In this way they departed that nameless town by the bridge and followed the tracks. They looped and curved through the mountain pass. It was hard going and with no Sticks, and what little food they had was all but gone. Overhead the sky became a blank window. Far ahead Mathieu thought he could hear gulls. They drove the handcars over a last bridge spanning the river between two mountains. The distant smell of salt and tar, and he felt a longing awake in him, a desire to one last time see the sea. The handcars creaked across the chasm, see-saw, eew-aww, the gears creaking, the wheels sliding, a shower of sparks.

Thunder overhead, and Mathieu looked up to see a mountain wake, an icy rock face like a torso, a snow-capped head, shaking.

“Hurry! Hurry!”

And faster and faster they went, the avalanche overhead gathering, a rain of stones beginning to fall, slowly, so slowly, an inexorable decline.

“Quick! Quick!” Bent double like the old and the infirm they went, clochards, with their golden treasure. A falling rock caught Mikhel, tossed him off the trolley like a rag doll. Down, down into the depths, a splash of foam like a white question mark his only tombstone.

“Hurry, damn it, hurry!”

He risked a glance back. Behind him, the shadows of Davide and Esther spread giant wings of ink. Shadow battles stone. He heard inhuman laughter. Falling rocks. The opening of a tunnel in the mountain straight ahead. He looked only forward.

They’d made it. Somehow they were through, into the safety of the tunnel. Dark, dark. They worked the trollies till their hands bled and their breath dribbled out of their bodies. Onwards. Until they were through, and on the other side, and into sunlight, and for just one moment, he saw the sea.

It was easier after that. A gentle slope down into farmland, and the smoke rising from chimneys, and neat roads, and the railway tracks were new and gleamed in the sunlight. In the first town they came to they found a bar and proceeded to get so drunk that the Escapement disappeared entire, and for one long glorious day he explored the streets of his old neighbourhood, with posters on the walls warning residents to keep decent, and once he went past the cemetery with the pointed stars on the tombstones but he did not go in.

After that they hopped a junk car, going deep.