The City and The City

Chapter Twelve

THE INNARD ROADS OF COPULA HALL seen from a police car. We did not travel fast and our siren was off, but in some vague pomp our light flickered and the concrete around us was staccato blue-lit. I saw my driver glance at me. Constable Dyegesztan his name was, and I had not met him before. I had not been able to get Corwi even as my escort.

We had gone on the low flyovers through Besźel Old Town into the convolutes of Copula Hall’s outskirts, and down at last into its traffic quadrant. Past and under the stretches of facade where caryatids looked at least somewhat like figures from Besź history, towards where they were Ul Qoman, into the hall itself, where a wide road overlit by windows and grey lights was sided at the Besź end by a long line of pedestrians seeking day entry. In the distance beyond the red taillights we were faced by the tinted headlights of Ul Qoman cars, more gold than ours.

“Been to Ul Qoma before, sir?”

“Not for a long time.”

When the border gates came into view Dyegesztan spoke to me again. “Did they have it like this before?” He was young.

“More or less.”

A policzai car, we were in the official lane, behind dark imported Mercedeses that probably carried politicians or businesspeople on fact-finding missions. A way off was the engine-grumbling line of quotidian travellers in cheaper cars, spivs and visitors.

“Inspector Tyador Borlú.” The guard looked at my papers.

“That’s right.”

He went carefully over everything written. Had I been a tourist or trader wanting a day-pass, passage might well have been quicker and questioning more cursory. As an official visitor, there was no such laxity. One of those everyday bureaucratic ironies.

“Both of you?”

“It’s right there, Sergeant. Just me. This is my driver. I’m being picked up, and the constable here’ll be coming straight back. In fact if you look, I think you can see my party over in Ul Qoma.”

There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour. Beyond, beyond the stateless space and the backwards-to-us-facing Ul Qoman checkpoint, a small group of militsya officers stood around an official car, its lights stuttering as pompously as our own, but in different colours and with a more modern mechanism (true on-off, not the twisting blinder that our own lamps contained). Ul Qoman police lights are red and darker blue than the cobalt in Besźel. Their cars are charcoal and streamlined Renaults. I remember when they drove ugly little local-made Yadajis, more boxy than our own vehicles.

The guard turned and glanced at them. “We’re due about now,” I told him.

The militsya were too far for any details to be clear. They were waiting for something though. The guard took his time of course—You may be policzai but you get no special treatment, we watch the borders —but without excuses to do otherwise eventually saluted somewhat sardonically and pointed us through as the gate rose. After the Besź road itself the hundred metres or so of no-place felt different under our tires, and then through the second set of gates and we were on the other side, with uniformed militsya coming towards us.

There was the gunning of gears. The car we had seen waiting sped in a sudden tight curve around and in front of the approaching officers, calling out one truncated and abrupt whoop from the siren. A man emerged, putting on his police cap. He was a bit younger than me, thickset and muscular and moving with fast authority. He wore official militsya grey with an insignia of rank. I tried to remember what it meant. The border guards had stopped in surprise as he held out his hand.

“That’ll do,” he shouted. He waved them away. “I got this. Inspector Borlú?” He was speaking Illitan. Dyegesztan and I climbed out of the car. He ignored the constable. “Inspector Tyador Borlú, Besźel Extreme Crime, right?” Shook my hand hard. Pointed to his car, in which his own driver waited. “Please. I’m Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. You got my message, Inspector? Welcome to Ul Qoma.”

COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated—corridors might start mostly total, Besźel or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall only , and of which the Oversight Committee and its bodies were the only government. Legended diagrams of the buildings inside were pretty but daunting meshes of colours.

At ground level, though, where the wide road jutted into the first set of gates and wire, where the Besź Border Patrol waved arrivals to a stop in their separated lines—pedestrians, handcarts, and animal-drawn trailers, squat Besź cars, vans, sub-lines for various kinds of passes, all moving at different speeds, the gates rising and lowering out of any phase—the situation was simpler. An unofficial but ancient market where Copula Hall vents into Besźel, within sight of the gates. Illegal but tolerated street hawkers walked the lines of waiting cars with roasted nuts and paper toys.

Beyond the Besźel gates, below the main mass of Copula Hall, a no-man’s-land. The tarmac was unpainted: this was neither a Besź nor an Ul Qoman thoroughfare, so what system of road markings would be used? Beyond towards the other end of the hall the second set of gates, which we on the Besźel side could not but notice were better kept than our own, with weapon-wielding Ul Qoman guards staring, most of them away from us at their own efficiently shepherded lines of visitors to Besźel. Ul Qoman border guards are not a separate wing of government, as they are in Besźel: they are militsya , police, like the policzai .

It is bigger than a coliseum, but Copula Hall’s traffic chamber is not complicated—an emptiness walled by antiquity. From the Besźel threshold you can see over the crowds and crawling vehicles to daylight filtering in from Ul Qoma, beyond. You can see the bobbing heads of Ul Qoman visitors or returning fellow countrymen approaching, the ridges of Ul Qoman razorwire beyond the hall’s midpoint, beyond that empty stretch between checkpoints. You can just make out the architecture of Ul Qoma itself through the enormous gateway hundreds of metres off. People strain to see, across that junction.

On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Besźel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Besźel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma’s weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbour, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. We drove as if coincidentally by the Copula Hall exit into Ul Qoma.

I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the lines of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besź emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking around in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been breach to see before.

Near the Ul Qoma exit is the Temple of Inevitable Light. I had seen photos many times, and though I had unseen it dutifully when we passed I was aware of its sumptuous crenellations, and had almost said to Dyegesztan that I was looking forward to seeing it soon. Now light, foreign light, swallowed me as I emerged, at speed, from Copula Hall. I looked everywhere. From the rear of Dhatt’s car, I stared at the temple. I was, suddenly, rather astonishingly and at last, in the same city as it.

“First time in Ul Qoma?”

“No, but first time in a long time.”

IT WAS YEARS since I had first taken the tests: my passmark was long expired and in a defunct passport. This time I had undergone an accelerated orientation, two days. It had only been me and the various tutors, Ul Qomans from their Besź embassy. Illitan immersion, the reading of various documents of Ul Qoman history and civic geography, key issues of local law. Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actuallybeing in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.

“Acclimatisation pedagogy’s come a long way with computers,” said one of the teachers, a young woman who praised my Illitan constantly. “We’ve got so much more sophisticated ways of dealing with stuff now; we work with neuroscientists, all sorts of stuff.” I got spoiled because I was policzai . Everyday travellers would undergo more conventional training, and would take considerably longer to qualify.

They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimised with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability. Pahlaniuk’s novel Diary of an Insile had been illegal in Besźel (and, I was sure, in Ul Qoma), but like most people I had skimmed a pirated edition.

I did the tests, pointing with a cursor at an Ul Qoman temple, an Ul Qoman citizen, an Ul Qoman lorry delivering vegetables, as quick as I could. It was faintly insulting stuff, designed to catch me inadvertently seeing Besźel. There had been nothing like this the first time I had done such studies. Not very long ago the equivalent tests would have involved being asked about the different national character of Ul Qomans, and judging who from various pictures with stereotyped physiognomies was Ul Qoman, Besź, or “Other” (Jewish, Muslim, Russian, Greek, whatever, depending on the ethnic anxieties of the time).

“Seen the temple?” Dhatt said. “And that there used to be a college. Those are apartment blocks.” He jabbed his finger at buildings as we passed, told his driver, to whom he had not introduced me, to go various routes.

“Weird?” he said to me. “Guess it must be strange.”

Yes. I looked at what Dhatt showed me. Unseeing, of course, but I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country. I had them in the background now, hardly any more present than Ul Qoma was when I was at home. I held my breath. I was unseeing Besźel. I had forgotten what this was like; I had tried and failed to imagine it. I was seeing Ul Qoma.

Day, so the light was that of the overcast cold sky, not the twists of neon I had seen in so many programmes about the neighbouring country, which the producers evidently thought it easier for us to visualise in its garish night. But that ashy daylight illuminated more and more vivid colours than in my old Besźel. The Old Town of Ul Qoma was at least half transmuted these days into a financial district, curlicued wooden rooflines next to mirrored steel. The local street hawkers wore gowns and patched-up shirts and trousers, sold rice and skewers of meat to smart men and a few women (past whom my nondescript compatriots, I tried to unsee, walked on their way to Besźel’s more quiet destinations) in the doorways of glass blocks.

After mild censure from UNESCO, a finger-wag tied to some European investment, Ul Qoma had recently passed zoning laws to stop the worst of the architectural vandalism its boomtime occasioned. Some of the ugliest recent works had even been demolished, but still the traditional baroque curlicues of Ul Qoma’s heritage sights were made almost pitiful by their giant young neighbours. Like all Besźel dwellers, I had become used to shopping in the foreign shadows of foreign success.

Illitan everywhere, in Dhatt’s running commentary, from the vendors, taxi drivers and insult-hurling local traffic. I realised how much invective I had been unhearing on crosshatched roads at home. Each city in the world has its own road-grammar, and though we were not in any total Ul Qoma areas yet, so these streets shared the dimensions and shapes of those I knew, they felt in the sharp turns we took more intricate. It was as strange as I had expected it would be, seeing and unseeing, being in Ul Qoma. We went by narrow byways less frequented in Besźel (deserted there though bustling in Ul Qoma), or which were pedestrian-only in Besźel. Our horn was constant.

“Hotel?” Dhatt said. “Probably want to get cleaned up and have something to eat, right? Where then? I know you must have some ideas. You speak good Illitan, Borlú. Better than my Besź.” He laughed.

“I’ve got a few thoughts. Places I’d like to go.” I held my notebook. “You got the dossier I sent?”

“Sure did, Borlú. That’s the lot of it, right? That’s where you’re at? I’ll fill you in about what we’ve been up to but”—he held up his hands in mock surrender—“truth is there’s not that much to tell. We thought Breach was going to be invoked. Why didn’t you give them it? You like making work for yourself?” Laugh. “Anyway, I only got assigned all this in the last couple of days, so don’t expect too much. But we’re on it now.”

“Any idea where she was killed yet?”

“Not so much. There’s only CCTV of that van coming through Copula Hall; we don’t know where it went then. No leads. Anyway, things …”

A visiting Besź van, one might assume, would be memorable in Ul Qoma, as an Ul Qoman one would be in Besźel. The truth is that unless someone saw the sign in the windscreen, people’s assumption would be that such a foreign vehicle was not in their home city, and accordingly it would remain unseen. Potential witnesses would generally not know there was anything to witness.

“That’s the main thing I want to track down.”

“Absolutely. Tyador, or is it Tyad? Got a preference?”

“And I’d like to talk to her advisors, her friends. Can you take me to Bol Ye’an?”

“Dhatt, Quss, whichever’s fine by me. Listen, just to get this out of the way, avoid confusions, I know your commissar told you this”—he relished the foreign word—“but while you’re here this is an Ul Qoman investigation, and you don’t have police powers. Don’t get me wrong—we’re totally grateful for the cooperation, and we’re going to work out what we do together, but I’ve got to be the officer here. You’re a consultant, I guess.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry, I know turf bullshit is bullshit. I was told—did you speak to my boss yet? Colonel Muasi?—anyway, he wanted to make sure we were cool before we talked. Of course you’re an honoured guest of the Ul Qoman militsya.”

“I’m not restricted to … I can travel?”

“You’ve got your permit and stamp and all that.” A single-entry trip, a month renewable. “Sure if you have to, if you want take a tourist day or two, but you’re strictly a tourist when you’re on your own. Cool? It might be better if you didn’t. I mean shit, no one’s going to stop you, but we all know it’s harder to cross over without a guide; you could breach without meaning to, and then what?”

“So. What would you do next?”

“Well look.” Dhatt turned in his seat to look at me. “We’ll be at the hotel soon. Anyway listen: like I’m trying to tell you, things are getting … I guess you haven’t heard about the other one … No, we don’t even know if there’s anything there and we only just got sniff ourselves. Look, there may be a complication.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“We’re here, sir,” the driver said. I looked out but stayed in the car. We were by the Hilton in Asyan, just outside the Ul Qoma Old Town. It was at the edge of a total street of low, modern concrete Ul Qoman residences, at the corner of a plaza of Besź brick terraces and Ul Qoman faux pagodas. Between them was an ugly fountain. I had never visited it: the buildings and pavements at its rim were crosshatched, but the central square itself was total Ul Qoma.

“We don’t know for sure yet. Obviously we’ve been up to the dig, talked to Iz Nancy, all Geary’s supervisors, all her classmates and that. No one knew anything; they just thought she’d fucked off for a couple of days. Then they heard what had happened. Anyway, the point is that after we spoke to a bunch of the students, we got a phone call from one of them. It was only yesterday. About Geary’s best friend—we saw her the day we went in to tell them, another student. Yolanda Rodriguez. She was totally in shock. We didn’t get much out of her. She was collapsing all over the place. She said she had to go, I said did she want any help, blah blah, she said she had someone to look after her. Local boy, one of the others said. Once you’ve tried Ul Qoman …” He reached over and opened my door. I did not get out.

“So she called?”

“No, that’s what I’m saying, the kid who called wouldn’t give us his name, but he was calling about Rodriguez. It seems like—and he was saying he’s not sure, could be nothing, et cetera et cetera. Anyway. No one’s seen her for a little while. Rodriguez. No one can get her on her phone.”

“She’s disappeared?”

“Holy Light, Tyad, that’s melodramatic. She might just be sick, she might have turned her phone off. I’m not saying we don’t go looking, but don’t let’s panic yet, right? We don’t know that she’s disappeared …”

“Yeah we do. Whatever’s happened, whether anything’s happened to her at all, no one can find her. That’s pretty definitional. She’s disappeared.”

Dhatt glanced at me in the mirror and then at his driver.

“Alright, Inspector,” he said. “Yolanda Rodriguez has disappeared.”

Chapter Thirteen

“WHAT’S IT LIKE, BOSS?” There was a lag on the hotel’s line to Besźel, and Corwi and I were stutteringly trying not to overlap each other.

“Too early to say. Weird to be here.”

“You saw her rooms?”

“Nothing helpful. Just student digs, with a bunch of others in a building leased by the university.”

“Nothing of hers?”

“Couple of cheap prints, some books complete with scribbled margin notes, of which none are interesting. A few clothes. A computer which either has really industrial-strength encryption or nothing germane on it. And on that I have to say I trust Ul Qoman geeks more than ours. Lots of Hi Mom love you emails, a few essays. She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”

“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”

“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.” Perhaps one day we would be finished with I-don’t-understand-the-internet jokes. “On which topic she hadn’t updated her MySpace since moving to Ul Qoma.”

“So you didn’t figure her all out?”

“Sadly no, the force was not with me.” It really had been a star-tlingly bland and uninformative room. Yolanda’s, by contrast, a corridor over, into which we had also peered, had been crammed with hipster toys, novels and DVDs, moderately flamboyant shoes. Her computer was gone.

I had gone carefully through Mahalia’s room, referring often to the photographs of how it had been when the militsya entered, before the books and few bits and pieces had been tagged and processed. The room was cordoned, and officers kept the students away, but when I glanced out of the door over the little pile of wreaths I could see Mahalia’s classmates in knots at either end of the corridor, young women and men with little visitors’ marks discreetly on their clothes. They whispered to each other. I saw more than one weeping.

We found no notebooks and no diaries. Dhatt had acquiesced to my request for copies of Mahalia’s textbooks, the copious annotations of which appeared to be her preferred study method. They were on my table: whoever had photocopied them had been rushed, and the print and handwriting yawed. As I spoke to Corwi I read a few cramped lines of Mahalia’s telegraphic arguments with herself in A People’s History of Ul Qoma .

“What’s your contact like?” Corwi said. “Your Ul Qoman me?”

“Actually I think I’m his you.” The phrase was not best chosen but she laughed.

“What’s their office like?”

“Like ours with better stationery. They took my gun.”

In fact the police station had been rather different from our own. It did have better fittings, but it was large and open-plan, full of whiteboards and cubicles over which neighbouring officers debated and bickered. Though I am sure most of the local militsya must have been informed that I was coming, I left a wake of unabashed curiosity as I followed Dhatt past his own office—he was ranked enough to get a little room—to his boss’s. Colonel Muasi had greeted me boredly with something about what a good sign of the changing relationships between our countries, herald of future cooperation, any help at all I needed, and had made me surrender my weapon. That had not been agreed beforehand, and I had tried to argue it but had given in quickly rather than sour things so early.

When we had left it had been to another roomful of not-very-friendly stares. “Dhatt,” someone had greeted him in passing, in a pointed way. “Ruffling feathers, am I?” I had asked, and Dhatt had said, “Touchy touchy. You’re Besź, what did you expect?”

“Fuckers!” said Corwi. “They did not.”

“No valid Ul Qoman licence, here in advisory role, et cetera.” I went through the bedside cupboard. There was not even a Gideon Bible. I did not know whether that was because Ul Qoma is secular, or because of lobbying by its disestablished but respected Lux Templars.

“Fuckers. So nothing to report?”

“I’ll let you know.” I glanced over the list of code phrases we had agreed to, but none of them—I miss Besź dumplings = am in trouble, Working on a theory = know who did it —were remotely germane. “I feel fucking stupid,” she had said as we came up with them. “I agree,” I had said. “I do too. Still.” Still, we could not assume that our communications would not be listened to, by whatever power it was that had outmanoeuvred us in Besźel. Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

“Same weather over here as back home,” I said. She laughed. That cliché witticism we had arranged meant nothing to report .

“What next?” she said.

“We’re going to Bol Ye’an.”

“What, now?”

“No. Sadly. I wanted to go earlier today, but they didn’t get it together and it’s too late now.” After I had showered and eaten, and wandered around the drab little room, wondering if I would recognise a listening device if I saw one, I had called the number Dhatt gave me three times before getting through to him.

“Tyador,” he had said. “Sorry, did you try to call? Been flat out, got caught tying up some stuff here. What can I do for you?”

“It’s getting on. I wanted to check about the dig site …”

“Oh, shit, yeah. Listen, Tyador, it’s not going to happen tonight.”

“Didn’t you tell people to expect us?”

“I told them to probably expect us. Look, they’ll be glad to go home, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“What about What’s-her-name Rodriguez?”

“I’m still not convinced she’s actually … no, I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m not convinced that the fact that she’s missing is suspicious, how’s that? It’s hardly been very long. But if she’s still gone tomorrow, and not answering her email or her messages or anything, then it’s looking worse, I grant you. We’ll get Missing Persons on it.” So …

“So look. I’m not going to get a chance to come over tonight. Can you …? You’ve got stuff you can do, right? I’m sorry about this. I’m couriering over a bunch of stuff, copies of our notes, and that info you wanted, about Bol Ye’an and the university campuses and all that. Do you have a computer? Can you go online?”

“… Yeah.” A departmental laptop, a hotel Ethernet connection at ten dinar a night.

“Alright then. And I’m sure they’ve got video-on-demand. So you won’t be lonely.” He laughed.

I READ Between the City and the City for a while, but stalled. The combination of textual and historic minutiae and tendentious therefores was wearing. I watched Ul Qoman television. There were more feature films than on Besź TV, it seemed, and more and louder game shows, all a channel-hop or two from newsreaders listing the successes of President Ul Mak and the New Reform packages: visits to China and Turkey, trade missions to Europe, praise from some in the IMF, whatever Washington’s sulk. Ul Qomans were obsessed with economics. Who could blame them?

“Why not, Corwi?” I took a map and made sure all of my papers, my policzai ID, my passport and my visa were in my inside pocket. I pinned my visitor’s badge to my lapels and went into the cold.

Now there was the neon. All around me in knots and coils, effacing the weak lights of my far-off home. The animated yammering in Illitan. It was a busier city than Besźel at night: now I could look at the figures at business in the dark that had been unseeable shades until now. I could see the homeless dossing down in side streets, the Ul Qoman rough sleepers that we in Besźel had had to become used to as protubs to pick our unseeing ways over and around.

I crossed Wahid Bridge, trains passing to my left. I watched the river, that was here the Shach-Ein. Water—does it crosshatch with itself? If I were in Besźel, as these unseen passersby were, I would be looking at the River Colinin. It was quite a way from the Hilton to Bol Ye’an, an hour along Ban Yi Way. Aware that I was crisscrossing Besźel streets I knew well, streets mostly of very different character than their Ul Qoman topolgangers. I unsaw them but knew that the alleys off Ul Qoma’s Modrass Street were in Besźel only, and that the furtive men entering and emerging from them were customers of the cheapest Besź prostitutes, who if I failed to unsee them I might have made out as miniskirted phantoms in that Besźel darkness. Where were Ul Qoma’s brothels, near what Besźel neighbourhoods? I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passersby we tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintily over fucking couples they assiduously unsaw.

