The City and The City

Chapter Twenty-Three

IT WAS NOT A SOUNDLESS DARK. It was not without intrusions. There were presences within it that asked me questions I could not answer, questions I was aware of as urgencies at which I failed. Those voices again and again said to me, Breach . What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena where I was quarry.

I REMEMBERED THAT LATER. In the moment I woke it was without a sense of time having passed. I closed my eyes in the crosshatched streets of the Old Towns; I opened them again and gasped for breath and looked into a room.

It was grey, without adornment. It was a small room. I was in a bed, no, on it. I lay on top of the sheets in clothes I did not recognise. I sat up.

Grey floor in scuffed rubber, a window admitting light at me, tall grey walls, stained in places and cracked. A desk and two chairs. Like a shabby office. A dark glass half-globe in the ceiling. There was no sound at all.

I was blinking, standing, nowhere near as groggy as I felt I should have been. The door was locked. The window was too high for me to see through. I jumped up, which did send a little spin through my head, but I saw only sky. The clothes I wore were clean and terribly nondescript. They fit me well enough. I remembered what had been with me in the dark, then, and my heart and my breath began to speed.

The soundlessness was enervating. I gripped the lower rim of the window and pulled myself up, my arms trembling. With nothing on which to brace my feet I could not stay in the position long. Roofs spread out below me. The slates, satellite dishes, flat concrete, ajut girders and antennae, the onion domes, corkscrew towers, gasrooms, the backs of what might be gargoyles. I could not tell where I was, nor what might be listening beyond the glass, guarding me from outside.

“Sit.”

I dropped hard at the voice. I struggled to my feet and turned.

Someone stood in the doorway. Light behind him, he was a cutout of darkness, a lack. When he stepped forward he was a man fifteen or twenty years my senior. Tough and squat, in clothes as vague as my own. There were others behind him: a woman my age, another man a little older. Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.

“Sit.” The older man pointed to a chair. “Come out of the corner.”

It was true. I was flattened into the corner. I realised it. I slowed my lungs and stood straighter. I took my hands away from the walls. I stood like a proper person.

After a long time I said, “How embarrassing.” Then, “Excuse me.” I sat where the man indicated. When I could control my voice I said, “I’m Tyador Borlú. And you?”

He sat and looked at me, his head to one side, abstract and curious like a bird.

“Breach,” he said.

“BREACH,” I SAID. I took a shaky breath. “Yes, Breach.”

Finally he said, “What were you expecting? What are you expecting?”

Was that too much? Another time I might have been able to tell. I was looking around nervily as if to catch sight of something almost invisible in the corners. He pointed his right hand at me fork-fingered, index and middle digits one at each of my eyes, then at his own: Look at me . I obeyed.

The man glanced at me from under his brows. “The situation,” he said. I realised we were both speaking Besź. He did not sound quite Besź, nor Ul Qoman, but was certainly not European or North American. His accent was flat.

“You breached, Tyador Borlú. Violently. You killed a man by it.” He watched me again. “You shot from Ul Qoma right into Besźel. So you are in the Breach.” He folded his hands together. I watched how his thin bones moved under his skin: just like mine. “His name was Yorjavic. The man you killed. Do you remember him?”

“You knew him from before.”

“How do you know?”

“You told us. It’s up to us how you go under, how long you stay there, what you see and say while you’re there, when you come out again. If you come out. Where did you know him from?”

I shook my head but—“The True Citizens,” I said suddenly. “He was there when I questioned them.” Who had called Gosz the lawyer. One of the tough, cocky nationalist men.

“He was a soldier,” the man said. “Six years in the BAF. A sniper.”

No surprise. It was an amazing shot. “Yolanda!” I looked up. “Jesus, Dhatt. What happened?”

“Senior Detective Dhatt will never fully move his right arm again, but he’s recovering. Yolanda Rodriguez is dead.” He watched me. “What hit Dhatt was intended for her. It was the second shot that went through her head.”

“God damn.” For seconds I could only look down. “Do her family know?”

“They know.”

“Was anyone else hit?”

“No. Tyador Borlú, you breached.”

“He killed her. You don’t know what else he’s—”

The man sat back. I was already nodding an apology, a hopelessness, when he said, “Yorjavic didn’t breach, Borlú. He shot over the border, in Copula Hall. He never breached. Lawyers might have an argument: was the crime committed in Besźel where he pulled the trigger, or Ul Qoma where the bullets hit? Or both?” He held out his hands in an elegant who cares? “He never breached. You did. So you are here, now, in the Breach.”

WHEN THEY LEFT, food came. Bread, meat, fruit, cheese, water. When I had eaten I pushed and pulled at the door, but there was no way I could move it. I fingertipped its paint, but it was only splitting paint or its messages were in a more arcane code than I could decrypt.

Yorjavic was not the first man I had shot, nor even the first I had killed, but I had not killed many. I had never before shot someone not raising a gun at me. I waited for shakes. My heart was slamming but it was with where I was, not guilt.

I was alone a long time. I walked the room every way, watched the globe-hidden camera. I pulled myself up to stare out of the window at the roofs again. When the door opened again, it was twilight looking down. The same trio entered.

“Yorjavic,” the older man said, in Besź again. “He did breach in one way. When you shot him you made him. Victims of breach always breach. He interacted hard with Ul Qoma. So we know about him. He had instructions from somewhere. Not from the True Citizens. Here’s how it is,” he said. “You breached, so you’re ours.”

“What happens now?”

“Whatever we want. Breach, and you belong to us.”

They could disappear me without difficulty. There were only rumours about what that would mean. No one ever heard even stories about those who had been taken by Breach and—what?—served their time. Such people must be impressively secretive, or never released.

“Because you may not see the justice of what we do doesn’t mean it’s unjust, Borlú. Think of this, if you want, as your trial.

“Tell us what you did and why, and we might see ways to perform actions. We have to fix a breach. There are investigations to be carried out: we can talk to those who haven’t breached, if it’s relevant and we prove it. Understand? There are less and more severe sanctions. We have your record. You’re police.”

What was he saying? Does that make us colleagues? I did not speak.

“Why did you do this? Tell us. Tell us about Yolanda Rodriguez, and tell us about Mahalia Geary.”

I said nothing for a long time but had no plan. “You know? What do you know?”

“Borlú.”

“What’s out there?” I pointed at the door. They had left it a little open.

“You know where you are,” he said. “What’s out there you’ll see. Under what conditions depends on what you say and do now. Tell us what got you here. This fool’s conspiracy that’s recurred, for the first time in a long time. Borlú, tell us about Orciny.”

THE SEPIA ILLUMINATION from the corridor was all they let light me, in a wedge, a slice of inadequate glow that kept my interrogator in shade. It took hours to tell them the case. I did not dissemble because they must already know everything.

“Why did you breach?” the man said.

“I hadn’t meant to. I wanted to see where the shooter went.”

“That was breach then. He was in Besźel.”

“Yes, but you know. You know that happens all the time. When he smiled, the look he had, I just… I was thinking about Mahalia and Yolanda …” I paced closer to the door.

“How did he know you’d be there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a nat, and a crazy one, but he’s obviously got contacts.”

“Where is Orciny supposed to be in this?”

We looked at each other. “I’ve told you everything I know,” I said. I held my face in my hands, looked over my fingertips. It looked as if the man and woman in the doorway weren’t paying attention. I ran hard at them, I thought without any warning. One—I do not know which—hooked me in midair and sent me across the room into the wall and down. Someone hit me, the woman it must be, because my head was tugged up and the man stood leaning still in the doorway. The older man sat at the table waiting.

The woman straddled my back and held me in some neck-lock. “Borlú, you are in Breach. This room is where your trial is taking place,” the older man said. “This can be where it’s finished. You’re beyond law now; this is where decision lives, and we are it. Once more. Tell us how this case, these people, these murders, connects to this story of Orciny.”

After many seconds he said to the woman, “What are you doing?”

“He’s not choking,” she said.

I was, so far as her hold would allow, laughing.

“This isn’t about me,” I said at last, when I was able. “My god. You’re investigating Orciny.”

“There is no such place as Orciny,” the man said.

“So everyone tells me. And yet things keep happening, people keep disappearing or dying, and there’s that word again and again, Orciny.” The woman got off me. I sat on the floor and shook my head at it all.

“You know why she never came to you?” I said. “Yolanda? She thought you were Orciny. If you said How could there be a place between the city and the city? she’d say Do you believe in the Breach? Where’s that? But she was wrong, wasn’t she? You’re not Orciny.”

“There is no Orciny.”

“So why are you asking all this? What have I been running from for days? I just saw Orciny or something a lot like it shoot my partner. You know I’ve breached: what do you care about the rest of it? Why aren’t you just punishing me?”

“As we say—”

“What, this is mercy? Justice? Please.

“If there’s something else between Besźel and Ul Qoma, where does that leave you? You’re hunting. Because it’s suddenly back. You don’t know where Orciny is, or what’s going on. You’re …” Hell with it . “You’re afraid.”

***

THE YOUNGER MAN AND WOMAN left and returned with an old film projector, trailing a lead into the corridor. They fiddled with it and it hummed, and made the wall a screen. It projected scenes from an interrogation. I scooted back to see better, still sitting on the floor.

The subject was Bowden. A snap of static and he was speaking in Illitan, and I saw that his interrogators were militsya .

“… don’t know what happened. Yes, yes I was hiding because someone was coming after me. Someone was trying to kill me. And when I heard Borlú and Dhatt were getting out, I didn’t know if I could trust them but I thought maybe they could get me out too.”

“… have a gun?” The voice of the interrogator was muffled.

“Because someone was trying to kill me, is why. Yes, I had a gun. You can get one on half the street corners in East Ul Qoma, as well you know. I’ve lived here for years, you know.”

Something .

“No.”

“Why not?” That was audible.

“Because there is no such thing as Orciny,” Bowden said.

Something . “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think, or what Mahalia thought, or what Yolanda said, or what Dhatt’s been insinuating, and no I have no idea who called me. But there’s no such place.”

A big loud crack of distressed image-sound, and there was Aikam. He was just weeping and weeping. Questions came, and he ignored them to weep.

The picture changed again and Dhatt was in Aikam’s place. He was not in uniform and his arm was in a sling.

“I fucking do not know,” he shouted. “Why the fuck are you asking me? Go get Borlú, because he seems to have a damn sight more of an idea what the fuck is going on than I do. Orciny? No I fucking don’t, because I’m not a child, but here’s the thing, even though it’s goddamn obvious Orciny’s a pile of shit, something is still going on, people are still getting hold of information they should not be able to, and other people are still being shot in the head by forces unknown. Fucking kids. That is why I agreed to help Borlú, illegal be fucked, so if you’re going to take my badge go the fuck ahead. And be my guest—disbelieve in Orciny all you want, I fucking do. But keep your head down in case that nonexistent fucking city shoots you in the face. Where is Tyador? What’ve you done?”

The picture went still on the wall. The interrogators looked at me in the light of Dhatt’s oversized monochrome snarl.

“So,” the older man said. He nodded at the wall. “You heard Bowden. What’s happening. What do you know about Orciny?”

THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see. The Breach has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.

This trail that led and led again to Orciny suggested systemic transgression, secret para-rules, a parasite city where there should be nothing but nothing, nothing but Breach. If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let that go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist? , put it like this, “So, are we at war?”

I brought our collaboration to their attention. I, daring, bargained. “I’ll help you …” I kept saying, with a drawn-out pause, an ellipsis implying if . I wanted the killers of Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez and they could tell that, but I was not too noble to bargain. That there was room to barter, a way, a small chance that I might get out of Breach again, was intoxicating.

“YOU ALMOST CAME for me once before,” I said. They had been watching, when I came grosstopically close to my house. “So are we partners?” I said.

“You’re a breacher. But it’ll go better if you help us.” “You really think Orciny killed them?” the other man said. Would they finish with me when there was even a possibility that Orciny was here, emerging, and still unfound? Its population walking the streets, unseen by the populations of Besźel and Ul Qoma, each thinking they were in the other. Hiding like books in a library.

