There were copses of trees across the steamer’s body, old and densely spaced, tiny conspiratorial forests. Saplings, and many midsize trees a century or two old. But there were also some massive specimens, ancient and huge, that must have been uprooted full-grown from wooded shorelines and replanted scores of years ago, to grow old aboard. Grass was everywhere underfoot, and cow parsley and nettles. There were cultivated flowerbeds on the Curhouse gunboat, but on the steamer’s corpse the woods and meadows of Croom Park were wild.

Not all the plants were familiar to Bellis. In its slow journeys around Bas-Lag, Armada had visited places unknown to New Crobuzon’s scientists, and it had plundered those exotic ecosystems. On the smaller ships were little glades of head-high fungus, that shifted and hissed as walkers passed through them. There was a tower covered in vivid red, thorned creepers that stank like rotting roses. The long forecastle of the star’d-most ship was out of bounds, and Silas told Bellis that beyond the intricately woven fence of briars, the flora was dangerous: pitcher plants of odd and unquantified power, wake trees like predatory weeping willows.

But on the old steamer itself, the landscape and the foliage were more familiar. One of its raised deck-hills was paved inside with moss and turf and made into sunken gardens. Lit and kept alive by bright gaslight and what little day came through dirt-caked portholes, plants of different themes filled each of the cabins. There was a tiny tundra garden of rocks and purple scrub; a desert full of succulents; woodland flowers and meadowland-all adjoining, all linked by a dim corridor knee-high in grass. In its sepia light, under warpaint of verdigris and climbing plants, plaques pointing to the mess and the heads and boiler rooms could still be read. They were crossed by paths well-worn by woodlice and ladybirds.

A little way from its entrance-a door in the hill-out in the air, Bellis and Silas walked slowly in the damp shade.

They had visited each of the four ships of the park. There were only a few other people in the green environs with them. On the aft-most of the vessels Bellis had stopped, shocked, and pointed across the gardens and the reclaimed rails of the deck, out over a hundred feet of ocean to the city’s edge. Tethered there, she had seen the Terpsichoria. The chains and ropes that bound it were clean. New bridges connected it to the rest of the city. An architectural skeleton of wood loomed from its main deck: a building site, foundations.

This was how Armada grew for its populace, swallowing up prey and reconfiguring them, rendering them into its own material like mindless plankton.

Bellis felt nothing for the Terpsichoria, had only contempt for those who felt affection for boats. But seeing her last link to New Crobuzon brazenly and effortlessly assimilated depressed her.