"But we don’t know what it’ll be there…"

"No. But it won’t make a difference."

"What are you talking about, Judah?"

"It won’t make a difference."

"Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone," Drogon said. "I’m going back to the city, believe it."

"They’ll find us, you know," Elsie said. "Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us."

"As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men," Cutter said, but she interrupted.

"And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too."

One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.

There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.

They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.

Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.

The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.

"What in Jabber’s name is it?" Cutter asked Qurabin.