The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.

They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.

The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. -We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. -Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.

They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.

One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.

They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.

-You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. -Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.

-It isn’t finished yet.

-No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle-I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.

-But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?

-I don’t know. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get through. Judah does not know why he is speaking like a prophet. It is not him who speaks; it is his thing inside, his innard good. -They won’t follow you in. I’ll lay money.

They laughed at that. Money was ornament now. There were those who still hoarded it, but it was notepaper for the children. It was jewellery.

-And Uzman was right, even though he was wrong, Judah says. -We should have got word to New Crobuzon. Think on it. No one might know.

There is silence. -You might tell no one, just disappear, and all they’d say is that once, when they was building the railroad, the train just went. The Remade went fReemade and took the train with them. You want more than that. The Remade in the city, waiting, they deserve more.