I considered taking the subway, which I never had (there is nothing like it in Besźel), but it was a good thing to walk. I tested my Illitan on conversations I overheard; I saw the groups of Ul Qomans unsee me because of my clothes and the way I held myself, double-take and see my visitor’s mark, see me. There were groups of young Ul Qomans outside amusement arcades that rang with sound. I looked at, could see, gasrooms, small vertically oriented blimps contained within integuments of girders: once urban crow’s nests to guard against attack, for many decades now architectural nostalgias, kitsch, these days used to dangle advertisements.

There was a siren I quickly unheard, of a Besź policzai car, that passed. I focused instead on the locals moving quickly and without expression to get out of its way: that was the worst kind of protub. I had marked Bol Ye’an on my street map. Before coming to Ul Qoma I had considered travelling to its topolganger, the physically corresponding area of Besźel, to accidentally glimpse that unseen dig, but I would not risk it. I did not even travel to the edges where the ruins and park trip over tinily into Besźel itself. Unimpressive, people said, like most of our antique sites: the large majority of the great remnants were on Ul Qoman soil.

Past an old Ul Qoman edifice, though of European style, I—having planned this route—stared down a slope the length of Tyan Ulma Street, heard distantly (across a border, before I thought to un-hear) the bell of a tram crossing the street in Besźel a half mile in front of me in the country of my birth, and I saw filling the plateau at the street’s end under the half-moon the parkland, and ruins of Bol Ye’an.

Hoardings surrounded them, but I was above and could look down over those walls. An up-down treed and flowered landscape, some parts wilder, some coiffed. At the northern end of the park, where the ruins themselves were, what looked at first like a wasteland, was scrub punctuated with old stones of fallen temples, canvas-covered walkways linking marquees and prefab office buildings in some of which lights were still on. Ground showed the marks of digging: most of the excavation was hidden and protected by tough tents. Lights dotted and shone down at the winter-dying grass. Some were broken, and shed nothing but excess shadow. I saw figures walking. Security guards, keeping safe these forgotten then remembered memories.

In places the park and the site itself were edged right up to its rubble and boscage by the rear of buildings, most in Ul Qoma (some not) that seemed to jostle up against it, against history. The Bol Ye’an dig had about a year before the exigencies of city growth would smother it: money would breach the chipboard and corrugated iron boundary, and with official expressions of regret and necessity, another (Besźel-punctuated) block of offices would rise in Ul Qoma.

I traced on my map the proximity and route between Bol Ye’an and the offices of Ul Qoma University used by Prince of Wales Archaeology Department. “Hey.” It was amilitsya officer, his hand on the butt of his weapon. He had a partner a pace behind.

“What are you doing?” They peered at me. “Hey.” The officer at the rear pointed at my visitor’s sign.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m interested in archaeology.”

“The fuck you are. Who are you?” Finger click for papers. The few unseeing Besź pedestrians crossed without probably being conscious that they did so to the other side of the street. There is little more unsettling than nearby foreign trouble. It was late, but there were some Ul Qomans close enough to hear the exchange, and they did not pretend not to listen. Some stopped to watch.

“I’m …” I gave them my papers.

“Tye Adder Borlo.”

“More or less.”

“Police?” They stared all confused at me.

“I’m here assisting the militsya with an international investigation. I suggest you contact Senior Detective Dhatt of the Murder Team”

“Fuck.” They conferred out of my hearing. One radioed something through. It was too dark to take a shot of Bol Ye’an on my cheap cell phone camera. The smell of some heavy-scented street food reached me. This was increasingly the prime candidate for the smell of Ul Qoma.

“Alright, Inspector Borlú.” One of them returned my documents.

“Sorry about that,” his colleague said.

“It’s quite alright.” They looked annoyed, and waited. “I’m on my way back to the hotel anyway, officers.”

“We’ll escort you, Inspector.” They would not be deterred.

When Dhatt came to pick me up the next morning, he said nothing beyond pleasantries when he came into the dining hall to find me trying “Traditional Ul Qoman Tea,” which was flavoured with sweet cream and some unpleasant spice. He asked how the room was. Only when I had finally got into his car and he lurched away from the kerb faster and more violently than even his officer the previous day had done did he say to me finally, “I wish you hadn’t done that last night.”

THE STAFF AND STUDENTS of the Prince of Wales University Ul Qoman Archaeology program were mostly at Bol Ye’an. I arrived at the site for the second time in less than twelve hours.

“I didn’t make us appointments,” Dhatt said. “I spoke to Professor Rochambeaux, the head of the project. He knows we’re coming again, but the rest of them I thought we’d take by chance.”

Unlike for my distance viewing of the night, up close the walls blocked off the site from watchers. Militsya were stationed at points outside, security guards within. Dhatt’s badge got us immediately into the little complex of makeshift offices. I had a list of the staff and students. We went first to Bernard Rochambeaux’s office. He was a wiry man about fifteen years my senior, who spoke Illitan with a strong Quebecois accent.

“We’re all devastated,” he told us. “I didn’t know the girl, you understand? Only to see in the common room. By reputation.” His office was in a portacabin, folders and books on the temporary shelves, photographs of himself in various dig sites. Outside we heard young people walking past and talking. “Any help we can give you, of course. I don’t know many of the students myself, not well. I have three PhD students at the moment. One is in Canada, the other two being, I think, over there.” He indicated the direction of the main dig. “Them I know.”

“What about Rodriguez?” He looked at me and signalled confusion. “Yolanda? One of your students? Have you seen her?”

“She’s not one of my three, Inspector. I’m afraid there’s not much I can tell you. Have we … Is she missing?”

“She is. What do you know about her?”

“Oh my God. She’s missing? I don’t know anything about her. Mahalia Geary I knew by reputation of course, but we had literally never exchanged words other than at a welcome-new-students party a few months ago.”

“A lot longer than that,” Dhatt said. Rochambeaux stared at him.

“There you go—it’s impossible to keep track of time. Is it really? I can tell you about her all the things you already know. Her supervisor’s the one who can really help you. Have you met Isabelle?”

He had his secretary print a list of staff and students. I did not tell him we had one already. When Dhatt did not offer it to me I took it. Judging by the names, and in accordance with law, two of the archaeologists detailed were Ul Qoman.

“He’s got an alibi for Geary,” Dhatt said when we left. “He’s one of the very few who does. Most of them, you know, it was late in the night, no one can vouch, so alibi-wise at least they’re all fucked. He was on a conference call to a colleague in an uncongenial time zone roundabout the time she was killed. We checked it.”

We were looking for Isabelle Nancy’s office when someone called my name. A trim man in his early sixties, grey beard, glasses, hurrying between temporary rooms towards us. “Is it Inspector Borlú?” He glanced at Dhatt, but seeing the Ul Qoman insignia looked back at me. “I heard you might be coming. I’m glad to coincide with you. I’m David Bowden.”

“Professor Bowden.” I shook his hand. “I’m enjoying your book.”

He was visibly taken aback. He shook his head. “I take it you mean my first one. No one ever means the second one.” He dropped my hand. “That’ll get you arrested, Inspector.” Dhatt was looking at me in surprise.

“Where’s your office, Professor? I’m Senior Detective Dhatt. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I don’t have one, SD Dhatt. I’m only in here a day a week. And it’s not professor . Plain doctor. Or David is fine.”

“How long will you be here this morning, Doctor?” I said. “Could we grab a word with you?”

“I … of course, if you’d like, Inspector, but as I say, I’ve no office. Normally I meet students at my flat.” He gave me a card and when Dhatt raised an eyebrow he gave Dhatt one too. “My number’s on that. I’ll wait around if you’d like; we can probably find a place to talk.”

“Did you not come in to see us, then?” I said.

“No, this is chance. I wouldn’t normally be in today at all, but my supervisee didn’t turn up yesterday and I thought I might find her here.”

“Your supervisee?” Dhatt said.

“Yes, they only trust me with the one.” He smiled. “Hence no office.”

“Who is it you’re looking for?”

“Her name’s Yolanda, SD. Yolanda Rodriguez.”

He was horrified when we told him that she was unreachable. He stammered for something to say.

“She’s gone? After what happened to Mahalia, now Yolanda? Oh my God, Officers, do you—”

“We’re looking into it,” Dhatt said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Bowden looked stricken. We had similar reactions from his colleagues. One by one we went through the four academics we could find on-site, including Thau’ti, the senior of the two Ul Qomans, a young taciturn man. Only Isabelle Nancy, a tall well-dressed woman with two pairs of glasses of different prescriptions on chains around her neck, was aware that Yolanda had disappeared.

“It’s good to meet you, Inspector, Senior Detective.” She shook our hands. I had read her statement. She claimed she had been at home when Mahalia was murdered but could not prove it. “Anything I can do to help,” she kept saying.

“Tell us about Mahalia. I get the sense she was well-known here, if not by your boss.”

“Not so much anymore,” Nancy said. “At one point maybe. Did Rochambeaux say he didn’t know her? That’s a bit… disingenuous. She’d ruffled some feathers.”

“At the conference,” I said. “Back in Besźel.”

“That’s right. Down south. He was there. Most of us were. I was, David, Marcus, Asina. Anyway she’d been raising eyebrows at more than one session, asking questions about dissensi , about Breach, that sort of thing. Nothing explicitly illegitimate, but a bit vulgar , you could say, the sort of thing you’d expect from Hollywood or something, not the nuts-and-bolts stuff of Ul Qoman or pre-Cleavage or even Besź research. You could see the bigwigs who’d come along to open proceedings and dedicate ceremonies and whatnot were getting a bit leery. Then finally she out and starts raving about Orciny. So David’s mortified, of course; the university’s embarrassed; she nearly gets chucked out—there were some Besź representatives there who made a big hoo-ha about it.”

“But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.

“I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”

Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”

“She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.

“They were best friends.”

“Anyone who might know anything?”

“She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.

Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.

Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?

At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.

“Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.

She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense of any of it. Have you heard of the Gallimaufrians? For a long time when the pre-Cleavage stuff was first unearthed, after archaeologist-error was grudgingly ruled out,” she laughed, “people made them up as an explanation for what was being fished up. A hypothetical civilisation before Ul Qoma and Besźel that systematically dug up all artefacts in the region, from millennia ago to their own grandmother’s bric-a-brac, mixed them all up and buried them again or chucked them away.”

Nancy saw me looking at her. “They didn’t exist,” she reassured me. “That’s agreed now. By most of us, anyway. This”—she gestured at the hole—“is not a mix. It is the remnants of a material culture. Just one we’re still not very clear on. We had to learn to stop trying to find and follow a sequence and just look.”

Items that should have spanned epochs, contemporaneous. No other culture in the region made any but the scantest, seductively vague references to the pre-Cleavage locals, these peculiar men and women, witch-citizens by fairy tale with spells that tainted their discards, who used astrolabes that would not have shamed Arzachel or the Middle Ages, dried-mud pots, stone axes that my flat-browed many-greats grandfather might have made, gears, intricately cast insect toys, and whose ruins underlay and dotted Ul Qoma and, occasionally, Besźel.

“This is Senior Detective Dhatt of the militsya and Inspector Borlú of the policzai,” Nancy was telling the students in the hole. “Inspector Borlú’s here as part of the investigation into the … into what happened to Mahalia.”

Several of them gasped. Dhatt crossed off names, and I copied him, as one by one the students came to talk to us in the common room. They had all been interviewed before but came docile as lambs, and answered questions they must have been sick of.

“I was relieved when I realised you were here for Mahalia,” the Goth woman said. “That sounds awful. But I thought you’d found Yolanda and something’d happened.” Her name was Rebecca Smith-Davis, she was a first year, working on pot reconstruction. She got teary when she spoke about her dead friend and her missing friend. “I thought you’d found her and it was … you know, she’d been …”

“We’re not even sure Rodriguez is missing,” Dhatt said.

“You say. But you know. With Mahalia, and everything.” Shook her head. “Them both being into strange stuff.”

“Orciny?” I said.

“Yeah. And other stuff. But yeah, Orciny. Yolanda’s more into that stuff than Mahalia was, though. People said Mahalia used to be way into it when she first started, but not so much now, I guess.”

Because they were younger and partied later, several of the students, unlike their teachers, had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death. At some unspoken point Dhatt deemed Yolanda an official missing person, and his questions grew more precise, the notes he took longer. It did not do us much good. No one was sure of the last time they had seen her, only that they hadn’t seen her for days.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened to Mahalia?” Dhatt asked all the students. We got no after no.

“I’m not into conspiracies,” one boy said. “What happened was … unbelievably horrible. But, you know, the idea that there’s some big secret …” He shook his head. He sighed. “Mahalia was … she could piss people off, and what happened happened because she went to the wrong part of Ul Qoma, with the wrong person.” Dhatt made notes.

“No,” said a girl. “No one knew her. You maybe thought you did, but then you realise she was doing all kinds of secret stuff you didn’t know anything about. I think I was a bit scared of her. I liked her, I did, but she was kind of intense. And smart. Maybe she was seeing someone. Some local crazy. That’s the kind of thing she’d have … She was into weird stuff. I’d always see her in the library—we’ve got like reading cards for the university library here?—and she’d be making all those little notes in her books.” She made cramped writing motions and shook her head, inviting us to agree on how strange that was.

“Weird stuff?” Dhatt said.

“Oh, you know, you hear stuff.”

“She pissed someone off, yo.” This young woman spoke loud and quickly. “One of the crazies. You heard about her first time to the cities? Over in Besźel? She nearly got into a fight. With like academics and like politicians . At an archaeology conference. That’s hard to do. It’s amazing she ever got let back in anywhere.”

“Orciny.”

“Orciny?” Dhatt said.

“Yeah.”

This last speaker was a thin and straightlaced boy wearing a grubby T-shirt featuring what must have been the character from a children’s television show. His name was Robert. He looked mournfully at us. He blinked desperately. His Illitan was not good.

“Do you mind if I speak to him in English?” I said to Dhatt.

“No,” he said. A man put his head round the corner of the door and stared at us. “You go on,” Dhatt said to me. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He left, closing the door behind him.

“Who was that?” I said to the boy.

“Doctor UlHuan,” he said. The other of the Ul Qoman academics on-site. “Will you find who did this?” I might have answered with the usual kind, meaningless certainties, but he looked too stricken for them. He stared at me and bit his lip. “Please,” he said.

“What did you mean about Orciny?” I said eventually.

“I mean”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Just keep thinking about it, you know? Makes you nervy. I know it’s stupid but Mahalia used to be right up in that, and Yolanda was getting more and more into it—we used to rip shit out of her for it, you know?—and then both of them disappear…” He looked down and closed his eyes with his hand, as if he did not have the strength to blink. “It was me who called about Yolanda. When I couldn’t find her. I don’t know,” he said. “It just makes you wonder.” He ran out of what to say.

“WE’VE GOT SOME STUFF,” Dhatt said. He was pointing me along the walkways between the offices, back out of Bol Ye’an. He looked at the masses of notes he had made, sorted through the business cards and phone numbers on scraps. “I don’t know yet what it is that we’ve got, but we’ve got stuff. Maybe. Fuck.”

“Anything from UlHuan?” I said.

“What? No.” He glanced at me. “Backed up most of what Nancy said.”

“You know what it’s interesting that we didn’t get?” I said.

“Eh? Not following,” Dhatt said. “Seriously, Borlú,” he said as we neared the gate. “What d’you mean?”

“That was a group of kids from Canada, right…”

“Most of them. One German, one a Yank.”

“All Anglo-Euro-American, then. Let’s not kid ourselves—it might seem a bit rude to us, but we both know what outsiders to Besźel and Ul Qoma are most fascinated with. You notice what not a single one of them brought up, in any context, as even possibly to do with anything?”

“What do you …” Dhatt stopped. “Breach.”

“None of them mentioned Breach. Like they were nervous. You know as well as I do that normally it’s the first and only thing foreigners want to know about. Granted this lot have gone a bit more native than most of their compatriots, but still.” We waved thanks to the guards who opened the gate, and we stepped out. Dhatt was nodding carefully. “If someone we knew just disappeared without a single damned trace and out of nowhere like this, it’s one of the first things we’d consider, right? However much we might not want to?” I said. “Let alone people who must find it a whole lot harder than us not to breach every minute.”

“Officers!” It was one of the security detail, an athletic-looking young man with a mid-period David Beckham Mohican. He was younger than most of his colleagues. “Officers, please?” He jogged towards us.

“I just wanted to know,” he said. “You’re investigating who killed Mahalia Geary, right? I wanted to know … I wanted to know if you knew anything. If you got anywhere. Could they have got away?”

“Why?” said Dhatt eventually. “Who are you?”

“I, no one, no one. I just… It’s sad, it’s terrible, and we all, me and the rest of us, the guards, we feel bad and we want to know if, whoever, if who did this …”

“I’m Borlú,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Aikam. Aikam Tsueh.”

“You were a friend of hers?”

“I, sure a little bit. Not really, but you know I knew her. To say hello. I just want to know if you found anything.”

“If we did, Aikam, we can’t tell you,” said Dhatt.

“Not now,” I said. Dhatt glanced at me. “Have to work things out first. You understand. But maybe we can ask you a few questions?” He looked alarmed for a moment.

“I don’t know anything. But sure, I guess. I was worried if they could get out of the city, past the militsya . If there was a way you could do that. Is there?”

I made him write his phone number in my notebook before he went back to his station. Dhatt and I watched his back.

“Did you question the guards?” I said, watching Tsueh go.

“Of course. Nothing very interesting. They’re security guards, but this site’s under ministry aegis, so the checks are a bit more stringent than usual. Most of them had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death.”

“Did he?”

“I’ll check, but I don’t remember his name being red-flagged, so he probably did.”

Aikam Tsueh turned at the gate and saw us watching. Raised his hand hesitantly in a good-bye.

Chapter Fourteen

SIT HIM IN A COFFEE SHOP—a teahouse, really, we were in Ul Qoma—and Dhatt’s aggressive energy dissipated somewhat. He still drummed his fingers on the edge of the table in a complicated rhythm I could not have mimicked, but he met my eyes, did not shift in his seat. He listened and made serious suggestions for how we might proceed. He twisted his head to read the notes I made. He took messages from his centre. While we sat there he did a gracious job, in truth, of obscuring the fact that he did not like me.

“I think we need to get some protocol in place about questioning,” was all he said, when first we sat, “too many cooks,” to which I murmured some half apology.

The tea shop staff would not take Dhatt’s money: he did not offer it very hard. “Militsya discount,” the serving woman said. The café was full. Dhatt eyed a raised table by the front window until the man who sat there noticed the scrutiny, rose, and we sat. We overlooked a Metro station. Among the many posters on a nearby wall was one I saw then unsaw: I was not sure it was not the poster I had had printed, to identify Mahalia. I did not know if I was right, if the wall was alter to me now, total in Besźel, or crosshatched and a close patchwork of information from different cities.

Ul Qomans emerged from below the street and gasped at the temperature, shrank into their fleeces. In Besźel, I knew—though I tried to unsee the Besź citizens doubtless descending from Yan-jelus Station of the overland transit, which was by chance a few scores of metres from the submerged Ul Qoman stop—people would be wearing furs. Among the Ul Qoman faces were people I took to be Asian or Arab, even a few Africans. Many more than in Besźel.

“Open doors?”

“Hardly,” Dhatt said. “Ul Qoma needs people, but everyone you see’s been carefully vetted, passed the tests, knows the score. Some of them are having kids. Ul Qoman pickaninnies!” His laugh was delighted. “We’ve got more than you lot, but not because we’re lax.” He was right. Who wanted to move to Besźel?

“What about the ones that don’t make it through?”

“Oh, we have our camps, same as you, here and there, round the outskirts. The UN’s not happy. Neither’s Amnesty. Giving you shit about conditions too? Want smokes?” A cigarette kiosk was a few metres from the entrance to our café. I had not realised I was staring at it.

“Not really. Yes, I guess. Curiosity. I haven’t smoked Ul Qoman I don’t think ever.”

“Hold on.”

“No, don’t get up. I don’t anymore; I gave up.”

“Oh come on, consider it ethnography, you’re not at home … Sorry, I’ll stop. I hate people who do that.”

“That?”

“Pimping stuff on people who’ve given up. And I’m not even a smoker.” He laughed and sipped. “Then at least it would be some fucked-up resentment at your success in quitting. I must just generally resent you. Malicious little bastard I am.” He laughed.

“Look, I’m sorry about, you know, jumping in like that…”

“I just think we need protocols. I don’t want you to think—”

“I appreciate that.”

“Alright, no worries. How about I handle the next one?” he said. I watched Ul Qoma. It was too cloudy to be so cold.

“You said that guy Tsueh has an alibi?”

