A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps-sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

-Here. Uzman presses the map. -What’s this?

-Swamp.

Uzman moves his finger.

-Unknown.

-Salt flats.

-Scree.

-Unknown.

-Tar pits.

-Unknown.

-Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

-Do we have any meteoromancers?

-There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. -Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really…

-We need someone can raise a gale-

-No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. -I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

-There must be ways to know when it’s coming…

The young man shrugs. -Pressure, he says. -Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. -We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

-But there are ways of telling…

-Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. -See? What this is?

It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

-You know what that is?

Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

-You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

-I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

-It’s the stain.

-No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

-It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats-

-If they’re there.

-If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

-And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

-We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. -The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.