Lin had never been to Spatters. She knew it only by its notoriety. Forty years previously, the Sink Line had been extended south-west of Lichford, past Vaudois Hill and into the spur of Rudewood that abutted the southern reaches of the city. The planners and money-men had built the tall shells of residential blocks: not the monoliths of nearby Ketch Heath, but impressive nonetheless. They had opened the railway station, Fell Stop, and had started building another in Rudewood itself, before anything more than a narrow strip around the railway had been cleared. There had been plans for another station beyond that, and the tracks had extended into the forest accordingly. There had even been tentative, absurdly hubristic schemes to extend the rails hundreds of miles south or west, to link New Crobuzon to Myrshock or Cobsea.

Then the money had run out. There had been some financial crisis, some speculative bubble had burst, some trade network had collapsed under the weight of competition and a plethora of too-cheap products no one could buy, and the project had been killed in its infancy. The trains had still visited Fell Stop, pointlessly waiting a few minutes before returning to the city. Rudewood quickly reclaimed the land south of the empty architecture, assimilating the nameless empty station and the rusting tracks. For a couple of years, the trains at Fell Stop waited empty and silent. And then, a few passengers had started appearing.

The empty integuments of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough. The word spread that this was a ghost sector, beyond Parliament’s ken, where taxes and laws were as rare as sewage systems. Rough frameworks of stolen wood filled the empty floors. In the outlines of stillborn streets shacks of concrete and corrugated iron blistered overnight. Inhabitation spread like mould. There were no gaslamps to take the edge off the night, no doctors, no jobs, yet within ten years the area was dense with ersatz housing. It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shantytown seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.

The suburb was beyond the reach of New Crobuzon’s municipality. There was an unreliable alternative infrastructure: a selfappointed network of postal workers, sanitary engineers, even a kind of law. But these systems were inefficient and partial at best. For the most part, neither the militia nor anyone else went in to Spatters. The only visitors from outside were the regular trains appearing at the incongruously well-maintained Fell Stop Station, and the gangs of masked gunmen who appeared sometimes at night to terrorize and murder. The Spatters street-children were particularly vulnerable to the ferocious barbarism of the murder-squads.