Shaun relaxes. Judah feels him lean backward and puts his arm around him and feels his front slick, too wet for sweat, and Judah knows his friend is dead. The horse stumbles and stops and Judah dismounts, dragging Shaun with him, his sternum all ruptured. Judah hauls him until volleys disturb him and he must let his dead friend go and run through the lines of his comrades and along the train, staying low, grabbing a bow from a pile as he goes. A rivebow it is-he curses its weight, its limited range, but he tries to level it as he runs the length of the battered cars, toward the steaming chimney where his golem trap is set.

He fires a scalpel-edged chakri; he hunkers by Remade and edges toward the cowcatcher. There are thaumaturges among the militia, and darts of baleful energy spit at the Councillors and do arcane damage. The wyrmen perform brave and dangerous raids on the militia, and the militia begin to withdraw.

-We make them run! We make them run! screams a wyrman, hysterical with pride, but she is wrong. The militia are leaving because airships are coming.

-Move! There is a shout. -We’re through! And the segmented edifice lurches and trembles and crawls through the stone mist and up, looking as if it will derail any second, on smokestone shards. The scree moves uneasy but holds, and the carriages progress, bullets typing on their iron skin. The train pauses at the apex of the shard hill, descends. The train finds a pothole-a track cracks, carriages list, but somehow the rutted wheels keep traction and shuddering like something wounded the train rolls into the land beyond.

-Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. -Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.

The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she looks at Judah and nods before he can ask, points into the ground. -There, she says. -I think.

The train gushes steam and hisses impatient. -Get on, get on get on get on, Ann-Hari shouts from the cab. Wyrmen race across the reefs of stone to where the last Councillors hold out at the crevice. The Remade run. They are such little things. Can no one see it? Judah looks west and up. Can no one see the sky? The land?

A panorama like and unlike everything they have passed.