“What is it?” the woman said, seeing my face.

“I’ve told you what I know, and it’s not much. It’s Mahalia who really knew what was happening, and she’s dead. But she left something behind. She told a friend. She told Yolanda that she’d realised the truth when she was going through her notes. We never found anything like that. But I know how she worked. I know where they are.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

WE LEFT THE BUILDING—the station, call it—in the morning, me in the company of the older man, Breach, and I realised I did not know what city we were in.

I had stayed up much of the night watching films of interrogations, from Ul Qoma and from Besźel. A Besź border guard and an Ul Qoman, passersby from both cities who knew nothing. “People started screaming …” Motorists over whom bullets had gone.

“Corwi,” I said, when her face appeared on the wall.

“So where is he?” A quirk of recording made her voice far away. She was angry and controlling herself. “What the fuck has boss-man got himself into? Yes, he wanted me to help him get someone through.” That was all they established, repeatedly, her Besź questioners. They threatened her job. She was as contemptuous of that as Dhatt, though more careful how she phrased it. She knew nothing.

Breach showed me brief shots of someone questioning Biszaya and Sariska. Biszaya cried. “I’m not impressed with this,” I said. “This is just cruel.”

The most interesting films were those of Yorjavic’s comrades among the extreme nationalists of Besźel. I recognised some who had been with Yorjavic. They stared sulky at their questioners, the policzai . A few refused to speak except in the company of their lawyers. There was hard questioning, an officer leaning across the table and punching a man in the face.

“Fuck’s sake,” the bleeding man shouted. “We’re on the same fucking side, you fuck. You’re Besź, you’re not fucking Ul Qoman and you’re not fucking Breach …”

With arrogance, neutrality, resentment or, often, compliance and collaboration, the nationalists denied any knowledge of Yorjavic’s action. “I’ve never fucking heard of this foreign woman; he never mentioned her. She’s a student?” one said. “We do what’s right for Besźel, you know? And you don’t have to know why. But …” The man we watched agonised with his hands, made shapes to try to explain himself without recrimination.

“We’re fucking soldiers. Like you. For Besźel. So if you hear that something has to be done, if you get instructions, like someone has to be warned, reds or unifs or traitors or UQ or the fucking Breach-lickers are gathering or whatever, something has to be done, okay. But you know why. You don’t ask, but you can see it’s got to be done, most of the time. But I don’t know why this Rodriguez girl … I don’t believe he did and if he did I don’t…” He looked angry. “I don’t know why.”

“Of course they have contacts in the deep state,” my Breach interlocutor said. “But with something as hard to parse as this, you can see the possibility, that Yorjavic maybe wasn’t a True Citizen. Or not only, but a representative of a more hidden organisation.”

“A more hidden place maybe,” I said. “I thought you watched everything.”

“No one breached.” He put papers in front of me. “Those are the findings of the Besźel policzai who searched Yorjavic’s apartment. Nothing linking him to anything like Orciny. Tomorrow we’re leaving early.”

“How did you get all this?” I said as he and his companions stood. He looked at me with a motionless but withering face as he left.

HE RETURNED AFTER A SHORT NIGHT, alone this time. I was ready for him.

I waved the papers. “Presuming my colleagues did a good job, there’s nothing. A few payments come in time to time, but not that much—could be anything. He passed the exam a few years back, could cross—not so unusual, although with his politics …” I shrugged. “Subscriptions, bookshelves, associates, army record, criminal record, hangouts, and all that mark him out as a run-of-the-mill violent nat.”

“Breach has watched him. Like all dissidents. There’s been no sign of unusual connections.”

“Orciny, you mean.”

“No sign.”

He ushered me finally out of the room. The corridor had the same scabbing paint, a worn colourless carpet, a succession of doors. I heard the steps of others, and as we turned into a stairwell a woman passed us, with a moment’s acknowledgement to my companion. Then a man passed, and then we were in a hallway with several other people. What they wore would be legal in either Besźel or in Ul Qoma.

I heard conversation in both languages and a third thing, a mongrel or antique that combined them. I heard typing. I never considered rushing or attacking my companion and trying to escape. I admit that. I was very observed.

On the walls of an office we passed were corkboards thick with memos, shelves of folders. A woman tore paper from a printer. A telephone rang.

“Come on,” the man said. “You said you know where the truth is.”

There were double doors, doors to an outside. We stepped through, and that, when the light ate me up, was when I realised I did not know which city we were in.

AFTER PANIC AT THE CROSSHATCH, I realised we must be in Ul Qoma: that was where our destination was. I followed my escort down the street.

I was breathing deep. It was morning, noisy, overcast but without rain, boisterous. Cold: the air made me gasp. I was pleasantly disoriented by all the people, by the motion of coated Ul Qomans, the growl of cars moving slowly on this mostly pedestrian street, the shouts of hawkers, the sellers of clothes and books and food. I unsaw all else. There was the thrum of cables above us as one of the Ul Qoman inflates butted against the wind.

“I don’t need to tell you not to run,” the man said. “I don’t need to tell you not to shout. You know I can stop you. And you know I’m not alone in watching you. You’re in Breach. Call me Ashil.”

“You know my name.”

“While you’re with me you’re Tye.”

Tye, like Ashil, was not traditional Besź, nor Ul Qoman, could just plausibly be either. Ashil walked me across a courtyard, below facades of figures and bells, video screens with stock information. I did not know where we were.

“You’re hungry,” Ashil said.

“I can wait.” He steered me to a side street, another crosshatched side street where Ul Qoman stalls by a supermarket offered software and knickknacks. He took my arm and guided me, and I hesitated because there was no food in sight except, and I pulled against him a moment, there were dumpling stations and bread stalls, but they were in Besźel.

I tried to unsee them but there could be no uncertainty: that source of the smell I had been unsmelling was our destination. “Walk,” he said, and he walked me through the membrane between cities; I lifted my foot in Ul Qoma, put it down again in Besźel, where breakfast was.

Behind us was an Ul Qoman woman with raspberry punk hair selling the unlocking of mobile phones. She glanced in surprise then consternation; then I saw her quickly unsee us as Ashil ordered food in Besźel.

Ashil paid with Besźmarques. He put the paper plate in my hand, walked me back across the road into the supermarket. It was in Ul Qoma. He bought a carton of orange juice with dinar, gave it to me.

I held the food and the drink. He walked me down the middle of the crosshatched road.

My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up.

Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besźel; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home.

“Where are you?” Ashil said. He spoke so only I could hear.

“Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?”

“… Neither. I’m in Breach.”

“You’re with me here.” We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. “In Breach. No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. Don’t creep. You’re not in neither: you’re in both.”

He tapped my chest. “Breathe.”

HE TOOK US BY METRO IN UL Qoma, where I sat still as if the remnants of Besźel clung to me like cobwebs and would frighten fellow passengers, out and onto a tram in Besźel, and it felt good, as if I were back home, misleadingly. We went by foot through either city. The feeling of Besźel familiarity was replaced by some larger strangeness. We stopped by the glass-and-steel frontage of UQ University Library.

“What would you do if I ran?” I said. He said nothing.

Ashil took out a nondescript leather holder and showed the guard the sigil of Breach. The man stared at it for seconds, then jumped to his feet.

“My God,” he said. He was an immigrant, from Turkey judging from his Illitan, but he had been here long enough to understand what he saw. “I, you, what can I …?” Ashil pointed him back to his chair and walked on.

The library was newer than its Besź counterpart. “It will have no classmark,” Ashil said.

“That’s the point,” I said. We referred to the map and its legend. The histories of Besźel and Ul Qoma, carefully separately listed but shelved close to each other, were on the fourth floor. The students in their carrels looked at Ashil as he passed. There was in him an authority unlike that of parents or tutors.

Many of the titles we stood before were not translated, were in their original English or French. The Secrets of the Precursor Age; The Literal and the Littoral: Besźel, Ul Qoma and Maritime Semiotics . We scanned for minutes—there were many shelves. What I was looking for, and there at last on the second-to-top shelf three rows back from the main walkway found, pushing past a confused young undergraduate as if I were the one with authority here, was a book marked by lack. It was unadorned at the bottom of its spine with a printed category mark.

“Here.” The same edition I had had. That psychedelic doors-of-perception-style illustration, a long-haired man walking a street made patchwork from two different (and spurious) architectural styles, from the shadows of which watched eyes. I opened it in front of Ashil. Between the City and the City . Markedly worn.

“If all this is true,” I said quietly, “then we’re being watched. You and me, now.” I pointed to one of the pairs of eyes on the cover.

I riffled the pages. Ink flickers, most pages annotated in tiny scrawl: red, black, and blue. Mahalia had written in an extra-fine nib, and her notes were like tangled hair, years of annotations of the occult thesis. I glanced behind me, and Ashil did the same. No one was there.

NO , we read in her hand. NOT AT ALL , and REALLY? CF HARRIS ET AL , and LUNACY!! MAD!!! and so on. Ashil took it from me.

“She understood Orciny better than anyone,” I said. “That’s where she kept the truth.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“THEY’VE BOTH BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT what’s happened to you,” Ashil said. “Corwi and Dhatt.”

“What did you tell them?”

A look: We don’t speak to them at all . That evening he brought me colour copies, bound, of every page, and inside and outside covers, of Mahalia’s Ul Qoma copy ofBetween . This was her notebook. With effort and attention, I could follow a particular line of reasoning from each tangled page, could track each of her readings in turn.

That evening Ashil walked with me in that both-cities. The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel –continental and middle-history brickwork of Besźel, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Besźel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing. Being in both cities had gone from being in Besźel and Ul Qoma to being in a third place, that nowhere-both, that Breach.

Everyone, in both cities, seemed tense. We had returned through the two crosshatched cities not to the offices where I had woken—they were in Rusai Bey in Ul Qoma or TushasProspekta in Besźel, I had back-figured-out—but to another, a middling-smart apartment with a concierge’s office, not too far from that larger HQ. On the top floor the rooms extended across what must be two or three buildings, and in the warrens of that, Breach came and went. There were anonymous bedrooms, kitchens, offices, outdated-looking computers, phones, locked cabinets. Terse men and women.

As the two cities had grown together, places, spaces had opened between them, or failed to be claimed, or been those controversial dissensi . Breach lived there.

“What if you get burgled? Doesn’t that happen?”

“Time to time.”

“Then …”

“Then they’re in Breach, and they’re ours.”

The women and men stayed busy, carrying out conversations that fluctuated through Besź, Illitan, and the third form. The featureless bedroom into which Ashil put me had bars on its windows, another camera somewhere, for sure. There was an en-suite toilet. He did not leave. Another two or three Breach joined us.

“Look at this,” I said. “You’re evidence this could all be real.” The interstitiality which made Orciny so absurd to most citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma was not only possible but inevitable. Why would Breach disbelieve life could thrive in that little gap? The anxiety was now rather something like We have never seen them , a very different concern.

“It can’t be,” Ashil said.

“Ask your superiors. Ask the powers. I don’t know.” What other, higher or lower, powers were there in Breach? “You know we’re watched. Or they were—Mahalia, Yolanda, Bowden—by something somewhere.”

“There’s nothing linking the shooter to anything.” That was one of the others, speaking Illitan.

“Alright.” I shrugged. I spoke in Besź. “So he was just a random, very lucky right-winger. If you say so. Or maybe you think it’s insiles, doing this?” I said. None of them denied the existence of the fabled scavenging interstitial refugees. “They used Mahalia, and when they were done they killed her. They killed Yolanda, in a way exactly so you couldn’t chase them. As if of all the things in Besźel, Ul Qoma, or anywhere, what they’re most scared of is Breach.”

“But”—a woman pointed at me—“look what you did.”

“Breached?” I had given them a way in to whatever this war was. “Yes. What did Mahalia know? She worked something out about what they had planned. They killed her.” The overlaid glimmer of nighttime Ul Qoma and Besźel lit me through the window. I made my ominous point to a growing audience of Breach, their faces like owls’.

