I’ll decide the plan when I see the old rails, Cutter told himself, but then he walked with the track-layers as they bent the iron road through gaps between sediment and basalt stanchions and through the V the graders had cut in soft displaced earth and there, there, there wetly ashine, black but glowing, were the rails. More than twenty years old. Curving away, drawn together by perspective, slipped through geography. The metal path. The crossties were bucked by neglect but held the rails down.

The Councillors gave a cheer that was reedy in the cold wet air but that continued a long time. The track-layers waved their tools. The Remade gesticulated their unshaped limbs. The road to New Crobuzon. That old road. Left to moulder when the collapse of money and the stockpiles in warehouses had made an end to the TRT boom. They had been left to the shifting ground-Cutter could see where the banks of the cut had bowed and buried the metal. They were running grounds for wild things.

In some places the iron had been stolen by salvagers. The Council would have to lay down some from its own stock. The Iron Council had come this way before, unborn, when it was just a train. The wet of the stones, the dark and glistening way. Cutter stared. And what was it? What was happening in his city? Where the Collective was fighting? How should he run?

Judah, you bastard, where are you?

The hammermen laid down the rails, and with careful measured sideswipes of their mallets, they put in curves. They made bends, gently, so that their tracks came out of the west and skewed gradually through the banks of the train-gash up and onto the roadbed of the old rails.

This is all a postlude, Cutter thought. This is all happening after the story.

The Collective was falling or fallen and all there was was this unfolding of violence. We’ll swing it, change it, Cutter thought with sad scorn, in the voice of a Councillor.

The greatest moment in the history of New Crobuzon. Laid low by war and by the end of war, which was gods help me my doing, our doing. But what could we do? Could we let the city fall? The Collective would have fallen anyway, he told himself, but he was not sure of that. He drew icons in the earth, making trains in outline, men and women running away or toward something. Maybe the Collective’s just hiding. Everyone in the city waiting. Maybe I should stay on the train. He knew he would not.