They had to drag me the last twenty feet, into the dried-up bed of the Ghost River. I twisted and fought at every step. I begged for mercy I did not deserve. We were half a mile from our encampment and I am sure that my band heard every scream.

I was stretched out cruciform, my belly in the dust and the sun driving upon me. I tugged at my bonds until my hands and feet were absolutely numb.

Five on each side, holding my wings. Holding my great wings tight as I thrashed and sought to beat them hard and viciously against my captors’ skulls. I looked up and saw the sawman, my cousin, red-feathered San’jhuarr.

Dust and sand and heat and the coursing wind in the channel. I remember them.

I remember the touch of the metal. The extraordinary sense of intrusion, the horrific in-out-in-out motion of the serrated blade. It fouled with my flesh many times, had to be withdrawn and wiped clean. I remember the breathtaking inrush of hot air on tissue laid bare, on nerves torn from their roots. The slow, slow, merciless cracking of bone. I remember the vomit that quenched my screams, briefly, before my mouth cleared and I drew breath and screamed again. Blood in frightening quantities. The sudden, giddying weightlessness as one wing was lifted away and the stubs of bone trembled shatteringly back into my flesh and ragged fringes of meat slithered from my wound and the agonizing pressure of clean cloth and unguents on my lacerations and the slow stalk of Sanjhuarr around my head and the knowledge, the unbearable knowledge that it was all about to happen again.

I never questioned that I deserved the judgement. Even when I fled to find flight again. I was doubly ashamed. Crippled and shorn of respect for my choice-theft; I would add to that the shame of overturning a just punishment.

I could not live. I could not be earthbound. I was dead.

I put Isaac’s letter in my ragged clothes without reading his merciless, miserable farewell. I cannot say for sure that I despise him. I cannot say for sure I would do other than he has done.

I step out and down.

Some streets away in Saltbur, a fifteen-storey towerblock rises over the eastern city. The front door will not lock. It is easy to clamber over the gate that supposedly blocks access to the flat roof. I have climbed that edifice before.

It is a short walk. I feel as if I am sleeping. The citizens stare at me as I step past them. I am not wearing my hood. I cannot see that it matters.

No one stops me as I climb the huge building. On two levels, doors open very slightly as I walk past on the treacherous stairwell, and I am stared at by eyes too hidden in darkness for me to see. But I am not challenged, and within minutes I am on the roof.

One hundred and fifty feet or more. There are plenty of taller structures in New Crobuzon. But this is high enough that the block rears out of the streets and stone and brick like something enormous emerging from water.

I stalk past the rubble and the signs of bonfires, the detritus of intruders and squatters. I am alone in the skyline tonight.

The brick wall that contains the roofspace is five feet high. I lean on it and look out, to all sides.

I know what it is I see.

I can place myself exactly.

That is a glimpse of the Glasshouse dome, a smudge of dirty light between two gas towers. The clenching Ribs are only a mile away, dwarfing the railways and the stubby houses. Dark clutches of trees pepper the city. The lights, the lights of all the different colours, all around me.

I vault easily onto the wall, and stand.

I am on top of New Crobuzon now.

It is such an enormous thing. Such a great wallow. There is everything within it, spread out under my feet.

I can see the rivers. The Canker is about six minutes’ flying time away. I stretch out my arms.

The winds rush up to me and hammer me with joy. The air is boisterous and alive.

I close my eyes.

I can imagine it with absolute exactitude. A flight. To kick out with the legs and feel my wings grab the air and throw it easily earthward, scooping great chunks away from me like paddles. The hard slog into a thermal where the feathers plump and prime, spread out, drifting, easing, gliding up around in a spiral over this enormity below me. It is another city from above. The hidden gardens become spectacles to delight me. The dark bricks are something to shake off like mud. Every building becomes an eyrie. The whole of the city can be treated with disrespect, landing and alighting on a whim, soiling the air in passing.

From the air, in flight, from above, the government and militia are pompous termites, the squalor a dulled patch passing quickly away, the degradations that take place in the shadow of the architecture are none of my concern.

I feel the wind force my fingers apart. I am buffeted invitingly. I feel the twitching as my ragged flanges of wingbone stretch.

I will not do this any more. I will not be this cripple, this earth-bound bird, any longer.

This half-life ends now, with my hope.

I can so well picture a last flight, a swift, elegant curving sweep through the air that parts like a lost lover to welcome me.

Let the wind take me.

I lean forward on the wall, out over the tumbling city, into the air.

Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised.

And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them mercilessly the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.

And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.

A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.

A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.

I find that I am not surprised.

Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.

He invites me in. Into his city.

I step forward into what little light there is.

I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.

I know how I must look.

My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.