“Yeah. They called it in for me. Most of those security guys are married and their wives’ll vouch, which okay isn’t worth a turd, but we couldn’t find any link from any of them to Geary except nods in a corridor. That one, Tsueh, actually was out that night with a bunch of the students. He’s young enough to fraternise.”

“Convenient. And unusual.”

“Sure. But he’s got no connections between anyone and anything. The kid’s nineteen. Tell me about the van.” I went over it again. “Light, am I going to have to come back with you?” he said. “Sounds like we’re looking for someone Besź.”

“Someone in Besźel drove the van through the border. But we know Geary was killed in Ul Qoma. So unless the killer murdered her, raced over to Besźel, grabbed a van, raced back, grabbed her, raced back again to dump the body, and why, we might add did they dump the body where they dumped it?, we’re looking at a cross-border phone call followed by a favour. So two perps.”

“Or breach.”

I moved.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or breach. But from what we know someone’s gone to a fair bit of trouble to not breach. And to let us know that.”

“The notorious footage. Funny how that turned up …”

I looked at him, but he did not seem to be mocking. “Isn’t it?”

“Oh come on, Tyador, what, are you surprised? Whoever’s done this, smart enough to know not to fuck with the borders, gives a friend over your side a call, and now’s shitting rocks that Breach is going to appear for him. And that would be unfair. So they’ve got some little helper in Copula Hall or Traffic or something and they’ve given them a whisper what time they crossed. It isn’t as if Besź bureaucrats are irreproachable.”

“Hardly.”

“There you go, then. See, you look happier.”

It would be a smaller conspiracy that way, than some of the other looming possibilities. Someone had known which vans to look for. Pored over a bunch of videos. What else? In that freezing but pretty day, cold muting Ul Qoma’s colours to everyday shades, it was hard and felt absurd to see Orciny in any corners.

“Let’s retrace,” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere hunting for this fucking van driver. Hopefully your lot are on that. We’ve got nothing except a description of the van, and who in Ul Qoma’s going to admit having even maybe seen a Besź van, with or without permit to be there? So let’s go back to square one. What was your break?” I looked at him. I looked at him carefully and thought over the order of events. “When did she stop being Unknown Corpse One? What started it?”

In my room at the hotel were the notes I had taken from the Gearys. Her email address and phone number were in my notebook. They did not have their daughter’s body nor could they return to collect it. Mahalia Geary lay in the freezer waiting. For me, you could say.

“A phone call.”

“Yeah? A snitch?”

“… Sort of. It was his lead got me to Drodin.” I saw him remember the dossier, that this was not how it was described there.

“What are you … Who?”

“Well this is the thing.” I paused a long time. Eventually I looked at the table and drew shapes in my spilled tea. “I’m not sure what to … It was a phone call from here.”

“Ul Qoma?” I nodded. “What the fuck? From who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why were they calling?”

“They saw our posters. Yeah. Our posters in Besźel.”

Dhatt leaned in. “The fuck they did. Who?”

“You realise that this puts me in—”

“Of course I do.” He was intent, spoke quickly. “Of course I do, but come on, you’re police, you think I’m going to fuck you over? Between us. Who was it?”

It was not a small thing. If I was accessory to breach, he was now accessory to accessory. He did not seem nervous about it. “I think they were unifs. You know, unificationists?”

“They said so?”

“No, but it was what they said and how they said it. Anyway, I know it was totally not-on, but it was that got me on the right track … What?” Dhatt was sitting back. His fingers drummed faster now, and he was not looking at me.

“Fuck, we’ve got something. I cannot fucking believe you didn’t mention this before.”

“Hold on, Dhatt.”

“Okay, I can really—I can see that this puts you in a bit of a position.”

“I don’t know anything about who this was.”

“We’re still in time; we can maybe hand it over and explain that you were just a bit late …”

“Hand what over? We don’t have anything.”

“We have a unif bastard who knows something is what we have. Let’s go.” He stood and jiggled his car keys.

“Go where?”

“Go fucking detecting!”

“OF BLOODY COURSE,” Dhatt said. He was tearing up Ul Qoma streets, the car’s siren gasping. He turned, shouting abuse at scuttling Ul Qoman civilians, swerved wordlessly to avoid Besź pedestrians and cars, accelerating with the expressionless anxiety foreign emergencies occasion. If we hit one of them it would be a bureaucratic disaster. A breach now would not be helpful.

“Yari, it’s Dhatt.” He shouted into his cell phone. “Any clue if the cc of the unifs are in at the moment? Excellent, thanks.” He slapped it shut.

“Looks like at least some of them are. I knew you’d spoken to Besź unifs, of course. Read your report. But what kind of fool am I”—slap slap of his forehead with the heel of his hand—“didn’t occur to me to go talk to our own little homegrowns. Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers—and we have our share of fuckers, Tyad—are all talking to each other. I know where they hang out.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“I hate those little sods. I hope … Goes without saying, I mean, that I’ve met some great Besź in my time.” He glanced at me. “Nothing against the place and I hope I get to visit, and it’s great that we’re all getting on so well these days, you know, better than it used to be—what was the fucking point of all that shit? But I’m Ul Qoman and I’m fucked if I want to be anything else. You imagine unification?” He laughed. “Fucking catastrophe! Unity is strength my Ul Qoman arse. I know they say crossbreeding makes animals stronger, but what if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Besź optimism?”

He made me laugh. We passed between ancient age-mottled roadside stone pillars. I recognised them from photographs, remembered too late that the one on the eastern side of the road was the only one I should see—it was in Ul Qoma, the other in Besźel. So most people said, anyway: they were one of the cities’ controversial disputed loci. The Besź buildings I couldn’t help fail to completely unsee were, I glimpsed, sedate and tidy, but in Ul Qoma wherever we were was an area of decay. We passed canals, and for several seconds I did not know which city they were in, or if it was both. By a weed-flecked yard, where nettles poked out from below a long-immobile Citroën like a hovercraft’s skirt of air, Dhatt braked hard and got out before I had even undone my seatbelt.

“Time was,” Dhatt said, “we’d have locked every one of these fuckers away.” He strode towards a tumbledown door. There are no legal unificationists in Ul Qoma. There are no legal socialist parties, fascist parties, religious parties in Ul Qoma. Since the Silver Renewal almost a century before under the tutelage of General Ilsa, Ul Qoma had had only the People’s National Party. Many older establishments and offices still displayed portraits of Ya Ilsa, often above “Ilsa’s Brothers” Atatürk and Tito. The cliché was that in older offices there was always a faded patch between those two, where erstwhile brother Mao had once beamed.

But this is the twenty-first century, and President Ul Mak (whose portrait you can also see where managers are most obsequious), like President Umbir before him, had announced certainly not a repudiation but a development of the National Road, an end to restrictive thinking, a glasnostroika , as Ul Qoman intellectuals hideously neologised. With the CD-and-DVD shops, the software startups and galleries, the bullish Ul Qoman financial markets, the revalued dinar, came, they said, New Politics, a very vaunted openness to hitherto dangerous dissidence. Not to say that radical groups, let alone parties, were legalised, but their ideas were sometimes acknowledged. So long as they displayed restraint in meetings and proselytisation, they were indulged. So one heard.

“Open!” Dhatt slammed on the door. “This is the unif hangout,” he said to me. “They’re constantly on the phone to your lot in Besźel—that’s kind of their deal , right?”

“What’s their status?”

“You’re about to hear them say they’re just a group of friends meeting for a chat. No membership cards or anything, they’re not stupid. Shouldn’t take a fucking bloodhound for us to track down some contraband, but that’s not really what I’m here for.”

“What are we here for?” I looked around at decrepit Ul Qoman facades, Illitan graffiti demanding that so-and-so fuck off and informing that such-and-such person sucked cock. Breach must be watching.

He looked at me levelly. “Whoever made that phone call to you did it from here. Or frequents this place. Pretty much guarantee it. Want to find out what our seditionist pals know. Open.” That to the door. “Don’t be fooled by their whole who us? thing; they’re perfectly happy to smack shit out of anyone quote working against unification unfuckingquote. Open.”

The door obeyed this time, a crack onto a small young woman, the sides of her head shaved, showing tattooed fish and a few letters in a very old alphabet.

“Who …? What do you want?”

Perhaps they had sent her to the door hoping her size would shame anyone out of what Dhatt did next, which was to shove the door hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into the grotty hallways.

“Everyone here now,” he shouted, striding through the corridor, past the dishevelled punkess.

After confused moments when the thought of attempting to get out must have crossed their minds and been overruled, the five people in the house gathered in their kitchen, sat on the unstable chairs where Dhatt put them, and did not look at us. Dhatt stood at the head of the table and leaned over them.

“Right,” he said. “Here it is. Someone made a phone call that my esteemed colleague here is keen to recall, and we’re keen to find out who it was who was so helpful on the phone. I won’t waste your time by pretending I think any of you are going to admit it, so instead we’re going to go round the table and each of you is going to say, ‘Inspector, I have something to tell you.’” They stared at him. He grinned and waved them begin. They did not, and he cuffed the man nearest him, to the cries of his companions, the man’s own shout of pain and a noise of surprise from me. When the man looked slowly up his forehead was stained with incoming bruise.

“‘Inspector, I have something to tell you,’” Dhatt said. “We’re just going to have to keep going till we get our man. Or woman.” He glanced at me; he had forgotten to check. “That’s the thing with cops.” He got ready for a backwards swipe across the same man’s face. I shook my head and raised my hands a bit, and the unificationists gathered around the table made various moans. The man Dhatt threatened tried to rise but Dhatt grabbed his shoulder with his other hand and shoved him back into the chair.

“Yohan, just say it!” the punk girl shouted.

“Inspector, I’ve got something to tell you.”

Around the table it went. “Inspector, I have something to tell you.” “Inspector, I have something to tell you.”

One of the men spoke slowly enough, at first, that it might have been a provocation, but Dhatt raised an eyebrow at him and slapped his friend yet again. Not as hard, but this time blood came.

“Holy fucking Light!”

I dithered by the door. Dhatt made them all say it again, and their names.

“Well?” he said to me.

It had been neither of the two women, of course. Of the men, one’s voice was reedy and his Illitan accent, I presumed, from a part of the city I didn’t recognise. It could have been either of the other two. One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar. Had I heard him say exactly the words my interlocutor had used, or had I heard him speak in the same long-dead form of language, it might have been easier to be sure. Dhatt saw me looking at him and pointed questioningly. I shook my head.

“Say it again,” Dhatt said to him.

“No,” I said, but Jaris was gabbling pointlessly through the phrase. “Anyone speak old Illitan or Besź? Root-form stuff?” I said. They looked at each other. “I know, I know,” I said. “There’s no Illitan, no Besź, and so on. Do any of you speak it?”

“All of us,” said the older man. He did not wipe the blood from his lip. “We live in the city and it’s the language of the city.”

“Careful,” said Dhatt. “I could charge you on that. It’s this one, right?” He pointed at Jaris again.

“Leave it,” I said.

“Who knew Mahalia Geary?” Dhatt said. “Byela Mar?”

“Marya,” I said. “Something.” Dhatt fished in his pocket for her photograph. “But it’s none of them,” I said. I was in the door frame, and moving out of the room. “Leave it. It’s no one. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

He approached me close, looking quizzical. “Hmm?” he whispered. I shook my head minutely. “Fill me in, Tyador.”

Eventually he pursed his lips and turned back to the unificationists. “Stay careful,” he said. He left and they stared after him, five faces frightened and bewildered, one of them bloody and dripping. My own was set, I suspect, from the effort of not showing anything.

“You’ve got me confused, Borlú.” He drove much more slowly than we had come on the return. “I can’t work out what just happened. You backed away from that, and it was our best lead. The only thing that makes sense is that you’re worried about complicity. Because sure, if you got a call and went with it, if you took them up on that information, then yeah that’s breach. But no one’s going to give a shit about you, Borlú. It’s a little tiny breach, and you know as well as I do that they’ll let that go if we sort out something bigger.”

“I don’t know how it is in Ul Qoma,” I said. “In Besźel breach is breach.”

“Bullshit. What does that even mean? Is that what this is? That’s it?” He slowed behind a Besź tram; we rocked over the foreign rails in the crosshatched road. “Fuck, Tyador, we can sort it out; we can come up with something, no problem, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“That’s not it.”

“I fucking hope that’s it. I really do. What else is your beef? Listen, you wouldn’t have to incriminate yourself or anything—”

“That’s not it. None of those were the ones that made the phone call. I don’t know for sure the phone call was even from abroad. From here. I don’t know anything for sure. Could have been a crank call.”

“Right.” When he dropped me at the hotel he did not get out. “I’ve got paperwork,” he said. “I’m sure you do too. Take a couple of hours. We should talk to Professor Nancy again, and I want to have another word with Bowden. Does that meet with your approval? If we drove there and asked a few questions, would those methods be acceptable?”

After a couple of tries I got Corwi. At first we tried to stick to our stupid code, but it did not last.

“I’m sorry boss, I’m not bad at this shit, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to snag Dhatt’s personnel files from the militsya . You’ll cause a sodding international incident. What do you want, anyway?”

“I just want to know what his story is.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Who knows? They’re old-school here.”

“Yeah?”

“Robust interrogations.”

“I’ll tell Naustin, he’ll love it, get an exchange. You sound rattled, boss.”

“Just do me a favour and see if you can get anything, okay?” When I had rung off I picked up Between the City and the City and put it down again.

Chapter Fifteen

“STILL NO LUCK WITH THE VAN?” I said.

“Not pitching up on any cameras we can find,” Dhatt said. “No witnesses. Once it’s through Copula Hall from your side it’s mist.” We both knew that with its make and its Besź number plates, anyone in Ul Qoma who glimpsed it would likely have thought it elsewhere and quickly unseen it, without noticing its pass.

When Dhatt showed me on the map how close Bowden’s flat was to a station, I suggested we go by public transport. I had travelled on the Paris and Moscow Metros and the London Tube. The Ul Qoma transit used to be more brutalist than any—efficient and to a certain taste impressive, but pretty unrelenting in its concrete. Something over a decade ago it was renewed, at least all those stations in its inner zones. Each was given to a different artist or designer, who were told, with exaggeration but not as much as you might think, that money was no object.

The results were incoherent, sometimes splendid, variegated to a giddying extent. The nearest stop to my hotel was a camp mimicry of Nouveau. The trains were clean and fast and full and on some lines, on this line, driverless. Ul Yir Station, a few turns from the pleasant, uninteresting neighbourhood where Bowden lived, was a patchwork of Constructivist lines and Kandinsky colours. It was, in fact, by a Besź artist.

“Bowden knows we’re coming?”

Dhatt lifted a hand for me to wait. We had ascended to street level and he had his cell to his ear, was listening to a message.

“Yeah,” he said after a minute, shutting the phone. “He’s waiting for us.”

David Bowden lived in a second-floor apartment, in a skinny building, giving him the whole storey to himself. He had crammed it with art objects, remnants, antiquities from the two cities and, to my ignorant eye, their precursor. Above him, he told us, was a nurse and her son: below him a doctor, originally from Bangladesh, who had lived in Ul Qoma even longer than he had.

“Two expats in one building.” I said.

“It’s not exactly a coincidence,” he said. “Used to be, before she passed away, that upstairs was an ex-Panther.” We stared. “A Black Panther, made it out after Fred Hampton was killed. China, Cuba and Ul Qoma were the destinations of choice. When I moved here, when your government liaison officer told you an apartment had come up, you took it, and blow me if all the buildings we were housed in weren’t full of foreigners. Well, we could moan together about whatever it was we missed from home. Have you heard of Marmite? No? Then you’ve obviously never met a British spy in exile.” He poured me and Dhatt, unbidden, glasses of red wine. We spoke in Illitan. “This was years ago, you understand. Ul Qoma didn’t have a pot to piss in. It had to think about efficiencies. There was always one Ul Qoman living in each of these buildings. Much easier for a single person to keep an eye on several foreign visitors if they were all in one place.”

Dhatt met his eye. Fuck off, these truths don’t intimidate me , his expression said. Bowden smiled a little bashfully.

“Wasn’t it a bit insulting?” I said. “Honoured visitors, sympaticos being watched like that?”

“Might have been for some of them,” Bowden said. “The Philbys of Ul Qoma, the real fellow travellers, were probably rather put out. But then they’d also be the ones most likely to put up with anything. I never particularly objected to being watched. They were right not to trust me.” He sipped his drink. “How are you getting on withBetween , Inspector?”

His walls were painted beiges and browns in need of renovation, and busy with bookshelves and books and the folk art in Ul Qoman and Besź styles, antique maps of both cities. On surfaces were figurines and the remnants of pottery, tiny clockwork-looking things. The living room was not large, and so full of bits and pieces it was cramped.

“You were here when Mahalia was killed,” Dhatt said.

“I have no alibi, if that’s what you mean. My neighbour might have heard me puttering about, ask her, but I don’t know.”

“How long have you lived here?” I said. Dhatt pursed his lips without looking at me.

“God, years.”

“And why here?”

“I don’t understand.”

“So far as I can tell you have at least as much Besź stuff as local.” I pointed at one of the many old or reproduction Besź icons. “Is there a particular reason you ended up here rather than Besźel? Or anywhere else?”

Bowden turned his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling.

“I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know how much you know about this stuff. Most of the artefacts that are worth looking at, including the ones that look to us now like they were made by Besź craftsmen, are in Ul Qoman soil. That’s just how it’s always been. The situation was never helped by Besźel’s idiotic willingness to sell what little heritage it could dig up to whoever wanted it. Ul Qoma’s always been smarter about that.”

“Even a dig like Bol Ye’an?”

“You mean under foreign direction? Sure. The Canadians don’t technically own any of it; they just have some handling and cataloguing rights. Plus the kudos they get from writing up, and a warm glow. And dibs on museum tours, of course. The Canadians are happy as Larry about the US blockade, believe me. Want to see a very vivid green? Tell an American archaeologist you work in Ul Qoma. Have you seen Ul Qoma’s laws on antiquities export?” He closed his hands, fingers interlocking like a trap. “Everyone who wants to work on Ul Qoma, or Besźel, let alone if they’re into Precursor Age, ends up here if they can get here.”

“Mahalia was an American archaeologist…” Dhatt said.

“Student,” Bowden said. “When she finished her PhD she’d have had a harder time staying.”

I was standing, glancing into his study. “Could I …?” I indicated in.

“I … sure.” He was embarrassed at the tiny space. It was if anything even more cramped with the tat of antiquity than his living room. His desk was its own archaeology of papers, computer cables, a street-finder map of Ul Qoma, battered and several years old. Amid the mess of papers were some in a strange and very ancient script, neither Illitan nor Besź, pre-Cleaved. I could not read any of it.

“What’s this?”

“Oh …” He rolled his eyes. “It arrived yesterday morning. I still get crank mail. Since Between . Stuff that people put together and say is in the script of Orciny. I’m supposed to decode it for them. Maybe the poor sods really believe it’s something.”

“Can you decode that one?”

“Are you kidding? No. It doesn’t mean anything.” He closed the door. “No news of Yolanda?” he said. “This is seriously worrying.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Dhatt. “Missing Persons are on it. They’re very good. We’re working closely with them.”

“We absolutely have to find her, Officers. I’m … This is crucial.”

“Do you have any idea who might have any grievance against Yolanda?”

“Yolanda? My God no, she’s sweet, I can’t think of anyone. Mahalia was a bit different. I mean … Mahalia was … what happened to her was utterly appalling. Appalling. She was smart, very smart, and opinionated, and brave, and it isn’t quite so … What I’m saying is I can imagine Mahalia getting people angry. She did that. It’s the kind of person she was, and I mean that as a compliment. But there was always that fear that Mahalia might one day piss off the wrong person.”

“Who might she have pissed off?”

“I’m not talking specifics, Senior Detective, I have no idea. We didn’t have very much contact, Mahalia and I. I hardly knew her.”

“Small campus,” I said. “Surely you all knew everyone.”

“True. But honestly I avoided her. We hadn’t spoken for a long time. We didn’t get off to a very auspicious start. Yolanda, though, I know. And she’s nothing like that. She’s not as clever, maybe, but I cannot think of a single person who doesn’t like her, nor why anyone would want to do anything to her. Everyone’s horrified. Including the locals who work there.”

“Would they have been devastated about Mahalia, too?” I said.

“I doubt any of them knew her, to be frank.”

“One of the guards seemed to. Made a point of asking us about her. About Mahalia. I thought he might be her boyfriend or something.”

“One of the guards? Absolutely not. Sorry, that sounded a bit peremptory. What I mean is that I’d be amazed. Knowing what I do of Mahalia, I mean.”

“Which isn’t much, you said.”

