"What did they Remake you for? Why that way?" It showed trust to ask. Ulliam did not blench at the query, showed no shock. He laughed.

"Ori, you wouldn’t believe me, boy. You can’t have been more than a baby, if you was even born. I can’t tell you it all now; it’s done and gone. I was a herder, of sorts." He laughed again. "I’ve seen things. Oh, the animals I guarded. Nothing scares me no more. Except, you know… when I saw Baron come into that room. I won’t say I was scared again but I remembered what it was, to feel that way.

"Do you think about what we’ll do, when we do this?" he asked later. "This job? The chair-of-the-board?" Ori shook his head.

"We’ll change things. Push it all the way." Excitement rose in him as it always did, with speed. "When we cut off the head and watch it fall, we’ll wake people up. Nothing’ll stop us." We’ll change everything. We’ll change history. We’ll wake the city up, and they’ll free themselves.

When they left and walked a few careful feet apart (whole and Remade could not fraternise in Pelorus Fields) they heard screaming from a few streets away, heard a woman running, her voice coming over the nightlit slates of Wynion Street. It just come, it just come, she shouted, and Ori and Ulliam looked at each other tense and wondered if they should go to her, but the sound became crying and then faded, and when they turned north they could not find her.

On Dockday the twelfth of Octuary, something came in front of the cold summer sun. Later Ori could not remember if he had seen the moment of its arrival or if he had only heard it so many times he had made it a memory.

He was in a train. On the Sink Line, passing over the shantytown of Spatters, toward the incline and grand houses of Vaudois Hill. Someone farther on in the carriage gave a shriek that he ignored, but others came then, too, and he looked up through the window.

They were raised, the train on arches, so they pushed through chimneys like little swells, minarets, towers with damp-splintered skins like swamp trees. They saw clearly across to the east and the morning sun spreading shadows and thick light, and at its centre something was swimming. A figure tiny in the core of the sun’s glare and made of the deepest silhouette, neither human nor ciliated plankton nor rapid startling bird but all of them and other things, in turn or at one instant. It moved with an impossible crawl, straight out, emerging from the sun with a swimming motion that used all of its contradicting limbs.