Miles every day. Sharp turns of the reused and reused rails, and the snatch of railroad skirts impediments-pools, rock snarls. Crews of graders throw rubble into sinkholes. Behind the train is a track of dust. The train is in a sparse wood that has waited for the railroad to fill it, and the iron council meets.

-We got to get more planned. We need scouts, hunters, we need water. We have to track a route.

-Where we going then?

-Brothers, brothers…

-I ain’t your brother, a woman shouts.

-All right bloody hell sisters then, and everyone is laughing. -Sisters, sisters…

-They won’t stop, you know. It is Uzman. People quiet. -It ain’t a joke. It ain’t safe. Brothers… sisters… We crossed Weather Wrightby. He won’t forget. They’ll hunt us down.

Steam rises from his pipes. You never wanted us here, Judah thinks. This isn’t what you wanted. You wanted us to hold. Your pretty runagate dreams were of making a line to the guilds, as if they’d run come save us. Now you’re still trying. Though you’d not have chose it thus.

Uzman is a good man.

-It ain’t just the gendarmes. TRT’ll put a price on our head. We stole their train. We stole their railroad. Think they’ll let that go?

-Every bounty hunter in Rohagi’s coming for us. And godspit, you think the city ’ll let this go? It is quiet but for the snap of insects against the lantern. -It’s New Crobuzon’s railway too, and we took it. You think they’ll let Remade walk away, find a place in the wilds? The militia are coming for us now, too. The militia.

-They’ll come in airships. They’ll come over land. Think they’ll let us go to ground, some fucking fReemade arcadia? They’ll bring the train back wearing our heads. We can’t just find a little valley ten, thirty, a hundred miles from here. If we do this… we have to go.

-We have to be gone. Bring me a damn map. Do you realise what we’ve done here? What we are now?

A scattered mess of Remade. A town of Remade and their xenian and freeanole friends. These thieves and murderers, rapists, vagrants, embezzlers, liars. -You look carved, Uzman says with a wonder they can suddenly hear. -Bits of wood, man-sized, whittled by gods. They blink up at him in the shadow of the train they have stolen.

Only three days’ deviation from their plotted route, the iron council is beyond the details of maps. These are strange lands. These are the Middling Sweeps. The Rohagi wilds.

The more intelligent wyrmen are sent out over empty geographies that make them nervous, little urban things that they are. They are charged with finding the hunters still away, the water-rriers in their carts, looking for springs. Those reconnoitring, who will return to find nothing but carnage where the tunnel once was. They will look over the moulding and sunburnt corpses of the gendarme train, and will say, -What happened here? The wyrmen are sent to gather the iron council’s own.