“No. But, you know, you pick up on who’s doing what, which students do what. Some of them—Yolanda’s one—hang out with the Ul Qoman staff, but not Mahalia. You will tell me if you find anything out about Yolanda? You have to find her. Or even if you just have theories about where she is, please, this is terrible.”

“You’re Yolanda’s supervisor?” I said. “What’s her PhD on?”

“Oh.” He waved. “‘Representing Gender and the Other in Precursor Age Artefacts.’ I still prefer ‘pre-Cleavage’ but it makes an unfortunate pun in English, so Precursor Age is the newly preferred term.”

“You said she’s not smart?”

“I did not say that. She’s perfectly intelligent enough. It’s fine. She’s just … There aren’t that many people like Mahalia in any postgraduate program.”

“So why weren’t you her supervisor?”

He stared at me as if I was mocking him.

“Because of her bullshit , Inspector,” he said at last. He stood and turned his back, seemed to want to walk around the room, but it was too small. “Yes, these were the tricky circumstances under which we met.” He turned back to us. “Senior Detective Dhatt, Inspector Borlú. Do you know how many PhD students I have? One. Because no one else wanted her. Poor thing. I have no office at Bol Ye’an. I have no tenure nor am I on tenure track. Do you know what my official title is, at Prince of Wales? I’m a Corresponding Lecturer . Don’t ask me what that means. Actually, I can tell you what it means—it means We are the world’s leading institution for Ul Qoma, Besźel and Precursor Age studies, and we need all the names we can get, and we may even entice a few rich kooks onto our program with your moniker, but we are not so stupid as to give you a real job.”

“Because of the book?”

“Because of Between the City and the City . Because I was a stoned young man with a neglectful supervisor and a taste for the arcane. No matter that you turn around a little later and say ‘Mea culpa, I messed up, no Orciny, my apologies.’ No matter that eighty-five percent of the research still holds up and is still used . Hear me? No matter what else you do, ever. You can never walk away from it no matter how hard you try.

“So when, as happens regularly, someone comes to me and tells me that the work that fucked things up is so great, and that she’d love to work with me—and this is what Mahalia did at the conference over in Besźel where I first met her—and that it’s such a travesty that the truth is still banned in both cities, and that she’s on my side … Did you know by the way that when she first arrived here she not only smuggled a copy of Between into Besźel but told me she was going to shelve it in the history section of the University Library, for Christ’s sake? For people to find? She told me that proudly. I told her to get rid of it immediately or I would set the policzai on her. Anyway, when she tells me all that, yes, I got shirty.

“I meet these people pretty much every conference I go to. I tell them I was wrong and they think either that I’ve been bought off by the Man, or that I’m afraid for my life. Or that I’ve been replaced by a robot or something.”

“Did Yolanda ever talk about Mahalia? Wasn’t it hard, you feeling like that about her best friend …”

“Feeling like what? There was nothing, Inspector. I told her I wouldn’t supervise her; she accused me of cowardice or capitulation or something, I can’t remember; that was the last of it. I gathered that she’d more or less shut up about Orciny in the years since she’d been on the program. I thought good , she’s grown out of it. That was it. And I heard she was clever.”

“I got the impression Professor Nancy was a bit disappointed with her.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. She wouldn’t be the first person to be a letdown in writing, but she still had a reputation.”

“Yolanda wasn’t into Orciny stuff? That’s not why she was studying with you?”

He sighed and sat down again. It was unimpressive, his lacklustre up-down.

“I thought not. I wouldn’t have supervised her. And no, not at first… but she’d mentioned it recently. Brought up dissensi , what might live there, all that. She knew my feelings, so she was trying to act as if it was all hypotheticals. It sounds ridiculous, but it honestly hadn’t even occurred to me that it was because of Mahalia’s influence. Was she talking to her about it? Do you know?”

“Tell us about the dissensi,” Dhatt said. “Do you know where they are?”

He shrugged. “You know where some are, SD. There’s no secret about lots of them. A few paces of back yard here, a deserted building there. The central five metres or so of Nuistu Park? Dissensus . Ul Qoma claims it; Besźel claims it. They’re effectively crosshatched or out of bounds in both cities while the bickering goes on. There’s just not that much exciting about them.”

“I’d like a list from you.”

“If you want, but you’ll get it quicker via your own department, and mine is probably twenty years out of date. They do get resolved, time to time, and new ones emerge. And then you might hear of the secret ones.”

“I’d like a list. Hang on, secret? If no one knows they’re disputed, how can they be?”

“Quite. They’re secretly disputed, SD Dhatt. You have to get your head into the right mindset for this foolishness.”

“Doctor Bowden …” I said. “Do you have any reason to think anyone might have anything against you?”

“Why?” He was very abruptly alarmed. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing, only …” I said, and paused. “There’s some speculation that someone is targeting people who’ve been investigating Orciny.” Dhatt made no move to interrupt me. “Perhaps you should be careful.”

“What? I don’t study Orciny, I haven’t for years …”

“As you say yourself, once you’ve started this stuff, Doctor… I’m afraid you’re the doyen whether you like it or not. Have you received anything that could be construed as a threat?”

“No …”

“You were burgled.” That was Dhatt. “A few weeks ago.” We both looked at him. Dhatt was unembarrassed by my surprise. Bowden’s mouth worked.

“But that was just a burglary,” he said. “Nothing was even taken …”

“Yes, because they must’ve got startled—that was what we said at the time,” Dhatt said. “Could be it was never their intent to take anything.”

Bowden, and more surreptitiously I, looked around the room, as if some malevolent gris-gris or electronic ear or painted threat might jump suddenly to light.

“SD, Inspector, this is utterly absurd; there is no Orciny …”

“But,” Dhatt said, “there are such things as nutters.”

“Some of whom,” I said, “for whatever reason are interested in some of the ideas being explored by yourself and Miss Rodriguez, Miss Geary …”

“I don’t think either of them were exploring ideas …”

“Whatever,” Dhatt said. “The point is they got someone’s attention. No, we’re not sure why, or even if there is a why.”

Bowden was staring absolutely aghast.

Chapter Sixteen

DHATT TOOK THE LIST Bowden gave him and sent an underling to supplement it, sent officers to the itemised lots, derelict buildings, patches of kerb and little promenade spaces on the river’s shore, to scuff stones and probe at the edges of disputed, functionally crosshatched patches. I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.

Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.

Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling. Young Bowden’s readings of some still-unsolved mysteries of Precursor or Pre-Cleavage age works were ingenious and even convincing. He had an elegantly argued claim that the incomprehensible mechanisms euphemistically slanged as “clocks” were not mechanisms at all, but intricately chambered boxes designed solely to hold the gears they contained. His leaps to the therefore were lunatic, as he now admitted.

Of course there would be paranoia, for a visitor to this city, where the locals would stare and stare furtively, where I would be watched by Breach, of which snatched glances would not feel like anything I had experienced.

My cell phone rang, later, while I was sleeping. It was my Besź phone, showing an international call. It would piss credit, but it was on the government.

“Borlú,” I said.

“Inspector…” Illitan accent.

“Who is this?”

“Borlú I don’t know why you … I can’t talk long. I … thank you.”

“Jaris.” I sat up, put my feet on the floor. The young unif. “It’s…”

“We’re not fucking comrades, you know.” He was not speaking in Old Illitan this time, but quickly in his own everyday language.

“Why would we be?”

“Right. I can’t stay on the line.”

“Okay.”

“You could tell it was me, couldn’t you? Who called you in Besźel.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Right. This call never fucking happened.” I said nothing. “Thanks for the other day,” he said. “For not saying. I met Marya when she came over here.” I had not given her that name for a while, but for the moment when Dhatt had questioned the unifs. “She told me she knew our brothers and sisters over the border; she’d worked with them. But she wasn’t one of us, you know.”

“I know. You set me on that track in Besźel …”

“Shut up. Please. I thought she was at first, but the stuff she was asking about, it was … She was into stuff you don’t even know about.” I would not preempt him.“Orciny.” He must have interpreted my silence as awe. “She didn’t give a shit about unification. She was putting everyone in danger so she could use our libraries and our contacts lists … I really liked her, but she was trouble. She only cared about Orciny.

“Borlú, she fucking found it, Borlú.

“Are you there? Do you understand? She found it…”

“How do you know?”

“She told me. None of the others knew. When we realised how … dangerous she was she was banned from meetings. They thought she was, like, a spy or something. She wasn’t that.”

“You stayed in touch with her.” He said nothing. “Why, if she was so …?

“I … she was …”

“Why’d you call me? In Besźel?”

“… She deserved better than a potter’s field.”

I was surprised he knew the term. “Were you together, Jaris?” I said.

“I hardly knew anything about her. Never asked. Never met her friends. We’re careful. But she told me about Orciny. Showed me all her notes about it. She was … Listen, Borlú, you won’t believe me but she’d made contact . There are places—”

“Dissensi?”

“No, shut up. Not disputed: places that everyone in Ul Qoma thinks are in Besźel, and everyone in Besźel thinks are in Ul Qoma. They’re not in either one. They’re Orciny. She found them. She told me she was helping.”

“Doing what?” I only spoke at last because the silence went on so long.

“I don’t know much. She was saving them. They wanted something. She said. Something like that. But when I said to her once ‘How d’you know Orciny’s on our side?’ she just laughed and said ‘I don’t, they’re not.’ She wouldn’t tell me a lot. I didn’t want to know. She didn’t talk about it much at all. I thought she might be crossing, through some of these places, but…”

“When did you last see her?”

“I don’t know. A few days before she … before. Listen, Borlú, this is what you need to know. She knew she was in trouble. She got really angry and upset when I said something about Orciny. The last time. She said I didn’t understand anything. She said something like she didn’t know if what she was doing was restitution or criminal.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. She said Breach was nothing . I was shocked. Can you imagine? She said everyone who knew the truth about Orciny was in danger. She said there weren’t many but anyone that did wouldn’t even know how much shit they were in, wouldn’t believe it. I said ‘Even me?’ she said ‘Maybe, I maybe already told you too much.’”

“What do you think it means?”

“What do you know about Orciny, Borlú? Why the fuck would anyone think Orciny was safe to fuck with? How d’you think you stay hidden for centuries? By playing nice? Light! I think somehow she got mixed up working for Orciny, is what I think happened, and I think they’re like parasites, and they told her she was helping them but she found something out, and when she realised they killed her.” He gathered himself. “She carried a knife at the end, for protection. From Orciny.” A miserable laugh. “They killed her, Borlú. And they’re going to kill everyone who might trouble them. Everyone who’s ever brought attention to them.”

“What about you?”

“I’m fucked, is what. She’s gone, so I’m gone too. Ul Qoma can go fuck itself and so can Besźel and so can Or-fucking-ciny. This is my good-bye. Can you hear the sound of wheels? In a minute this phone is going out the fucking window when we’re done and say-onara. This call’s a good-bye present, for her sake.”

By the last words he was whispering. When I realised he had rung off I tried to call him back but his number was blocked.

***

I RUBBED MY EYES for long seconds, too long. I scribbled notes on the hotel-headed paper, nothing I would ever look at again, just trying to organise thoughts. I listed people. I saw the clock and did a time-zone calculation. I dialled a long-distance number on the hotel phone.

“Mrs. Geary?”

“Who is this?”

“Mrs. Geary, this is Tyador Borlú. Of the Besźel police.” She said nothing. “We … May I ask how Mr. Geary is?” I walked barefoot to the window.

“He’s alright,” she said finally. “Angry.” She was very careful. She could not decide about me. I pulled the heavy curtains back a little, looked out. No matter that it was the small hours, there were a few figures visible in the street, as there always are. Now and then a car passed. So late, it was harder to tell who was local and who foreign and so unseeable in the day: the colours of clothes were obscured by streetlamp light and the huddled quick night-walking blurred body language.

“I wanted to say again how sorry I was about what happened and to make sure you were alright.”

“Have you got anything to tell me?”

“You mean have we caught who did this to your daughter? I’m sorry, Mrs. Geary, we have not. But I wanted to ask you …” I waited, but she did not hang up, nor say anything. “Did Mahalia ever tell you she was seeing anyone here?”

She only made some sound. When I had waited several seconds I continued. “Do you know Yolanda Rodriguez? And why was it the Besź nationalists Mr. Geary was looking for? When he breached. Mahalia lived in Ul Qoma.”

She made the sound and I realised that she was crying. I opened my mouth but could only listen to her. Too late as I woke up more I realised that I should perhaps have called from another phone, if my and Corwi’s suspicions were right. Mrs. Geary did not break the connection, so after a little while I said her name.

“Why are you asking me about Yolanda?” she said finally. She had pulled her voice together. “Of course I met her, she’s Mahalia’s friend. Is she …?”

“We’re just trying to get hold of her. But…”

“Oh my God, is she missing? Mahalia confided in her. Is that why …? Is she …?”

“Please don’t, Mrs. Geary. I promise you there’s no evidence of anything untoward; she may have just taken a few days away. Please.” She started again but controlled herself.

“They hardly spoke to us on that flight,” she said. “My husband woke up near the end and realised what had happened.”

I said, “Mrs. Geary, was Mahalia involved with anyone here? That you know of? In Ul Qoma, I mean?”

“No.” She sighed it. “You’re thinking ‘How would her mother know?’ but I would. She didn’t tell me details, but she …” She gathered herself. “There was someone who hung around with her, but she didn’t like him that way. Said it was too complicated.”

“What was his name?”

“Don’t you think I’d have told you? I don’t know. She met him through politics, I think.”

“You mentioned Qoma First.”

“Oh, my girl made them all mad.” She laughed a bit. “She got people sore on all sides of it. And even the unifiers, is that what they are? Michael was going to check them all. It was easier to find names and addresses for Besźel. That’s where we were. He was going to check them all out, one at a time. He wanted to find them all, because … one of them did this.”

I promised her all the things she wanted me to, rubbing my forehead and staring at Ul Qoma’s silhouettes.

Not later enough, I was woken by Dhatt’s phone call.

“Are you still in fucking bed? Get up.”

“How long before you …” It was morning, not that early.

“I’m downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.”

Chapter Seventeen

IN BOL YE’AN men of the Ul Qoma bomb squad lounged outside the tiny ersatz postroom, talking to several awed security guards, chewing, squat in their protective clothes. The squad wore their visors up, angling from their foreheads.

“You Dhatt? It’s cool, SD,” one said, glancing at Dhatt’s insignia. “You can go in.” He eyed me and opened the door onto the cupboard-sized room.

“Who caught it?” Dhatt said.

“One of the security boys. Sharp. Aikam Tsueh. What? What?” Neither of us said anything, so he shrugged. “Said he didn’t like how it felt; he went out to the militsya outside, asked them to take a look at it.”

Pigeonholes covered the walls, and large brown parcels, opened and unopened, lay in corners and plastic bins, on tabletops. Displayed on a stool in the centre, surrounded by ripped envelope and fallen letters trodden with footprints, was a package splayed, electronic innards jutting like wire stamens from a flower.

“This is the mechanism,” the man said. I read the Illitan on his Kevlar: his name was Tairo. He spoke to Dhatt, not me, pointing with a little laser pen, red-dotting what he referred to. “Two layers of envelope.” Scribbling with the light all over the paper. “Open the first one, nothing. Inside’s another one. Open that… ” Clicked his fingers. Indicating the wires. “Nicely done. Classic.”

“Old-fashioned?”

“Nah, just nothing fancy. But nicely done. Not just son et lumiere either—this wasn’t made to scare someone, it was made to fuck someone up. And I tell you what also. See this? Very directed. It’s linked up with the tag.” The remnants of it visible in the paper, a red strip on the inner envelope, printed in Besź Pull here to open . “Whoever does is going to get a faceful of bang and fall down. But short of pretty bad luck, anyone standing next to them’s only going to need a new hairdo. The blast is directed.”

“It’s defused?” I asked Tairo. “Can I touch it?” He did not look at me but at Dhatt, who nodded him to answer.

“Fingerprints,” Tairo said, but shrugged. I took a ballpoint from one of the shelves and took out its cartridge, not to mark anything. I prodded gently at the paper, smoothing down the inner envelope. Even scored open by the defusers, it was easy to read the name written on it: David Bowden.

“Check this,” Tairo said. He rummaged gently. Below the parcel on the inside of the outer envelope, someone had scribbled, in Illitan, The heart of a wolf . I recognised the line but could not place it. Tairo sang it and grinned.

“It’s an old motherland song,” Dhatt said.

“It wasn’t a scare and it wasn’t for generalised mayhem either,” Dhatt said to me quietly. We sat in the office we had commandeered. Opposite us, trying politely to avoid eavesdropping, Aikam Tsueh. “That was a kill-shot. What the fuck?”

“With Illitan written on it, sent from Besźel,” I said.

Dusting didn’t turn anything up. Both envelopes had been scrawled on, the address on the outer and Bowden’s name on the inner in a chaotic script. The package was sent from Besźel from a post office that was grosstopically not far from the dig itself, though of course the package would have been imported a long way round through Copula Hall.

“We’ll get the techs on it,” Dhatt said. “See if we can trace it backwards, but we’ve got nothing to point to anyone. Maybe your lot’ll turn something up.” The chances were low to nil we could reconstruct its journey backwards through both the Ul Qoman and Besź postal services.

“Listen.” I made sure Aikam could not hear. “We know Mahalia had pissed off some hardcore nats back home. I get it, such organisations cannot possibly exist in Ul Qoma, of course, but if by some inadvertent glitch any of them are out here too, the chances are reasonable that she might have pissed them off too, no? She was mixed up in stuff that could have been designed to annoy them. You know, undermining the power of Ul Qoma, secret groups, porous boundaries, all that. You know.”

He watched me without expression. “Right,” he said eventually.

“Two out of two students with special interests in Orciny are out of the picture. And now we’ve got a bomb to Mr. Between Cities.”

We looked at each other.

After a moment, louder now, I said, “Well done, Aikam. That was really something that you did.”

“Have you held a bomb before, Aikam?” Dhatt said.

“Sir? No.”

“Not in national service?”

“I haven’t done mine yet, Officer.”

“So how do you know what a bomb feels like?”

Shrug. “I didn’t, I don’t, I just… It was wrong. Too heavy.”

“I bet this place gets a lot of books in the mail,” I said. “Maybe computer stuff too. They’re pretty heavy. How did you know this was different?”

“… Different heavy. It was harder. Under the envelopes. You could tell it wasn’t paper, it was like metal or something.”

“Matter of fact is it even your job to be checking mail?” I said.

“No, but I was in there, just because. I was thinking that I could bring it out. I wanted to, and then I felt that one and it was … there was something about it.”

“You have good instincts.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you think about opening it?”

“No! It wasn’t to me.”

“Who was it to?”

“It wasn’t to anyone.” That outer envelope had named no recipient, only the dig. “That’s another reason, that’s why I looked at it, maybe, because I thought that was weird.”

We conferred. “Okay, Aikam,” Dhatt said. “You gave your address to the other officer, in case we need to get hold of you again? When you go out would you send in your boss and Professor Nancy, please?”

He hesitated in the doorway. “Do you have any information about Geary yet? Do you know what happened yet? Who killed her?” We told him no.

Kai Buidze, the chief guard, a muscular fifty-year-old, ex-army I’d guess, came in with Isabelle Nancy. She, not Rochambeaux, had offered her help in any way she could. She was rubbing her eyes. “Where’s Bowden?” I said to Dhatt. “Does he know?”

“She called him when the bomb squad opened the outer envelope and there was his name.” He nodded at Nancy. “She heard one of them reading it out. Someone’s gone to get him. Professor Nancy.” She looked up. “Does Bowden get a lot of mail here?”

“Not so much. He doesn’t even have an office. But a bit. Quite a lot from foreigners, a few from prospective students, people who don’t know where he lives or who assume he’s based here.”

“Do you send it on?”

“No, he comes in to check it every few days. Throws most of it away.”

“Someone’s really …” I said quietly to Dhatt. Hesitated. “Trying to outrun us, know what we’re doing.” With everything that was happening, Bowden might be wary now of any packages to his home. With the outer envelope and its foreign postmark discarded, he might even have thought something with only his name written on it an internal communication, something from one of his colleagues, and torn the strip. “Like someone knew he’d been warned to be careful.” After a moment I said, “They’re bringing him in?” Dhatt nodded.

“Mr. Buidze,” Dhatt said. “You had any trouble like this before?”

“Not like this. Sure, we get, you know, we had some letters from fuckups. Excuse me.” A glance at an unruffled Nancy. “But you know, we get warnings from Leave-the-Past-Alone types, people who say we’re betraying Ul Qoma, all that shit, UFO watchers and junkies. But an actual … but this? A bomb?” He shook his head.

“That’s not true,” Nancy said. We stared at her. “This happened before. Not here. But to him. Bowden’s been targeted before.”

“Who by?” I said.

