Judah wants her with him. Ann-Hari is lost to her family and her village. There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets.

Ann-Hari is not Judah’s; he cannot keep her. He first finds her when she is flushed by the road, and she takes him and discards her virginity with eagerness he knows has little to do with him. For the few days that she is only his he tries to make it as much as he can; he tries to give the arc of a life’s love. It is not an affectation but a role; he gives himself over. She is looking over his shoulder while she straddles him, for something else-not even something better, but else, more. She makes friends. She comes to him in the village smelling of other men’s sex.

Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.

There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.

One cold night Ann-Hari comes to Judah terrified, blackened, bloodied and welted. There has been a fight. A gang of prostitutes has gone from tent to tent. They have pulled apart any lovers they find, overwhelming the outraged men by numbers, holding them, checking the face and voice of each woman. Those that are locals taking no pay, they have hauled outside and decorated with engine oil and feathers. The gendarmes have sympathies with the working girls, and they let them carry on.

Ann-Hari was rutting a man at the edges of camp when the raucous whores’ justice caught her. She fought back. She punched with all her peasant strength. She knocked three of them down, jabbed out with a little gimlet that punctured an older woman’s stomach. Ann-Hari ran from her whitening victim.