It is as if some gentle sob, some mass exhalation of relief and languor sweeps the city. A wave of calm gusts in from the nightside, from the west, from Gallmarch and Smog Bend to Gross Coil, to Sheck and Brock Marsh, Ludmead and Mog Hill and Abrogate Green.

The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.

The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.

But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.

Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.

I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.

When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.

We have been freed.

This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.

We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.

We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.

But she does not.

That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.

But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.

She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.

She raises her hands and signs for him.

He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.

Derkhan’s eyes widen as she reads the words.

Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.

Morning . . . food . . . warming, he falters, insect . . . journey . . . happy.

She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.