And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.

A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.

A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.

I find that I am not surprised.

Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.

He invites me in. Into his city.

I step forward into what little light there is.

I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.

I know how I must look.

My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.

My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden. The fringes of feathers that segued into their scales are ripped clean. I walk gingerly, my groin as raw and newly plucked as my head.

I tried to break my beak, but I could not.

I stand before the building in my new flesh.

Half-a-Prayer pauses, but not for very long. With another languorous stroke, he repeats his invitation.

It is generous, but I must decline.

He offers me the half-world. He offers to share his bastard liminal life, his interstitial city. His obscure crusades and anarchic vengeance. His scorn for doors.

Escaped Remade, fReemade. Nothing. He does not fit in. He has wrested New Crobuzon into a new city, and he strives to save it from itself.

He sees another broken-down half-thing, another exhausted relic that he might convert to fight his unthinkable fight, another for whom existence in any world is impossible, a paradox, a bird that cannot fly. And he offers me a way out, into his uncommunity, his margin, his mongrel city. The violent and honourable place from where he rages.

He is generous, but I decline. That is not my city. Not my fight.

I must leave his half-breed world alone, his demimonde of weird resistance. I live in a simpler place.

He is mistaken.

I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor.