Free Jack by China Miéville

 
    NOW THAT THINGS have
gone the way they have, everyone's got a story. Everyone'll tell you how they
or their friend, which you can see in the way they say it they want you to
think means them, knew Jack. Maybe even how they helped him, how they were part
of his schemes. Mostly though of course they know that's too much and it'll
just be how they or their friend was there one time and saw him running over
the roofs, money flying from his swag-bags, militia trying and failing to track
him down below. That sort of thing.   My mate saw Jack Half-a-Prayer once,   they'll
say,   just for a moment.   As if
they're being modest.
    It's supposed to be
respect. They reckon they're showing their respect, with everything that's
happened. They ain't, of course. They're like dogs on his corpse and they
disgust me.
    I tell you that so you
know where I'm coming from. Because I know how what I'm about to say might
sound. I want you to know where I'm coming from when I tell you that I   did   know
Jack. I did.
    I worked with him.
    I was lowly, don't get
me wrong, but I was part of the whole thing. And please don't think I'm talking
myself up, but I swear to you I ain't being arrogant. I'm nothing important,
but the work I did, in a little way, was crucial to him. That's all I'm saying.
So. So you can understand that I was pretty interested when I heard we'd got
our hands on the man who sold Jack out. That would be one way of putting it.
That would be mild. I made it my business to meet him, let's put it that way.
     
    I remember the first
time I heard what Jack was up to, after he escaped. He was daring enough that
he got noticed.   Did you hear about that Remade done
that robbery?   someone said to me in a pub. I was
careful, couldn't show any reaction.
    I'd felt something when
I met Jack, you know? I respected him. He wasn't boastful, but he had a fire in
him. Even so, I couldn't be sure he'd come to anything.
    That first job, he got
away with hundreds of nobles and gave it away on the streets. He scored himself
the love of the Dog Fenn poor that way. That was what had people all excited,
told them he was something else than your average gangster. He weren't the
first to do that, but he was one of few.
    What got me wasn't so
much what he did with the money as where he stole it from. It was a government
office. Where they store taxes.
    Everyone knows what the
security on those places is like. And I knew that there was no way he'd have
done something like that without it being a   screw you.   He
was making a point, and my good bloody gods but I admired that.
    It was then, in that
pub, when I realised what he'd done, how he must have made that night-raid
work, how he must have climbed and crept and fought his way in, with his new
body, how he must have been able to vanish, weighed down with specie, that I
realised he was something. That was when I knew that Jack Half-a-Prayer was no
ordinary Remade, and no ordinary renegade.
     
    Not many people see the
Remade like I do, or like Jack did.
    You know it's true. To
most of you they're to be ignored or used. If you really   notice   them
you wish you hadn't. It wasn't like that for Jack, and not just because he   was   Remade.
I bet ― I know ― that Jack used to notice them, see them clear,
before anything was done to him. And that's the same for me.
    People walk along and
see nothing but trash, Remade trash with bodies all wrong, shat out by the
punishment factories. Well, I don't want to be too sentimental about it but
I've no doubts at all that Jack'd have seen this   woman ―   whose
hands yes were gone and been replaced with little birds' wings ― and he'd
have seen an   old man,   not
the sexless thing he'd been made into, and a young lad with eyes gone and in
their place an array of dark glass and pipework and lights and the boy
stumbling trying to see in ways he weren't born to but still a boy. Jack'd see
people changed with engines in steam, and oily gears, and the