Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks.

Lin wanted to displace Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

Every day that she saw Mr. Motley, he pulled her-unwilling as she was-into his city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped hints of gangland massacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for. But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her. It must be deliberate.

The statue grew thighs and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonishing piece, as befitted its subject.

Despite her attempts to insulate her mind, Mr. Motley’s blithe chat crept in, past her defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she would find herself idly wondering who was more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer’s End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import.

Lin found herself thinking more and more of Ma Francine.

Mr. Motley discussed her in carefree tones, but she came up again and again in his monologues, and Lin realized that he was a little concerned.

To her surprise, Lin began to root for Ma Francine.

She was not sure how it started. The first she was aware of it was when Mr. Motley had been talking with mock humour about a disastrous attack on two couriers the previous night, during which a huge quantity of some undisclosed substance, some raw material for the manufacture of something, had been snatched by khepri raiders from Ma Francine’s gang. Lin had realized that she was thinking a little mental cheer. She was astonished, her glandwork stopping for a moment as she thought through her own feelings.

She wanted Ma Francine to win.

There was no logic to it. As soon as she applied any rigorous thought to the situation she had no opinion at all. Intellectually speaking, the triumph of one drug-dealer and hoodlum over another was of no interest to her. But emotionally, she was beginning to see the unseen Ma Francine as her champion. She found herself booing silently when she heard Mr. Motley’s slyly smug assurance that he had a plan that would radically alter the shape of the marketplace.

What’s this? she thought wryly. After all these years, the stirrings of khepri consciousness?

She mocked herself, but there was some truth in the ironic thought. Maybe it would be the same for anyone who was opposing Motley, she thought. Lin was so fearful of reflecting on her relationship with Mr. Motley, so nervous of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long time to realize that she hated him. My enemy’s enemy…she thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But-and maybe this was at the heart of her feelings-Francine was not good khepri.

These thoughts pricked at Lin, discomforted her. For the first time in many years, they made her think of her relationship with the khepri community in other than a straightforward, righteous, confrontational way. And that made her think of her childhood.

After each day with Mr. Motley ended, Lin took to visiting Kinken. She would leave him and catch a cab from the edge of the Ribs. Across Danechi’s or Barguest Bridge, past the restaurants and offices and houses of Spit Hearth.

Sometimes she would stop at Spit Bazaar and take her time wandering through its subdued lights. She felt the linen dresses and coats hanging from the stalls, ignoring the passers-by staring rudely, wondering at the khepri shopping for human clothes. Lin would meander through the bazaar until she came to Sheck, dense and chaotic with intricate streets and sprawling brick apartment buildings.

This was not a slum. The buildings of Sheck were solid enough, and most kept the rain out. Compared to the mutant sprawl of Dog Fenn, the rotting brick mulch of Badside and Chimer’s End, the desperate shacks of Spatters, Sheck was a desirable place. A little crowded, of course, and not without drunkenness and poverty and thievery. But all things considered, there were many worse places to live. This was where the shopkeepers lived, the lower managers and better-paid factory workers that every day crowded Echomire and Kelltree docks, Gross Coil and Didacai Village, known universally as Smog Bend.

Lin was not made welcome. Sheck bordered Kinken, separated only by a couple of insignificant parks. The khepri were a constant reminder to Sheck that it did not have far to fall. Khepri filled Sheck’s streets during the day, making their way to The Crow to shop or take the train from Perdido Street Station. At night, though, it was a brave khepri who would walk streets made dangerous by pugnacious Three Quillers out to “keep their city clean.” Lin made sure she was through this zone by sundown. Because just beyond was Kinken, where she was safe.

Safe, but not happy.

Lin walked Kinken’s streets with a kind of nauseated excitement. For many years, her journeys to the area had been brief excursions to pick up colourberries and paste, perhaps the occasional khepri delicacy. Now her visits were jars to memories she had thought banished.

Houses oozed the white mucus of home-grubs. Some were completely coated in the thick stuff: it spread across roofs, linking different buildings into a lumpy, congealed totality. Lin could see in through windows and doors. The walls and floors that had been provided by human architects had been broken away in places, and the massive home-grubs allowed to burrow their blind way through the shell, oozing their phlegm-cement from their abdomens, their stubby little legs skittering as they ate their way through the ruined interiors of the buildings.

Occasionally Lin would see a live specimen taken from the farms by the river, going about its refitting of a building into the intricate twisting organic passageways preferred by most khepri tenants. The big, stupid beetles, larger than rhinos, responded to the tweaks and tugs of their keepers, blundering this way and that through the houses, recasting rooms in a quick-drying coating that softened edges and connected chambers, buildings and streets with what looked from the inside like giant worm-tracks.