ground; he feels its energy in a way he should not. He sees Uzman’s despair.

In their desperation to save the last of their comrades they delay bursting the seam so late the re-formed cadres of militia catch up with the stragglers of Remade. At last there is a stuttering of three explosions, and a huge squall of smokestone kecks up from porous earth and uncoils in a smog that expands fast to clog the channel the graders have made, and moves slower as it begins to set.

Uzman cries miserably out as it enfolds the slower Remade. He looks down at the gaseous rock expanding.

In the ropes of his gut Judah feels a newness, a constructed nonlife, a giant anthropoid wind come to him, as Ann-Hari releases his golem trap. Judah flexes inside, spits out an effort and grabs control of the thing, reaches up as if he would hold its hand and together Judah and his golem run for the unfolding stone. The golem walks into it, stretches out its air arms, pushes back wafts, tries ineffectually to clear a hollow.

Judah is scores of yards from the now sluggish vapor, which is smothering as it indurates. From within its setting stone Judah hears choked calls. In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

Judah reaches them. The first man through is militia, they see through a ragged epidermis of stone, but it is impossible to feel hate or anger for him as he shivers and fights to breathe through a mouth thick with mineral curd. The other is council. There is no saving him. His comrades try to break the boulder that has settled over his face but by the time they do their efforts have cracked his skull.

– We have to go, Uzman shouts from above. He is stricken but controlled.

An enormous boiling of rock is where the train came through. The rails disappear into it, embedded forever or until it desolidifies again. Judah has his golem disaggregate, and the air currents around them change.

There is motion, and Judah’s face curls to see in the mid of the new rock geography a forearm protruding, jutted like some horizontal cliff plant, still clutching or trying to clutch as the nerves of the corpse within the smokestone die.

Though they shatter aspects of the train with their bombs the aeronauts are uncertain. The ballooners swivel to see the sudden blockage, rock all full of their colleagues. They are shot down by boldened Councillors. One falls as Judah watches, gas venting from his split globe.

In sudden formation the aeronauts hornet away over the new low hills. Uzman shouts instructions and Councillors run to strip the fallen ballooner of his equipment, to salvage the cloth of his dirigible. -We have to be scavengers, says Uzman. -We have to learn that, from now on. He looks up at the sky.

– There’ll be more, he says, before Judah can even feel relief.

But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.

– They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. -Some of them was still on the other side.

Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.

Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.

The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.

They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.

The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. -We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. -Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.

They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.

One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.

They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.

– You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. -Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.

– It isn’t finished yet.

– No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle-I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.

– But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?

– I don’t know. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get through. Judah does not know why he is speaking like a prophet. It is not him who speaks; it is his thing inside, his innard good. -They won’t follow you in. I’ll lay money.

They laughed at that. Money was ornament now. There were those who still hoarded it, but it was notepaper for the children. It was jewellery.

– And Uzman was right, even though he was wrong, Judah says. -We should have got word to New Crobuzon. Think on it. No one might know.

There is silence. -You might tell no one, just disappear, and all they’d say is that once, when they was building the railroad, the train just went. The Remade went fReemade and took the train with them. You want more than that. The Remade in the city, waiting, they deserve more.

– There’s those as know what happened…

– Yes but will they do it right? You’ll be rumour-that can’t be altered-but what kind of rumour? Do you want to be a rumour that won’t die? That matters? Do you want them to shout the council’s name when they strike?

Ann-Hari smiles.

Judah says, -I’ll go back. I’ll be your bard.

Some of them say at first that it is cowardice, that he is afraid to come with them across the little purlieu of the cacotopos, but none of them really believe him cowardly. They are sorry that he is leaving them.

– We need your golems, a woman says.

– How can you go? Don’t you care for the council, Judah?

Judah rounds at that.

– You ask me that? he says. -You ask me that? He shames them.