The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.

Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.

In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.

New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.

He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.

"It’s better now," she said. "But in the first weeks, gods.

"Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.

"Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills," she said, "Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.

"Some of us escaped."

She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.