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

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

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

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

“He does that.”

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

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

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

“Your parents haven’t heard from you …”

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

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

“You know why.”

“Say I don’t.”

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

“Who?” Let’s hear it.

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you know your neighbours?”

She did not smile. “By voice.”

“Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”

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

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

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

“Alright.”

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

“HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is it?”

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

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

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

“Her PhD …”

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

“She made enemies. I heard about it.”

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

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

“Did she show you?”

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

“What did it say?”

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

“She showed you?”

“Not straightaway.”

“What were they saying to her? Why?”

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

“Did she meet them?”

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

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

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