-You will, you’ll get through, sisters. He looks at them without even uncertainty. -Take it, he says. His voxiterator. They are quizzical. -Here. This is how you make it keep what you say. They watch him load the wax and take what spare cylinders he has. -One every year, he says slowly. -Send me one back. Wherever you are. By boat, horse, foot, whatever. We’ll see if they get through. I want to hear your voices. He looks at Ann-Hari. -I want to hear your voices.

One by one he holds them. He grips each of his comrades very hard, even those whose names he does not know. -Long live iron council, he says to each of them in turn. -Long live, long live.

With sudden mischievous love Judah tongues Uzman, and the Remade jerks and is about to pull away and then does not. Judah does not kiss him for long. -Be gentle to the Chainday-night boys, he says in the Remade’s ear, and Uzman smiles.

And Judah holds Ann-Hari and she kisses him as she did when first they were lovers, and he pulls her close by the hips and she holds his face for seconds. -Long live, he whispers into her mouth. -Long live.

He has forgotten how much faster it is to travel alone. It is not a day before he is returned to the smokestone. The hand of the trapped man, egressing the rock, has been gnawed down to red bone.

Judah walks across the tops of the swells as if over the sea. He sees detritus from the fight and a scattering of corpses. At noon he feels shadows, and over him is a school of airships, moving toward the perpetual train. Judah shields his eyes and leans against his staff.

He supposes that perhaps he should be afraid for his comrades, but he is not. He reads the changing formations of the dirigibles. He smiles, alone on the ground, as they pass like slow barracuda. They seem to hesitate. He sits, his back to a granitic coil, and watches.

Judah can see the smoke of the train. One midsize warflot edges nervously into the air of the cacotopic zone. From here, the landscape seems utterly quotidian, but Judah can feel something baneful welling below the world’s skin.

The airship lets its bombs fall as it approaches the perpetual train. Judah sees little explosion-flowers over the hills. Even now he is not afraid.

In the distance the sky convulses. A bolus of something moves, a coilsome organic thing-not a cloud but an aspect of the sky itself become palpable and squidish across the land not quite seen. Sound is strange. Judah does not breathe. There is a stutter. The dirigible falters and comes clear again and then it is different-it is a splinter different, it is lower in the sky-and it turns, it removes itself with a speed that Judah would swear was panicked.