-Fucking useless, one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. -What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

The free men and cactus workers watch the punitive work, and cannot stop the road unrolling. They wince and watch.

-Stupid scab bastards, a cactus-man says.

They pity the Remade, but cannot forgive them breaking the strikes. The pay train always arrives in the end.

An absurd orgy of speculation, the financiers swimming like grease-whales in a slick of stolen and invented cash, prices for land and the stocks of the TRT soaring. It will not last. As returns slow, as the stench of TRT corruption and government collusion grows overpowering, the weakness at the base will show. When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!

The Remade draw a line. One of them is beaten by the guards and dies, and though he is not the first he was old enough and liked enough that many Remade refuse to work the next day, and carry the corpse in a raucous funeral. The unprecedented situation is digested; messages are expedited back and forth along the track.

The intransigent Remade are ranged alongside the train. The gendarmes take up positions. The guntower on the perpetual train turns.

Oh my gods, Judah thinks.

-Anyone willing to return to work now, raise your hand, a captain says. The Remade are confused. He does not wait more than five seconds before turning his back. He signals someone and the tower fires.

A shell arcs into the mid of the Remade. Later, Judah will realise its load must have been reduced, not to send burning shrapnel into the train itself. Now all he hears and sees is the fire and explosion, the circle of bloody clearance in the Remade.

A strong accomplished man drives a spike down in three strikes. Many men take four swings: cactacae and the most augmented steam-strong Remade two. There are three prodigious and respected cactus-men who can push a spike home in one blow. There is one Remade woman who can do this, too, but in her the ability is judged grotesque.

Judah is a free spiker. No one on the TRT line is higher. He makes each spike a golem, tasked to hide in the earth, so that with each blow it strives to embed itself.

He hears the metal slaps of his maul as the breaths of a stiltspear. Ah ah ah. Ah ah ah. It sends him back to his voxiterator, listening and teasing apart the elements of the sounds, the overlapping beats. Judah sees Thick Shanks talking to someone without looking at them, standing with his back to the Remade stockade, a refigured man behind the chains lounging as if by chance but Judah knows he is listening.