Ori followed Jacobs as the tramp kinked the city’s geography. He went easily between areas that were not coterminous. Later, alone, Ori tried to retrace the routes and of course could not.

From Flyside to Creekside, from Salacus Fields to St Jabber’s Mound, Spiral Jacobs made the city convenient. He quietly put this area by that, had a terrace (always momentarily empty of passersby) wind impossibly through far-apart areas. He passed in and out of the Collective without seeing barricades or militia, and Ori followed, and begged him to answer questions, and sometimes in his rage fired or knifed at the old man, and always his weapon met nothing.

I’m in trouble. Ori knew it. I’m trapped. There was something in him: his mind was rutting, he was not well, he was despairing. In the middle of this upturn, this upheaval, the Remaking of the city, he who should live this moment was stricken, was crying, was lying in bed days at a time. Something’s wrong with me.

All he could do was track Jacobs through the byways he made: and sit alone, sometimes weep. He was crushed by a weight, while things changed, while the first days-of excitement, construction, arguments and street-meetings-became days of injury, of losses, became embattlement, became terror, became a sense of end.

The Collectivists’ resolution grew for a last stand, for something they knew was coming. Ori lay, and walked the violent streets and saw the initial spreading of the Collective halt, and reverse. Saw the militia encroach. Nightly another barricade was lost. The militia took the kilns on Pigsty Street, the stables of Helianthus Avenue, the arcades of Sunter. The Collective was shrinking. Ori, Toro, lay alone.

I should tell someone, he thought. Spiral Jacobs is trouble. He’s the cause of something. But he did nothing.

Was the city full of Jacobs’ castoffs? Men and women lost, their tasks unfinished, their work for Spiral Jacobs interrupted before they knew they did it, or what it was at all. Was it better or worse to have succeeded?

"Hush, hush," Spiral Jacobs said to him as they walked at night. The old man’s wall-paintings became more arcane, more complexly spiralled. Ori was not quite crying but like a lost thing, following and asking questions in a tone near begging. "What did you have me do, what are you doing, what did you do?"

"Hush, hush." Jacobs did not sound unkind. "It’s nearly done. We just needed something to keep things busy. Not long now."

Ori returned home, and people were waiting for him: Madeleina di Farja; Curdin, whom he had not seen for months, Remade and broken; and a group of men and women he did not know.

"We need to talk to you," Madeleina said. "We need your help. We have to find your friend Jacobs. We have to stop him."