They locked me in overnight. I read Mahalia’s annotations. I could discern phases of annotation, though not in any pagewise chronology—all the notes were layered, a palimpsest of evolving interpretation. I did archaeology.

Early on, in the lowest layers of marks, her handwriting was more careful, the notes longer and neater, with more references to other writers and to her own essays. Her idiolect and unorthodox abbreviations made it hard to be sure. I started page on page trying to read, transcribe, those early thoughts. Mostly what I discerned was her anger.

I felt a something-stretched-out over the night streets. I wanted to talk to those I had known in Besźel or Ul Qoma, but I could only watch.

Whatever unseen bosses, if any, waited in the Breach’s bowels, it was Ashil who came for me again the next morning, found me going over and over those notes. He led me the length of a corridor to an office. I imagined running—no one seemed to be watching me. They would stop me, though. And if they did not, where would I go, hunted in-betweener refugee?

There were twelve or so Breach in the cramped room, sitting, standing, precarious on the edge of desks, low muttering in two or three languages. A discussion midway. Why was I shown this?

“… Gosharian says it hasn’t, he just called …”

“What about SusurStrász? Wasn’t there some talk …?”

“Yes, but everyone’s accounted for.”

This was a crisis meeting. Mutterings into phones, quick checks against lists. Ashil said to me, “Things are moving.” More people came and joined the talk.

“What now?” The question, spoken by a young woman wearing the headscarf of a married Besźel woman from a traditional family, was addressed to me, prisoner, condemned, consultant. I recognised her from the previous night. Silence went through the room, leaving itself behind, with all the people watching me. “Tell me again about when Mahalia was taken,” she said.

“Are you trying to close in on Orciny?” I said. I had nothing to suggest to her, though something felt close to my reach.

They continued their quick back-and-forth, using shorthands and slang I did not know, but I could tell they were debating each other, and I tried to understand over what—some strategy, some question of direction. Periodically everyone in the room murmured something final-sounding and paused, and raised or did not raise a hand, and glanced around to count how many did which.

“We have to understand what got us here,” Ashil said. “What would you do to find out what Mahalia knew?” His comrades were growing agitated, interrupting each other. I recalled Jaris and Yolanda talking about Mahalia’s anger at the end. I sat up hard.

“What is it?” Ashil said.

“We need to go to the dig.” I said. He regarded me.

“Ready with Tye,” Ashil said. “Coming with me.” Three-quarters of the room raised their hands briefly.

“Said my piece about him,” said the headscarfed woman, who did not raise hers.

“Heard,” Ashil said. “But.” He pointed her eyes around the room. She had lost a vote.

I left with Ashil. It was there on the streets, that something fraught.

“You feel this?” I said. He even nodded. “I need … can I call Dhatt?” I said.

“No. He’s still on leave. And if you see him …”

“Then?”

“You’re in Breach. Easier for him if you leave him alone. You’ll see people you know. Don’t put them in positions. They need to know where you are.”

“Bowden …”

“He’s under surveillance by militsya . For his protection. No one in Besźel or Ul Qoma can find any link between Yorjavic and him. Whoever tried to kill him—”

“Are we still saying it’s not Orciny? There’s no Orciny?”

“—might try again. The leaders of True Citizens are with the policzai . But if Yorj and any other of their members were some secret cell, they don’t seem to know. They’re angry about it. You saw the film.”

“Where are we? Which way is the dig?”

HE TOOK US BY THAT AWESOME SUCCESSION of breaching transport, worming through the two cities, leaving a tunnel of Breach in the shape of our journey. I wondered where he carried what weapon. The guard at the gate of Bol Ye’an recognised me and smiled a smile that quickly faltered. He had perhaps heard I had disappeared.

“We’re not approaching the academics, we’re not questioning the students,” Ashil said. “You understand we’re here to investigate the background to and terms of your breach.” I was police on my own crime.

“It would be easier if we could talk to Nancy.”

“None of the academics, none of the students. Begin. You know who I am?” This to the guard.

We went to Buidze, who stood with his back to the wall of his office, stared at us, at Ashil in great and straightforward fear, at me in fear that was more bewildered: Can I speak of what we spoke of before? I saw him think, Who is he? Ashil manoeuvred me with him to the back of the room, found a shaft of shadow.

“I haven’t breached,” Buidze kept whispering.

“Do you invite investigation?” Ashil said.

“Your job’s to stop smuggling,” I said. Buidze nodded. What was I? Neither he nor I knew. “How’s that going?”

“Holy Light… Please. The only way any of these kids could do it would be to slip a memento straight in their pockets from the ground, so it never gets catalogued, and they can’t because everyone’s searched when they leave the site. No one could sell this stuff anyway. Like I said, the kids go for walks around the site, and they might be breaching when they stand still. What can you do? Can’t prove it. Doesn’t mean they’re thieves.”

“She told Yolanda you could be a thief without knowing it,” I said to Ashil. “At the end. What have you lost?” I asked Buidze.

“Nothing!”

He took us to the artefact warehouse, stumbling eager to help us. On the way two students I somewhat recognised saw us, stopped still—something about Ashil’s gait, that I was mimicking—backed away. There were the cabinets where the finds were, in which the latest dusted-off things born from the ground were stored. Lockers full of the impossible variety of Precursor Age debris, a miraculous and obstinately opaque rubble of bottles, orreries, axe heads, parchment scraps.

“Goes in, whoever’s in charge that night makes sure everyone puts whatever’s been found away, locks up, leaves the key. Doesn’t get out the grounds without we search them. They don’t even give us shit about that; they know that’s how it is.”

I motioned Buidze to open the cabinet. I looked into the collection, each piece nestled in its little house, its segment of polystyrene, in the drawer. The topmost drawers had not yet been filled. Those below were full. Some of the fragile pieces were wrapped in lint-free cloth, swaddled from view. I opened the drawers one below the other, examining the ranked findings. Ashil came to stand beside me and looked down into the last as if it were a teacup, as if the artefacts were leaves with which one could divine.

“Who has the keys each night?” Ashil said.

“I, I, it depends.” Buidze’s fear of us was wearing, but I did not believe he would lie. “Whoever. It’s not important. They all do it sometimes. Whoever’s working late. There’s a schedule, but they’re always ignoring it…”

“After they’ve given the keys back to security, they leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Straightaway?”

“Yeah. Usually. They might go to their office a bit, walk in the grounds, but they don’t usually stick around.”

“The grounds?”

“It’s a park. It’s … nice.” He shrugged helpless. “There’s no way out, though; its alter a few metres in, they have to come back through here. They don’t leave without being searched.”

“When did Mahalia last lock up?”

“Loads of times. I don’t know …”

“Last time.”

“… The night she disappeared,” he said at last.

“Give me a list of who did it when.”

“I can’t! They keep one, but like I say half the time they just do each other favours …”

I opened the lowest drawers. Between the tiny crude figures, the intricate Precursor lingams and ancient pipettes, there were deli-cats wrapped. I touched the shapes gently.

“Those are old,” Buidze said, watching me. “They were dug up ages ago.”

“I see,” I said, reading the labels. They had been disinterred in the early days of the dig. I turned at the sound of Professor Nancy entering. She stopped hard, stared at Ashil, at me. She opened her mouth. She had lived in Ul Qoma many years, was trained to see its minutiae. She recognised what she saw. “Professor,” I said. She nodded. She stared at Buidze and he at her. She nodded and backed out.

“When Mahalia was in charge of the keys, she went for walks after locking up, didn’t she?” I said. Buidze shrugged, bewildered. “She offered to lock up when it wasn’t her turn, too. More than once.” All the small artefacts were in their cloth-lined beds. I did not rummage, but I felt around at the rear of the drawer without what I imagined was the preferred care.

He shifted, but Buidze would not challenge me. At the rear of the third shelf up, of things brought to light still more than a year ago, one of the cloth-wrapped items gave under my finger in a way that made me pause. “You have to wear gloves,” Buidze said.

I unwrapped it and within was newspaper, and in the twist of paper was a piece of wood still flecked with paint and marked by where screws had held it. Not ancient nor carved: the offcut of a door, an absolute piece of nothing.

Buidze stared. I held it up. “What dynasty’s this?” I said.

“Don’t,” said Ashil to me. He followed me out. Buidze came behind us.

“I’m Mahalia,” I said. “I’ve just locked up. I’ve just volunteered to do it, though it’s someone else’s turn. Now a little walk.”

I marched us out into the open air, past the carefully layered hole where students glanced at us in surprise, on into the wasteland, where there was that rubble of history, and beyond it out of the gate that would open to a university ID, that opened for us because of where and what we were, that we propped open, into the park. Not much of a park this close to the excavation, but scrub and a few trees crossed by paths. There were Ul Qomans visible, but none too close. There was no unbroken Ul Qoman space between the dig and the bulk of the Ul Qoman park. Besźel intruded.

We saw other figures at the edges of the clearing: Besź sitting on the rocks or by the crosshatched pond. The park was only slightly in Besźel, a few metres at the edge of vegetation, a rill of crossover in paths and bushes, and a little stretch of totality cutting the two Ul Qoman sections off from each other. Maps made clear to walkers where they might go. It was here in the crosshatch that the students might stand, scandalously, touching distance from a foreign power, a pornography of separation.

“Breach watches fringes like this,” Ashil said to me. “There are cameras. We’d see anyone emerge into Besźel who didn’t come in by it.”

Buidze was hanging back. Ashil spoke so he could not hear. Buidze was trying not to watch us. I paced.

“Orciny …” I said. No way in or out of here in Ul Qoma but back through Bol Ye’an dig. “Dissensi? Bullshit. That’s not how she delivered. This is what she was doing. Have you seen The Great Escape?” I walked to the edge of the crosshatched zone, where Ul Qoma ended for metres. Of course I was in Breach now, could wander on into Besźel if I wanted, but I stopped as if I were only in Ul Qoma. I walked to the edge of the space it shared with Besźel, where Besźel became briefly total and separated it from the rest of Ul Qoma. I made sure Ashil was watching me. I mimed placing the piece of wood in my pocket, stuffing it in fact down past my belt, down the inside of my trousers. “Hole in her pockets.”

I walked a few steps in the crosshatch, dropping the thankfully unsplintering wood down my leg. I stood still when it hit the ground. I stood as if contemplating the skyline and moved my feet gently, letting it onto the earth, where I trod it in and scuffed plant muck and dirt onto it. When I walked away, without looking back, the wood was a nothing shape, invisible if you did not know it was there.

“When she goes, someone in Besźel—or someone who looks like they are, so there’s nothing for you to notice—comes by,” I said. “Stands and looks at the sky. Kicks their heels. Kicks something up. Sits on a rock for a moment, touches the ground, puts something in their pocket.

“Mahalia wouldn’t take the recent stuff because it was just put away, much too noticeable. But while she’s locking up, because it only takes a second, she opens the old drawers.”

“What does she take?”

“Maybe it’s random. Maybe she’s following instructions. Bol Ye’an searches them every night, so why would they think anyone’s stealing? She never had anything on her. It was sitting here in the crosshatch.”

“Where someone came to take it. Through Besźel.”

I turned and looked slowly in all directions.

“Do you feel watched?” Ashil said.

“Do you?”

A very long quiet. “I don’t know.”

“Orciny.” I turned again. “I’m tired of this.” I stood. “Really.” I turned. “This is wearing.”

“What are you thinking?” Ashil said.

A noise of a dog in the woods made us look up. The dog was in Besźel. I was ready to unhear, but of course I did not have to.

It was a lab, a friendly dark animal that sniffed out of the undergrowth and trotted to us. Ashil held out his hand for it. Its owner emerged, smiled, started, looked away in confusion and called his dog to heel. It went to him, looking back at us. He was trying to unsee, but the man could not forebear looking at us, wondering probably why we would risk playing with an animal in such an unstable urban location. When Ashil met his eye the man looked away. He must have been able to tell where and so what we were.

