“You know why she never came to you?” I said. “Yolanda? She thought you  were Orciny. If you said How could there be a place between the city and the city?  she’d say Do you believe in the Breach? Where’s  that?  But she was wrong, wasn’t she? You’re not Orciny.”

“There is no Orciny.”

“So why are you asking all this? What have I been running from for days? I just saw  Orciny or something a lot like it shoot my partner. You know I’ve breached: what do you care about the rest of it? Why aren’t you just punishing me?”

“As we say—”

“What, this is mercy? Justice? Please.

“If there’s something else  between Besźel and Ul Qoma, where does that leave you? You’re hunting. Because it’s suddenly back. You don’t know where Orciny is, or what’s going on. You’re …” Hell with it . “You’re afraid.”

***

THE YOUNGER MAN AND WOMAN left and returned with an old film projector, trailing a lead into the corridor. They fiddled with it and it hummed, and made the wall a screen. It projected scenes from an interrogation. I scooted back to see better, still sitting on the floor.

The subject was Bowden. A snap of static and he was speaking in Illitan, and I saw that his interrogators were militsya .

“… don’t know what happened. Yes, yes  I was hiding because someone was coming after me. Someone was trying to kill me. And when I heard Borlú and Dhatt were getting out, I didn’t know if I could trust them but I thought maybe they could get me out too.”

“… have a gun?” The voice of the interrogator was muffled.

“Because someone was trying to kill me, is why. Yes, I had a gun. You can get one on half the street corners in East Ul Qoma, as well you know. I’ve lived here for years, you know.”

Something .

“No.”

“Why not?” That was audible.

“Because there is no such thing as Orciny,”  Bowden said.

Something . “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think, or what Mahalia thought, or what Yolanda said, or what Dhatt’s been insinuating, and no I have no idea who called me. But there’s no such place.”

A big loud crack of distressed image-sound, and there was Aikam. He was just weeping and weeping. Questions came, and he ignored them to weep.

The picture changed again and Dhatt was in Aikam’s place. He was not in uniform and his arm was in a sling.

“I fucking do not know,” he shouted. “Why the fuck are you asking me? Go get Borlú, because he seems to have a damn sight more of an idea what the fuck is going on than I do. Orciny? No I fucking don’t, because I’m not a child, but here’s the thing, even though  it’s goddamn obvious Orciny’s a pile of shit, something is still going on, people are still getting hold of information they should not be able to, and other people are still being shot in the head by forces unknown. Fucking kids. That  is why I agreed to help Borlú, illegal be fucked, so if you’re going to take my badge go the fuck ahead. And be my guest—disbelieve in Orciny all you want, I fucking do. But keep your head down in case that nonexistent fucking city shoots you in the face. Where is Tyador? What’ve you done?”

The picture went still on the wall. The interrogators looked at me in the light of Dhatt’s oversized monochrome snarl.

“So,”  the older man said. He nodded at the wall. “You heard Bowden. What’s happening. What do you know about Orciny?”

THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see. The Breach has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.

This trail that led and led again to Orciny suggested systemic transgression, secret para-rules, a parasite city where there should be nothing but nothing, nothing but Breach. If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let that go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist? , put it like this, “So, are we at war?”

I brought our collaboration to their attention. I, daring, bargained. “I’ll help you …” I kept saying, with a drawn-out pause, an ellipsis implying if . I wanted the killers of Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez and they could tell that, but I was not too noble to bargain. That there was room to barter, a way, a small chance that I might get out of Breach again, was intoxicating.

“YOU ALMOST CAME for me once before,” I said. They had been watching, when I came grosstopically close to my house. “So are we partners?” I said.

“You’re a breacher. But it’ll go better if you help us.” “You really think Orciny killed them?” the other man said. Would they finish with me when there was even a possibility that Orciny was here, emerging, and still unfound? Its population walking the streets, unseen by the populations of Besźel and Ul Qoma, each thinking they were in the other. Hiding like books in a library.

“What is it?” the woman said, seeing my face.

“I’ve told you what I know, and it’s not much. It’s Mahalia who really knew what was happening, and she’s dead. But she left something behind. She told a friend. She told Yolanda that she’d realised the truth when she was going through her notes. We never found anything like that. But I know how she worked. I know where they are.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

WE LEFT THE BUILDING—the station, call it—in the morning, me in the company of the older man, Breach, and I realised I did not know what city we were in.

I had stayed up much of the night watching films of interrogations, from Ul Qoma and from Besźel. A Besź border guard and an Ul Qoman, passersby from both cities who knew nothing. “People started screaming …” Motorists over whom bullets had gone.

“Corwi,” I said, when her face appeared on the wall.

“So where is he?” A quirk of recording made her voice far away. She was angry and controlling herself. “What the fuck has boss-man got himself into? Yes, he wanted me to help him get someone through.” That was all they established, repeatedly, her Besź questioners. They threatened her job. She was as contemptuous of that as Dhatt, though more careful how she phrased it. She knew nothing.

Breach showed me brief shots of someone questioning Biszaya and Sariska. Biszaya cried. “I’m not impressed with this,” I said. “This is just cruel.”

The most interesting films were those of Yorjavic’s comrades among the extreme nationalists of Besźel. I recognised some who had been with Yorjavic. They stared sulky at their questioners, the policzai . A few refused to speak except in the company of their lawyers. There was hard questioning, an officer leaning across the table and punching a man in the face.

“Fuck’s sake,” the bleeding man shouted. “We’re on the same fucking side, you fuck. You’re Besź, you’re not fucking Ul Qoman and you’re not fucking Breach …”

With arrogance, neutrality, resentment or, often, compliance and collaboration, the nationalists denied any knowledge of Yorjavic’s action. “I’ve never fucking heard of this foreign woman; he never mentioned her. She’s a student?” one said. “We do what’s right for Besźel, you know? And you don’t have to know why. But …” The man we watched agonised with his hands, made shapes to try to explain himself without recrimination.

“We’re fucking soldiers. Like you. For Besźel. So if you hear that something has to be done, if you get instructions, like someone has to be warned, reds or unifs or traitors or UQ or the fucking Breach-lickers are gathering or whatever, something has to be done, okay. But you know why. You don’t ask, but you can see it’s got to be done, most of the time. But I don’t know why this Rodriguez girl … I don’t believe he did and if he did  I don’t…” He looked angry. “I don’t know why.”