It made her laugh humorlessly. She had done what was best for her true home, and as a result she spent her days working for the governors of her prison, helping them gain the power to take her anywhere they wanted.

How did it come to this?

And where is Silas?

Every day, Tanner thought about what he had done on the anophelii island.

It was not something he felt comfortable considering. He was not sure what his emotions were. He probed the memory of what he had done, as if it were a wound, and discovered a reserve of pride inside him. I saved New Crobuzon, he thought, not quite believing it.

Tanner thought carefully about the few people he had left behind there. The drinking partners, the friends and girlfriends: Zara and Pietr and Fezhenechs and Dolly-Ann… He thought of them with a sort of abstracted fondness, as if they were characters in a book of whom he had grown affectionate.

Do they think of me?he thought. Do they miss me?

He had left them behind. He had been so long in that stinking prison in Iron Bay, and in that drab place in the Terpsichoria, and then his life had been so suddenly and extraordinarily renewed, that New Crobuzon had attenuated as a memory in him.

But still there was a wellspring of feeling for it, a recognition that the city had shaped him. He would not have seen it destroyed. He could not think of the men and women he had known there, murdered. So-it bewildered him to consider it-he had given them a valedictory gift that they would never know they had received. New Crobuzon had been saved. He had saved it.

The awareness of that gnawed at him. It troubled him and made him sheepishly proud. It was such a huge thing he had done, something to change the tide of history. He imagined the city preparing for war, never knowing who had saved it. It was such a big thing, and here he was remembering it with a little arch of his eyebrows, not sure how much mind to pay it, as if it were a detail.

It wasn’t a betrayal of Armada, not really. No one was hurt; it was just a little thing to them-a quick night’s absence. He had taken a few hours to slip away and save New Crobuzon. And he was glad of it. It made him happy to think of what he’d done. Despite the magisters and the punishment factories.

He had saved it. Now tell it good-bye.