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

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

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

“Dhatt.”

“It’s Borlú.”

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

“I’m alright, but…”

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

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

“The fuck you can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe I could.”

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

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

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

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

“Do you believe them?”

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

“This is all beyond them.”

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

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

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

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

“From who?”

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

“What? What does it say?”

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

“A warning of what?”

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