Judah cannot understand what the fReemade want. They die in the raids, too. Judah does not see it, but he hears that a litter of fReemade bodies and their nearly dead are laid across the line for the perpetual train to dismember. They steal odds of iron, machinery, a few cattle. Can it be worth it?

The ground kinks toward higher rocks and trees. The grading crews are nearby, slowed by the sudden gnarlings in the way; they have met tunnellers who have been rasping out a hollow in granite for two years, and who have not yet come through.

A tide approaches, a rill of brown. It is a forestful of insects fleeing the graders and the cutters.

Men swear and try to cover themselves. The insects buffet the crews, millions of tough bodies: their chitin cuts. They are big as cactus thumbs. Mindlessly they fight the train. They immolate themselves in the gears and beneath the wheels, and the tracks become slippery with oily carnage. Pipes vent sand for traction.

From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.

Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tunnellers and the bridgemen, the train and track-layers meet the graders, the whore and mendicant followers meet the train, and everything stops.

Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tunnel. Judah climbs the rise. On the other side it is sheer, edging a ravine. He can see the nearly finished bridge, girders emerging two hundred feet below him, marking where the tunnel will break through. There are men suspended in baskets, tamping charges into the holes they drill, hauled away as fuses spit.

There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.

Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.

There is a huge celebration that night, the tunnellers and bridgemen delirious with new company. Judah drinks. He dances to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy with Ann-Hari, and she with him, and then with Shaun Sullervan, and with Thick Shanks. They smoke; they drink. Men are speechless from the cheap drugs and hexed moonshine they have concocted in stills.