With the weeks and the miles and tons comes spring and the slow lengthening of days. The land around the iron road becomes sparse. Judah huddles with his crew behind an overturned cart while a strider family hurls indistinct missiles. The guntower of the perpetual train swivels and lays down craters like flowers.

Judah reads Runagate Rampant.

The borinatch, striders, have reason to hate the TRT. Their land is being stolen by the businesses of New Crobuzon, and the state and militia will not be far behind. Who has not heard the stories of Nova Esperium and the carnage of the natives? Each dead railworker is a tragedy, but the blame lies not with the borinatch, whose revenge is misplaced but whose fears are real. The blame lies with Weather Wrightby, and the Mayor, and the moneyed classes of New Crobuzon suckling at the teat of corruption. We say: For a people’s railway, and peace with the natives!

Fucktown is close. Judah is not a customer there, preferring his own right hand or the guilty shut-eyed clutching of men on men in the hollows each Chainday night to the boredom of the whores.

Each week in the stockades where the Remade are kept there is a concession to conviviality, drunken parties where Remade women are given to Remade men and cheap drink is given to all under the aegis of the overseers. Judah watches the Remade women in the aftermath being bathed in the cold river, screaming at the temperature and drinking purgative to stop pregnancies. One guard oversees this. He is gentle with them. He dresses their bite marks and bruises, and punishes the Remade men who hurt too much or often. -It ain’t right how some of them women is used, he says.

It is common for the wages train to be delayed. A day or two and there are only grumbles, but sometimes as long as a week goes without money. Three times when this happens there is a strike. By some chaos of democracy the track-layers put down their tools and block the train until they have their shekels in their pockets. They are nonplussed by their own mass, by their numbers. Hundreds of muscled men, the tall green brawn of cactacae emerging from them. The prostitutes, the surgeons, clerks, scholars, off scouts, and hunters come to watch them.

Judah stands among them, ashudder with excitement. He is unlocked by this, and is briefly at one with the thing inside him. An intervention, he thinks. He is never among the first wave to put his tools down-like Thick Shanks the cactus spiker who Judah thinks is a Runagater, like Shaun Sullervan the pugnacious alltradesman-but he is always among the second.

In response to the picketing, the Remade are worked hard. The foremen assure the strikers once that every effort is being made to expedite the money, and then they turn to the Remade, who are made to make up for the strike. The chained and altered men rock from blows, from the hexes of thaumaturge-guards; they drip under the weight of their own limbs as well as the loads they carry.