“They never proved anything, but he got a lot of people angry when his book came out. The right. People who thought he was disrespectful.”

“Nats,” Dhatt said.

“I don’t even remember which city it was from. Both lots had it in for him. Probably the only thing they agreed on. But this was years ago.”

“Someone’s remembered him,” I said. Dhatt and I stared at each other and he pulled me aside.

“From Besźel,” he said. “With a little Illitan fuck-you on it.” He threw up his hands: Any ideas?

“What’s the name of those people?” I said after a silence. “Qoma First.”

He stared. “What? Qoma First?” he said. “It came from Besźel.”

“Maybe a contact there.”

“A spy? A nat Qoman in Besźel?”

“Sure. Don’t look like that—it’s not so hard to believe. They’d send it from over there to cover their tracks.”

Dhatt wagged his head noncommittally. “Okay …” he said. “Still a hell of a thing to organize, and you’re not—”

“They never liked Bowden. Maybe they figure if he’s got wind that they’re after him he might have alarm bells, but not with a package from Besźel,” I said.

“I get the idea,” he said.

“Where’s Qoma First hang out?” I said. “That’s what they’re called, right? Maybe we should visit—”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell you,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go. There is no ‘Qoma First,’ not like that. I don’t know how it is in Besźel, but here …”

“In Besźel I know exactly where our own versions of these characters hang out. Me and my constable went round there recently.”

“Well congratulations but it doesn’t work that way here. There’s not like a fucking gang with little membership cards and a house they all live in; they’re not unifs and they’re not The Monkees.”

“You’re not saying you’ve got no ultranationalists …”

“Right, I’m not saying that, we’ve got plenty, but I’m saying I don’t know who they are or where they live, very sensibly they keep it that way, and I’m saying Qoma First’s just a term some press guy came up with.”

“How come the unificationists congregate but this lot don’t? Or can’t?”

“Because the unifs are clowns. Dangerous clowns sometimes, alright, but still. The sort of people you’re talking about now are serious. Old soldiers, that sort of thing. I mean you got to … respect that…”

No wonder they could not be allowed to gather visibly. Their hard nationalism might rebuke the People’s National Party on its own terms, which the rulers would not permit. The unifs, by contrast, were free or free-ish to unite the locals in loathing.

“What can you tell us about him?” Dhatt said, raising his voice to the others who watched us.

“Aikam?” Buidze said. “Nothing. Good worker. Dumb as a brick. Okay look, I’d have said that until today, but given what he just did, scratch that. Not nearly as tough as he looks. All pecs and no teeth, that one. Likes the kids, makes him feel good to hobnob with clever foreigners. Why? Tell me you’re not eye-balling him, SD. That parcel came from Besźel . How the hell would he—”

“Absolutely it did,” Dhatt said. “No one here’s accusing anyone, least of all the hero of the hour. Standard questions.”

“Tsueh got on with the students, you said?” Unlike Tairo, Buidze did not look for permission to answer me. He met my eye and nodded. “Anyone in particular? Good friends with Mahalia Geary?”

“Geary? Hell no. Geary probably never even knew his name. Rest her.” He made the Sign of Long Sleep with his hand. “Aikam’s friends with some of them, but not Geary. He hangs out with Jacobs, Smith, Rodriguez, Browning …”

“Just that he asked us—”

“He was very keen to know about any leads in the Geary case,” Dhatt said.

“Yeah?” Buidze shrugged. “Well that got everyone really upset. Of course he wants to know about it.”

“I’m wondering …” I said. “This is a complicated site, and I notice that even though it’s mostly total, there’s a couple of places where it crosshatches a bit. And that’s got to be a nightmare to watch. Mr. Buidze, when we spoke to the students, not a single one of them mentioned Breach. At all. Didn’t bring it up. A group of foreign kids? You know how much foreigners are obsessed with that stuff. One of their friends is disappeared and they’re not even mentioning the most notorious bogeyman of Ul Qoma and Besźel, which is even real , and they don’t mention it? Which couldn’t help but make us wonder what are they afraid of?”

Buidze stared at me. He glanced at Nancy. He looked around the room. After long seconds he laughed.

“You’re joking. Okay then. Alright then, Officers. Yeah they’re scared alright, but not that someone’s breaching from fuck knows where to mess with them. Is that what you’re thinking?” He shook his head. “They’re scared because they don’t want to get caught.” He held up his hands in surrender. “You’ve got me, Officers. There is breaching going on that we’re not able to stop. These little sods breach all the damn time.”

He met our stares. Not defensive. He was matter-of-fact. Did I look as shocked as Dhatt? Professor Nancy’s expression was if anything embarrassed.

“You’re right, of course,” Buidze said. “You can’t avoid all breach, not in a place like this, and not with kids like these. These aren’t locals, and I don’t care how much training you give them, they’ve never seen anything like this before. Don’t tell me it’s not the same back in your place, Borlú. You think they’re going to play loyal? You think while they wander around town they’re really unseeing Besźel? Come on. Best any of us can hope for’s they’ve got the sense not to make a big thing of it, but ofcourse they’re seeing across the border. No we can’t prove it, which is why Breach wouldn’t come unless they really fuck up. Oh it’s happened. But much rarer than you think. Not for a long time.”

Professor Nancy still looked down at the table. “You think any of the foreigners don’t breach?” Buidze said, and leaned in towards us, spreading his fingers. “All we can get from them’s a bit of politeness, right? And when you get a bunch of young people together, they’re going to push it. Maybe it’s not just looks. Did you always do what you’re told? But these are smart kids.”

He sketched maps on the table with his fingertips. “Bol Ye’an crosshatches here, here , and the park it’s in here and here . And yeah, over at the edges in this direction, it even creeps into Besźel total. So when this lot get drunk or whatever, don’t they egg each other on to go stand in a crosshatch bit of the park? And then, who knows if they don’t, maybe standing still there, without a single word, without even moving, cross over into Besźel, then back again? You don’t have to take a step to do that, not if you’re in a crosshatch. All here.” Tapped his forehead. “No one can prove shit. Then maybe next time when they’re doing that they reach down, grab a souvenir, straighten back up into Ul Qoma with a rock from Besźel or something. If that’s where they were when they picked it up, that’s where it’s from, right? Who knows? Who could prove it?

“So long as they don’t flaunt it, what can you do? Even Breach can’t watch for breach all the time. Come on. If they did, not a single one of this foreign lot would still be here. Isn’t that right, Professor?” He looked at her not unkindly. She said nothing but looked at me in embarrassment. “None of them mentioned Breach, SD Dhatt, because they’re all guilty as hell.” Buidze smiled. “Hey, don’t get me wrong: they’re only human, I like them. But don’t make this more than it is.”

As we ushered them out, Dhatt got a call that had him scribbling notes and muttering. I closed the door.

“That was one of the uniforms we sent to get Bowden. He’s gone. They got to his apartment and no one’s answering. He’s not there.”

“They told him they were coming?”

“Yeah, and he knew about the bomb. But he’s gone.”

Chapter Eighteen

“I WANT TO GO BACK AND TALK to that kid again,” Dhatt said.

“The unificationist?”

“Yeah, Jaris. I know, I know, ‘It wasn’t him.’ Right. You said. Well, whatever, he knows something and I want to talk to him.”

“You won’t find him.”

“What?”

“Good luck. He’s gone.”

He fell behind me a few steps and made a phone call.

“You’re right. Jaris is nowhere. How did you know? What the fuck are you playing at?”

“Let’s go to your office.”

“Fuck the office. The office can wait. Repeat, how the fuck did you know about Jaris?”

“Look …”

“I’m getting a bit spooked by your occult abilities, Borlú. I didn’t sit on my arse—when I heard I’d be babysitting you, I looked you up, so I know a little bit, I know you’re no one to fuck with. I’m sure you did the same, so you know the same.” I should have done. “So I was geared up to be working with a detective. Even some hot shit. I wasn’t expecting this lugubrious tutting bugger. How the fuck did you know about Jaris, and why are you protecting that little shit?”

“Okay. He phoned me last night from a car or I think from the train and told me he was going.”

He stared at me. “Why the fuck did he call you? And why the fuck did you not tell me? Are we working together or not, Borlú?”

“Why did he call me? Maybe he wasn’t bananas about your interrogation style, Dhatt. And are we working together? I thought the reason I was here was to obediently give you everything I’ve got, then watch TV in my hotel room while you find the bad guy. When did Bowden get burgled? When were you going to tell me that? I didn’t see you rushing to spill whatever shit you found out from UlHuan at the dig, and he should have the choicest info—he is the bloody government mole, isn’t he? Come on, it’s no big deal, all public works have them. What I object to is you cutting me out then coming the ‘How could you?’”

We stared at each other. After a long moment he turned and walked to the kerb.

“Put out a warrant for Jaris,” I said to his back. “Put a stop on his passports, inform the airports, stations. But he only called me because he was en route, to tell me what he thinks happened. His phone’s probably smashed up by the tracks in the middle of Cucinis Pass, halfway to the Balkans by now.”

“So what is it he thinks happened?”

“Orciny.”

He turned in disgust and waved the word away.

“Were you even going to fucking tell me this?” he said.

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“He’s just done a runner. Doesn’t that tell you anything? The goddamn guilty run.”

“What, you talking about Mahalia? Come on, what’s his motive?” I said that but remembered some of what Jaris had told me. She had not been one of their party. They had driven her out. I hesitated a little. “Or you mean Bowden? Why the hell and how the hell would Jaris organise something like that?”

“I don’t know, both. Who knows what makes these fuckers do what they do?” Dhatt said. “There’ll be some fucked-up justification or other, some conspiracy thing.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said carefully, after a minute. “It was … Okay, it was him who called me from here in the first place.”

“I knew it. You fucking covered for him …”

“I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. When he called last night he told me. Wait, wait, listen, Dhatt: why would he call me in the first place if it was him who killed her?”

He stared at me. After a minute he turned and hailed a cab. He opened its door. I watched. The cab had halted skew-whiff on the road: Ul Qoman cars sounded their horns as they went past, Besź drivers cut quietly around the protub, the law-abiding not even whispering cusses.

Dhatt stood there half-in, half-out, and the cabbie made some remonstrance. Dhatt snapped something and showed him his ID.

“I don’t know why,” he said to me. “Something to find out. But it’s a bit fucking much, isn’t it? That he’s gone?”

“If he was in on it there’s no sense him drawing my attention to anything . And how’s he supposed to have got her to Besźel?”

“Called his friends over there; they did it …”

I shrugged a doubting maybe . “It was the Besź unifs who gave us our first lead on all this, guy called Drodin. I’ve heard of misdirection, but we didn’t have anything to misdirect. They don’t have the smarts or contacts to know which van to steal—not the ones I’ve met. Plus there’s more policzai agents than members on their books anyway. If this was unifs it was some secret hardcore we’ve not seen.

“I spoke to Jaris … He’s scared,” I said. “Not guilty: scared and sad. He was into her, I think.”

“Alright,” Dhatt said after a while. He looked at me, motioned me into the cab. He stayed standing outside for several seconds, giving orders into his phone too quiet and quick for me to follow. “Alright. Let’s change the record.” He spoke slowly as the cab drove.

“Who gives a fuck what’s gone down between Besźel and Ul Qoma, right? Who gives a fuck what my boss is telling me or what yours is telling you? You’re police. I’m police. Let’s fix this. Are we working together, Borlú? I could do with some help on a case that’s getting more fucked by the minute, how about you? UlHuan doesn’t know fuck, by the way.”

Where he took me, a place very close to his office, was not as dark as a cop bar in Besźel would have been. It was more salubrious. I still would not have booked a wedding reception there. It was, if only just, during working hours, but the room was more than half-full. It cannot have all been local militsya , but I recognised many of the faces from Dhatt’s office. They recognised me, too. Dhatt entered to greetings, and I followed him past whispers and those so-charmingly frank Ul Qoman stares.

“One definite murder and now two disappearances,” I said. I watched him very carefully. “All people who are known to have looked at this stuff.”

“There is no fucking Orciny.”

“Dhatt, I’m not saying that. You said yourself there are such things as cults and lunatics.”

“Seriously fuck off. The most culty lunatic we’ve met just fled the scene of the crime, and you gave him a free pass.”

“I should have said first thing this morning, I apologise.”

“You should’ve called last night.”

“Even if we could find him I thought we didn’t have enough to hold him. But I apologise.” Held my hands open.

I stared at him some time. He was overcoming something. “I want to solve this,” he said. The pleasant burr of Illitan from the customers. I heard the clucks as one or two saw my visitor’s mark. Dhatt bought me a beer. Ul Qoman, flavoured with all kinds of whatnot. It would not be winter for weeks, and though it was no colder in Ul Qoma than in Besźel, it felt colder to me. “What do you say? If you won’t even fucking trust me …”

“Dhatt, I’ve already told you stuff that—” I lowered my voice. “No one else knows about that first phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not solving anything. I’m by some fluke that I do not know the whys of any more than you, being used. For some reason I’ve been a repository for a bunch of information that I don’t know what to do with. I hope there’s a yet after that, but I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything.”

“What does Jaris think happened? I’m going to track that fucker down.” He would not.

“I should’ve called, but I could … He’s not our guy. You know, Dhatt. You know. How long you been an officer? Sometimes you know , right?” I tapped my chest. I was right, he liked that, nodded.

I told him what Jaris had said. “Fucking crap,” he said, when I was done.

“Maybe.”

“What the fuck is this Orciny stuff? That’s what he was running from? You’re reading that book. The dodgy one Bowden wrote. What’s it like?”

“There’s a lot in it. A lot of stuff. I don’t know. Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”

“Maybe I’ll take a look at it after you,” Dhatt said. “Who the fuck knows anything.” He said the last word carefully.

“Qussim.” A couple of his colleagues, men of about his age or mine, raising their glasses to him, just about to me. There was something in their eyes, they were moving in like curious animals. “Qussim, we’ve not had a chance to meet our guest. You’ve been hiding him away.”

“Yura,” Dhatt said. “Kai. How’s tricks? Borlú, these are detectives blah and blah.” He waved his hands between them and me. One of them raised his eyebrow at Dhatt.

“I just wanted to find out how Inspector Borlú was finding Ul Qoma,” the one called Kai said. Dhatt snorted and finished his beer.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said. He sounded as amused as angry. “You want to get drunk and get into an argument with him, maybe even if you’re far gone enough, Yura, a fight. You’ll bring up all manner of unfortunate international incidents. The fucking war might get dusted off. You might even say something about your dad. His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.” I glanced, but neither of our interlocutors looked particularly outraged. There was even a trace of humour on Kai’s face. “I’ll save you the trouble,” Dhatt said. “He’s as much of a Besź wanker as you think, and you can spread that around the office. Come on, Borlú.”

We went via his station’s garage and he picked up his car. “Hey …” He indicated me the steering wheel. “It never even occurred to me, maybe you want to give the Ul Qoman roads a go.”

“No, thanks. I think it would be a bit confusing.” Driving in Besźel or Ul Qoma is hard enough when you are in your home city, negotiating local and foreign traffic. “You know,” I said. “When I was first driving … it must be the same here, as well as seeing all the cars on the road you’ve got to learn to unsee all the other cars, the ones abroad, but unsee them fast enough to get out of their way.” Dhatt nodded. “Anyway, when I was a kid first driving we had to get used to zooming past all these old bangers and stuff in Ul Qoma, donkey carts in some parts and what have you. That you unsaw, but you know … Now years later most of the unseens have been overtaking me.”

Dhatt laughed. Almost embarrassed. “Things go up and down,” he said. “Ten years from now it’ll be you lot doing the overtaking again.”

“Doubt it.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll shift; it always does. It’s already started.”

“Our expos? A couple of little pity investments. I think you’ll be top wolf for a while.”

“We’re blockaded!”

“Not that you seem to be doing too bad on it. Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke.”

“Don’t knock that,” Dhatt said. “Have you tasted Canuck Cola? All this is old Cold War bullshit. Who gives a fuck who the Americans want to play with, anyway? Good luck with them. OhCanada …” He sang the line. Dhatt said to me, “What’s the food like at that place?”

“Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food.”

He yanked the wheel, took us off the route I’d come to know. “Sweet?” he said into his phone. “Can you chuck some more stuff on for supper? Thanks, beautiful. I want you to meet my new partner.”

Her name was Yallya. She was pretty, quite a lot younger than Dhatt, but she greeted me very poised, playing a role and enjoying it, waiting at the door of their apartment to triple-kiss me hello, the Ul Qoman way.

On the way to the house, Dhatt had looked at me and said “You okay?” It was quickly obvious that he lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. Children are sacks of infection. That was the sort of thing that spread diseases. Epidemiology was always complicated here and back home.

“How you liking Ul Qoma, Inspector?”

“Tyador. Very much.”

“Bullshit, he thinks we’re all thugs and idiots and being invaded by secret armies from hidden cities.” Dhatt’s laughter was not without edge. “Anyway we’re not getting much chance to exactly go sightseeing.”

“How’s the case?”

“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”

“Is that true?” she said to me. They were bringing out food in bits and pieces. It was not home cooking, and seemed to include a lot of convenience and prepackaged food, but it was better quality than I’d been eating, and was more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good. The sky darkened over the crosshatched park, with night and with wet clouds.

“You miss potatoes,” Yallya said.

“Is it written on my face?”

“It’s all you eat, isn’t it?” She thought she was being playful. “This too spicy for you?”

“There’s someone watching us from the park.”

“How can you tell from here?” She glanced over my shoulder. “Hope for their sake they’re in Ul Qoma.” She was an editor at a financial magazine and had, judging by the books I saw and the posters in the bathroom, a taste for Japanese comics.

“Are you married, Tyador?” I tried to answer Yallya’s questions though they came too fast really for that. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“No, but the first time for a long time.”

“So you don’t know it.”

“No. I might once have claimed to know London, but not for years.”

“You’re well travelled! And now with all this are you mixing with insiles and breachers?” I did not find this line adorable. “Qussim says you’re spending your time where they’re digging up old hex stuff.”

“It’s like most places, much more bureaucratic than it sounds, no matter how weird the stories are.”

“It’s ridiculous.” She looked contrite, quite suddenly. “I shouldn’t make jokes about it. It’s just because I don’t know almost anything about the girl who died.”

“You never ask,” Dhatt said.

“Well, it’s … Do you have a picture of her?” Yallya said. I must have looked surprised because Dhatt shrugged at me. I reached into my inner pocket jacket, but remembered when I touched it that the only picture I had—a small copy of a copy taken in Besźel, tucked into my wallet—was of Mahalia dead. I would not show that.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.” In the little quiet it occurred to me that Mahalia was only a few years younger than Yallya.

I stayed longer than I had expected. She was a good host, particularly when I got her off this stuff—she let me steer the conversation away. I watched her and Dhatt perform gentle bickering. The proximity of the park and of other people’s affection was moving, to the point of distracting. Watching Yallya and Dhatt made me think of Sariska and Biszaya. I recalled the odd eagerness of Aikam Tsueh.

When I left, Dhatt took me down to the street and headed for the car, but I said to him, “I’ll make my own way.”

He stared. “Are you okay?” he said. “You’ve been funny all night.”

“I’m fine, sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude; it was very kind of you. Really it was a good night, and Yallya … you’re a lucky man. I just, I’m trying to think things through. Look, I’m okay to go. I’ve money. Ul Qoman money.” I showed him my wallet. “I’ve got all my papers. Visitor’s badge. I know it makes you uncomfortable having me out and about, but seriously, I’d like to walk; I need to be out for a bit. It’s a beautiful night.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? It’s raining.”

“I like rain. Anyway, this is drizzle. You wouldn’t last a day in Besźel. We get real rain in Besźel.” An old joke but he smiled and surrendered.

“Whatever. We have to work this out, you know; we’re not getting very far.”

“No.”

“And us the best minds our cities have, right? And Yolanda Rodriguez remains unfound, and now we’ve lost Bowden, too. We’re not going to win medals for this.” He looked around. “Seriously, what is going on?”

“You know everything I know,” I said.

“What bugs me,” he said, “isn’t that there’s no way to make sense of this shit. It’s that there is a way to make sense of it. And it’s not a way I want to go. I don’t believe in …” He waved at malevolent hidden cities. He stared the length of his street. It was total, so none of the lights from windows above was foreign. It was not so late, and we were not alone. People were silhouetted by the lights of a road perpendicular to Dhatt’s street, a road mostly in Besźel. For a moment I thought one of the black figures had, for seconds long enough to constitute breach, watched us, but then they moved on.

When I started walking, watching the wet-edged shapes of the city, I was not going anywhere in particular. I was moving south. Walking alone past people who were not, I indulged the idea of walking to where Sariska or Biszaya lived, or even Corwi—something of that melancholy connection. They knew I was in Ul Qoma: I could find them and could walk alongside them in the street and we would be inches apart but unable to acknowledge each other. Like the old story.

