At a signal from Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.

The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.

The handlingers communed.

The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.

They spawned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.

There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.

They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers were ever found.

Many people in New Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in the city, were gone.

In the shadows of their motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of lower lifeforms.

They shared information. Rescue’s told what it knew, gave orders. It repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the secret war.

The handlingers squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to conclusions.

After two, three minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way back into the gaping holes in their hosts’ bodies. Each body spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.

As they had agreed, they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right handlinger, like Rescue’s, and one left. Rescue himself was paired with the dog.