But a kind of calm horror descended on her as she realized that her own escape was not the only consideration. What if we can’t escape? she thought coolly. Is that the end of it? Is that the last word?

Silas was watching her, his face bleak and tired. Looking at him, Bellis saw the spires and markets and brick rookeries of her home city with sudden, stark clarity. She remembered her friends. She thought again about New Crobuzon. In spring, stinking of sap; at the close of the year, cold and intricate; at the festival of Jabber’s Morning, lit up, strung with gimgews and lanterns, jostled by singing crowds, the trains decked out in pious livery. At midnight on any day of the year, in the lamplight.

At war, at bloody war with The Gengris.

"We have to get a message to them," she said quietly. "That’s the most important thing. Whether or not we can get back, we have to warn them."

With that, she let go of what she could not achieve. And miserable as it made her, something inside her became less frantic. The schemes that she tentatively suggested now were more grounded, more systematic, more likely to succeed.

Bellis realized that Hedrigall was key.

There were many stories about the big cactus-man, the Samheri fabler and aeronaut. A cloud of rumors, truth and lies. And among the things that Shekel had breathlessly told her, one had stuck hard in Bellis’ memory: Hedrigall had been to the island of the mosquito-people.

It could be true. He had been a trader-pirate from Dreer Samher, who were the only group known regularly to deal with the anophelii. Sap, not blood, ran in them: they were undrinkable. They could barter without fear.

And he might remember things.

The day was overcast and warm, and Bellis sweated from the moment she left her rooms for work. Even scrawny as she was, by the end of the day she felt laden down with excess flesh. The smoke from her cigarillos seemed to cosset her head like a stinking hat, and even Armada’s unending winds didn’t dust her clean.

Silas was waiting for her outside her rooms.

"It’s true," he said, grimly elated. "Hedrigall’s been there. He remembers it. I know how the Dreer Samher traders operate."

Their maps could become more accurate, their knowledge of the island less tenuous.

"He’s loyal, is Hedrigall," Silas said, "so I’ve got to be careful. Agree or disagree with what he’s told to do, he’s a Garwater man. But I can get information out of him. It’s my job."

Even with what they learned from Hedrigall, they were armed with nothing more than a sheaf of unconnected facts. They shuffled and reshuffled them, dropped them like spillikins and watched how they fell. And, having stripped herself of that unrealistic desperation for her own freedom, Bellis began to see order in the facts’ patterns.