Not that I would ever do such a thing. Having to unsee acquaintances or friends is a rare and notoriously uncomfortable circumstance. What I did do was walk past my own house.

I half expected to see one of my neighbours, none of whom, I think, knew I was abroad, and who might therefore be expected to greet me before noticing my Ul Qoman visitor’s badge and hurriedly attempting to unbreach. Their lights were on, but they were all indoors.

In Ul Qoma I was in Ioy Street. It is pretty equally crosshatched with RosidStrász where I lived. The building two doors along from my own house was a late-night Ul Qoman liquor store, half the pedestrians around me in Ul Qoma, so I was able to stop grosstopically, physically close to my own front door, and unsee it of course, but equally of course not quite, with an emotion the name of which I have no idea. I came slowly closer, keeping my eyes on the entrances in Ul Qoma.

Someone was watching me. It looked like an old woman. I could hardly see her in the dark, certainly not her face in any detail, but something was curious in the way she stood. I took in her clothes and could not tell which city she was in. That is a common instant of uncertainty, but this one went on for much longer than usual. And my alarm did not subside, it grew, as her locus refused to clarify.

I saw others in similar shadows, similarly hard to make sense of, emerging, sort of, not approaching me, not even moving but holding themselves so they grew more in focus. The woman continued to stare at me, and she took a step or two in my direction, so either she was in Ul Qoma or breaching.

That made me step back. I kept backing away. There was an ugly pause, until as if in belated echo she and those others did the same, and were gone suddenly into shared dark. I got out of there, not quite running but fast. I found better-lit avenues.

I did not walk straight to the hotel. After my heart had slowed and I had spent some minutes in a not-empty spot, I walked to the same vantage point I had taken before, overlooking Bol Ye’an. I was much more careful in my scrutiny than I had been, and tried to affect Ul Qoman bearing, and for the hour I watched that unlit excavation, nomilitsya came. So far they tended to be either violently present or altogether absent. Doubtless there was a method of ensuring subtle intervention from the Ul Qoman police, but I did not know it.

At the Hilton I requested a 5 a.m. wakeup call, and asked the woman behind the desk if she would print me up a message, as the tiny room called a “business centre” was closed. First she did so on marked Hilton paper. “Would you mind doing it on plain?” I said. I winked. “Just in case it’s intercepted.” She smiled, not sure what intimacy it was she was privy to. “Can you read that back to me?”

“‘Urgent. Come ASAP. Don’t call.’”

“Perfect.”

I was back overlooking the site the next morning, having taken a circuitous walked route through the city. Though as law demanded I wore my visitor’s mark, I had placed it at the very edge of my lapel, where cloth folded, only visible to those who knew to look. I wore it on a jacket that was a genuine Ul Qoman design and was, like my hat, not new but new to me. I had set out some hours before any shops were open, but a surprised Ul Qoman man at the farthest reach of my walk was several dinar richer and lighter his outer clothes.

Nothing guaranteed that I was not watched, but I did not think I was by the militsya . It was not long after dawn, but Ul Qomans were everywhere. I would not risk walking closer to Bol Ye’an. As the morning wore on the city filled with hundreds of children: those in the strict Ul Qoman school uniforms, and dozens of street children. I attempted to be moderately unobtrusive, watched from behind the overlong headlines of the Ul Qoma Nasyona , eating fried street food for breakfast. People began to arrive at the dig. Arriving often in little groups, they were too far away for me to tell who was who as they entered, showing their passes. I waited a while.

The little girl I approached in her outsized trainers and cutoff jeans looked at me sceptically. I held up a five-dinar note and a sealed envelope.

“You see that place? You see the gate?” She nodded, guarded. They were opportunist couriers, these kids, among everything else.

“Where you from?” she said.

“Paris,” I said. “But that’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. I have a job for you. Do you think you could persuade those guards to call someone for you?” She nodded. “I’m going to tell you a name, and I want you to go there, and find the person with that name, and only that person, and I want you to hand over this message.”

She was either honest or realised, smart girl, that from where I stood I could see almost her entire route to the door of Bol Ye’an. She delivered it. She threaded in and out of the crowds, tiny and quick—the sooner this lucrative task was done the sooner she could get another. It was easy to see why she and the other homeless children like her had the nickname “job-mice.”

A few minutes after she reached the gates, someone emerged, moving fast, bundled up, head down, walking stiffly and quickly away from the dig. Though he was far away, alone like that and expected, I could tell that it was Aikam Tsueh.

I HAD DONE THIS BEFORE. I could keep him in sight, but in a city I didn’t know it was hard to do so while ensuring that I could not be seen. He made it easier than it should have been, never once looking behind him, taking in all but a couple of places the largest, most crowded and crosshatched roads, which I presumed were the most direct routes.

The most complicated point came when he took a bus. I was close to him, and was able to huddle behind my paper and keep him in sight. I winced when my phone rang, but it was not the first in the bus to do so, and Aikam did not glance at me. It was Dhatt. I diverted the call and switched the ringer off.

Tsueh disembarked, and led me to a desolate total zone of Ul Qoman housing projects, out past Bisham Ko, way out from the centre. No pretty corkscrew towers or iconic gasrooms here. The concrete warrens were not deserted but full of noise and people between the stretches of garbage. It was like the poorest estates of Besźel, though even poorer, with a soundtrack in a different language, and children and hustlers in other clothes. Only when Tsueh entered one of the dripping towerblocks and ascended did I have to exercise real care, padding as soundlessly as I could up the concrete stairs, past graffiti and animal shit. I could hear him racing ahead of me, stopping at last, and knocking softly. I slowed.

“It’s me,” I heard him say. “It’s me, I’m here.”

An answering voice, alarm, though that impression may have been because I expected alarm. I continued to quietly and carefully climb. I wished I had my gun.

“You told me to,” Tsueh said. “You said . Let me in. What is it?”

The door creaked a little, and the second voice came whispering, but just a little louder. I was one stained pillar away now. I held my breath.

“But you said… ” The door opened more and I heard Aikam step forward, and I turned and went fast across the little landing behind him. He did not have time to register me, or to turn. I shoved him hard, and he barrelled into the ajar door, slamming it open, pushing aside someone beyond him, falling and sprawling on the floor of the hallway beyond. I heard a scream, but I had followed him through the door and slammed it closed behind me. I stood against it, blocking exit, looking along a gloomy corridor between rooms, down at where Tsueh wheezed and struggled to stand, at the screaming young woman backing away, staring at me in terror.

I put my finger to my lips and, surely by coincidence of her breath running out, she ebbed to silence.

“No, Aikam,” I said. “She didn’t say. The message wasn’t from her.”

“Aikam,” she blubbered.

“Stop,” I said. I put my finger to my lips again. “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not here to hurt you, but we both know there are others who want to. I want to help you, Yolanda.”

She cried again and I could not tell if it was fear or relief.

Chapter Nineteen

AIKAM GOT TO HIS FEET and tried to attack me. He was muscular and held his hands as if he had studied boxing but if he had he was not a good student. I tripped him and pushed his face down onto the stained carpet, pinioned an arm behind his back. Yolanda shouted his name. He half rose, even with me straddling him, so I pushed his face down again, ensuring that his nose bled. I stayed between both of them and the door.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Are you ready to calm down? I’m not here to hurt her.” Strength to strength, eventually he would overpower me unless I broke his arm. Neither eventuality was desirable. “Yolanda, for God’s sake.” I caught her eye, riding his shuffles. “I have a gun—don’t you think I’d have shot you if I wanted to hurt you?” I switched to English for the lie.

“’Kam,” she said at last, and almost instantly he grew calm. She stared at me, backed into the wall at the corridor’s end, her hands flat against it.

“You hurt my arm,” Aikam said beneath me.

“Sorry to hear it. If I let him up, is he going to behave?” That in English again to her. “I’m here to help you. I know you’re scared. You hear me, Aikam?” Switching between two foreign languages was not hard, so adrenalised. “If I let you up, you going to go look after Yolanda?”

He did nothing to clear away the blood that dripped from his nose. He cradled his arm and, unable to put it comfortably around Yolanda, sort of loomed lovingly over and around her. He put himself between me and her. She looked out at me from behind him with wariness, not terror.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I know you’re scared. I’m not Ul Qoma militsya —I don’t trust them any more than you do. I’m not going to call them. Let me help you.”

IN WHAT YOLANDA RODRIGUEZ called the living room she cowered in an old chair they had probably pulled in from an abandoned flat in the same tower. There were several such pieces, broken in various ways but clean. The windows overlooked the courtyard, from which I could hear Ul Qoman boys playing a rough makeshift version of rugby. They were invisible through the whitewash on the glass.

Books and other things sat in boxes around the room. A cheap laptop, a cheap inkjet printer. No power, though, so far as I could tell. There were no posters on the walls. The door to the room was open. I stood leaning by it, looking at the two pictures on the floor: one of Aikam; the other, in a better frame, of Yolanda and Mahalia smiling behind cocktails.

Yolanda stood, sat again. She would not meet my eye. She did not try to hide her fear, which had not abated though I was no longer its immediate object. She was afraid to show or indulge her growing hope. I had seen her expression before. It is not uncommon for people to crave deliverance.

“Aikam’s been doing a good job,” I said. I was back to English. Though he did not speak it, Aikam did not ask for translation. He stood by Yolanda’s chair and watched me. “You had him trying to find out how to get out of Ul Qoma, below the radar. Any luck?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Your boy’s been doing just what you told him to. He’s been trying to find out what’s going on. What did he ever care about Mahalia Geary? They never spoke. Now you, though, he cares about. So there’s something odd when, like you told him to, he’s been asking all about her. Gets you thinking. Why would he do that? You, you did care about her, and you do care about yourself.”

She stood again and turned her face to the wall. I waited for her to say something, and when she did not I continued. “I’m flattered you’d get him to ask me. The one police you think just might possibly not be part of what’s happening. The outsider.”

“You don’t know!” She turned to me. “I don’t trust you—”

“Okay, okay, I never said you did.” A strange reassurance. Aikam watched us jabbering. “So do you never leave?” I said. “What do you eat? Tins? I guess Aikam comes, but not often …”

“Can’t come often. How did you even find me?”

“He can explain. He got a message to come back. For what it’s worth he was trying to look after you.”

“He does that.”

“I can see.” Dogs began to fight outside, noise told us. Their owners joined in. My phone buzzed, audible even with the ringer off. She started and backed away as if I might shoot her with it. The display told me it was Dhatt.

“Look,” I said. “I’m turning it off. I’m turning it off.” If he was paying attention, he would know his call was rerouted to voicemail before the rings had all sounded out. “What happened? Who got to you? Why did you run when you did?”

“I didn’t give them the chance. You saw what happened to Mahalia. She was my friend . I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going down like that, but she’s dead.” She said it with what sounded almost like awe. Her face collapsed and she shook her head. “They killed her.”

“Your parents haven’t heard from you …”

“I can’t. I can’t, I have to …” She bit her nails and glanced up. “When I get out…”

“Straight to the embassy next country along? Through the mountains? Why not here? Or in Besźel?”

“You know why.”

“Say I don’t.”

“Because they’re here, and they’re there too. They run things. Looking for me. It’s just ’cause I got away when I did that they haven’t found me. They’re ready to kill me like they killed my friend . Because I know they’re there. Because I know they’re real.” Her tone alone was enough reason for Aikam to hug her then.

“Who?” Let’s hear it.

“The third place. Between the city and the city. Orciny.”

A WEEK OR SO would have been long enough ago for me to tell her she was being foolish or paranoid. The hesitation—when she told me about the conspiracy, there were those seconds when I was tacitly invited to tell her she was wrong, during which I was silent-vindicated her beliefs, gave her to think I agreed.

She stared and thought me a co-conspirator, and not knowing what was occurring I behaved like one. I could not tell her her life was not in danger. Nor that Bowden’s was not—perhaps he was dead already—nor mine, nor that I could keep her safe. I could tell her almost nothing.

Yolanda had stayed hidden in this place, that her loyal Aikam had found and tried to prepare, in this part of town that she had never intended to so much as visit and of which she did not know the name the day before she arrived here, after an arduous, circuitous and secret midnight dash. He and she had done what they could to make the place bearable, but it was an abandoned hovel in a slum, that she could not quit for terror of being spotted by the unseen forces she knew wanted her dead.

I would say that she could never have seen the like of this place before, but that may not be true. Maybe she had once or twice watched a documentary named something like The Dark Side of the Ul Qoma Dream or The Sickness of the New Wolf or what have you. Films about our neighbour were not generally popular in Besźel, were rarely distributed, so I could not vouch, but it would not be surprising if some blockbuster had been made with the backdrop of gangs in the Ul Qoma slums—the redemption of some not-too-hardcore drug-runner, the impressive murder of several others. Perhaps Yolanda had seen footage of the failed estates of Ul Qoma, but she would not have meant to visit.

“Do you know your neighbours?”

She did not smile. “By voice.”

“Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”

“They got Mahalia, they got Doctor Bowden, now they’re going to get me.”

“I know you’re afraid, but you have to help me. I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know what happened. If I don’t know, I can’t help you.”

“Help me?” She looked around the room. “You want me to tell you what’s up? Sure, you ready to bunk down here? You’ll have to, you know. If you know what’s going on, they’ll come for you too.”

“Alright.”

She sighed and looked down. Aikam said to her, “Is it okay?” in Illitan, and she shrugged, Maybe .

“HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know and I do not want to. There are access points, she said. She didn’t tell me any more and that was alright by me.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone but you?” She seemed to know nothing of Jaris.

“She wasn’t crazy. You’ve seen what happened to Doctor Bowden? You don’t admit you want to know about Orciny. That was always what she was here for, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s how they want it. Orcinians. It’s perfect for them that no one thinks they’re real. That’s just what they want. That’s how they rule.”

“Her PhD …”

“She didn’t care about it. She was just doing enough to keep Prof Nance off her back. She was here for Orciny. Do you realise they contacted her.” She stared at me intently. “Seriously. She was a bit… the first time she was at a conference, in Besźel, she sort of said a load of stuff. There was a load of politicians and stuff there as well as academics and it caused a bit of—”

“She made enemies. I heard about it.”

“Oh, we all knew the nats had their eyes on her, nats on both sides, but that wasn’t the issue. It was Orciny who saw her then. They’re everywhere.”

Certainly she had made herself visible. Shura Katrinya had seen her: I remembered her face at the Oversight Committee when I mentioned the incident. As had Mikhel Buric, I recalled, and a couple of others. Perhaps Syedr had seen her too. Perhaps there had been interested unknown others. “After she first started writing about them, after she was reading all that stuff in Between , and writing it up, and researching, making all her mad little notes”—she made tiny scribbling motions—“she got a letter.”

“Did she show you?”

She nodded. “I didn’t understand it when I saw it. It was in the root form. Precursor stuff, old script, before Besź and Illitan.”

“What did it say?”

“She told me. It was something like: We are watching you. You understand. Would you like to know more? There were others too.”

“She showed you?”

“Not straightaway.”

“What were they saying to her? Why?”

“Because she worked them out. They could tell she wanted to be part of it. So they recruited her. Had her do stuff for them, like, like initiation. Give them information, deliver things.” This was impossible stuff. With a look she challenged me to mock and I was silent. “They gave her addresses where she should leave letters and things. Indissensi . Messages back and forth. She was writing back. They were telling her things. About Orciny. She told me a little bit about it, and the history and that, and it was like … Places no one can see because they think they’re in the other city. Besź think it’s here; Ul Qomans think it’s in Besźel. The people in Orciny, they’re not like us. They can do things that aren’t…”

“Did she meet them?”

Yolanda stood beside the window pane, staring out and down at an angle that kept her from being framed by its whitewash-diffused light. She turned to look at me and said nothing. She had calmed into despondency. Aikam came closer to her. His eyes went between us like a spectator at a tennis match. Finally Yolanda shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“She wanted to. I don’t know. I know at first they said no.” Not yet , they had said. “They told her stuff, history, stuff about what we were doing. This stuff, the Precursor Age stuff… it’s theirs . When Ul Qoma digs it up, or even Besźel, there’s this whole thing about whose is it, where was it found, you know, all that? It’s not Ul Qoma’s or Besźel’s. It’s Orciny’s; it always was. They told her about stuff we’d found that no one who hadn’t put it there could know . This is their history. They were here before Ul Qoma and Besźel split, or joined, around them. They never went away.”

“But it was just lying there until a bunch of Canadian archaeologists—”

“That’s where they kept it. That stuff wasn’t lost. The earth under Ul Qoma and Besźel’s their store room. It’s all Orciny’s. It was all theirs, and we were just… I think she was telling them where we were digging, what we were finding.”

“She was stealing for them.”

“We were stealing from them … She never breached, you know.”

“What? I thought all of you—”

“You mean … like games? Not Mahalia. She couldn’t. Too much to lose. Too likely someone was watching, she said. She never breached, not even in one of those ways that you can’t tell, standing there, you know? She wouldn’t give Breach a chance to take her.” She shivered again. I squatted down and looked around. “Aikam,” she said in Illitan. “Can you get us something to drink?” He did not want to leave the room, but he could see she was not afraid of me anymore.

“What she did do,” she said, “was go to these places where they’d leave her letters. The dissensi are entrances to Orciny. She was so close to being part of it. She thought. At first.” I waited, and at last she continued. “I kept asking her what was up. Something was really wrong, in the last couple of weeks. She stopped going to the dig, meetings, everything.”

“I heard.”

“‘What is it?’ I kept saying, and at first she was like, ‘Nothing,’ but in the end she told me she was scared. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. She’d been frustrated I think because Orciny wouldn’t let her in, and she’d been going mad with work. She was studying harder than I’d ever seen. I asked her what it was. She just kept saying she was scared. She said she’d been going over and over her notes, and that she was figuring stuff out. Bad stuff. She said we could be thieves without even knowing.”

Aikam came back. He carried for me and for Yolanda warm cans of Qora-Oranja.

“I think she’d done something to make Orciny angry . She knew she was in trouble, and Bowden too. She said so just before she—”

“Why would they kill him?” I said. “He doesn’t even believe in Orciny any more.”

“Oh, God, of course he knows they’re real. Of course he does. He’s denied it for years because he needs work, but have you read his book? They’re going after everyone who knows about them. Mahalia told me he was in trouble. Just before she disappeared. He knew too much, and I do too. And now you do too.”

“What are you intending to do?”

“Stay here. Hide. Get out.”

“How’s that going?” I said. She looked at me in misery. “Your boy did his best. He was asking me how a criminal might get out of the city.” She even smiled. “Let me help you.”

“You can’t. They’re everywhere.”

“You don’t know that.”

“How can you keep me safe? They’re going to get you now too.”

Every few seconds there came the sounds of someone ascending outside the apartment, shouts and the noise of a handheld MP3 player, rap or Ul Qoman techno played loud enough to be insolent. Such everyday noises could be camouflage. Corwi was a city away. Listening now it seemed that every few noises paused by the door to the apartment.

“We don’t know what the truth is,” I said. I had intended to say more, but realising that I was not sure whom I was trying to convince of what, I hesitated, and she interrupted me.

“Mahalia did. What are you doing?” I had taken out my phone. I held it up as if surrendering, both hands.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “I was just thinking … we need to work out what we’re going to do. There are people who might be able to help us—”

“Stop,” she said. Aikam looked as if he might come for me again. I got ready to sidestep but waved the phone so she could see it was not on.

“There’s an option you never pursued,” I said. “You could go outside, cross the road a little bit down the way there, and walk into YahudStrász. It’s in Besźel.” She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Stand there, wave your hands. You could breach.” Her eyes got wider.

Another loud man ran upstairs outside, and we three waited. “Did you ever think it was worth a try? Who can touch Breach? If Orciny’s out to get you …” Yolanda was staring at the boxes of her books, her boxed-up self. “Maybe you’d be safer, even.”

“Mahalia said they were enemies,” she said. She sounded far away. “She once said the whole history of Besźel and Ul Qoma was the history of the war between Orciny and Breach. Besźel and Ul Qoma were set up like chess moves, in that war. They might do anything to me.”

“Come on,” I interrupted. “You know most foreigners who breach are just ejected—” But she interrupted back.

“Even if I knew what they’d do, which neither of us do, think about it. A secret for like more than a thousand years, in between Ul Qoma and Besźel, watching us all the time, whether we know it or not. With its own agenda. You think I’d be safer if Breach had me? In the Breach? I’m not Mahalia. I’m not sure Orciny and the Breach are enemies at all.” She looked at me then and I did not disdain her. “Maybe they work together. Or maybe when you invoke you’ve been handing power to Orciny for centuries, while you all sit there telling each other it’s a fairy tale. I think Orciny is the name Breach calls itself.”

