The mirrors had been taken out of their careful wrapping in the armoury car. The glass was veined, the tain made dust. Cutter wanted to tell someone what had happened, but he was afraid of the bitterness in him, the miserable certainty of an expectation fulfilled-he was afraid that for all the real loss of it he would seem to crow. He hated it in him. He knew Drogon had sensed it. It was why they had approached him.

He took the broken mirrors to Ann-Hari, and told her.

The old rails shone back moonlight. At the edge of their vision, in the east, was a darker dark: Rudewood, closing. The lights of the train and its cooking fires shed tiny auras.

"Well?" Ann-Hari said.

"Well?"

"Yes."

"What will you do?"

"What would you do?"

"I’d turn away, for Jabber’s sake. I’d turn and go south on the rails, not north."

"Into the swamp?"

"For a start. If that’s what it takes to get away. To live, good gods, Ann-Hari. To live. They’re waiting. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, they’re there. "

"Are they? So?"

Cutter shouted. Right into the night. " ‘So?’ Are you insane? Haven’t you listened to me? And what do you mean ‘Are they?’?" Abruptly he stopped. They watched each other. "You don’t believe me."

"I don’t know."

"You think I’m lying."

"Now now," she said. "Come. You’re a good friend to the Council, Cutter, we know-"

"Oh my good gods, you think I’m lying. So what does that mean? You think, my gods, you think I broke the godsdamned mirrors?"

"Cutter, now."

"You do. "

" Cutter. You didn’t break the mirrors. I know that."

"So what, you think I’m lying about Drogon?"

"You never wanted us to come back, Cutter. You never wanted us here. And now you tell me the militia are waiting. How do you know Drogon or this man weren’t lying? They know what you think; they know what to tell you. Maybe they want us to fear and fail."

Cutter stopped up short. Could Weather Wrightby be trying to frighten them away?

Perhaps the Collective had won. The refugees in the stony lands beyond the city were all wrong, and the Collective was establishing new democracy, had ended the suffrage lottery, had disarmed the militia and armed the populace. And there were statues to those fallen. Parliament was being rebuilt. And there were no militia pods, the clouds had no unmarked dirigibles in them, the air was full only of wyrmen, of balloons and bunting. Perhaps Weather Wrightby wanted them not to join that new New Crobuzon.

No. Cutter knew. He knew the truth. That was not how it was. He shook his head.

"You have to tell the Councillors," he said.