ACCORDING TO THE CATALOGUE the wood offcut was a replacement for a brass tube containing gears encrusted into position by centuries. Three other pieces were missing, from those early digs, all from within wrappings, all replaced by twists of paper, stones, the leg of a doll. They were supposed to be the remains of a preserved lobster’s claw containing some proto-clockwork; an eroded mechanism like some tiny sextant; a hand ful of nails and screws.

We searched the ground in that fringe zone. We found potholes, cold scuffs, and the near-wintry remains of flowers, but no shallow-buried priceless treasures of the Precursor Age. They had been picked up, long ago. No one could sell them.

“That makes it breach then,” I said. “Wherever these Orciny-ites came from or went, they can’t have picked the stuff up in Ul Qoma, so it was in Besźel. Well, maybe to them they never left Orciny. But to most people they were put down in Ul Qoma and picked up in Besźel, so it’s breach.”

ASHIL CALLED THROUGH TO SOMEONE on our way back, and when we arrived at the quarters Breach were bickering and voting in their fast loose way on issues alien to me. They entered the room in the middle of the strange debate, made cell phone calls, interrupted at speed. The atmosphere was fraught, in that distinct expressionless Breach way.

There were reports from the two cities, with muttered additions from those holding telephone receivers, delivering messages from other Breach. “Everyone on guard,” Ashil kept saying. “This is starting.”

They were afraid of head shots and breach mugging-murders. The number of small breaches was increasing. Breach were where they could be, but there were many they missed. Someone said graffiti were appearing on walls in Ul Qoma in styles that suggested Besźel artists.

“It hasn’t been this bad, since, well …” Ashil said. He whispered explanations to me as the discussion continued. “That’s Raina. She’s unremitting on this.” “Samun thinks even mentioning Orciny’s to give ground.” “Byon doesn’t.”

“We need to be ready,” the speaker said. “We stumbled on something.”

“She did, Mahalia. Not us,” Ashil said.

“Alright, she did. Who knows when whatever’s going to happen will? We’re in the dark and we know war’s come, but can’t see where to aim.”

“I can’t deal with this,” I said to Ashil quietly.

He escorted me back to the room. When I realised he was locking me in I shouted in remonstration. “You need to remember why you’re here,” he said through the door.

I sat on the bed and tried to read Mahalia’s notes a new way. I did not try to follow the thread of a particular pen, the tenor of a particular period of her studies, to reconstruct a lineage of thought. Instead I read all the annotations on each page, years of opinions set together. I had been trying to be an archaeologist of her marginalia, separating the striae. Now I read each page out of time, no chronology, arguing with itself.

On the inside of the back cover among layers of irate theory I read in big letters written over earlier smaller ones BUT CF SHERMAN . A line from that to an argument on the facing page: ROSEN’S COUNTER . These names were familiar from my earlier investigations. I turned a couple of pages backwards. In the same pen and late hurried hand I read, abutting an older claim: NO—ROSEN, VIJNIC .

Assertion overlaid with critique, more and more exclamationmarked clauses in the book. NO , a pointer connecting the word not to the original printed text but to an annotation, to her own older, enthusiastic annotations. An argument with herself. WHY A TEST? WHO?

“Hey,” I shouted. I did not know where the camera was. “Hey, Ashil. Get Ashil.” I did not stop making noise until he arrived. “I need to get online.”

He took me to a computer room, to what looked like a 486 or something similarly antique, with an operating system I did not recognise, some jury-rigged imitation of Windows, but the processor and connection were very fast. We were two of several in the office. Ashil stood behind me as I typed. He watched my researches, as well, certainly, as ensuring I did not email anyone.

“Go wherever you need,” Ashil told me, and he was right. Pay sites guarded by password protection needed only an empty return to roll over.

“What kind of connection is this?” I did not expect or get any answer. I searched Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic . On the forums I had recently visited, the three writers were subjected to ferocious contumely. “Look.”

I got the names of their key works, checked listings on Amazon for a quick-and-dirty appreciation of their theses. It took minutes. I sat back.

“Look. Look . Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic are all absolute hate figures on these fractured-city boards,” I said. “Why? Because they wrote books claiming Bowden was full of shit. That the whole argument’s bollocks.”

“So does he.”

“That’s not the point, Ashil. Look.” Pages and pages in Between the City and the City . I pointed to Mahalia’s early remarks to herself, then her later ones. “The point is that she’s citing them. At the end. Her last notes.” Turning more pages, showing him.

“She changed her mind,” he said finally. We looked at each other a long time.

“All that stuff about parasites and being wrong and finding out she was a thief,” I said. “God damn. She wasn’t killed because she was, some, one of the bloody elect few who knew the awesome secret that the third city existed. She wasn’t killed because she realised Orciny was lying to her, was using her. That’s not the lies she was talking about. Mahalia was killed because she stopped believing in Orciny at all.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

THOUGH I BEGGED and grew angry, Ashil and his colleagues would not let me call Corwi or Dhatt.

“Why the hell not?” I said. “They could do this. Alright then, do whatever the hell it is you do, find out. Yorjavic’s still our best connection, him or some of his partners. We know he’s involved. Try to get the exact dates Mahalia locked up, and if possible we need to know where Yorjavic was every one of those evenings. We want to work out if he picked up. The policzai watch the TC; they might know. Maybe the leaders’ll even tell, if they’re that disgruntled. And check out where Syedr was too—someone with access to stuff from Copula Hall’s involved.”

“We’re not going to be able to get every day Mahalia did the keys. You heard Buidze: half of them weren’t planned.”

“Let me call Corwi and Dhatt; they’d know how to sift them.”

“You.” Ashil spoke hard. “Are in Breach here. Don’t forget. You don’t get to demand things. Everything we’re doing is an investigation into your breach. Do you understand?”

They would not give me a computer in the cell. I watched the sun rising, the air beyond my window growing light. I had not realised how late it was. I fell asleep at last, and woke with Ashil back in the room with me. He drank something—it was the first time I had seen him eat or drink anything. I rubbed my eyes. It was morning enough to be day. Ashil did not seem an iota tired. He tossed papers onto my lap, indicated a coffee and a pill by my bed.

“Wasn’t as hard as that,” he said. “They sign off when they put the keys back, so we got all the dates. You’ve got the original schedules there, that changed, and the signings sheets themselves. But there are loads. We can’t put a bead on Yorjavic let alone Syedr or any other nat for this many nights. This stretches over more than two years.”

“Hold on.” I held the two lists against each other. “Forget when she was scheduled in advance—she was obeying orders, don’t forget, from her mysterious contact. When she wasn’t down to take the keys but did it anyway, that’s what we should be looking at. No one loves the job—you have to stay late—so those are the days she suddenly turns around and says to whoever’s turn it is ‘I’ll do it.’ These are the days she got a message. She got told to deliver. So let’s see who was doing what then . Those are the dates. And there aren’t nearly so many.”

Ashil nodded—counted the evenings in question. “Four, five. Three pieces are missing.”

“So a couple of those days nothing happened. Maybe they were legitimate changes, no instructions at all. They’re still the ones to chase.” Ashil nodded again. “That’s when we’re going to see the nats moving.”

“How did they organise this? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wait here.”

“This would be easier if you’d just let me come with you. Why are you shy now?”

“Wait.”

More waiting, and though I did not shout at the unseen camera, I glared at all the walls in turn, so it would see me.

“No.” Ashil’s voice came from a loudspeaker I could not see. “Yorjavic was under policzai observation at least two of those nights. He didn’t go near the park.”

“What about Syedr?” I addressed the emptiness.

“No. Accounted for on four of the nights. Could be another of the nat bigwigs, but we’ve seen what Besźel has on them all, and there’s nothing red-flagging.”

“Shit. What do you mean Syedr’s ‘accounted for’?”

“We know where he was, and he was nowhere near. He was in meetings those evenings and the days after them.”

“Meetings with whom?”

“He’s on the Chamber of Commerce. They had trade events those days.” Silence. When I did not speak a long time he said, “What? What?”

“We’ve been thinking wrong.” I pincered my fingers in the air, trying to catch something. “Just because it was Yorjavic who shot, and because we know Mahalia pissed off the nats. But doesn’t it seem like a hell of a coincidence that those trade things would happen on the very nights that Mahalia volunteers to lock up?” Another long quiet. I remembered the delay before I could see the Oversight Committee, for one of those events. “There are receptions afterwards, for the guests, aren’t there?”

“Guests.”

“The companies. The ones Besźel’s schmoozing—that’s what those things are for, when they bicker for contracts. Ashil, find out who was there on those dates.”

“At the Chamber of Commerce …”

“Check the guest lists for the parties afterwards. Check press releases a few days afterwards and you’ll see who got what contract. Come on.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said minutes later in silence, when I still stalked back and forth in my room without him. “Why the fuck don’t you just let me out? I’m policzai , god damn it, this is what I do. You’re good at being bogeymen but you’re shit at this.”

“You’re a breacher,” Ashil said, pushing open the door. “It’s you we’re investigating.”

“Right. Did you wait outside till I said something you could make an entrance to?”

“This is the list.” I took the paper.

Companies—Canadian, French, Italian and British, a couple of smaller American ones—next to the various dates. Five names were ringed in red.

“The rest were there on one or other fair, but the ones in red, those ones are the ones that were there on every one of the nights Mahalia did the keys,” Ashil said.

“ReddiTek’s software. Burnley—what do they do?”

“Consultancy.”

“CorIntech are electronics components. What’s this written next to them?” Ashil looked.

“The man heading their delegation was Gorse, from their parent company, Sear and Core. Came to meet up with the local head of CorIntech, guy runs the division in Besźel. They both went to the parties with Nyisemu and Buric and the rest of the chamber.”

“Shit,” I said. “We … Which time was he here?”

“All of them.”

“All? The CEO of the parent company? Sear and Core? Shit …”

“Tell me,” he said, eventually.

“The nats couldn’t pull this off. Wait.” I thought. “We know there’s an insider in Copula Hall but… what the hell could Syedr do for these guys? Corwi’s right—he’s a clown. And what would be his angle?” I shook my head. “Ashil, how does this work? You can just siphon this information, right, from either city. Can you … What’s your status internationally? Breach, I mean.

“We need to go for the company.”

I’M AN AVATAR OF BREACH, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.

No, they can’t sell it, I said, that’s not what this is about. We had all heard rumours about Precursor artefacts. Their questionable physics. Their properties. They want to see what’s true. They’ve got Mahalia to supply them. And to do it they’ve got her thinking she’s in touch with Orciny. But she realised.

Corwi had said something once about the visitors’ tours of Besźel those companies’ representatives endured. Their chauffeurs might take them anywhere total or crosshatched, any pretty park to stretch their legs.

Sear and Core had been doing R&D.

Ashil stared at me. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Who’d put money into superstitious nonsense …?”

“How sure are you? That there’s nothing to the stories? And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said. “Sear and Core pay, what, a few thousand dollars to set this up? They don’t have to believe a word of it: it’s worth that kind of money just on the off chance that any of the stories turn out to have anything at all to them. It’s worth that for curiosity.”

Ashil took out his cell and began to make calls. It was the early part of the night. “We need a conclave,” he said. “Big stake. Yes, make it.” “Conclave. At the set.” He said more or less the same many times.

“You can do anything,” I said.

“Yes. Yes… We need a show. Breach in strength.”

“So you believe me? Ashil, you do?”

“How would they do it? How would outsiders like that get word to her?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what we have to find out. Paid off a couple of locals—we know where that money came to Yorj from.” They had been small amounts.

“They could not possibly, not possibly create Orciny for her.”

“They wouldn’t have the CEO of their parent here for these piddling little glad-handers, let alone every time Mahalia locks up. Come on. Besźel’s a basket case, and they’ve already thrown us a bone by being here. There’s got to be a connection …”

“Oh, we’ll investigate. But these aren’t citizens nor citizens, Tye. They don’t have the …” A silence.

