Crews work in cadres, all convict Remade or all freemen, no mixing. With tongs or their own metal limbs they slide the rails out, five men or three cactus or big Remade to each, and lay them down with midwife gentleness. Gaugemen space the irons out, and they in turn are gone, and the spikers move in.

Judah makes each rail momentarily an absurdly shaped golem. No others on his team feel the faint fishlike flutters of the metal as it tries to help him. He lays down angles in the random land. He grows strong. Once he sleeps on the roof of the train to know what it is like. Men have tethered goats up there and even make carefully corralled fires.

A tinker-showman works the length of the road, performing. Judah watches him make his own tiny dancing dirt figures, but they are not golems. They are only matter tugged as if by hand at a little distance, direct manipulations. They have no bounded reality, no ablife, no mindless mind to follow instruction, any more than puppets do.

Slogans are written on the train and the rocks. Each morning they appear, some nothing but crudities to shock the earth, some personal, some polemical, screw you wrightby. Twice when the bell brings Judah out of sleep into the dark morning posters are slathered to the train and to trees.

Some are very simple: FAIR PAY, UNIONS, FREEDOM FOR THE REMADE, and below a little doubled r. Others are a mass of tiny writing. Judah tries to read them while the foremen tear them down.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT. RACKS’-END SUPPLEMENT 3.

The death toll on the TRT Railroad continues to rise, as safety is spurned in the rush for money. The rails go down on the bones of workers, free and Remade…

-What in Jabber’s name these fuckers on about? one man says. -Who ain’t for fair pay? And if there are them as wants guilds I ain’t got no problem, but free Remade? They’re fucking criminals, or don’t these dozy fuckers know that?

Judah is beguiled by the bravery of the dissidents. They creep at night when the gendarmes patrol. If they were caught they would not walk away. They would be made part of the landscape.

Runagate Rampant s are left under tables, on rocks. It is poor distribution, but it is all they have. Judah takes copies, and reads when he is alone.

He is only just aware of the dramas of the line. He works, hardly looking up at a rain-patter of shots down the rail. Later he hears that a joint war party of fReemade and striders, a long way east of their supposed territory, attacked the crews in the rear. They were driven off, but the gendarmes are concerned that so proud a race as striders are allying with the punk fReemade against the trains.