“Fuck no,” Isaac said again. “Not inland…Let’s go out…Let’s go to Kelltree. Let’s go to the docks.”

So they walked together slowly south and west. They skirted between Saltbur and Mog Hill, shuffling through the busy streets, an unlikely trio. A tall and bulky beggar with a hidden face, a striking crow-haired woman and a hooded cripple walking in unsteady spasming gait, half-supported and half-pulled by her companions.

Every steaming construct that walked past made them duck their heads uncomfortably away. Isaac and Derkhan kept their eyes down, talking quickly under their breath. They glanced up nervously as they passed below skyrails, as if the militia streaking above them could sniff them out from all that way above. They avoided catching the eyes of the men and women who lounged aggressively on street corners.

They felt as if they held their breath. An agonizing journey. They were tremulous with adrenalin.

They looked around them as they walked, taking in everything they could as if their eyes were cameras. Isaac snatched glimpses of opera posters curling ragged off walls, twists of barbed wire and concrete embedded with broken glass, the arches of the Kelltree rail-link that branched from the Dexter Line, hovering over Sunter and Bonetown.

He looked up at the Ribs that loomed colossal to his right, and he tried to remember their angles, exactly.

With every step they pulled themselves free of the city. They could feel its gravity receding. They felt light-headed. As if they might cry.

Unseen, just below the clouds, a shadow drifted lazily after them. It turned and spiralled as their course became clear. It swept giddily in a moment of lonely aerobatics. As Isaac and Lin and Derkhan continued, the figure broke off its circles and shot away at speed through the sky, heading out of the city.

Stars appeared and Isaac began to whisper goodbye to The Clock and Cockerel, to Aspic Bazaar and Ketch Heath and his friends.

It stayed warm as they made their way south, shadowing the trains, into a wide-open landscape of industrial estates. Weeds escaped from lots and encroached onto the pavement, tripping the pedestrians that still filled the night-city, making them swear. Isaac and Derkhan guided Lin carefully through the outskirts of Echomire and Kelltree, bearing south, the trains beside them, heading for the river.

The Gross Tar, shimmering prettily under the neon and the gaslight, its pollution obscured by reflections: and the docks full of tall ships with heavy furled sails and steamboats leaking iridescently into the water, merchant vessels drawn by bored seawyrms chewing on vast bridles, unsteady factory-freighters that bristled with cranes and steamhammers; ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a journey.

In the Cymek, we call the moon’s little satellites the mosquitoes. Here in New Crobuzon they call them her daughters.

The room is full of light from the moon and her daughters, and empty of all else.

I have stood here for a long time, Isaacs letter in my hand.

In a moment, I will read it again.

I heard the emptiness of the decaying house from the stairs. The echoes receded for too long. I knew before I touched the door that the attic was deserted.

I was away for hours, seeking some spurious, faltering freedom in the city.

I wandered into the pretty gardens of Sobek Croix, through fussing clouds of insects and past the sculpted lakes of overfed fowl. I found the ruins of the monastery, the little shell displayed proudly at the park’s heart. Where romantic vandals carve their lovers’ names onto the ancient stone. The little keep was deserted a thousand years before New Crobuzon’s foundations were laid. The god to which it was consecrated died.

Some people come at night to honour the dead god’s ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology.

I visited Howl Barrow today. I saw Lichford. I stood before a grey wall in Barrackham, the crumbling skin of a dead factory, and read all the graffiti.

I was foolish. I took risks. Did not remain carefully hidden.

I felt almost drunk with that little snatch of freedom, eager for more.

So I returned at last through the night, to that hollow and forsaken attic, to Isaac’s brutal betrayal.

What breach of faith, what cruelty.

I open it once more (ignoring Derkhan’s pathetic little words, like some dusting of sugar on poison). The extraordinary tension in the words seems to make them crawl. I can see Isaac striving for so many things as he writes. Bluff no-nonsense. Anger, stern disapproval. True misery. Objectivism. And some weird comradeship, some shame-faced apology.

…had a visitor today…I read, and…under the circumstances…

Under the circumstances. Under the circumstances I will flee you. I will turn and judge you. I will leave you with your shame, I will know you from the inside and I will pass on and I will not help you.

…not going to ask you “how could you?” I read and I feel weak suddenly, truly weak, not as if I will faint or vomit but as if I will die.

It makes me cry out.

It makes me scream. I cannot stop this noise, I do not want to, I shriek and shriek and as my voice grows, memories of war-cries come to me, memories of my band racing in to hunt or fight, memories of funereal ululation and exorcism wails but this is none of these, this is my pain, unstructured, uncultured, unregulated and illicit and my own, my agony, my loneliness, my misery, my guilt.

She told me no, that Sazhin had asked for her that summer; that as it was his gathering-year she had said yes; that she wanted to pair exclusively as a present to him.

She told me I was unfair, that I should leave her immediately, respect her, show respect and leave her be.

It was an ugly, vicious coupling. I was only a little stronger than her. It took a long time to subdue her. She clawed and bit me every moment, battered me viciously. I was unrelenting.

I grew infuriated. Lustful and jealous. I beat her and entered her when she lay stunned.

Her anger was extraordinary and awesome. It woke me to what I had done.

Shame has draped me since that day. Remorse came only a little later. They gather about me as if to replace my wings.

The band’s vote was unanimous. I did not contest the facts (it entered my mind to do so for the briefest moment and a wave of self-loathing made me retch).

There could be no question about judgement.

I knew it was the correct decision. I could even show a little dignity, a tiny shred, as I walked between the elected finishers of the law. I was slow, shuffling with the enormous weight of ballast attached to me, to stop me fleeing and flying, but I walked on without pause or question.

It was only at the last that I faltered, when I saw the stakes that would tether me to the baked earth.