“The fear,” I said. That Breach freeze, that obedience reflex shared in Ul Qoma and Besźel.

“They don’t have a certain response to us, so if we do anything we need to show weight—we need many of us, a presence. And if there’s truth to this, it’s the shutdown of a major business in Besźel. It’ll be a crisis for the city. A catastrophe. And no one will like that.

“It isn’t unknown for a city or a city to argue with Breach, Tye. It’s happened. There’ve been wars with Breach.” He waited while that image hung. “That doesn’t help anyone. So we need to have presence.” Breach needed to intimidate. I understood.

“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”

But the ingathering of Breach avatars from wherever they had posted themselves, the attempt with that diffuse authority, a corralling of chaos, was not efficient. Breach answered their phones, agreed, disagreed, said they would come or said they would not, said they would hear Ashil out. This was to judge from his side of the conversations.

“How many do you need?” I said. “What are you waiting for?”

“We need a presence , I said.”

“You feel what’s going on out there?” I said. “You’ve felt it in the air.”

There had been more than two hours of this. I was wired by something in the food and drink I had been given, pacing and complaining of my incarceration. More calls began to come in to Ashil. More than the messages he had left—word had gone viral. In the corridor was commotion, quick steps, voices, shouting and responding to shouts.

“What is it?”

Ashil was listening on his phone, not to the sound outside. “No,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing. He said it again several times until he closed the phone and looked at me. For the first time that set face looked like an evasion. He did not know how to say what he had to say.

“What’s happened?” The shouting outside was greater, and now there was noise from the street too.

“A crash.”

“A car crash?”

“Buses. Two buses.”

“They breached?”

He nodded. “They’re in Besźel. They jackknifed on Finn Square.” A big crosshatched piazza. “Skidded into a wall in Ul Qoma.” I did not say anything. Any accident leading to breach obviously necessitated Breach, a few avatars gusting into view, sealing off the scene, sorting out parameters, ushering out the blameless, holding any breachers, handing authority back as quickly as possible to the police in the two cities. There was nothing in the fact of a traffic breach to lead to the noise I heard outside, so there must be more.

“They were buses taking refugees to camps. They’re out, and they haven’t been trained; they’re breaching everywhere, wandering between the cities without any idea what they’re doing.”

I could imagine the panic of bystanders and passersby, let alone those innocent motorists of Besźel and Ul Qoma, having swerved desperately out of the path of the careening vehicles, of necessity in and out of the topolganger city, trying hard to regain control and pull their vehicles back to where they dwelt. Faced then with scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders. Approaching people they saw, not attuned to the nuances of nationality—clothes, colours, hair, posture—oscillating back and forth between countries.

“We’ve called a closure,” Ashil said. “Complete lockdown. Clearing both the streets. Breach is out in force, everywhere, until this is finished.”

“What?”

Martial Breach. It had not happened in my lifetime. No entrance to either city, no passage between them, ultrahard enforcement of all Breach rules. The police of each city on mopping-up standby under Breach injunctions, adjuncts for the duration to the shutdown of borders. That was the sound I could hear, those mechanised voices over the growing roar of sirens: loudspeakers announcing the closure in both languages. Get off the streets .

“For a bus crash …?”

“It was deliberate,” Ashil said. “It was ambushed. By unificationists. It’s happened. They’re all over. There’s reports of breaches everywhere.” He was regaining himself.

“Unifs in which city …?” I said, and my question petered out as I guessed the answer.

“Both. They’re working in concert. We don’t even know if it was Besź unifs who stopped the buses.” Of course they worked together; that we knew. But that those little bands of eager utopians could do this? Could untether this breakdown, could make this happen? “They’re everywhere in both cities. This is their insurrection. They’re trying to merge us.”

ASHIL WAS HESITATING. That kept me talking, only that, that he was there in the room minutes more than he needed to be. He was checking the contents of his pockets, preparing himself into soldierly alertness. All Breach were called out. He was expected. The sirens continued, the voices continued.

“Ashil, for Christ’s sake listen to me. Listen to me. You think this is coincidence? Come on . Ashil, don’t open that door. You think we get to this, you think we figure this out, get this far and all of a sudden there’s a fucking uprising? Someone’s doing this, Ashil. To get you and all the Breach out and away from them.

“How did you find out about which companies were here when? The nights Mahalia delivered.”

He was motionless. “We’re Breach,” he said eventually. “We can do whatever we need …”

“Damn it, Ashil. I’m not some breacher for you to scare; I need to know. How do you investigate?”

At last: “Taps. Informants.” Glance up at the window, at a welling-up of the crisis sound. He waited by the door for more from me.

“Agents or systems in offices in Besźel and Ul Qoma tell you what you need to know, right? So someone somewhere was going through databases trying to find out who was where, when, in the Besź Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s been red-flagged, Ashil. You sent someone looking, and them pulling up files has been seen . What better evidence do you need that we’re onto something? You’ve seen the unifs. They’re nothing. Besźel and Ul Qoma, doesn’t make a difference, they’re a tiny bunch of dewy-eyed punks. There’s more agents than agitators; someone’s given an order. Someone’s engineered this because they’ve realised we’re onto them.

“Wait,” I said. “The lockdown … It’s not just Copula Hall, right? All borders to everywhere are closed, and no flights in or out, right?”

“BesźAir and Illitania are grounded. The airports aren’t taking incoming traffic.”

“What about private flights?”

“… The instruction’s the same, but they’re not under our authority like the national carriers, so it’s a bit more—”

“That’s what this is. You can’t lock them down, not in time. Someone’s getting out. We have to get to the Sear and Core building.”

“That’s where—”

“That’s where what’s happening’s happening. This …” I pointed at the window. We heard the shattering of glass, the shouts, the frenetics of vehicles in panicked rush, the fight sounds. “This is a decoy.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

IN THE STREETS we went through the last throes, the nerve twitches of a little revolution that had died before it was born, and had not known it. Those dying flails remained dangerous, though, and we were in a soldierly way. No curfew could contain this panic.

People were running, in both cities, along the street in front of us while the barks of public announcements in Besź and Illitan warned them this was a Breach lockdown. Windows broke. Some figures I saw run did so with more giddiness than terror. Not unifs, too small and too aimless: teenagers throwing stones, in their most transgressive act ever, little hurled breaches breaking glass in the city they did not live or stand in. An Ul Qoman fire crew sped in its bleating engine the length of the road, towards where the night sky glowed. A Besź wagon followed seconds behind it: they were still trying to maintain their distinctions, one fighting the fire in one part of the conjoined facade, the other in the other.

Those kids had better get out of the street fast, because Breach were everywhere. Unseen by most still out that night, maintaining their covert methods. Running I saw other Breach moving in what could pass as the urban panic of citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma but was a somewhat different motion, a more purposeful, predatory motion like Ashil’s and mine. I could see them because of recent practice, as they could see me.

We saw a unif gang. It was shocking to me even then after days of interstitial life to see them running together, from both chapters, in clothes which despite their transnational punk-and-rocker jackets and patches clearly marked them, to those attuned to urban semiosis, as from, whatever their desire, either Besźel or Ul Qoma. Now they were grouped as one, dragging a grassroots breach with them as they went from wall to wall spraying slogans in a rather artful combine of Besź and Illitan, words that, perfectly legible if somewhat filigreed and seriffed, read TOGETHER! UNITY! in both languages.

Ashil reached. He carried a weapon he had prepared before we left. I had not seen it closely.

“We don’t have time …” I started to say, but from the shadows around that insurgence a small group of figures did not so much emerge as come into focus. Breach. “How do you move like that?” I said. The avatars were outnumbered, but they moved without fear into that group, where with sudden not dramatic but very brutal locks and throws they incapacitated three of the gang. Some of the others rallied, and the Breach raised weapons. I did not hear anything but two unifs dropped.

“Jesus,” I said, but we were moving.

With a key and a quick expert twist Ashil opened a random parked car, selected by unclear criteria. “Get in.” He glanced back. “Cessation’s best done out of sight; they’ll move them. This is an emergency. Both cities are Breach now.”

“Jesus …”

“Only where it can’t be avoided. Only to secure the cities and the Breach.”

“What about the refugees?”

“There are other possibilities.” He started the engine.

There were few cars on the streets. The trouble always seemed to be around corners from us. Small groups of Breach were moving. Several times someone, Breach, appeared in the chaos and seemed about to stop us; but each time Ashil stared or slapped his sigil or drummed in some secret fingercode, and his status as avatar was noted and we were away.

I had begged for more Breach to come with us. “They won’t,” he had said. “They won’t believe. I should be with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone’s dealing with this. I don’t have time to win the argument.”

He said this, and it had been abruptly clear how few Breach there were. How thin a line. The crude democracy of their methodology, their decentralised self-ordering, meant that Ashil could do this mission the importance of which I had convinced him, but the crisis meant we were alone.

Ashil took us across lanes of highway, through straining borders, avoiding little anarchies. Militsya and policzai were on corners. Sometimes Breach would emerge from the night with that uncanny motion they perfected and order the local police to do something—to take some unif or body away, to guard something—then disappear again. Twice I saw them escorting terrified north African men and women from somewhere to somewhere, refugees made the levers of this breakdown.

“It isn’t possible, this, we’ve …” Ashil interrupted himself, touched his earpiece as reports came in.

There would be camps full of unificationists after this. We were in a moment of outright foregone conclusion, but the unifs still fought to mobilise populations deeply averse to their mission. Perhaps the memory of this joint action would buoy up whichever of them remained after that night. It must be an intoxication to step through the borders and greet their foreign comrades across what they made suddenly one street, to make their own country even if just for seconds at night in front of a scrawled slogan and a broken window. They must know by now that the populaces were not coming with them, but they did not disappear back to their respective cities. How could they go back now? Honour, despair, or bravery kept them coming.

“It isn’t possible,” Ashil said. “There is no way the head of Sear and Core, some outsider , could have constructed this … We’ve …” He listened, set his face. “We’ve lost avatars.” What a war, this now bloody war between those dedicated to bringing the cities together and the force charged with keeping them apart.

UNITY had been half written across the face of the Ungir Hall which was also the Sul Kibai Palace, so now in dripping paint the building said something nonsense. What passed as Besźel’s business districts were nowhere near the Ul Qoman equivalent. The headquarters of Sear and Core were on the banks of the Colinin, one of the few successes in the attempts to revivify Besźel’s dying dockside. We passed the dark water.

We both looked up at percussion in the otherwise empty locked-down sky. A helicopter the only thing in the air, backlit by its own powerful lights as it left us below.

“It’s them,” I said. “We’re too late.” But the copter was coming in from the west, towards the riverbank. It was not an exit; it was a pickup. “Come on.”

Even in such a distracting night Ashil’s driving prowess cowed me. He veered across the dark bridge, took a one-way total street in Besźel the wrong way, startling pedestrians trying to get out of the night, through a crosshatch plaza then a total Ul Qoma street. I was leaning to watch the helicopter descend into the roofscape by the river, half a mile ahead of us.

“It’s down,” I said. “Move.”

There was the reconfigured warehouse, the inflatable gasrooms of Ul Qoman buildings to either side of it. No one was in the square, but there were lights on throughout the Sear and Core building, despite the hour, and there were guards in the entrance. They came towards us aggressively when we entered. Marbled and fluorescently lit, the S&C logo in stainless steel and placed as if it were art on the walls, magazines and corporate reports made to look like magazines on tables by sofas.

“Get the fuck out,” a man said. Besź ex-military. He put his hand to his holster and led his men towards us. He came up short a moment later: he saw how Ashil moved.

“Stand down,” Ashil said, glowering to intimidate. “The whole of Besźel’s in Breach tonight.” He did not have to show his sigil. The men fell back. “Unlock the lift now, give me the keys to reach the helipad, and stand down. No one else comes in.”

If the security had been foreign, had come from Sear and Core’s home country, or been drafted in from its European or North American operations, they might not have obeyed. But this was Besźel and the security was Besź, and they did as Ashil said. In the elevator, he drew out his weapon. A big pistol of unfamiliar design. Its barrel encased, muzzled in some dramatic silencer. He worked the key the security had given us, to the corporate levels, all the way up.

