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

“Have you got anything to tell me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was his name?”

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

“You mentioned Qoma First.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Seventeen

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

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

“Who caught it?” Dhatt said.

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

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

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

“Old-fashioned?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We looked at each other.

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

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

“Sir? No.”

“Not in national service?”

“I haven’t done mine yet, Officer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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