Their little dissimulation, that they might make it. A long way around, up toward the rises behind the trainyard, where they might find a way north of the TRT sidings and eastward to New Crobuzon’s slum suburbs. To Chimer, say, or on up through the foothills to the River Tar and the barge nomads and low merchants with whom they might take a ride and be pulled in past Raven’s Gate, past Creekside and the remnants of the khepri ghetto, under the rails, to Smog Bend, into the innards of New Crobuzon. Cutter walked them north, as if that might be their plan.

What was that, Judah? What was that you did? Cutter remembered Judah’s talk of the noncorporeal golems, the stiltspear and their arcane golemetry. I didn’t know you could do that, Judah.

They saw people. "You’re going the wrong way, mate," one caravanner said. Cutter and Judah pushed past them. The cart wheels scuffed and turned the earth and receded. Cutter looked up at birds. More. A little more. A little longer. He did not have any sense of to whom or to what he was pleading. Judah leant on him, and Cutter held him up.

"Look at you," he said. "Look at you." He wiped dirt off Judah’s face, onto his own clothes. "Look at you."

A second tiny wave of runaways approached. This time all variegated. Humans with handcarts, a vodyanoi panting out of water. A fat she-cactus carrying a prodigious club. She hefted it at Cutter and Judah but set it down again when she saw them more closely. There were two khepri, their skinny women’s bodies swaddled in shawls so they moved with tiny steps, conversing with their headscarabs, the iridescent beetles on their thin necks moving headlegs and mandibles in sign, emitting gusts of chymical meaning. Behind them, a kind of punctuation mark to this random Collective, was a construct.

Cutter stared at it. Even Judah looked, through the fug of his exhaustion. It waddled toward and past them on the ruts.

Limbs, a trunk and head in rough human configuration, its body an iron tube, its head featured in pewter and glass. One arm was its own original, the other some later repair in a scrubbed, lighter steel. From a vent like a cluster of cigars it jetted breaths of smoke. It raised its cylinder legs and placed them down with inhuman precision. Wedged over what would be its shoulder it carried a bundle dangling on the end of a staff.

One of the city’s rare legal constructs, the servant or plaything of someone rich? An underground machine, an illegal, hidden for years? What are you? Did it follow its owner into exile, was its meticulous stomping progress simple obedience to a mathematised rule in its analytical engine? Cutter watched it with the superstition of someone grown up after the Construct War.