THE DOOR OPENED onto gusts of hard cold air amid surrounds of vaulting roofs and antennae. The tethers of the Ul Qoman gasrooms, a few streets off the mirrored fronts of Ul Qoman businesses, the spires of temples in both cities, and there in the darkness and the wind ahead of us behind a thicket of safety rails the helipad. The dark vehicle waiting, its rotor turning very slowly, almost without noise. Gathered before it a group of men.

We could not hear much except the bass of the engine, the siren-infested putting down of unification riots all around us. The men by the helicopter did not hear us as we approached. We stayed close to cover. Ashil led me towards the aircraft, the gang who did not yet see us. There were four of them. Two were large and shaven-headed. They looked like ultranats: True Citizens on secret commission. They stood around a suited man I did not know and someone I could not see from the way he stood, in deep and animated conversation.

I heard nothing, but one of the men saw us. There was a commotion and they turned. From his cockpit the pilot of the helicopter swivelled the police-strength light he held. Just before it framed us the gathered men moved and I could see the last man, staring straight at me.

It was Mikhel Buric. The Social Democrat, the opposition, the other man on the Chamber of Commerce.

Blinded by the floodlight I felt Ashil grab me and pull me behind a thick iron ventilator pipe. There was a moment of dragged-out quiet. I waited for a shot but no one shot.

“Buric,” I said to Ashil. “Buric . I knew there was no way Syedr could do this.”

Buric was the contact man, the organiser. Who knew Mahalia’s predilections, who had seen her on her first visit to Besźel, when she angered everyone at the conference with her undergraduate dissidence. Buric the operator. He knew her work and what she wanted, that abhistory, the comforts of paranoia, a cosseting by the man behind the curtain. In the Chamber of Commerce as he was, he was in a position to provide it. To find an outlet for what she stole at his behest, for the invented benefit of Orciny.

“It was all geared stuff that got stolen,” I said. “Sear and Core are investigating the artefacts. This is a science experiment.”

It was his informers—he like all Besź politicians had them—who had told Buric that investigations had occurred into Sear and Core, that we were chasing down the truth. Perhaps he thought we had understood more than we had, would be shocked at how little of this we could have predicted. It would not take so much for a man in his position to order the government provocateurs in the poor foolish unificationists to begin their work, to forestall Breach so he and his collaborators could get away.

“They’re armed?” Ashil glanced out and nodded.

“Mikhel Buric?” I shouted. “Buric? What are True Citizens doing with a liberal sellout like you? You getting good soldiers like Yorj killed? Bumping off students you think are getting too close to your bullshit?”

“Piss off, Borlú,” he said. He did not sound angry. “We’re all patriots. They know my record.” A noise joined the noise of the night. The helicopter’s engine, speeding up.

Ashil looked at me and stepped out into full view.

“Mikhel Buric,” he said, in his frightening voice. He kept his gun unwavering and walked behind it, as if it led him, towards the helicopter. “You’re answerable to Breach. Come with me.” I followed him. He glanced at the man beside Buric.

“Ian Croft, regional head of CorIntech,” Buric said to Ashil. He folded his arms. “A guest here. Address your remarks to me. And fuck yourself.” The True Citizens had their own pistols up. Buric moved towards the helicopter.

“Stay where you are,” Ashil said. “You will step back,” he shouted at the True Citizens. “I am Breach.”

“So what?” Buric said. “I’ve spent years running this place. I’ve kept the unifs in line, I’ve been getting business for Besźel , I’ve been taking their damned gewgaws out from under Ul Qoman noses , and what do you do? You gutless Breach? You protect Ul Qoma.”

Ashil actually gaped a moment at that.

“He’s playing to them,” I whispered. “To the True Citizens.”

“Unifs have one thing right,” Buric said. “There’s only one city, and if it weren’t for the superstition and cowardice of the populace, kept in place by you goddamnedBreach , we’d all know there was only one city. And that city is called Besźel . And you’re telling patriots to obey you? I warned them, I warned my comrades you might turn up, despite it being made clear you have no business here.”

“That’s why you leaked the footage of the van,” I said. “To keep Breach out of it, send the mess to the militsya instead.”

“Breach’s priorities are not Besźel’s,” Buric said. “Fuck the Breach.” He said it carefully. “Here we recognise only one authority, you pissing little neither-nor, and that isBesźel.”

He indicated Croft to precede him into the helicopter. The True Citizens stared. They were not quite ready to fire on Ashil, to provoke Breach war—you could see a kind of blasphemy-drunkenness in their look at the intransigence they were already showing, disobeying Breach even this far—but they would not lower their guns either. If he shot they would shoot back, and there were two of them. High on their obedience to Buric they did not need to know anything about where their paymaster was going or why, only that he had charged them to cover his back while he did. They were fired with jingo bravery.

“I’m not Breach,” I said.

Buric turned to look at me. The True Citizens stared at me. I felt Ashil’s hesitation. He kept his weapon up.

“I’m not Breach.” I breathed deep. “I am Inspector Tyador Borlú. Besźel Extreme Crimes Squad. I’m not here for Breach, Buric. I represent the Besźel policzai , to enforce Besź law. Because you broke it.

“Smuggling’s not my department; take what you want. I’m not a political man—I don’t care if you mess with Ul Qoma. I’m here because you’re a murderer.

“Mahalia wasn’t Ul Qoman, nor an enemy of Besźel, and if she seemed to be, it was only because she believed the crap you told her, so you could sell what she supplied you, for this foreigner’s R and D. Doing it for Besźel, my arse: you’re just a fence for foreign bucks.”

The True Citizens looked uneasy.

“But she realised she’d been lied to. That she wasn’t righting antique wrongs or learning any hidden truth. That you’d made her a thief. You sent Yorjavic over to get rid of her. That makes it an Ul Qoman crime, so even with the links we will find between you and him, nothing I can do. But that’s not the end of it. When you heard Yolanda was hiding, you thought Mahalia’d told her something. Couldn’t risk her talking.

“You were smart to get Yorj to take her out from his side of the checkpoint, keep Breach off your backs. But that makes his shot, and the order you gave for it, Besź. And that makes you mine.

“Minister Mikhel Buric, by the authority vested in me by the government and courts of the Commonwealth of Besźel, you are under arrest for Conspiracy to Murder Yolanda Rodriguez. You are coming with me.”

SECOND AFTER SECOND of astonished silence. I stepped slowly forward, past Ashil, towards Mikhel Buric.

It would not last. The True Citizens mostly had not much more respect for we who they believed were the weak local police than for many other of the herdlike masses of Besźel. But those were ugly charges, in Besźel’s name, that did not sound like the politics for which they were signed up, or the reasons they might have been given for those killings, if they even knew about them. The two men looked at each other uncertainly.

Ashil moved. I breathed out. “Fuck damn,” Buric said. From his pocket he took his own small pistol and raised it and pointed it at me. I said, “Oh,” or something as I stumbled back. I heard a shot but it did not sound as I expected. Not explosive; it was a hard-breathed gust of breath, a rush. I remember thinking that and being surprised that I would notice such a thing as I died.

Buric leapt into instant backward scarecrow motion, his limbs crazy and a rush of colour on his chest. I had not been shot; he had been shot. He threw his little weapon away as if deliberately. It was the silenced blast of Ashil’s pistol I had heard. Buric fell, his chest all blood.

Now, there, that was the sound of shots. Two, quickly, a third. Ashil fell. The True Citizens had fired on him.

“Stop, stop,” I screamed. “Hold your fucking fire!” I scrabbled crabwise back to him. Ashil was sprawled across the concrete, bleeding. He was growling in pain.

“You two are under fucking arrest,” I shouted. The True Citizens stared at each other, at me, at the unmoving dead Buric. This escort job had become suddenly violent and utterly confusing. You could see them glimpse the scale of the web that snagged them. One muttered to the other and they backed away, jogged towards the lift shaft.

“Stay where you are,” I shouted, but they ignored me as I knelt by wheezing Ashil. Croft still stood motionless by the helicopter. “Don’t you goddamn move,” I said, but the True Citizens pulled open the door to the roof and disappeared back down into Besźel.

“I’m alright, I’m alright,” Ashil gasped. I patted him to find his injuries. Below his clothes he was wearing some kind of armour. It had stopped what would have been the killing bullet, but he had been also hit below his shoulder and was bleeding and in pain. “You,” he managed to shout to Sear and Core’s man. “Stay. You may be protected in Besźel but you’re not in Besźel if I say you’re not. You’re in Breach.”

Croft leaned into the cockpit and said something to the pilot, who nodded and sped up the rotor.

“Are you finished?” Croft said.

“Get out. That vehicle’s grounded.” Even through pain-gritted teeth and having dropped his pistol, Ashil made his demand.

“I’m neither Besź nor Ul Qoman,” Croft said. He spoke in English, though he clearly understood us. “I’m neither interested in nor scared of you. I’m leaving. ‘Breach.’” He shook his head. “Freak show. You think anyone beyond these odd little cities cares about you? They may bankroll you and do what you say, ask no questions, they may need to be scared of you, but no one else does.” He sat next to the pilot and strapped himself in. “Not that I think you could, but I strongly suggest you and your colleagues don’t try to stop this vehicle. ‘Grounded.’ What do you think would happen if you provoked my government? It’s funny enough the idea of either Besźel or Ul Qoma going to war against a real country. Let alone you, Breach.”

He closed the door. We did not try to get up for a while, Ashil and I. He lay there, me kneeling behind him, as the helicopter grew louder and the distended-looking thing eventually bobbed up as if dangled from string, pouring air down on us, ripping our clothes every way and buffeting Buric’s corpse. It tore away between the low towers of the two cities, in the airspace of Besźel and Ul Qoma, once again the only thing in the sky.

I watched it go. An invasion of Breach. Paratroopers landing in either city, storming the secret offices in their contested buildings. To attack Breach an invader would have to breach Besźel and Ul Qoma.

“Wounded avatar,” Ashil said into his radio. He gave our location. “Assist.”

“Coming,” the machine said.

He sat back against the wall. In the east the sky was beginning faintly to lighten. There were still noises of violence from below, but fewer and ebbing. There were more sirens, Besź and Ul Qoman, as the policzai and militsya reclaimed their own streets, as Breach withdrew where it could. There would be a day more of lockdown to clear last nests of unifs, to return to normalcy, to corral the lost refugees back to the camps, but we were past the worst of it. I watched the dawn-lit clouds begin. I checked Buric’s body, but he carried nothing on him.

ASHIL SAID SOMETHING. His voice was weak, and I had to have him repeat himself.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said. “That he could have done this.”

“Who?”

“Buric. Any of them.”

I leaned against a chimney and watched him. I watched the sun coming.

“No,” I said finally. “She was too smart. Young but…”

“… Yes. She worked it out in the end, but you wouldn’t think Buric could have taken her in to begin with.”

“And then the way it was done,” I said slowly. “If he had someone killed we wouldn’t find the body.” Buric was not competent enough at one end, too competent at the other, to make sense of this story. I sat still in the slowly growing light as we waited for help. “She was a specialist,” I said. “She knew all about the history. Buric was clever, but not like that.”

“What are you thinking, Tye?” There were sounds from one of the doors that jutted onto the roof. A slamming and it flew open, disgorging someone I vaguely recognised as Breach. She came towards us, speaking into her radio.

“How did they know where Yolanda would be?”

“Heard your plans,” he said. “Listening to your friend Corwi’s phone …” He offered the idea.

“Why did they shoot at Bowden?” I said. Ashil looked at me. “At Copula Hall. We thought it was Orciny, going for him, because he inadvertently knew the truth. But it wasn’t Orciny. It was …” I looked at dead Buric. “His orders. So why would he go for Bowden?”

Ashil nodded. He spoke slowly. “They thought Mahalia told Yolanda what she knew, but…”

“Ashil?” the approaching woman shouted, and Ashil nodded. He even stood, but sat down again, heavily.

