Bellis was surprised to discover Johannes remaining in her life. There had been a time when he had seemed disgusted with her, not concerned ever to see her again.

She still found him spineless. Even when her own loyalty to New Crobuzon was such an odd, unsystematic thing, she could not help thinking of Johannes as a kind of turncoat. The speed of his accommodation with Armada disgusted her.

But now there was something plaintive in him. His rediscovered eagerness to be her friend was a little pathetic. And though Bellis spent what time she could with Carrianne, whose irreverence and affection were genuine pleasures, and though Carrianne did not much like Johannes, there were times when Bellis let him stay a while. She felt pity for him.

With the avanc caught, trapped, and tethered, and with Tintinnabulum’s crew gone, Johannes’ job was done. Now, after all Johannes’ work, Kruach Aum was working with the Lovers’ thaumaturges and Uther Doul, ushered into the new inner circle to discover the secrets of possibility mining. Johannes had realized, Bellis supposed, that there were very many years ahead of him as a captive in the city.

Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.

Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.

He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.

Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.

Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.

The Arrogance had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the Grand Easterly, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the Arrogance ’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.

"What did he see coming?" they muttered. "Hedrigall, what did he see coming?"