“How did she look? Did she dress well? What was she like?”

“Yeah she did. Smart. Almost chic, you know? Stood out here.” He even laughed at himself. “And she was clever. I really liked her at first, you know? I was really excited. At first.”

His pauses were requests for us to chivvy him, so that none of this discussion was at his behest. “But?” I said. “What happened?”

“We had an argument. Actually I only had an argument with her because she was giving some of the other comrades shit, you know? I’d walk into the library or downstairs or whatever and someone or other would be shouting at her. She was never shouting at them, but she’d be talking quietly and driving them mad, and in the end I had to tell her to go. She was … she was dangerous.” Another silence. Corwi and I looked at each other. “No I ain’t exaggerating,” he said. “She brought you here, didn’t she? I told you she was dangerous.”

He picked up the photograph and studied it. Across his face went pity, anger, dislike, fear. Fear, certainly. He got up, walked in a circle around his desk—ridiculous, too small a room to pace, but he tried.

“See the problem was …” He went to his small window and looked out, turned back to us. He was silhouetted against the skyline, of Besźel or Ul Qoma or both I could not tell.

“She was asking all this stuff about some of the kookiest underground bollocks. Old wives’ tales, rumours, urban myths, craziness. I didn’t think much of it because we get a lot of that shit, and she was obviously smarter than the loons into it, so I figured she was just feeling her way around, getting to know stuff.”

“Weren’t you curious?”

“Sure. Young foreign girl, clever, mysterious? Intense?”  He mocked himself with how he said that. He nodded. “Sure I was. I’m curious about all the people who come here. Some of them tell me shit, some of them don’t. But I wouldn’t be leader of this chapter if I went around pumping them. There’s a woman here, a lot older than me … I been meeting her on and off for fifteen years. Don’t know her real name, or anything about her. Okay, bad example because I’m pretty sure she’s one of your lot, an agent, but you get the point. I don’t ask.”

“What was she into, then? Byela Mar. Why did you kick her out?”

“Look, here’s the thing. You’re into this stuff…” I felt Corwi stiffen as if she would interrupt him, needle him to get on with it, and I touched her no, wait , to give him his head on this. He was not looking at us but at his provocative map of the cities. “You’re into this stuff you know you’re skirting with … well, you know you step out of line you’re going to get serious trouble. Like having you lot here, for a start. Or make the wrong phone call we can put our brothers in shit, in Ul Qoma, with the cops there. Or—or there’s worse.” He looked at us then. “She couldn’t stay, she was going to bring Breach down on us. Or something.

“She was into … No, she wasn’t into  anything, she was obsessed . With Orciny.”

He was looking at me carefully, so I did nothing but narrow my eyes. I was surprised, though.

By how she did not move it was clear that Corwi did not know what Orciny was. It might undermine her to go into it here, but as I hesitated he was explaining. It was a fairy tale. That was what he said.

“Orciny’s the third city. It’s between the other two. It’s in the dissensi , disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma’s and Ul Qoma Besźel’s. When the old commune split, it didn’t split into two, it split into three. Orciny’s the secret city. It runs things.”

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown—records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then those black-box centuries of urban instigation—certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the censor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth—then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style town-houses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

Some decades previously there would have been no need for explanations—Orciny stories had been children’s standards, alongside the tribulations of “King Shavil and the Sea-Monster That Came to Harbour.” Harry Potter and Power Rangers are more popular now, and fewer children know those older fables. That’s alright.

“Are you saying—what?” I interrupted him. “You’re saying that Byela was a folklorist? She was into old stories?” He shrugged. He would not look at me. I tried again to make him out and say what he was implying. He would only shrug. “Why would she be talking to you about this?” I said. “Why was she even here?”

“I don’t know. We have stuff on it. It comes up. You know? They have them in Ul Qoma, too, you know, Orciny stories. We don’t just keep documents on, you know, just just  what we’re into. You know? We know our history, we keep all kinds of…” He trailed off. “I realised it wasn’t us she was interested in, you know?”

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say they didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research. Their library must have defensively complete holdings of anything that even implied a blurring of urban boundaries. She had come—you could see it—seeking information not on some ur-unity but on Orciny. What an annoyance when they realised her odd researches weren’t quirks of investigation but the very point. When they realised that she did not much care about their project.

“So she was a time-waster?”

“No, man, she was dangerous, like I said. For real. She’d cause trouble for us. She said she wasn’t sticking around anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders vaguely.

“Why was she dangerous?” I leaned in. “Drodin, was she breaching?”

“Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned point, watching us out there is … you know. Breach.”

We were all silent a moment then. We all felt watched.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Course not. What do I look like? Who sees  it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse … we’re gone. Do you …” He shook his head, and when he looked back at me it was with anger and perhaps hate. “Do you know how many of my friends have been taken? That I’ve never seen again? We’re more  careful than anyone.”

It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.