The Collectivists tried grenades, bombs, sent frantic word for a thaumaturge who might be able to halt this ugly monster thing, but it would not be fast enough. They knew they must withdraw. This barricade, this street, was lost.

Snipers and witch-snipers appeared on rooftops over the no-man’s-land, to lay down fire and hex on the constructs and the militia. At first they cut into the government forces, but a swivelling motorgun brought a score of them down in meat-wet and panicked the rest.

As the constructs sped, the Collectivists scrambled and their order broke down as they made for the backstreets. Rahul and Maribet did not know where to go. They headed toward secondary lines that did not take them out of the militia fire. Afterward, Cutter heard what happened: the two Remade had loped with their animal legs and skittered one way and another across the street, called by terrified Collectivists trying to help them. Maribet had turned her hooves on a bomb hole, and as she struggled to stand again and Rahul put out his human and lizard hands to help her, there was a grinding and the wedge-fronted construct began to push the barricade apart, and a militia-loyal cactus-man came over the rim of the tons of city-stuff, fired his rivebow into Maribet’s neck.

Rahul told them about it when he made it to Ori’s house. It was the first Iron Council death in New Crobuzon.

Posters had appeared throughout Collective territory, half- begging half-demanding that the populace stay. EVERY LOST MAN OR WOMAN OR CHILD IS A WEAKENING OF THE CoLLECTIVE. TOGETHER WE CAN WIN. Of course they could not stem the refugees, who went out under the cordons, to the undercity or the collapsing suburbs beyond Grand Calibre Bridge.

Most ran to the Grain Spiral, the Mendican Foothills, the most adventurous into Rudewood to become forest bandits. But some, at risk, organised into guerrilla work-crews and made their way through the chaos of the city’s outer reaches, past neglected militia crews, by low boroughs become feral without food, too mean for Parliament to give them any notice. West of the city the escapees passed through the long-deserted hangars and goods yards where once the hub of the TRT had been. Rusting engines and flatcars were left deserted.

Offices were still inhabited and lit, where the remnant of Weather Wrightby’s company clung to existence, maintaining a last crew, a few tens of clerks and engineers. It survived off financial speculation, off railroad salvage, off the security work and bounty hunting of the TRT’s paramilitary guard-army, tiny and loyal to Wrightby’s corporatist vision, disdaining the race-thuggery of the Quillers. The men were stationed across the sprawling TRT property, and they and their dogs sometimes chased the escapees away.

The refugees took tools, made their way out of the once- terminus to the cut from where the Cobsea-Myrshock Railroad had set out.