He looks up after hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this, he says. We would need a focus.

And then another hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

We have to do this, he says, and still, we need a focus.

He tells us what we must do.

There is silence, and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and discard them. Our criteria are confused—do we choose the doomed or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

Our morality becomes rushed and furtive.

But the day is more than half gone, and we must choose.

Her face set hard but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged with the vile task.

She takes what money we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for what we need.

Outside it begins to darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets of paper.

The thick sun illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with dusk.

None of us fear the night’s crop of dreams.

PART SEVEN

Crisis

Chapter 46

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The streetlights flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker. It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft, which bobbed on the cool swell.

It was one of many that littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water, the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

This one was half covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

Hidden in the shadow of the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was naked and quite still.