Judah is scores of yards from the now sluggish vapor, which is smothering as it indurates. From within its setting stone Judah hears choked calls. In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

Judah reaches them. The first man through is militia, they see through a ragged epidermis of stone, but it is impossible to feel hate or anger for him as he shivers and fights to breathe through a mouth thick with mineral curd. The other is council. There is no saving him. His comrades try to break the boulder that has settled over his face but by the time they do their efforts have cracked his skull.

-We have to go, Uzman shouts from above. He is stricken but controlled.

An enormous boiling of rock is where the train came through. The rails disappear into it, embedded forever or until it desolidifies again. Judah has his golem disaggregate, and the air currents around them change.

There is motion, and Judah’s face curls to see in the mid of the new rock geography a forearm protruding, jutted like some horizontal cliff plant, still clutching or trying to clutch as the nerves of the corpse within the smokestone die.

Though they shatter aspects of the train with their bombs the aeronauts are uncertain. The ballooners swivel to see the sudden blockage, rock all full of their colleagues. They are shot down by boldened Councillors. One falls as Judah watches, gas venting from his split globe.

In sudden formation the aeronauts hornet away over the new low hills. Uzman shouts instructions and Councillors run to strip the fallen ballooner of his equipment, to salvage the cloth of his dirigible. -We have to be scavengers, says Uzman. -We have to learn that, from now on. He looks up at the sky.

-There’ll be more, he says, before Judah can even feel relief.

But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.

-They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. -Some of them was still on the other side.

Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.

Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.