They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.

-The gendarmes are coming.

Judah goes back with the demolishers.

-I want to do this with a golem, he says. He touches the flimsy bridge, sends his power out conducted by the metal, makes it ab-live. No one is listening to him. -I want to make this rail a golem. I want to make the rails conductors for it.

He can hear the crack of unsettling metal as the tracks try to stretch and become a giant man. He shudders. He has not the strength for this. His companions climb the shaking bridge, cross into the darkness of the hole. It is not golem they prepare but it is an intervention.

Judah rejoins the train shunting on the flat, toward Cobsea. It is turning. Some popular committee, some delegated or loudly insistent group squatting on the weather-hood, directing the track- layers. They turn from the invisible line to where that fickle town waits. With taps from the mallets, with their expertise, the perpetual train veers. Judah helps the crews take up the final rails and return them to the front. The tracks are turning.

The perpetual train deviates, west-northwest. Into wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place. The train is going feral. Judah cannot breathe.

(Much later he hears the crack and billow of explosions. He imagines the poorly built bridge folding and become spillikins. He imagines the gendarme’s train jackknifing to kiss its own tail, voiding men and ordnance, uncoiling to the chasm floor. He thinks of Oil Bill’s plan, and of the detritus that will scud across the dried-up river. The train and the skeleton of the bridge will settle, become wood-and-metal fossils.)

The perpetual train has gone wild. The iron council is renegade.

Spring is starting to sing summer, and the perpetual train is buzzed by insects Judah has never seen before, like folded paper lanterns, like tiny hooded monks. Their ichor is bloodred.

Judah hauls rails. He hauls them up, unbuckling the past. Behind him the army of camp followers are suddenly full of mission. They carry hoes and break up the earth where the tracks have been.

It is ineffective camouflage. They cannot pass without indelible marks. It will take years of earth shucking and rock rabbits and rock foxes crisscrossing ruts with their own paths, years of rain and winds before the scab left by the perpetual train is gone.

There is so much to do. It is not easy to run away.