Derkhan had turned to the nun who followed her emitting a constant stream of blather it was no effort to ignore.

Derkhan remembered her own words as if they had never been real.

This man is dying, she had said. The nun’s noise had quieted, and she had nodded. Can he move? Derkhan had asked.

Slowly, the nun said.

Is he mad? Derkhan had asked. He was not.

I’m taking him, she had said. I need him.

The nun had begun to vent outrage and astonishment and Derkhan’s own carefully battened down emotions had broken free momentarily and tears had flooded her face with appalling speed, and she had felt as if she would howl in misery so she closed her eyes and hissed in wordless animal grief until the nun was silent. Derkhan had looked at her again and shut down her own tears.

Derkhan had pulled her gun from inside her cloak and held it at the nun’s belly. The nun looked down and mewed in surprise and fear. While the nun still gazed at the weapon in disbelief, with her left hand Derkhan had pulled out the pouch of money, the remnants of Isaac’s and Yagharek’s money. She had held it out until the nun saw it, and realized what was expected and held out her hand. Then Derkhan poured the notes and gold-dust and battered coins into it.

Take this, she had said, her voice trembling and careful. She pointed randomly about the ward at the moaning, tossing figures in the beds. Buy laudanum for him and calciach for her, Derkhan had said, cure him and send that one quietly to sleep; make one or two or three or four of them live, and make death easier for one or two or three or four or five or I don’t know, I don’t know. Take it, make things better for how many you can, but this one I must take. Wake him up and tell him he has to come with me. Tell him I can help him.

Derkhan’s pistol wavered, but she kept it trained vaguely on the other woman. She closed the nun’s fingers around the money and watched her eyes crease and widen in astonishment and incomprehension.

Deep inside her, in the place that still felt, that she could not quite close down, Derkhan had been aware of a plaintive defence, an argument of justification-See? she felt herself assert. We take him but all these others we save!

But there was no moral accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could only ignore that anxious discourse. She stared deep and fervent into the nun’s eyes. Derkhan closed her hand tight around the nun’s fingers.

Help them, she had hissed. This can help them. You can help them all except him or you can help none of them. Help them.

And after a long, long time of silence, of staring at Derkhan with troubled eyes, of looking at the grubby currency and at the gun and then at the dying patients on all sides, the nun put the money into her white overall with a shaking hand. And as she moved away to waken the patient, Derkhan watched her with a terrible, mean triumph.

See? Derkhan had thought, sick with self-loathing. It wasn’t just me! She chose to do it too!

His name was Andrej Shelbornek. He was sixty-five. His innards were being eaten by some virulent germ. He was quiet and very tired of worrying, and after two or three initial questions, he followed Derkhan without complaint.

She told him a little about the treatments they had in mind, the experimental techniques they wished to try on his brutalized body. He said nothing about this, about her filthy appearance, or anything else. He must know what’s going on! she had thought. He’s tired of living like this, he’s making it easy on me. This was rationalization of the lowest kind, and she would not entertain it.

It was swiftly clear that he could not walk the miles to Griss Fell. Derkhan had hesitated. She pulled a few torn notes from her pocket. She had no choice but to hail a cab. She was nervous. She had lowered her voice into an unrecognizable snarl as she gave directions, with her cloak hiding her face.

The two-wheeled cab was pulled by an ox, Remade into a biped to fit with ease into New Crobuzon’s twisted alleyways and narrow thoroughfares, to turn tight corners and retreat without stalling. It lolloped on its two back-curved legs in constant surprise at itself, with a stride that was uncomfortable and bizarre. Derkhan sat back and closed her eyes. When she looked up again, Andrej was asleep.

He did not speak, or frown or seem perturbed, until she had bade him climb the steep slope of earth and concrete shards beside the Sud Line. Then his face had creased and he had looked at her in confusion.

Derkhan had said something blithely about a secret experimental laboratory, a site above the city, with access to the trains. He had looked concerned, had shaken his head and looked around to escape. In the dark below the railway bridge, Derkhan had pulled out her flintlock. Although dying, he was still afraid of death, and she had forced him up the slope at gunpoint. He had begun to cry halfway up. Derkhan had watched him and nudged him with the pistol, had felt all her emotions from very far away. She kept distant from her own horror.

Inside the dusty shack, Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out for help. He was astonishingly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.

There was a half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth, and it seemed that he would say something to assuage the old man’s fears, to assure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration. Andrej’s shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac, eager to be reassured.

But Isaac was tired, and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease, stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.

Isaac tried to meet his eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone finally shared her burden.

There was much to be done.

Isaac began his final calculations and preparations.

Andrej squealed through his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.

In curt whispers and brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what he was doing.

He looked over the battered engines in the shack, his analytical machines. He pored over his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box, a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic circuits.

He cleaned it slowly, examined its moving parts. Isaac readied himself and his equipment. When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment, oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had become of Shadrach’s pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac told her he did not know.