Free Jack by China Miéville Page A

parts of animals,
and their innards or their skin altered with hexes, and all those things, but
he'd have seen   them   under
the punishment.
    People get broken when
they get Remade. I've seen it so many times. Suddenly, take a wrong turn by the
law and it ain't just the physical punishment, it ain't just the new limbs or
metal or the change in the body, it's that they wake up and they're   Remade,   the
same as they spat on or ignored for years. They know they're nothing.
    Jack, when it was done
to him, never thought he was nothing. He'd never thought any of them were.
     
    There was this one
time. A foundry in Smog Bend, and there was a man there, some middling
supervisor ― this was years after Jack got free, and I only heard all
this ― who was causing trouble. Informing on guilders trying to recruit.
There was gangs following organisers home, and scaring them so they'd not come
back, or maybe retiring them permanently.
    I'm not clear on the details.
But the point is what Jack done.
    One day the workers
troop in and they take their places by the gears, but there's no klaxon. And
they're waiting, but nothing happens. Now they're getting wary, they're getting
very antsy. They know it's that overseer who's due in that day, so they're nervous,
they ain't talking much, but they go looking. And there at the foot of the
steps up to the office, there's an arrow put together out of tools. On the
floor, pointing up.
    So they creep up. And
on the landing there's another. And there's a whole gang of men now, and
they're following these arrows, soldered to the banisters, up on the walkway,
trooping round the factory, until pretty much the whole workforce is up there,
and they come to the end of the gangway, and there dangling is that supervisor.
    He's unconscious. His
mouth's all scabbed. It's sewn up, with wire.
    People know right then
and there what's happened, but when the man wakes up and gets unstitched he
starts raving, describing the man who done this to him, and then it's certain.
    That man was lucky he
didn't get killed, is my thinking. There was no more trouble there for a while,
I hear. That changed things. I think they called that one Jack's Whispering
Stitch. It's things like that make you see why people respected Jack
Half-a-Prayer. Loved him.
     
    This is the greatest
city in the world. You hear that all the time, because it's true. But it's sort
of an untrue truth, for a lot of us.
    I don't know where you
live. If it's Dog Fenn, then knowing that Parliament's a building like nothing
else, or that we've riches in the coffers that would make the rest of the world
jealous, or that the scholars of New Crobuzon could outthink the bloody gods
― knowing all of that doesn't do so much. You still live in Dog Fenn, or
Badside, or what have you.
    But when Jack ran, the
city was the greatest for Badside too.
    You could see it
― I could see it ― in the way people walked, after Jack'd done
something. I don't know how it was uptown in The Crow ― I expect the
well-dressed there sneered, or made a show of not caring -but where the houses
lean in to each other, where the bricks shed pointing, in the shadow of the
glass cactus ghetto, people walked tall. Jack was everyone's: men and women,
cactus-people, khepri and vod. The wyrmen made up songs about him. The same people
that would spit in the face of a Remade beggar cheered this fReemade. In
Salacus Fields they'd toast Jack by name.
    I wouldn't do that, of
course ― not that I didn't want to, but you can imagine, in the business
I'm in, I have to be careful. I'm involved, so of course I can't be seen to be.
In my head, though, I'd raise a glass with them.   To Jack,   I'd
think.
     
    In the short time I
worked with Jack I never used his given name, nor he mine. It's in the nature
of the work, obviously, that you don't use real names. But then, what could be
more his name than Jack? Remaking is the ruin of most, but it was the making of
him.
    It's hard to make sense
of