“Ashil,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I just…” He closed his eyes. The woman came faster. He opened them suddenly and looked at me. “Bowden told you all along Orciny wasn’t true.”

“He did.”

“Move,” the woman said. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Come on Ashil,” she said. “You’re weak …”

“Yes I am.” He interrupted her himself. “But…” He coughed. He stared at me and I at him.

“We have to get him out,” I said. “We have to get Breach to …” But they were still engaged in the end of that night, and there was no time to convince anyone.

“A second,” he said to the woman. He took his sigil out of his pocket and gave it to me, along with a ring of keys. “I authorize it,” he said. She raised an eyebrow but did not argue. “I think my gun went over there. The rest of Breach is still …”

“Give me your phone. What’s its number? Now go. Get him out of here. Ashil, I’ll do it.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

THE BREACH WITH ASHIL did not ask me for help. She shooed me away.

I found his weapon. It was heavy, its silencer almost organic-looking, like something phlegmy coating the muzzle. I had to look for far too long before I could find the safety catch. I did not risk trying to release the clip to check it. I pocketed it and took the stairs.

As I descended I scrolled through the numbers in the phone’s contacts list: they were meaningless-seeming strings of letters. I hand-dialled the number I needed. On a hunch I did not prefix a country code, and I was right—the connection made. When I reached the foyer it was ringing. The security looked at me uncertainly, but I held out the Breach sigil and they backed away.

“What… who is this?”

“Dhatt, it’s me.”

“Holy Light, Borlú? What … where are you? Where’ve you been? What’s going on?”

“Dhatt, shut up and listen. I know it’s not morning yet, but I need you to wake up and I need you to help me. Listen.”

“Light, Borlú, you think I’m sleeping? We thought you were with Breach … Where are you? Do you know what’s going on?”

“I am with Breach. Listen. You’re not back at work, right?”

“Fuck no, I’m still fucked—”

“I need you to help me. Where’s Bowden? You lot took him in for questioning, right?”

“Bowden? Yeah, but we didn’t hold him. Why?”

“Where is he?”

“Holy Light, Borlú.” I could hear him sitting up, pulling himself together. “At his flat. Don’t panic; he’s watched.”

“Send them in. Hold him. Till I get there. Just do it, please. Send them now. Thanks. Call me when you have him.”

“Wait, wait. What number is this? It isn’t showing on my phone.”

I told him. In the square, I watched the lightening sky and the birds wheel over both cities. I walked back and forth, one of few but not the only person out at that hour. I watched the others who passed close, furtively. I watched them trying to retreat to their home city—Besźel, Ul Qoma, Besźel, whichever—out of the massive Breach that was at last ebbing around them.

“Borlú. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a detail on his apartment, right? For protection, after he got shot? Well, when stuff started going mad tonight it was all hands to the pump and they got pulled off onto some other job. I don’t know the ins and outs—no one was there for a little while. I sent them back—things are calming down a bit, the militsya and your lot are trying to sort out boundaries again—but it’s still fucking lunacy on the streets. Anyway I sent them back and they’ve just tried his door. He’s not there.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Tyad, what the fuck is going on?”

“I’m getting there. Can you make a … I don’t know it in Illitan. Put out an APB on him.” I said it in English, copying the films.

“Yeah, we call it ‘send the halo.’ I’ll do it. But fuck, Tyad, you seen what chaos it is tonight. You think anyone’s going to see him?”

“We have to try. He’s trying to get out.”

“Well no problem, he’s fucked then, all the borders are closed, so wherever he turns up he’ll just get stopped. Even if he got through to Besźel earlier, your lot aren’t so incompetent they’re going to let people out.”

“Okay but still, put a halo on him?”

“Send , not put. Alright. We’re not going to find him, though.”

There were more rescue vehicles on the roads, in both cities, racing to the sites of continued crisis, here and there civilian vehicles, ostentatiously obeying their own city’s traffic laws, negotiating around each other with unusual legal care, like the few pedestrians. They must have good and defensible reasons to be out. The assiduousness of their unseeing and seeing was marked. The crosshatching is resilient.

It was predawn cold. With his skeleton key but without Ashil’s aplomb I was breaking into an Ul Qoman car when Dhatt called back. His voice was very different. He was—there was no other way to hear it—in some kind of awe.

“I was wrong. We’ve found him.”

“What? Where?”

“Copula Hall. The only militsya who weren’t sent onto the streets were the border guards. They recognised his photos. Been there for hours, they told me, must’ve headed there as soon as it all kicked off. He was inside the hall earlier, with everyone else who got trapped when it locked down. But listen.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Just waiting.”

“Have they got him?”

“Tyad, listen. They can’t. There’s a problem.”

“What’s going on?”

“They … They don’t think he’s in Ul Qoma.”

“He crossed? We need to talk to Besźel border patrol then—”

“No, listen . They can’t tell where he is.”

“… What? What? What the hell’s he doing?”

“He’s just… He’s been standing there, just outside the entrance, in full view, and then when he saw them moving towards him he started walking … but the way he’s moving … the clothes he’s wearing … they can’t tell whether he’s in Ul Qoma or Besźel.”

“Just check if he passed through before it closed.”

“Tyad, it’s fucking chaos here. No one’s been keeping track of the paperwork or the computer or whatever, so we don’t know if he did or not.”

“You have to get them to—”

“Tyad, listen to me. It was all I could do to get that out of them. They’re fucking terrified that even seeing him and saying that’s breach, and they’re not fucking wrong because you know what? It might be. Tonight of all nights. Breach are all over the place; there was just a fucking closure , Tyad. The last thing anyone’s going to do is risk breaching. That’s the last information you’re going to get unless Bowden moves so they can tell he’s definitely in Ul Qoma.”

“Where is he now?”

“How can I know? They won’t risk watching him. All they’d say was that he started walking. Just walking, but so no one can tell where he is.”

“No one’s stopping him?”

“They don’t even know if they can see him. But he’s not breaching either. They just… can’t tell.” Pause. “Tyad?”

“Jesus Christ, of course. He’s been waiting for someone to notice him.”

I sped the car towards Copula Hall. It was several miles away. I swore.

“What? Tyad, what?”

“This is what he wants. You said it yourself, Dhatt; he’ll be turned back from the border by the guard of whichever city he’s in. Which is?”

There were seconds of silence. “Fuck me,” Dhatt said. In that uncertain state, no one would stop Bowden. No one could.

“Where are you? How close are you to Copula Hall?”

“I can be there in ten minutes, but—”

But he would not stop Bowden either. Agonised as Dhatt was, he would not risk Breach by seeing a man who might not be in his city. I wanted to tell him not to be concerned, I wanted to beg him, but could I tell him he was wrong? I did not know he would not be watched. Could I say he was safe?

“Would the militsya arrest him on your say-so if he was definitely in Ul Qoma?”

“Sure, but they won’t follow him if they can’t risk seeing him.”

“Then you go. Dhatt, please. Listen. Nothing’s stopping you just going for a walk, right? Just going out there to Copula Hall and going wherever you want, and if it happens that someone who happens to be always in your vicinity tips a hand and turns out to be in Ul Qoma, then you could arrest him, right?” No one had to admit a thing, even to themselves. So long as there was no interaction while Bowden was unclear, there would be plausible deniability. “Please, Dhatt.”

“Alright. But listen, if I’m going for a fucking walk and someone in my maybe-grosstopic proximity does not turn out for certain into Ul Qoma, then I can’t arrest him.”

“Hold on. You’re right.” I could not ask him to risk breaching. And Bowden might have crossed and be Besźel, in which case Dhatt was powerless. “Okay. Go for your walk. Let me know when you’re at Copula Hall. I have to make another call.”

I disconnected and dialled another number, also without an international code, though it was in another country. Despite the hour the phone was answered almost immediately, and the voice that answered was alert.

“Corwi,” I said.

“Boss? Jesus, boss , where are you? What’s happening? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“Corwi. I’ll tell you everything, but right now I can’t; right now I need you to move, and move fast, and not ask any questions and to just do exactly as I say. I need you to go to Copula Hall.”

I CHECKED MY WATCH and glanced at the sky, which seemed resistant to morning. In their respective cities Dhatt and Corwi were on their way to the border. It was Dhatt who called me first.

“I’m here, Borlú.”

“Can you see him? Have you found him? Where is he?” Silence. “Alright, Dhatt, listen.” He would not see what he was not sure was in Ul Qoma, but he would not have called me had there been no point to the contact. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the corner of Illya and Suhash.”

“Jesus, I wish I knew how to do conference calls on this thing. I’ve got call waiting figured, so stay on the damn phone.” I connected to Corwi. “Corwi? Listen.” I had to pull up by the kerb and compare the map of Ul Qoma in the car’s glove compartment with my knowledge of Besźel. Most of the Old Towns were crosshatched. “Corwi, I need you to go to ByulaStrász and … and WarszaStrász. You’ve seen the photos of Bowden, right?”

“Yeah …”

“I know, I know.” I drove. “If you’re not sure he’s in Besźel you won’t touch him. Like I said, I’m just asking you to go walking so that if anyone were to turn out to be in Besźel, you could arrest him. And tell me where you are. Okay? Careful.”

“Of what, boss?”

It was a point. Bowden would not likely attack either Dhatt or Corwi: do so and he would declare himself a criminal, in Besźel or Ul Qoma. Attack both and he would be in Breach, which, unbelievably, he was not yet. He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.

“Where are you, Dhatt?”

“Halfway up Teipei Street.” Teipei shared its space grosstopically with MirandiStrász in Besźel. I told Corwi where to go. “I won’t be long.” I was over the river now, and the number of vehicles on the street was increasing.

“Dhatt, where is he? Where are you, I mean?” He told me. Bowden had to stick to crosshatched streets. If he trod on a total area, he’d be committing to that city, and its police could take him. In the centres the most ancient streets were too narrow and twisted for the car to save me any time and I deserted it, running through the cobbles and overhanging eaves of Besźel Old Town by the intricate mosaics and vaults of Ul Qoma Old Town. “Move!” I shouted at the few people in my way. I held out the Breach sigil, the phone in my other hand.

“I’m at the end of MirandiStrász, boss.” Corwi’s voice had changed. She would not admit she could see Bowden—she did not, nor quite did she unsee him, she was between the two—but she was no longer simply following my directions. She was close to him. Perhaps he could see her.

One more time I examined Ashil’s gun, but it made little sense to me. I could not work it. I returned it to my pocket, went to where Corwi waited in Besźel, Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and to where Bowden walked no one was quite sure where.

I SAW DHATT FIRST. He was in his full uniform, his arm in a sling, his phone to his ear. I tapped him on the shoulder as I passed him. He started massively, saw it was me, and gasped. He closed his phone slowly and indicated a direction with his eyes, for the briefest moment. He stared at me with an expression I was not sure I recognised.

The glance was not necessary. Though a small number of people were braving the overlapping crosshatched street, Bowden was instantly visible. That gait. Strange, impossible. Not properly describ-able, but to anyone used to the physical vernaculars of Besźel and Ul Qoma, it was rootless and untethered, purposeful and without a country. I saw him from behind. He did not drift but strode with pathological neutrality away from the cities’ centres, ultimately to borders and the mountains and out to the rest of the continent.

In front of him a few curious locals were seeing him then with clear uncertainty half looking away, unsure where, in fact, to look. I pointed at them, each in turn, and made ago motion, and they went. Perhaps some watched from their windows, but that was deniable. I approached Bowden under the looming of Besźel and the intricate coiled gutters of Ul Qoma.

A few metres from him, Corwi watched me. She put her phone away and drew her weapon, but still would not look directly at Bowden, just in case he was not in Besźel. Perhaps we were watched by Breach, somewhere. Bowden had not yet transgressed for their attention: they could not touch him.

I held out my hand as I walked, and I did not slow down, but Corwi gripped it and we met each other’s gaze a moment. Looking back I saw her and Dhatt, metres apart in different cities, staring at me. It was really dawn at last.

