“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.