Derkhan sleeps for hours, then sits alone, her sadness and her guilt finally given space to flower. Lin moves fitfully, in and out of consciousness. Isaac dozes and eats the food we have stolen. He cradles Lin constantly. He talks of Jack Half-a-Prayer in wondering tones.
He sifts through the battered and broken components of the crisis engine, tuts and purses his lips. He tells me he can get it working again, no problem.
At that I come alive with longing. A final freedom. I want if badly. Flight.
He reads the pilfered papers over my shoulder.
In the climate of crisis, the militia are to be given extraordinary powers, we read. They may revert to open, uniformed patrols. Civilian rights may be curtailed. Martial law is mooted.
But throughout that blustery day, the shit, the filthy discharge, the dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through the aether and on into the earth. I fancy I can feel it as I lie under these dilapidated planks; it subsides gently around me, denatured by the daylight. It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension and away.
And when the night comes, the nightmares have gone.
It is as if some gentle sob, some mass exhalation of relief and languor sweeps the city. A wave of calm gusts in from the nightside, from the west, from Gallmarch and Smog Bend to Gross Coil, to Sheck and Brock Marsh, Ludmead and MogHill and Abrogate Green.
The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.
The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.
But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.
Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.
I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.
When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.
We have been freed.
This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.
We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.
We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.
But she does not.
That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.
But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.
She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.
She raises her hands and signs for him.
He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.
Derkhan s eyes widen as she reads the words.
Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.
Morning…food…warming, he falters, insect…journey…happy.
She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.
He comforts her, holds the apple before her, helping her to bite, wiping her when she drips juice and residue across herself. Afraid, she signs, as Isaac hesitantly translates. Mind tiring spilling loose, art Motley! She shakes suddenly, peering around her in terror. Isaac shushes her, comforts her. Derkhan watches in misery. Alone, Lin signs desperately, and spews out a chymical message that is opaque to us all. Monster warm Remade…She looks around. Apple, she signs. Apple.
Isaac lifts it to her mouth and lets her feed. She jigs like a toddler.
When the evening comes and she falls asleep once more, quickly and deeply, Isaac and Derkhan confer, and Isaac begins to rage and shout, and to cry.
She’ll recover, he shouts, as Lin shifts in her sleep, she’s half-dead with fucking tiredness, she’s had the shit beaten out of her, it’s no wonder, no wonder she’s confused…
But she does not recover, as he knows she will not.
We ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone, burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men.
Lin wakes happy, talks animated gibberish with her hands, flails to stand and cannot, falls and weeps or laughs chymically, chatters with her mandibles, fouls herself like a baby.
Lin toddles across our roof with her half-mind. Helpless. Ruined. A weird patchwork of childish laughter and adult dreams, her speech extraordinary and incomprehensible, complex and violent and infantile.
Isaac is broken.
We move roofs, made uneasy by noises from below. Lin has a tantrum on our journey, made mad by our inability to understand her bizarre stream of words. She drums her heels on the pavement, slaps Isaac with weak strokes. She signs vile insults, tries to kick us away. We control her, hold her tight, bundle her away.
We move by night. We are fearful of the militia and of Motley’s men. We watch out for constructs which might report to the Council. We watch carefully for sudden movements and suspicious glances. We cannot trust our neighbours. We must live in a hinterland of half darkness, isolated and solipsistic. We steal what we need, or buy from tiny late-night grocers miles from where we are settled. Every askance look, every gaze, every shout, sudden flurry of hooves or boots, every bang or hiss of a constructs pistons is a moment of fear.
We are the most wanted in New Crobuzon. An honour, a dubious honour.
Lin wants colourberries.
Isaac interprets her motions thus. The faltering charade of chewing, the pulsing of her gland (an unsettling sexual sight).
Derkhan agrees to go. She loves Lin, too.
They spend hours on Derkhan’s disguise, with water and butter and soot, ragged clothes from all over, foodstuffs and the remnants of dyes. She emerges with sleek black hair that shines like coal-crystals and a puckered scar across her forehead. She holds herself hunched and scowls.
When she leaves, Isaac and I spend the hours waiting fearfully. We are almost totally silent.