The militia were at the door. Ori pushed, let the momentum take him, into the rift he had made, out of that room where the most notorious thief and murderer of a generation quietly wept, where the ruler of New Crobuzon grew stiff, and he was for a moment a long moment in a wrinkle, in an innard of time, of the world, his synapses gone sluggard so he felt his backwash of panic like slow clouding water as he thought what if he had the strength to break the surface of the universe and slip grubbish into the mortar between instants between cells of the real but what if he did not have the power to emerge again and was lost in the flesh of dimensions, a microbe in the protean, in spaceandtime?

What then?

But his push continued, and a long long time and an instant after the first split, he felt another; the membrane parted for him again, on the other side, and disgorged him like a splinter. He fell through and to the ground slippery, wet with reality’s blood, his inexpert passage having done trauma in its passing, blood that evanesced in iridescent skeins, a pavonine moment in the air that was gone, and left Ori disoriented and dry again, and in an alley scattered with rubbish.

For a long time he lay bleating weakly, until the feeling like overwhelming motion sickness subsided, and strength seeped back to him.

He could not fathom where he was. He was giddy. In his Toro getup, aware that it made him a target. I’ll rest soon, he thought through fog. His forehead hurt, in points at the bases of the horns. He had come through, but nowhere near where he wanted to go.

Ori could feel a chill, but it did not trouble him. He stumbled and looked up as he came through entangled alleyways, and there was a line intersecting his path, nightblack arches that even Toro’s eyes could not see into, the brick and the dorsal crest of the elevated railroad. And beyond, tooth-yellow in the gaslamps that underlit them, the soffit of the Ribs. Ori was in Bonetown.

He lay for hours. The sky was grey-lit when he woke. When he removed the helmet he almost blacked out, and had to lean and breathe in a cavity below the railway. Silence unnerved him. He heard a few of the sounds that made the city whisper, but the bricks against which he leaned were still. They conducted no vibrations. The New Crobuzon trains should run all night, but there were none.

Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight. What’s happening? He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did not believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him. What has happened?