Chapter Twenty

FIRST SHE HAD NOT WANTED ME TO ENTER; then Yolanda did not want me to leave. “They’ll see you! They’ll find you. They’ll take you and then they’ll come for me.”

“I can’t stay here.”

“They’ll get you.”

“I can’t stay here.”

She watched me walk the width of the room, to the window and back to the door.

“Don’t—you can’t make a phone call from here—”

“You have to stop panicking.” But I stopped myself, because I was not sure that she was wrong to do so. “Aikam, are there other ways out of this building?”

“Not the way we came in?” He looked intently and emptily a moment. “Some of the apartments downstairs are empty, and maybe you could go through them …”

“Okay.” It had begun to rain, fingertipping against the obscured windows. Judging by the halfhearted darkening of the white windows, it was only just overcast. Washed out of colour, perhaps. Still it felt safer to escape than if it had been clear or coldly sunny, as it had that morning. I paced the room.

“You’re alone in Ul Qoma,” Yolanda whispered. “What can you do?” I looked at her at last.

“Do you trust me?” I said.

“No.”

“Too bad. You’ve no choice. I’m going to get you out. I’m not in my element here, but…”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m going to get you out of here, back to home ground, back to where I can make things happen. I’m going to get you to Besźel.”

She protested. She had never been to Besźel. Both cities were controlled by Orciny, both were overlooked by Breach. I interrupted her.

“What else are you going to do? Besźel’s my city. I can’t negotiate the system here. I have no contacts. I don’t know my way around. But I can get you out from Besźel, and you can help me.”

“You can’t—”

“Yolanda, shut up. Aikam, don’t move another step.” No time for this immobility. She was right, I could promise her nothing but an attempt. “I can get you out, but not from here. One more day. Wait here. Aikam, your job’s finished. You don’t work at Bol Ye’an any more. Your job’s to stay here and look after Yolanda.” He would provide little protection, but his continued interventions at Bol Ye’an would eventually attract other people’s attention than my own. “I will be back. You understand? And I’ll get you out.”

She had food for some days, a diet of tins. This little living room/bedroom, another, smaller, filled with only damp, the kitchen with its electricity and gas supplies disconnected. The bathroom was not good but it would not kill them another day or two: from some standpipe Aikam had brought buckets that stood ready to flush. The many air fresheners he had bought made a stink different than it would otherwise have been.

“Stay,” I said. “I’ll be back.” Aikam recognised the phrase, though it was in English. He smiled and so I said the words again for him in an Austrian accent. Yolanda did not get it. “I will get you out,” I said to her.

On the ground floor a few shoves at doors yielded me an empty apartment, a long time since fire-damaged but still smelling of carbon. I stood in its glassless kitchen and watched the hardiest girls and boys outside refuse to get out of the rain. I watched for a long time, looking into all the shadows I could see. I saw only those children. My sleeves pulled over my fingertips in case of a fringe of glass, I vaulted out into the yard, where if any of the kids saw me emerge they did not remark.

I know how to watch to ensure I am not followed. I walked quickly through the byway meanders of the project, between its bins and cars, graffiti and children’s playgrounds, until I made it out of cul-de-sac land into the streetscape of Ul Qoma, and Besźel. With relief at being one of several pedestrians rather than the only purposeful figure in sight, I breathed out a little, I took on the same rain-avoidance gait as everyone else, and at last turned on my phone. It scolded me with how many messages I had missed. All from Dhatt. I was starving and uncertain of how to get back to the Old Town. I wandered, looking for a Metro but finding a phone box. I called him.

“Dhatt.”

“It’s Borlú.”

“Where the fuck are you? Where’ve you been?” He was angry but conspiratorial, his voice quieter as he turned and muttered into his phone, not louder. A good sign. “I’ve been trying to call you for fucking hours. Is everything … Are you alright? What the fuck’s going on?”

“I’m alright, but…”

“Something happened?” Anger but not only anger in his voice.

“Yeah, something happened. I can’t talk about it.”

“The fuck you can’t.”

“Listen. Listen . I need to talk to you but I don’t have time for this. You want to know what’s been going on, meet me, I don’t know”—flipping through my street map—“in Kaing Shé, in the square by the station, in two hours, and Dhatt, do not bring anyone else. This is serious shit. There’s more going on here than you know. I don’t know who to talk to. Now are you going to help me?”

I made him wait an hour. I watched him from the corner as he must surely have known I would. Kaing Shé Station is the city’s major terminus, so the square outside it bustled with Ul Qomans in cafés, by street performers, buying DVDs and electronics from stalls. The topolganger square in Besźel was not quite empty, so unseen Besź citizens were grosstopically there too. I stayed in the shadows of one of the cigarette kiosks shaped in homage to an Ul Qoman temporary hut, once common on the wetlands where scavengers sifted through the crosshatched mud. I saw Dhatt look for me, but I stayed out of sight while it grew dark and watched to see if he made any calls (he did not) or hand signals (he did not). He only set his face more and more as he drank teas and glowered in the shadows. At last I stepped into his line of sight and moved my hand in a little regular motion that caught his eye and beckoned him over.

“What the fuck is going on?” he said. “I’ve had your boss on the phone. And Corwi. Who the fuck is she anyway? What’s happening?”

“I don’t blame you being angry, but you’re keeping your voice low, so you’re being careful and you want to know what’s going on. You’re right. Something’s up. I found Yolanda.”

When I would not tell him where she was he was enraged enough to start threatening an international incident. “This is not your fucking city,” he said, “you come here and use our resources, you fucking hold up our investigations,” and so on, but still he kept his voice low and walked with me, so I let his anger ebb out a bit and began to tell him how Yolanda was afraid.

“We both know we can’t reassure her,” I said. “Come on. Neither of us knows the truth about what the hell’s going on. About the unifs, the nats, the bomb, about Orciny . Shit, Dhatt, for all we know …” He stared at me, so I said, “Whatever this is”—I glanced around to indicate everything that was happening—“it goes somewhere bad.”

We were both silent a while. “So why the fuck are you talking to me?”

“Because I need someone. But yeah, you’re right, it might be a mistake. You’re the only person who might understand … the scale of what might be going on. I want to get her out. Listen to me: this is not about Ul Qoma. I don’t trust my own lot any more than you. I want to get that girl out, away from Ul Qoma and Besźel. And I can’t do it from here; this isn’t my patch. She’s watched here.”

“Maybe I could.”

“You volunteering?” He said nothing. “Right. I am. I have contacts back home. You don’t cop for this long without being able to score tickets and false papers. I can hide her; I can talk to her in Besźel before I get her out, get some more sense of all this. This isn’t about giving up: the opposite. If we get her out of harm’s way we’ve got a much better chance of not getting blindsided. We can maybe work out what’s going on.”

“You said Mahalia had already made enemies back in Besźel. I thought you wanted them for this.”

“The nats? That doesn’t make much sense anymore. A, all this is way beyond Syedr and his boys, and B, Yolanda hasn’t pissed off anyone back home; she’s never been there. I can do my job there.” I could go beyond my job, I meant—could pull strings and favours. “I’m not trying to cut you out, Dhatt. I’ll tell you what I know if I get any more from her, maybe even come back and we can go hunting criminals, but I want to get that girl out of here. She’s scared to death, Dhatt, and can we really say she’s wrong to be?”

Dhatt kept shaking his head. He was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with me. After a minute he spoke again, tersely. “I sent my crew back to the unifs. No sign of Jaris. We don’t even know the little fucker’s real name. If any of his mates know where he is or that he was seeing her they’re not saying.”

“Do you believe them?”

He shrugged. “We’ve been checking them out. Can’t find anything. Doesn’t look like they know shit. One or two of them it’s obvious ‘Marya’ rings a bell, but most of them never even met her.”

“This is all beyond them.”

“Oh, they’re up to all kinds of shit, don’t you worry; we’ve got moles say they’re going to do this and that, they’re going to break the boundaries, planning all sorts of revolutions …”

“That’s not what we’re talking about. And you hear that stuff all the time.”

He was silent while I listed for him again what had happened on our watch. We slowed down in the dark and sped up in the pools of lamplight. When I told him that according to Yolanda, Mahalia had said that Bowden was in danger too, he halted. We stood in that freezing silence for seconds.

“Today while you were fucking around with Little Miss Paranoid we searched Bowden’s flat. There’s no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle. Nothing. Food left on the side, books page-down on the chair. We did find a letter on his desk.”

“From who?”

“Yallya told me you’d be onto something. The letter doesn’t say. It’s not in Illitan. It was just a single word. I thought it was in weird-looking Besź but it isn’t. It’s in Precursor.”

“What? What does it say?”

“I took it to Nancy. She said it’s an old version of the script she hasn’t seen before and she wouldn’t want to swear to it yadda yadda, but she’s pretty sure it’s a warning.”

“A warning of what?”

“Just a warning. Like a skull-and-crossbones. A word that is a warning.” It was dark enough that we could not see each other’s faces well. Not deliberately, I had steered us close to an intersection with a total Besź street. Those squat brick buildings in their brown light, the men and women walking beneath them in long coats under the swinging sepia signs that I unsaw bisected the Ul Qoman sodium-lit strip of glass fronts and imports like something old and recurrent.

“So who might use that kind of…?”

“Don’t fucking tell me about secret cities. Don’t.” Dhatt looked haunted and hunted. He looked sick. He turned and bundled himself into the corner of a doorway, punched his own palm furiously several times. “What the fuck?” he said, looking into the dark.

What lived like Orciny would live, if one indulged Yolanda’s and Mahalia’s ideas? Something so small, so powerful, lodged in the crevices of another organism. Willing to kill. A parasite. A tick-city, quite ruthless.

“Even if… even if, say, something is wrong with my lot and your lot, whatever,” Dhatt said at last.

“Controlled. Bought.”

“Whatever. Even if.”

We whispered under the foreign shriek of a flap above us in Besźel swinging in the wind. “Yolanda’s convinced that Breach is Orciny,” I said. “I’m not saying I agree with her—I don’t know what I’m saying—but I promised her I’d get her out.”

“Breach would get her out.”

“You prepared to swear she’s wrong? You prepared to abso-bloody-lutely swear she’s got nothing to worry about from them?” I was whispering. This was dangerous talk. “They’ve no way in yet—nothing’s fucking breached—and she wants to keep it that way.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I want to get her away. I’m not saying anyone here’s got her in their sights, I’m not saying she’s right about anything she’s saying, but someone killed Mahalia, and someone got to Bowden. Something’s going on in Ul Qoma. I’m asking for your help, Dhatt. Come with me. We can’t do this officially; she won’t cooperate with anything official. I promised her I’d look after her, and this is not my city. You going to help me? No, we can’t risk doing this by the book. So are you going to help me? I need to get her to Besźel.”

We did not go back to the hotel room that night, nor to Dhatt’s house. Not overcome by anxiety but indulging it, behaving as if this all might be true. We walked instead.

“Fuck’s sake, can’t believe I’m doing this,” he kept saying. He looked behind us more than I did.

“We can find a way to blame me,” I told him. It was not what I might have expected, despite that I’d risked telling him what I had, to have him be part of this, to put himself so on this line.

“Stick us to crowds,” I told him. “And to crosshatching.” More people, and where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

“I’ve got an exit anytime on my visa,” I said. “Can you get her a pass out?”

“I can get one for me, sure. I can get one for a fucking cop , Borlú.”

“Let me rephrase that. Can you get an exit visa for Officer Yolanda Rodriguez?” He stared at me. We were still whispering.

“She won’t even have an Ul Qoman passport …”

“So can you get her through? I don’t know what your border guards are like.”

“Oh what the fuck?” he said again. As the numbers of walkers fell our pedestrianism ceased being camouflage and risked becoming its opposite. “I know a place,” Dhatt said. A drinking club, the manager of which greeted him with almost convincing pleasure, in the basement opposite a bank in the outskirts of Ul Qoma Old Town. It was full of smoke and men who eyed Dhatt, knowing what he was, despite that he was in civilian clothes. It looked for a second as if they thought him there to bust the drag act, but he waved at them to get on with it. Dhatt gestured for the manager’s phone. Lips thinned, the man passed it to him over the counter and he passed it to me.

“Holy Light, let’s do this, then,” he said. “I can get her through.” There was music, and the growl of conversation was very loud. I stretched the phone to the extent of its cord and huddled down, squatting, by the bar, at stomach-level of the men around me. It felt quieter. I had to go through an operator to get an international line, which I did not like to do.

“Corwi, it’s Borlú.”

“Christ. Give me a minute. Christ.”

“Corwi, I’m sorry to call so late. Can you hear me?”

“Christ. What time … Where are you? I can’t fucking hear a word, you’re all—”

“I’m in a bar. Listen, I’m sorry about the time. I need you to organise something for me.”

“Christ, boss, are you fucking kidding?”

“No. Come on. Corwi, I need you.” I could almost see her rubbing her face, maybe walking phone in hand and sleepy to the kitchen and drinking cold water. When she spoke again she was more focused.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m coming back.”

“Serious? When?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. Dhatt, the guy I’m working with here, he’s coming over to Besźel. I need you to meet us. Can you get everything in motion and keep it on the QT? Corwi—black-ops stuff. Serious. Walls have ears.”

Long pause. “Why me, boss? And why at two-thirty in the morning?”

“Because you’re good, and because you’re the soul of discretion. I need no noise. I need you in a car, with your gun and preferably one for me, and that’s it. And I need you to book a hotel for them. Not one of the department’s usuals.” Another long silence. “And listen … he’s bringing another officer.”

“What? Who?”

“She’s undercover . What do you think? She wanted a free trip.” I glanced apology at him, though he could not hear me over the criminal din. “Keep this low, Corwi. Just a little moment in the investigation, okay? And I’m going to want your help getting something, getting a package, out of Besźel. You understand?”

“… Think so, boss. Boss, someone’s been calling for you. Asking what’s going on with your investigation.”

“Who? What do you mean, what’s going on?”

“Who I don’t know, won’t leave his name. He wants to know, Who are you arresting? When are you back? Have you found the missing girl? What are the plans? I don’t know how he got my desk number, but he blatantly knows something.”

I was clicking at Dhatt to pay attention. “Someone’s asking questions,” I said to him. “Won’t say his name?” I asked Corwi.

“No, and I don’t recognise his voice. Crap line.”

“What does he sound like?”

“Foreign. American. And scared.” On a bad, an international, line.

“God damn,” I said to Dhatt, hand over the receiver. “Bowden’s out there. He’s trying to find me. He must be avoiding our numbers here in case he’s traced … Canadian, Corwi. Listen, when did he call?”

“Every day, yesterday and today, won’t leave his details.”

“Right. Listen. When he calls again, tell him this. Give him this message from me. Tell him he’s got one chance. Hold on, I’m thinking. Tell him we’re … Tell him I’ll make sure he’s okay, I can get him out. We have to. I know he’s afraid with everything going on, but he’s got no chance on his own. Keep this to yourself, Corwi.”

“Jesus, you’re determined to fuck my career.” She sounded tired. I waited silently until I was sure she would do it.

“Thank you. Just trust me he’ll understand and please don’t ask me anything. Tell him we know more now. Shit, I can’t go into this.” A loud burst from the sequined Ute Lemper look-alike made me wince. “Just tell him we know more and tell him he has to call us.” I looked around as if inspiration might jump to me, and it did. “What’s Yallya’s mobile number?” I asked Dhatt.

“Huh?”

“He doesn’t want to call us on mine or yours, so just…” He recited it to me and I to Corwi. “Tell our mystery man to call that number, and we can help him. And you call me back on that, too, okay? From tomorrow on.”

“What the fuck?” said Dhatt. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“You’re going to have to borrow her phone; we need one so Bowden can find us—he’s too scared to, we don’t know who’s listening to ours. If he contacts us, you might have to …” I hesitated.

“What?”

“Jesus, Dhatt, not now , okay? Corwi?”

She was gone, the line disconnected, by her or by the old exchanges.

Chapter Twenty-One

I EVEN CAME WITH DHATT into his office the next day. “The more you’re a no-show, the more people wonder what the fuck’s going on and the more they’re going to notice you,” he said. As it was there were plenty of stares from his office colleagues. I nodded at the two who had tried halfheartedly to start an altercation with me.

“I’m getting paranoid,” I said.

“Oh no, they’re really watching you. Here.” He handed me Yallya’s cell phone. “I think that’s the last time you’re getting invited to supper.”

“What did she say?”

“What do you think? It’s her fucking phone; she was seriously pissed off. I told her we needed it, she told me to fuck off, I begged, she said no, I took it and blamed you.”

“Can we get hold of a uniform? For Yolanda …” We huddled over his computer. “Might get her through easier.” I watched him use his more up-to-date version of Windows. The first time Yallya’s phone rang we froze and looked at each other. A number appeared that neither of us knew. I connected without a word, still meeting his eyes.

“Yall? Yall?” A woman’s voice in Illitan. “It’s Mai, are you … Yall?”

“Hello, this isn’t Yallya actually …”

“Oh, hey, Qussim …?” but her voice faltered. “Who is this?”

He took it from me.

“Hello? Mai, hey. Yeah, he’s a friend of mine. No, well spotted. I had to borrow Yall’s phone for a day or two, have you tried the house? Alright then, take care.” The screen went dark and he handed it back. “That’s another fucking reason you can field this shit. You’re going to get a pissload of calls from her friends asking you if you still want to go for that facial or if you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie.”

After the second and third such call, we no longer started when the cell rang. There were not many, however, despite what Dhatt said, and none on those topics. I imagined Yallya on her office phone, making countless angry calls denouncing her husband and his friend for the inconvenience.

“Do we want to put her in a uniform?” Dhatt spoke low.

“You’re going to be in yours, right? Isn’t it always best to hide in plain sight?”

“You want one too?”

“Is it a bad idea?”

He shook his head slowly. “It’ll make life easier for some of it… I think I can get through my side on police papers and my say-so.” Militsya , let alone senior detectives, trumped Ul Qoman border guards, without much trouble. “Alright.”

“I’ll do the talking at the Besźel entrance.”

“Is Yolanda okay?”

“Aikam’s with her. I can’t go back … Not again. Every time we do …” We still had no idea how, or by whom, we might be watched.

Dhatt moved too much, and after the third or fourth time he had snapped at one of his colleagues for some imagined infraction I made him come with me for an early lunch. He glowered and would not speak, staring at everyone who passed us.

“Will you stop?” I said.

“I am going to be so fucking glad when you’re gone,” he said. Yallya’s phone rang and I held it to my ear without speaking.

“Borlú?” I tapped the table for Dhatt’s attention, pointed at the phone.

“Bowden, where are you?”

“I’m keeping myself safe, Borlú.” He spoke in Besź to me.

“You don’t sound like you feel safe.”

“Of course not. I’m not safe, am I? The question is, how much trouble am I in?” His voice was very strained.

“I can get you out.” Could I? Dhatt shrugged an exaggerated what the fuck? “There are ways out. Tell me where you are.”

He sort of laughed. “Right,” he said. “I’ll just tell you where I am.”

“What else do you propose? You can’t spend your life in hiding. Get out of Ul Qoma and I can maybe do something. Besźel’s my turf.”

“You don’t even know what’s going on …”

“You’ve got one chance.”

“Help me like you did Yolanda?”

“She’s not stupid,” I said. “She’s letting me help.”

“What? You’ve found her? What…”

“Like I told you, I told her. I can’t help either of you here. I might be able to help you in Besźel. Whatever’s going on, whoever’s after you …” He tried to say something, but I did not let him. “I know people there. Here I can’t do a thing. Where are you?”

“… Nowhere. Doesn’t matter. I’ll … Where are you? I don’t want to—”

“You’ve done well to stay out of sight this long. But you can’t do it forever.”

“No. No. I’ll find you. Are you … crossing now?”

I couldn’t help glancing around and lowering my voice again. “Soon.”

“When?”

“Soon. I’ll tell you when I know. How do I contact you?”

“You don’t, Borlú. I’ll contact you. Keep this phone.”

“What if you miss me?”

“I’ll just have to call every couple of hours. I’m afraid I’m going to have to bother you, a lot.” He disconnected. I stared at Yallya’s phone, looked up at last at Dhatt.

“Do you have any fucking idea how much I hate not knowing where I can look?” Dhatt whispered. “Who I can trust?” He shuffled papers. “What I should be saying to whom?”

“I do.”

“What’s going on?” he said. “Does he want out too?”

“He wants out too. He’s afraid. He doesn’t trust us.”

“I don’t blame him one bit.”

“Neither do I.”

