The body was at one hundred and eighty degrees to the human face, pistol-arms and legs and chest all facing the other way, with the metal head completing the illusion from the front. The Remade kept their bodies facing the same way as their unreversed companions at all times. They walked along corridors and into lifts with their arms and legs moving in a convincing automated analogue to a human stride. Stem-Fulcher had fallen deliberately behind them for a few steps, and watched their human eyes darting back and forth, their mouths twisted in concentration as they scanned what was ahead of them through their mirrors.

There were others, she saw, Remade more simply, with greater economy, to the same purpose. Their heads had been twisted around in a half-circle, until they gazed out from their own backs over a twisted, painful-looking neck. They stared into their mirrored helmets. Their bodies moved perfectly, without fumbling, walking and manipulating weapons and armour with hardly stilted motion. There was something almost more offputting about their relaxed, organic motions below reversed heads than the solid artificial motion of their more thoroughly Remade comrades.

Stem-Fulcher realized she was looking at the result of months or more of continual training, constantly living through mirrors. With bodies reversed as theirs were, it would have been a vital strategy. These troops, she pondered, must have been specifically designed and built with slake-moth husbandry in mind. Stem-Fulcher could hardly believe the scale of Motley’s operation. It would be no wonder, she thought ruefully, if, in dealing with the slake-moths, the militia seemed a little amateurish by comparison.

I think we were quite right to bring them on board, she reflected.

With the passage of the sun, the air over New Crobuzon slowly thickened. The light was thick and yellow as corn-oil.

Aerostats swam through that solar grease, eddying back and forth across the urban geography in a weird half-random motion.

Isaac and Derkhan stood in the street beyond the dump’s wire. Derkhan carried a bag, Isaac carried two. In the light, they felt vulnerable. They were unused to the city day. They had forgotten how to live in it.

They skulked as insignificantly as they could, and ignored the few passers-by.

“Why the godsdamn did Yag have to piss off like that?” hissed Isaac. Derkhan shrugged.