There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tunnellers and the bridgemen who have been trapped so long in the badland that they have become part of it do not differentiate as his workmates do. That though the Remade here are billeted separately, and there is some effort made to segregate them, the punitive landscape here does not support divisions so strongly as among his own. It is as if the iron link to New Crobuzon conducts its prejudices. The iron-road Remade watch the local Remade. Judah sees them see, sees the gendarmes and the overseers see.

Judah and his team lay tracks into the tunnel, up to its clawed end. They move very slowly. The men who have lived like worms step aside into wax-smeared alcoves. They see by fires and lux hexes in the stone. Judah’s friends are cowed. They blink under the pale wide eyes of the diggers. The slap of their hammers is horrible and loud in that darkness.

There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they cannot join the tunnellers, and they cannot build the bridge, and they can only wait, play cards, fuck and fight.

The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.

Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.

What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.

A tunnel-man is injured-an everyday terror in this blackpowder land, but he responds with an outrage as if it is the first time such a thing has happened. -Lookit, he says holding up his blooded hand. The red on the white dust that coats him is vivid. -They letting us fucking die here.

That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting. -Meeting going on, he says. -Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. -We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.

There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. -Something’s happening, says Ann-Hari to Judah. They sit on a blackened half-rock split by fire and cold water and the strikes of the biggest Remade man. -The girls are frightened.