“I don’t have any papers for him.” I met his eye and waited. “Holy Light , Borlú, you going to fucking …” He whispered furiously. “Alright, alright, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Tell me what to do,” I said to him, without breaking my gaze, “who to call, what corners to cut, and you can fucking blame me. Blame me, Dhatt. Please . But bring a uniform in case he comes.” I watched him, poor man, agonise.

It was after 7 p.m. that night that Corwi called me. “We’re go,” she said. “I’ve got the paperwork.”

“Corwi, I owe you, I owe you.”

“Do you think I don’t know that, boss? It’s you, your guy Dhatt, and his ahem ‘colleague,’ right? I’ll be waiting.”

“Bring your ID and be ready to back me up with Immigration. Who else? Who else knows?”

“No one. I’m your designated driver, again, then. What time?”

The question, what is the best way to disappear? There must be a graph, a carefully plotted curve. Is something more invisible if there are no others around, or if it is one of many? “Not too late. Not like two in the morning.”

“I’m glad to fucking hear it.”

“We’d be the only ones there. But not in the middle of the day either; there’s too much risk someone might know us or something.” After dark. “Eight,” I said. “Tomorrow evening.” It was winter and the nights came early. There would be crowds still, but in the dim colours of evening, sleepy. Easy not to see.

IT WAS NOT ALL LEGERDEMAIN; there were tasks we should and did perform. Reports of progress to finesse, and families to contact. I watched and with occasional over-the-shoulder suggestions helped Dhatt construct a letter saying polite and regretful nothing to Mr. and Mrs. Geary, whose main liaison now was with the Ul Qoma militsya . It was not a good feeling of power, to be present a ghost in that holding message, knowing them, seeing them from inside the words which would be like one-way glass, so they could not look back in and see me, one of the writers.

I told Dhatt a place—I did not know the address, had to describe it in vague topography, which he recognised—a piece of parkland walking distance from where Yolanda hid, to meet me at the end of the following day. “Anyone asks, tell them I’m working from the hotel. Tell them about all the ridiculous paperwork hoops they make us jump through in Besźel, that keep me busy.”

“It’s all we ever fucking talk about, Tyad.” Dhatt could not stay in one place, he was so anxious, so frenetic with lack of trust, in anything, so troubled. He did not know where to look. “Blame you or not, I’m going to be on school liaison for the rest of my fucking career.”

We had agreed there was a good possibility we would not hear from Bowden again, but I got a call on poor Yallya’s phone half an hour after midnight. I was sure it was Bowden though he said nothing. He called again just before seven the next morning.

“You sound bad, Doctor.”

“What’s happening?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Are you going? Is Yolanda with you? Is she coming?”

“You have one shot, Doctor.” I scribbled times on my notepad. “If you’re not going to let me come for you. You want out, be outside the main traffic gate of Copula Hall at seven p.m.”

I disconnected. I tried to make notes, plans on paper, could not. Bowden did not call me back. I kept the phone on the table or in my hand throughout my early breakfast. I did not check out of the hotel—no telegraphing of movements. I sorted through my clothes for anything I could not afford to leave, and there was nothing. I carried my illegal volume of Between the City and the City , and that was all.

I took almost the whole day to get to Yolanda and Aikam’s hide. My last day in Ul Qoma. I took taxis in stages to the ends of the city. “How long you staying?” the last driver asked me.

“A couple of weeks.”

“You like it here,” he said, in enthusiastic beginner’s Illitan. “Best city in the world.” He was Kurdish.

“Show me your favourite parts of town, then. You don’t get trouble?” I said. “Not everyone’s welcoming to foreigners, I heard …”

He made a pooh-poohing noise. “Are fools all over everywhere, but is the best city.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Four years and some. I was one year in camp …”

“A refugee camp?”

“Yeah, in the camp, and three years study for Ul Qoma citizenship. Speaking Illitan and learning, you know, not to, you know to unsee the other place, so not to breach.”

“Did you ever think of going to Besźel?”

Another snort. “What’s in Besźel? Ul Qoma is the best place.”

He took me first past the Orchidarium and the Xhincis Kann Stadium, a tourist route he had obviously taken before, and when I encouraged him to indulge more personal preferences he started to show me the community gardens where alongside Ul Qoman natives those Kurds, Pakistanis, Somalis and Sierra Leoneans who got through the stringent conditions for entry played chess, the various communities regarding each other with courteous uncertainty. At a crossroads of canals he, careful not to say anything unequivocally illegal, pointed out to me where the barges of the two cities-pleasure craft in Ul Qoma, a few working transport boats unseen in Besźel—wove between each other.

“You see?” he said.

A man on the opposite side of a nearby lock, half-hidden in people and little urban trees, was looking straight at us. I met his eye—for a moment I was not sure but then decided he must be in Ul Qoma, so it was not breach—until he looked away. I tried to watch where he went, but he was gone.

When I expressed choices between the various sights the driver proposed, I made sure the resulting route crisscrossed the city. I watched the mirrors as he, delighted with this fare, drove. If we were followed it was by very sophisticated and careful spies. I paid him a ridiculous amount, in a much harder currency than I was paid in, after three hours of escorting, and I had him drop me where backstreet hackers abutted cheap secondhand shops, around the corner from the estate where Yolanda and Aikam hid.

For moments I thought they had skipped out on me, and I closed my eyes, but I kept repeating in a whisper up close to the door, “It’s me, it’s Borlú, it’s me,” and at last it opened, and Aikam ushered me in.

“Get ready,” I said to Yolanda. She looked dirty to me, thinner and more startled like an animal than even when I had last seen her. “Get your papers. Be ready to agree with whatever me or my colleagues say to anyone at the border. And get lover-boy used to the idea that he’s not coming, because we’re not having a scene at Copula Hall. We’re getting you out.”

SHE MADE HIM STAY IN THE ROOM. He looked as if he would not do as she asked, but she made him. I did not trust him to be unobtrusive.

He demanded to know again and again why he could not come. She showed him where she had his number, and she swore that she would call him from Besźel, and from Canada, and that she would call for him there. It took her several such promises until he stood at last miserable as a neglected thing, staring as we closed the door on him and walked fast through the shadowing light to the corner of the park, where Dhatt was waiting in an unmarked police car.

“Yolanda.” He nodded to her from the driver’s seat. “Pain in my arse.” He nodded to me. We set off. “What the fuck? Who exactly have you pissed off, Miss Rodriguez? You’ve got me fucking my life and collaborating with this foreign wacko. There’s clothes in the back,” he said. “Course I’m out of work, now.” He very well might not be exaggerating.

Yolanda stared at him until he glanced into the mirror and snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, what, you think I’m peeping ?” and she scootched down in the rear seat and began to wriggle out of her clothes, replacing them with the militsya uniform he had brought for her, that almost fit.

“Miss Rodriguez, do as I say and stick close. There’s fancy dress for our possible-other-guest too. And that’s for you, Borlú. Might save us a bit of shit.” A jacket with a fold-down militsya blazon on it. I made it visible. “I wish they had rank on them. I’d’ve fucking demoted you.”

He did not meander, nor make the mistake of the guilty nervous and drive more slowly, more carefully than the cars around us. We took the main streets, and he flicked on and off the headlights at other drivers’ infractions as Ul Qoman drivers do, little messages of road-rage code like aggressive Morse, flick flick, you cut me up, flick flick flick, make up your mind .

“He called again,” I said to Dhatt quietly. “He might be there. In which case …”

“Come on, pain in my arse, say it again. In which case he’s going over, right?”

“He’s got to get out. Did you get spare papers?”

He swore and punched the steering wheel. “Fuck I really wish I’d thought of a way to talk myself out of this fucking shit. I hope he doesn’t come. I hope fucking Orcinydoes get him.” Yolanda stared at him. “I’ll sound out whoever’s on duty. Get ready to crack out your wallet. If push comes to shove I’ll give him my fucking papers.”

We saw Copula Hall over the roofs and through cables of telephone exchanges and gasrooms many minutes before we arrived at it. The way we came, we first passed, as unseeing as we could, the building’s rear-to-Ul Qoma, its entryway in Besźel, the queues of Besź and returning Ul Qoman passengers siphoning in in patient dudgeon. A Besź police light was flashing. We were obliged not to and did not see any of it, but we could not but be aware as we did so that we would be on that side soon. We rounded the huge building to its Ul Maidin Avenue entrance, opposite the Temple of Inevitable Light, where the slow line into Besźel proceeded. There Dhatt parked—a bad job not corrected, skewed from the kerb with the swagger of militsya , keys hanging ready—and we emerged to cross through the night crowds towards the great forecourt and the borders of Copula Hall.

The outer guards of militsya did not ask a thing or even speak to us as we cut across the lines of people, walked over the roads weaving through stationary traffic, only ushered us through the restricted gates and on into the grounds proper of Copula Hall, where the huge edifice waited to eat us.

I looked everywhere as we came. Our eyes never stopped moving. I walked behind Yolanda, moving uneasily in her disguise. I raised my stare above the sellers of food and tat, the guards, the tourists, the homeless men and women, the other militsya . Of the many entrances we had chosen the most open, wide and unconvoluted under a vault of old brickwork, with a view clear through the yawning interstitial space, over the mass of crowds filling the great chamber on both sides of the checkpoint—though more, noticeably, on the Besźel side, wanting to come in to Ul Qoma.

From this position, this vantage angle, for the first time in a long time we did not have to unsee the neighbouring city: we could stare along the road that linked Ul Qoma to it, over the border, the metres of no-man’s-land and the border beyond, directly into Besźel itself. Straight ahead. Blue lights awaited us. A Besź bruise just visible beyond the lowered gate between the states, the flashing we had unseen minutes before. As we passed the outer fringes of Copula Hall’s architecture, I saw at the far end of the hall standing on the raised platform where the Besź guards watched the crowds a figure in policzai uniform. A woman—she was very distant yet, on the Besźel side of the gates.

“Corwi.” I did not know I’d said her name aloud until Dhatt said to me, “That her?” I was about to tell him it was too far off to know, but he said to me, “Hold on a second.”

He was looking back the way we had come. We stood somewhat apart from most of those heading into Besźel, between lines of aspirant travellers and on a thin fringe of pavement vehicles travelling slowly. There was, Dhatt was right, something about one of the men behind us that was disconcerting. There was nothing about his appearance which stood out: he was bundled against the cold in a drab Ul Qoman cloak. But he walked or shuffled towards us somewhat across the directionality of the line of his fellow pedestrians, and I saw behind him disgruntled faces. He was pushing out of his turn, walking towards us. Yolanda saw where we were looking, and gave a little whimper.

“Come on,” Dhatt said, and put his hand to her back and walked her more quickly towards the entrance of the tunnel, but seeing how the figure behind us tried as far as the constraints of those around him would permit to raise his speed as well, to exceed our own, to come towards us, I turned around suddenly and began to move toward him.

“Get her over there,” I said to Dhatt behind me, without looking. “Go, get her to the border. Yolanda, go to the policzai woman over there.” I accelerated. “Go.”

“Wait,” Yolanda said to me but I heard Dhatt remonstrate with her. I was focused now on the approaching man. He could not fail to see that I was coming towards him, and he hesitated and reached into his jacket, and I fumbled at my side but remembered I had no gun in that city. The man backed up a step or two. The man threw up his hands and unwrapped his scarf. He was shouting my name. It was Bowden.

He pulled out something, a pistol dangling in his fingers as if he were allergic to it. I dived for him and heard a hard exhalation behind me. Behind me another spat-out breath and screams. Dhatt shouted and shouted my name.

Bowden was staring over my shoulder. I looked behind me. Dhatt was crouched between cars a few metres away. He was wrapping himself up in himself and bellowing. Motorists were hunched in their vehicles. Their screams were spreading to the lines of pedestrian travellers in Besźel and in Ul Qoma. Dhatt huddled over Yolanda. She lay as if tossed. I could not see her clearly, but there was blood across her face. Dhatt was gripping his shoulder.

“I’m hit!” he shouted. “Yolanda’s … Light, Tyad, she’s shot, she’s down …”

A commotion started in the hall a long way off. Over the sedately moving traffic I saw at the farthest end of the enormous room a surge in the crowd in Besźel, a movement like animal panic. People scattering away from a figure, who leaned on, no, raised, something in both hands. Aiming, a rifle.

Chapter Twenty-Two

ANOTHER OF THOSE ABRUPT LITTLE SOUNDS, hardly audible over the rising screams the length of the tunnel. A shot, silenced or muffled by acoustics, but by the time I heard it I was on Bowden and had pushed him down, and the explosive percussion of the bullet into the wall behind him was louder than the shot itself. Architecture sprayed. I heard Bowden’s panicked breath, put my hand on his wrist and squeezed until he dropped his weapon, kept him down out of the sightline of the sniper targeting him.

“Down! Everybody down!” I was shouting that. So sluggishly it was hard to believe, the crowds were falling to their knees, their cowering and their screams more and more exaggerated as they realised the danger. Another sound and another, a car braking violently and with an alarm, another implosive gasp as bricks took a bullet.

I kept Bowden on the tarmac. “Tyad!” It was Dhatt.

“Talk to me,” I shouted to him. The guards were all over the place, raising weapons, looking everywhere, yelling idiot pointless orders at each other.

“I’m hit, I’m okay,” he replied. “Yolanda’s head-shot.”

I looked up, no more firing. I looked up further, to where Dhatt rolled and gripped his wound, to where Yolanda lay dead. Rose slightly more and saw militsya approaching Dhatt and the corpse he guarded, and way off policzai running towards where the shots had come from. In Besźel the police were buffeted and blocked by the hysterical crowd. Corwi was looking in all directions—could she see me? I was shouting. The shooter was running.

His way was blocked, but he swung his rifle like a club when he had to, and people were clearing from around him. Orders would be going out to block the entrance, but how fast would they go? He was moving into a part of the crowd who had not seen him shoot, and were surrounding him, and good as he was he would drop or hide his weapon.

“God damn it.” I could hardly see him. No one was stopping him. He had some way to go before he was out. I looked, carefully, item by item, at his hair and clothes: cropped; grey tracksuit top with a hood behind; black trousers. All nondescript. Did he drop his weapon? He was into the crowd.

I stood holding Bowden’s gun. A ridiculous P38, but loaded and well kept. I stepped towards the checkpoint, but there was no way I could get through it, all that chaos, not ever and not now with both lines of guards in uproar flailing guns around; even if my Ul Qoman uniform got me through the Ul Qoman lines, the Besź would stop me, and the shooter was too far for me to catch. I hesitated. “Dhatt, radio help, watch Bowden,” I shouted, then turned and ran the other way, out into Ul Qoma, towards Dhatt’s car.

The crowds got out of my way; they saw me coming with my militsya emblazoning, saw the pistol I held, and scattered. The militsya saw one of their own, in pursuit of something, and did not stop me. I turned the emergency lights on and started the engine.

I sent the car breakneck, dodging local and foreign cars, screaming outside the length of Copula Hall. The siren confused me, I was not used to Ul Qoman sirens, a ya ya ya more whining than our own cars’. The shooter was, must be, fighting his way through the terrified and confused thronging tunnel of travellers. My lights and alarm cleared the roads before me, ostentatiously in Ul Qoma, on the topolganger streets in Besźel with the typical unstated panic of a foreign drama. I yanked the wheel and the car snapped right, bumped over Besź tram tracks.

Where was Breach? But no breach had occurred.

No breach had occurred though a woman had been killed, brazenly, across a border. Assault, a murder and an attempted murder, but those bullets had travelled across the checkpoint itself, in Copula Hall, across the meeting place. A heinous, complex, vicious killing, but in the assiduous care the assassin had taken—to position himself just so at the point where he could stare openly along the last metres of Besźel over the physical border and into Ul Qoma, could aim precisely down this one conduit between the cities—that murder had been committed with if anything a surplus of care for the cities’ boundaries, the membrane between Ul Qoma and Besźel. There was no breach, Breach had no power here, and only Besź police were in the same city as the killer now.

I turned right again. I was back where we had been an hour before, in Weipay Street in Ul Qoma, which shared the crosshatched latitude-longitude with the Besź entrance to Copula Hall. I drove the car as close as the crowds let me, braked hard. I got out and jumped on its roof—it would not be long before Ul Qoman police would come to ask me, their supposed colleague, what I was doing, but now I jumped on the roof. After a second’s hesitation I did not stare into the tunnel at the oncoming Besź escaping the attack. I looked instead all around, into Ul Qoma, and then in the direction of the hall, not changing my expression, giving away nothing that suggested that I might be looking anywhere other than at Ul Qoma. I was unimpeachable. The car’s stuttering police lights turned my legs red and blue.

I let myself notice what was happening in Besźel. Many more travellers were still trying to enter Copula Hall than leave it, but as the panic within spread there was a dangerous contraflow. There was commotion, lines backing up, those behind who did not know what it was they had seen or heard blocking those who knew very well and were trying to flee. Ul Qomans unsaw the Besź melee, looked away and crossed the road to avoid the foreign trouble.

“Get out, get out—”

“Let us in, what’s …?”

Among the clots and grots of panicked escapees I saw a hurrying man. He caught my attention by the care with which he tried not to run too fast, not to be too large, to raise his head. I believed it was, then that it was not, then that it was, the shooter. Pushing his way past a last shouting family and a chaotic line of Besź policzai trying to impose order without knowing what it was they should do. Pushing his way out and turning, walking with his hurried careful step away.

I must have made a sound. Certainly those scores of yards away the killer glanced backwards. I saw him see me and reflexively unsee, because of my uniform, because I was in Ul Qoma, but even as he dropped his eyes he recognised something and walked even faster away. I had seen him before, I could not think where. I looked around desperately, but none of the policzai in Besźel knew to follow him, and I was in Ul Qoma. I jumped off the roof of the car and walked quickly after the murderer.

Ul Qomans I shoved out of the way: Besź tried to unsee me but had to scurry to get out of my path. I saw their startled looks. I moved faster than the killer. I kept my eyes not on him but looking at some spot or other in Ul Qoma that put him in my field of vision. I tracked him without focusing, just legally. I crossed the plaza and two Ul Qoman militsya I passed called some tentative query at me which I ignored.

The man must have heard the sound of my step. I had come within a few tens of metres when he turned. His eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of me, which, careful even then, he did not hold. He registered me. He looked back into Besźel and sped up, trotting diagonally away toward ErmannStrász, a high street, behind a Kolyub-bound tram. In Ul Qoma, the road we were on was Saq Umir Way. I accelerated too.

He glanced back again and went faster, jogging through the Besź crowds, looking quickly to either side into the cafés lit by coloured candles, into the bookshops of Besźel—in Ul Qoma these were quieter alleys. He should have entered a shop. Perhaps he did not because there were crosshatched crowds he would have to negotiate on both pavements, perhaps his body rebelled at dead ends, cul-de-sacs, while pursued. He began to run.

The murderer ran left, into a smaller alley, where still I followed him. He was fast. He was faster than me now. He ran like a soldier. The distance between us grew. The stallholders and walkers in Besź stared at the killer; those in Ul Qoma stared at me. My quarry vaulted a bin that blocked his way, with greater ease than I knew I would manage. I knew where he was going. The Old Towns of Besźel and Ul Qoma are closely crosshatched: reach their edges, separations begin, alter and total areas. This was not, could not be, a chase. It was only two accelerations. We ran, he in his city, me close behind him, full of rage, in mine.

I shouted wordlessly. An old woman stared at me. I was not looking at him, I was still not looking at him, but fervently, legally, at Ul Qoma, its lights, graffiti, pedestrians, always at Ul Qoma. He was by iron rails curled in traditional Besź style. He was too far. He was by a total street, a street in Besźel only. He paused to look up in my direction as I gasped for breath.

For that sliver of time, too short for him to be accused of any crime, but certainly deliberate, he looked right at me. I knew him, I did not know from where. He looked at me at the threshold to that abroad-only geography and made a tiny triumphant smile. He stepped toward space where no one in Ul Qoma could go.

I raised the pistol and shot him.

I SHOT HIM IN THE CHEST. I saw his astonishment as he fell. Screaming from everywhere, at the shot, first, then his body and the blood, and almost instantly from all the people who had seen, at the terrible kind of transgression.

“Breach.”

“Breach.”

I thought it was the shocked declaration by those who had witnessed the crime. But unclear figures emerged where there had been no purposeful motion instants before, only the milling of no ones, the aimless and confused, and those suddenly appeared newcomers with faces so motionless I hardly recognised them as faces were saying the word. It was statement of both crime and identity.

“Breach.” A grim-featured something gripped me so that there was no way I could break out, had I wanted to. I glimpsed dark shapes draped over the body of the killer I had killed. A voice close up to my ear. “Breach.” A force shoving me effortlessly out of my place, fast fast past candles of Besźel and the neon of Ul Qoma, in directions that made sense in neither city.

“Breach,” and something touched me and I went under into black, out of waking and all awareness, to the sound of that word.