It is in the company of Thick Shanks that Judah finds Ann-Hari again.

Judah courts the friendship of the militant cactus-man. They talk of the railroad and the uncanny dust-rock landscape and the dry cold of this late winter, and of the rumours that creep down the tracks to them like boxcars. Myrshock’s crews striking again, Cobsea’s government falling again with its meaningless regularity.

They smoke and share drugs around the Fucktown fires, and some of the women join them. It is in the shaking fireside shadows that Judah sees Ann-Hari. She is dressed in the functional provocation of a whore; she sees him as he sees her, but where he stands and cries out and runs to her, she only smiles.

She lets Judah accompany her. Ann-Hari the prostitute has become a nurse, an organiser, a grassroots madame. She has become a counsellor, her strangeness-knowing and credulous in some pastoral combination-meaning the younger and newer girls speak to her for help. Ann-Hari speaks to Shaun and to Thick Shanks. Ann-Hari organises and intervenes.

Judah watches her at the chain stockade. She comes at night to a place where the guards are not watching, and does as Thick Shanks has done, her back to the fence, a Remade man behind her, pretending to be there by chance.

Another man is there, a boy, less than twenty years old. He is propelled to Ann-Hari by the panic that sometimes overtakes Remade. Judah comes forward. In these shocks of psychotic self-revulsion they can hurt themselves or others, and the boy could reach Ann-Hari through the chain. But he hears what they are saying to each other, and he slows.

-I’ll die I’ll die, I can’t go on, I’m cold, look at me, the boy says. He scrabbles at the outsize insect arms that radiate from his neck like a ruff, that clutch and scratch at him.

-I’ll run away.

-Where will you run? Ann-Hari says.

-I’ll follow the rails home.

Ann-Hari’s contact is watching. He has an integument of pipes and pistons emerging from his flesh, a steam-powered skeleton inside and outside.

-You’ll follow the rails.

-I’ll go home. I’ll join the fReemade.

-Go home to New Crobuzon? A Remade. You want to go there? Or you go fReemade? Scrabble like a bandit. They miles from here, they don’t come so close. You be killed by gendarmes within twenty mile.

The boy is quiet for a minute. -I go south. I go north. West.

-South is the sea. Hundreds of miles away. You know how to fish? North into an empty plain and to the mountains? West? Boy, west is the cacotopic zone. You choose that?

-No…

-No.

-But if I stay I die…

-Maybe. Ann-Hari turns and looks at the boy, and Judah can see her seeing him, and the thing in Judah uncoils. -Plenty of us going to die on this road. Maybe you die, be buried like a freeman under the iron. Maybe not. She reaches out and holds the chain so she is all but touching him. His insect neck-legs quiver.