Jack Read online

  I left that fucker red and dripping. He'll never be the fucking same. For Jack, I thought. Try telling tales again. I did something to his tongue.

  As I did it, as I dug my fingers in him, I kept thinking of when I met Half-a-Prayer.

  People need something, you know, to escape. They do. They need something to make them feel free. It's good for us, it's necessary. The city needs it. But there comes a time when it has to end.

  Jack was going too far. And there'll be others, I know that too.

  I knew it was necessary. He really had gone too far. But I can't talk to my workmates about this, like I say, because I don't think they think this stuff through. They just always went on about what a bastard Half-a-Prayer was, and how he'd get his, and blah blah. I don't think they realise that the city needs people like him, that he's good for all of us.

  People have their heroes, and gods know I don't grudge them that. It ain't a surprise. They ― the people I mean ― don't know how hard it is to keep a city, a state like New Crobuzon going, why some of the things that get done get done. It can be harsh. If Jack gives people a reason to keep going, they should have it. So long as it don't get out of hand, which, of course, it always does. That's why he had to be stopped. But there'll be another one, with more big shows, more grand gestures and thefts and the like. People need that.

  I'm grateful to Jack and his kin. If they weren't there, and this is what I think my mates don't understand, if they weren't there, and all them angry people in Dog Fenn and Kelltree and Smog Bend had no one to cheer on, gods know what they'd do. That would be much worse.

  So here's a cheer for Jack Half-a-Prayer. As a spectator who enjoyed his shows, and a loyal and loving servant of this city, I toast him in his death as I did in his life. And I exacted a little revenge for him, even though I know it was past time for him to stop.

  It was a basic Remaking. We took that little traitor's legs and put engines in their place, but I made sure to do a little extra. Reshaped a suckered filament from some fish-thing's carcass, put it in place of his tongue. It'll fight him. Can't kill him, but his tongue'll hate him till the day he's gone. That was my present to Jack.

  That's what I did at work today.

  When I met Jack he wasn't Jack yet. My boss, he's the master craftsman. Bio-thaumaturge. It was him did the clayflesh, who went to work. It was him took off Jack's right hand.

  But it was me held the claw. That great, outsized mantis limb, hinging chitin blades the length of my forearm. I held it on Jack's stump while my boss made the flesh and scute run together and alloy. It was him Remade Jack, but I was part of it, and that'll always make me proud.

  I was thinking about names as I knocked off today, as I walked home through this city it's my honour to protect. I know there are plenty who don't understand what has to be done sometimes, and if the name of Jack Half-a-Prayer gives them pleasure, I don't grudge them that.

  Jack, the man I made. It's his name, now, whatever he was called before.

  Like I say, in the short time I knew him, before I made him and after, I never called Jack by his name nor he me. We couldn't, not in this line of work. Whenever I spoke to Jack, I called him "Prisoner," and answering, he called me "Sir."