Past guards patrolling a border. Where there are runnels beneath the wires we slip through, where there are none we cut or climb very careful, cushioned with rag. Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.

We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade. Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground. Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is onrushing it is immanent and we see it only in this one moment. Circle it.

The engine smokestack towered and flared, a belch of black, keeping its shape, swept back fast by the wind embedded in that moment. We come in close scant hairs from the protuberance of animal-head horns and the blades of the warriors who wait, stand close up, stare at the Councillors preparing with shouts set on them.

That one is Thick Shanks. That big, age-discoloured cactus-man, him at the engine’s window. He helped make Iron Council all the time ago. Here he is to bring it home.

There is a route from Councillor to Councillor, given names. Here is Spitter whose excited shout has left saliva spray in a parabolic fringe around his mouth; here is Leapfrog who has jumped from one carriage top toward another and hangs over the gap midway in her arc; here is the Gunner from whose rifle has emerged a bullet, ajut six inches from the barrel. The tradition is to stop, wave your hand between unmoving missile and gun.

Some of us knew these Councillors once. There is a woman who comes many times to speak to the same man, her father, come back to her, unmoving in history. She is not the only one who visits family.