Inevitably, they had to cross the street itself, as it peeled away, curving slowly eastwards. They lowered the cable to the ground, approaching a rut that linked the two sides of the pavement. It was a gutter, originally for shit and now for rainwater, a six-inch channel between the paving slabs that sluiced through grilles into the undercity at the furthest end.

They laid the cable in the groove, attaching it firmly. They crossed quickly, standing aside occasionally while traffic interrupted them in their work, but this was not a busy street, and they were able to lay the cable without extensive interruption.

Their behaviour still did not merit attention. Running their cable back up the wall opposite—this time the boundary of a school, from the window of which came forth didactic barks—the unremarkable pair passed another group of workmen. They were digging up the opposite corner of the street, replacing shattered flagstones, and they looked up at the newcomers and grunted some shorthand greeting, then ignored them.

As they approached the red-light zone, the Construct Council’s followers turned into a courtyard, trailing their heavy coil. On three sides, walls rose above them, five or more floors of filthy brick, stained and mossy, years of smog and rain etched across them. There were windows at untidy intervals, as if they had been spilt from the highest point to fall irregularly between the roof and the ground.

Cries and oaths were audible, and laughed conversations, and the clattering of kitchenware. A pretty young child of uncertain sex watched them from a third-floor window. The two men looked at each other nervously for a moment, and scanned the rest of the overlooking windows. The child’s was the only face: they were otherwise unobserved.

They dropped the loops of cable, and one looked up into the child’s eyes, winked impishly and grinned. The other man dropped to one knee and peered through the bars of the circular manhole in the courtyard floor.

From the darkness below a voice hailed him curtly. A filthy hand shot up towards the metal seal.

The first man tugged his companion’s leg and hissed at him—“They’re here . . . this is the right place!”—then grabbed the rough end of the cable and tried to thrust it between the bars in the sewer’s entrance. It was too thick. He cursed and fumbled in his toolbox for a hacksaw, began to work on the tough grille, wincing at the screech of metal.

“Hurry,” said the invisible figure below. “Something’s been following us.”

When the cutting was done, the man in the courtyard shoved the cable hard into the ragged hole. His companion glanced down at the unsettling scene. It looked like some grotesque inversion of birth.

The men below grabbed at the cable, hauled it into the darkness of the sewers. The yards of wire coiled in the still, close courtyard began to unwind into the city’s veins.