With the knowledge that the militia followed them was a calm. "They’ll stop at the stain," Judah said, but Cutter realized he was no longer sure. Cutter took heliotypes from the stationary train, of the unstable landscape and creatures that were not insects nor lizards, birds nor metal cogs but something Torque-random that seemed inspired by all these things.

Judah was quiet. He was in himself. He came to Cutter one night and let the younger man fuck him, which Cutter did with the urgency and love he could not ever control. Judah smiled at him and kissed him and stroked his cheek, gods, not as a lover but like some kind of priest.

Judah spent most of his hours in the laboratory car wedged full of witchy detritus. He wound his voxiterator. Listened over and again to the recordings of the stiltspear songs. Cutter saw his notebooks. They were filled: musical scores slashed through with colours, queries, interruptions. Judah muttered rhythms under his breath.

Once Cutter saw him, standing in half-light at day’s end, at the front of the perpetual train. He heard Judah mutter a song-rhythm and pat his own face with one hand, clicking a syncopation with the other. There were motes around Judah’s head, unmoving, a scattered hand of specks, flies and mountain midges that did not eddy with the wind: an unnatural and profound inertia. When the train shucked and rolled a few feet on, Judah left the gust of immobile insects behind.

Wyrmen Councillors flew. They looked for the end of the zone. Some of course did not return, vanished in a fold of air or suddenly forgetful of how to fly, or ossified, or become wyrmen cubs or tangles of rope. But most came back, and after many days in the outlands half-bred from the monstrous and quotidian, they told the Iron Councillors that they were near the end.

They built their last rails along a path their geoseers said was ambulatory, would wander and confuse pursuers. With the engine newly coated with predator heads, newly charnel, and the carriages scratched and marked by their passage, the Iron Council jackknifed up a slope. Cutter found it impossible to imagine land untouched by Torque.

They crested the rise, hammers laying down last tracks, behind them the crews hauling away the iron of their passage. Cutter stared at a windblown landscape of smokestone. It was a vivid and strange place, but without that pathology, that dreadful cancer fertility of the cacotopic stain.

"Oh my gods," Cutter heard himself say. There was cheering, spontaneous, absolute with delight. "Oh my gods and Jabber and godsdamned fuck, we’re out, we’re out."

They took a route on the very edge, the littoral ridge that divided the fringes of the Torque from the healthy land. They hammered the metal home on the smokestone flat and came back into natural land.