“BOWDEN.”

He turned. His face was set. Tense. He held something the shape of which I could not make out.

“Inspector Borlú. Fancy meeting you … here?” He tried to grin but it did not go well.

“Where’s here?” I said. He shrugged. “It’s really impressive, what you’re doing,” I said. He shrugged again, with a mannerism neither Besź nor Ul Qoman. It would take him a day or more of walking, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are small countries. He could do it, walk out. How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours. He aimed with whatever it was he held.

“If you shoot me Breach’ll be on you.”

“If they’re watching,” he said. “I think probably you’re the only one here. There are centuries of borders to shore up, after tonight. And even if they are, it’s a moot question. What kind of crime would it be? Where are you?”

“You tried to cut her face off.” That ragged under-chin slit. “Did you … No, it was hers, it was her knife. You couldn’t though. So you slathered on her makeup instead.” He blinked, said nothing. “As if that would disguise her. What is that?” He showed the thing to me, a moment, before gripping and aiming it again. It was some verdigrised metal object, age-gnarled and ugly. It was clicking. It was patched with new metal bands.

“It broke. When I.” It did not sound as if he hesitated: his words simply stopped.

“… Jesus, that’s what you hit her with. When you realised she knew it was lies.” Grabbed and flailed, a moment’s rage. He could admit to anything now. So long as he remained in his superposition, whose law would take him? I saw that the thing’s handle, that he held, that pointed towards him, ended in an ugly sharp spike. “You grab it, smack her, she goes down.” I made stab motions. “Heat of the moment,” I said. “Right? Right?

“So did you not know how to fire it, then? Are they true, then?” I said. “All those ‘strange physics’ rumours? Is that one of the things Sear and Core were after? Sending one of their ranking visitors sightseeing, scuffing their heels in the park for? Just another tourist?”

“I wouldn’t call it a gun,” he said. “But… well, want to see what it can do?” He wagged it.

“Not tempted to sell it on yourself?” He looked offended. “How do you know what it does?”

“I’m an archaeologist and an historian,” he said. “And I’m incredibly good at it. And now I’m going.”

“Walking out of the city?” He inclined his head. “Which city?” He wagged his weapon no .

“I didn’t mean to, you know,” he said. “She was…” That time his words dried up. He swallowed.

“She must have been angry. To realise how you’d been lying to her.”

“I always told the truth. You heard me, Inspector. I told you many times. There’s no such place as Orciny.”

“Did you flatter her? Did you tell her she was the only one you could admit the truth to?”

“Borlú, I can kill you where you stand and, do you realise, no one will even know where we are. If you were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’renot . The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where you were either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever. People would have to step over you. Because no one breached. Neither Besźel nor Ul Qoma could risk clearing you up. You’d lie there stinking up both cities until you were just a stain. I am going, Borlú. You think Besźel will come for you if I shoot you? Ul Qoma?” Corwi and Dhatt must have heard him, even if they made to unhear. Bowden looked only at me and did not move.

“My, well, Breach, my partner, was right,” I said. “Even if Buric could have thought this up, he didn’t have the expertise or the patience to put it together so it would have fooled Mahalia. She was smart. That took someone who knew the archives and the secrets and the Orciny rumours not just a bit but totally. Completely. You told the truth, like you say: there’s no such place as Orciny. You said it again and again. That was the point, wasn’t it?

“It wasn’t Buric’s idea, was it? After that conference where she made such a nuisance of herself? It certainly wasn’t Sear and Core—they would have hired someone to smuggle more efficiently, a little nickel-and-dime operation like that, they just went along with an opportunity that was presented. Sure you needed Buric’s resources to make it work, and he wasn’t going to turn down a chance to steal from Ul Qoma, pimp Besźel out—how much investment was tied to this?—and make a mint for himself. But it was your idea, and it was never about the money.

“It was because you missed Orciny. A way to have it both ways. Yes, sure you were wrong about Orciny, but you could make it so you were right, too.”

Choice artefacts had been excavated, the details of which only the archaeologists could know—or those who had left them there, as poor Yolanda had thought. Supposed-Orciny sent their supposed-agent sudden instructions, not to be delayed, no time to think or rethink—only, quickly, liberate, hand over.

“You told Mahalia she was the only one you’d tell the truth. That when you turned your back on your book, that was just you playing politics? Or did you tell her it was cowardice? That would be pretty winning. I bet you did that.” I approached him. His expression shifted. “‘It’s my shame, Mahalia, the pressure was too much. You’re braver than me, keep on; you’re so close, you’ll find it…’ Your shit messed up your whole career, and you can’t have that time back. So the next best thing, make it have been true all along. I’m sure the money was nice—can’t tell me they didn’t pay—and Buric had his reasons and Sear and Core had theirs, and the nats’ll do for anyone with a way with words and a buck. But it was Orciny that was the point for you, right?

“But Mahalia figured out that it was nonsense, Doctor Bowden.”

How much more perfect that unhistory would be, second time around, when he could construct the evidence not only from fragments in archives, not from the cross-reference of misunderstood documents, but could add to those planted sources, suggest partisan texts, even create messages—to himself, too, for her benefit and later for ours, that all the while he could dismiss as the nothings they were—from the nonplace itself. But still she worked out the truth.

“That must have been unpleasant for you,” I said.

His eyes were unhitched from wherever we were. “It got… That’s why.” She told him her deliveries—so all secret payments—would end. That was not why his rage.

“Did she think you were fooled too? Or did she realise you were behind it?” It was amazing that such a detail should almost be epiphenomenal. “I think she didn’t know. It wasn’t her character to taunt you. I think she thought she was protecting you. I think she arranged to meet you, to protect you. To tell you that you’d both been duped by someone. That you were both in danger.”

The rage of that attack. The task, that post-facto vindication of a dead project, destroyed. No point scoring, no competition. Just the pure fact that Mahalia had, without even knowing it, outsmarted him, realised that his invention was invention, despite his attempts to seal up the creation, to watertight it. She crushed him without guile or bile. The evidence destroyed his conception again, the improved version, Orciny 2.0, as it had the last time, when he had actually believed it. Mahalia died because she proved to Bowden that he had been a fool to believe the folktale he created.

“What is that thing? Did she …?” But she could not have got that out, and had she delivered it it would not be with him.

“I’ve had this for years,” he said. “This I found myself. When I was first digging. Security wasn’t always like now.”

“Where did you meet her? A bullshit dissensus? Some old empty bollocks building you told her was where Orciny did their magic?” It did not matter. The murder site would just be some empty place.

“… Would you believe me if I told you I really don’t remember the actual moment?” he said carefully.

“Yes.”

“Just this constant, this …” Reasoning, that broke his creation apart. He might have shown her the artefact as if it were evidence. It’s not Orciny! she perhaps said. We have to think! Who might want this stuff? The fury at that.

“You broke it.”

“Not irreparably. It’s tough. The artefacts are tough.” Despite being used to beat her to death.

“It was a good idea to take her through the checkpoint.”

“When I called him Buric wasn’t happy sending the driver, but he understood. It’s never been militsya or policzai that are the problem. We couldn’t let Breach notice us.”

“But your maps are out of date. I saw it on your desk, that time. All that junk you or Yorj picked up—was that from where you killed her?—was useless.”

“When did they build that skate park?” For a moment he managed to make it sound as if he was genuinely humourous about it. “That was supposed to be direct to the estuary.” Where the old iron would pull her down.

“Didn’t Yorjavic know his way around? It’s his city. Some soldier.”

“He never had reason to go to Pocost. I hadn’t been over since the conference. I bought that map I gave him years ago, and it was right last time I was there.”

“But goddamn urban renewal, right? There he was, van all loaded up, and there’s ramps and half-pipes between him and the water, and light’s coming. When that went wrong, that was when Buric and you … fell out.”

“Not really. We had words, but we thought it had blown over. No, what got him troubled was when you came to Ul Qoma,” he said. “That was when he realised there was trouble.”

“So … in a way I owe you an apology …” He tried to shrug. Even that motion was urbanly undecidable. He kept swallowing but his tics gave away nothing about where he was.

“If you like,” he said. “That’s when he set his True Citizens on hunt. Even tried to get you blaming Qoma First, with that bomb. And I think he thought I believed it, too.” Bowden looked disgusted. “He must’ve heard about the time it happened before.”

“For real. All those notes you wrote in Precursor, threatening yourself to get us off you. Fake burglaries. Added to your Orciny.” How he looked at me, I stopped myself saying Your bullshit . “What about Yolanda?”

“I’m … really sorry about her. Buric must have thought she and I were … that Mahalia or I’d told her something.”

“You hadn’t, though. Nor did Mahalia—she protected her from all that. In fact Yolanda was the only one who believed in Orciny all the way along. She was your biggest fan. Her and Aikam.” He stared, his face cold. He knew that neither of them were the smartest. I did not say anything for a minute.

“Christ you’re a liar, Bowden,” I said. “Even now, Jesus. Do you think I don’t know it was you who told Buric Yolanda’d be there?” I spoke and I could hear his shaking breath. “You sent them there in case of what she knew. Which as I say was nothing. You had her killed for nothing. But why did you come? You knew they’d try to kill you too.” We faced each other for a long silence.

“… You needed to be sure, didn’t you?” I said. “And so did they.”

They wouldn’t send out Yorjavic and organise that extraordinary cross-border assassination for Yolanda alone. They did not even know for sure what if anything she knew. Bowden, though: they knew what he knew. Everything.

They thought I believed it too , he had said. “You told them she’d be there, and that you were coming too because Qoma First were trying to kill you. Did they really think you’d believed it? … But they could check, couldn’t they?” I answered myself. “By if you turned up. You had to be there, or they’d know they were being played. If Yorjavic hadn’t seen you he’d have known you were planning something. He had to have both targets there.” Bowden’s strange gait and manner at the hall. “So you had to turn up and try and keep someone in his way …” I stopped. “Were there three targets?” I said. I was the reason it had gone wrong, after all. I shook my head.

“You knew they’d try to kill you, but it was worth the risk to get rid of her. Camouflage.” Who would suspect him of complicity, after Orciny tried to kill him?

He had a slowly souring face. “Where is Buric?”

“Dead.”

“Good. Good …”

I stepped towards him. He pointed the artefact at me like some stubby Bronze Age wand.

“What do you care?” I said. “What are you going to do? How long have you lived in the cities? Now what?

“It’s over. Orciny’s rubble.” Another step, he still aiming at me, mouth-breathing and eyes wide. “You’ve got one option. You’ve been to Besźel. You’ve lived in Ul Qoma. There’s one place left. Come on. You going to live anonymous in Istanbul? In Sebastopol? Make it to Paris? You think that’s going to be enough?

“Orciny is bullshit. Do you want to see what’s really in between?”

A second held. He hesitated long enough for some appearance.

Nasty broken man. The only thing more despicable than what he had done was the half-hidden eagerness with which he now took me up on my offer. It was not bravery on his part to come with me. He held out that heavy weapon thing to me and I took it. It rattled. The bulb full of gears, the old clockworks that had cut Mahalia’s head when the metal burst.

He sagged, with some moan: apology, plea, relief. I was not listening and don’t remember. I did not arrest him—I was not policzai , not then, and Breach do not arrest—but I had him, and exhaled, because it was over.

BOWDEN HAD STILL NOT COMMITTED to where he was. I said, “Which city are you in?” Dhatt and Corwi were close, ready, and whichever shared a locus with him would come forward when he said.

“Either,” he said.

So I grabbed him by the scruff, turned him, marched him away. Under the authority I’d been granted, I dragged Breach with me, enveloped him in it, pulled him out of either town into neither, into the Breach. Corwi and Dhatt watched me take him out of either of their reaches. I nodded thanks to them across their borders. They would not look at each other, but both nodded to me.

It occurred as I led Bowden shuffling with me that the breach I had been empowered to pursue, that I was still investigating and of which he was evidence, was still my own.