I walked a few steps in the crosshatch, dropping the thankfully unsplintering wood down my leg. I stood still when it hit the ground. I stood as if contemplating the skyline and moved my feet gently, letting it onto the earth, where I trod it in and scuffed plant muck and dirt onto it. When I walked away, without looking back, the wood was a nothing shape, invisible if you did not know it was there.

“When she goes, someone in Besźel—or someone who looks like they are, so there’s nothing for you to notice—comes by,” I said. “Stands and looks at the sky. Kicks their heels. Kicks something up. Sits on a rock for a moment, touches the ground, puts something in their pocket.

“Mahalia wouldn’t take the recent stuff because it was just put away, much too noticeable. But while she’s locking up, because it only takes a second, she opens the old drawers.”

“What does she take?”

“Maybe it’s random. Maybe she’s following instructions. Bol Ye’an searches them every night, so why would they think anyone’s stealing? She never had anything on her. It was sitting here in the crosshatch.”

“Where someone came to take it. Through Besźel.”

I turned and looked slowly in all directions.

“Do you feel watched?” Ashil said.

“Do you?”

A very long quiet. “I don’t know.”

“Orciny.” I turned again. “I’m tired of this.” I stood. “Really.” I turned. “This is wearing.”

“What are you thinking?” Ashil said.

A noise of a dog in the woods made us look up. The dog was in Besźel. I was ready to unhear, but of course I did not have to.

It was a lab, a friendly dark animal that sniffed out of the undergrowth and trotted to us. Ashil held out his hand for it. Its owner emerged, smiled, started, looked away in confusion and called his dog to heel. It went to him, looking back at us. He was trying to unsee, but the man could not forebear looking at us, wondering probably why we would risk playing with an animal in such an unstable urban location. When Ashil met his eye the man looked away. He must have been able to tell where and so what we were.

ACCORDING TO THE CATALOGUE the wood offcut was a replacement for a brass tube containing gears encrusted into position by centuries. Three other pieces were missing, from those early digs, all from within wrappings, all replaced by twists of paper, stones, the leg of a doll. They were supposed to be the remains of a preserved lobster’s claw containing some proto-clockwork; an eroded mechanism like some tiny sextant; a hand ful of nails and screws.

We searched the ground in that fringe zone. We found potholes, cold scuffs, and the near-wintry remains of flowers, but no shallow-buried priceless treasures of the Precursor Age. They had been picked up, long ago. No one could sell them.

“That makes it breach then,” I said. “Wherever these Orciny-ites came from or went, they can’t have picked the stuff up in Ul Qoma, so it was in Besźel. Well, maybe to them they never left Orciny. But to most people they were put down in Ul Qoma and picked up in Besźel, so it’s breach.”

ASHIL CALLED THROUGH TO SOMEONE on our way back, and when we arrived at the quarters Breach were bickering and voting in their fast loose way on issues alien to me. They entered the room in the middle of the strange debate, made cell phone calls, interrupted at speed. The atmosphere was fraught, in that distinct expressionless Breach way.

There were reports from the two cities, with muttered additions from those holding telephone receivers, delivering messages from other Breach. “Everyone on guard,” Ashil kept saying. “This is starting.”

They were afraid of head shots and breach mugging-murders. The number of small breaches was increasing. Breach were where they could be, but there were many they missed. Someone said graffiti were appearing on walls in Ul Qoma in styles that suggested Besźel artists.

“It hasn’t been this bad, since, well …” Ashil said. He whispered explanations to me as the discussion continued. “That’s Raina. She’s unremitting on this.” “Samun thinks even mentioning Orciny’s to give ground.” “Byon doesn’t.”

“We need to be ready,” the speaker said. “We stumbled on something.”

“She did, Mahalia. Not us,” Ashil said.

“Alright, she did. Who knows when whatever’s going to happen will? We’re in the dark and we know war’s come, but can’t see where to aim.”

“I can’t deal with this,” I said to Ashil quietly.

He escorted me back to the room. When I realised he was locking me in I shouted in remonstration. “You need to remember why you’re here,” he said through the door.

I sat on the bed and tried to read Mahalia’s notes a new way. I did not try to follow the thread of a particular pen, the tenor of a particular period of her studies, to reconstruct a lineage of thought. Instead I read all the annotations on each page, years of opinions set together. I had been trying to be an archaeologist of her marginalia, separating the striae. Now I read each page out of time, no chronology, arguing with itself.

On the inside of the back cover among layers of irate theory I read in big letters written over earlier smaller ones BUT CF SHERMAN . A line from that to an argument on the facing page: ROSEN’S COUNTER . These names were familiar from my earlier investigations. I turned a couple of pages backwards. In the same pen and late hurried hand I read, abutting an older claim: NO—ROSEN, VIJNIC .

Assertion overlaid with critique, more and more exclamationmarked clauses in the book. NO , a pointer connecting the word not to the original printed text but to an annotation, to her own older, enthusiastic annotations. An argument with herself. WHY A TEST? WHO?

“Hey,” I shouted. I did not know where the camera was. “Hey, Ashil. Get Ashil.” I did not stop making noise until he arrived. “I need to get online.”

He took me to a computer room, to what looked like a 486 or something similarly antique, with an operating system I did not recognise, some jury-rigged imitation of Windows, but the processor and connection were very fast. We were two of several in the office. Ashil stood behind me as I typed. He watched my researches, as well, certainly, as ensuring I did not email anyone.

“Go wherever you need,” Ashil told me, and he was right. Pay sites guarded by password protection needed only an empty return  to roll over.

“What kind of connection is this?” I did not expect or get any answer. I searched Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic . On the forums I had recently visited, the three writers were subjected to ferocious contumely. “Look.”

I got the names of their key works, checked listings on Amazon for a quick-and-dirty appreciation of their theses. It took minutes. I sat back.

“Look. Look . Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic are all absolute hate figures on these fractured-city boards,” I said. “Why? Because they wrote books claiming Bowden was full of shit. That the whole argument’s bollocks.”

“So does he.”

“That’s not the point, Ashil. Look.” Pages and pages in Between the City and the City . I pointed to Mahalia’s early remarks to herself, then her later ones. “The point is that she’s  citing them. At the end. Her last notes.” Turning more pages, showing him.

“She changed her mind,” he said finally. We looked at each other a long time.

“All that stuff about parasites and being wrong and finding out she was a thief,” I said. “God damn. She wasn’t killed because she was, some, one of the bloody elect few who knew the awesome secret that the third city existed. She wasn’t killed because she realised Orciny was lying to her, was using her. That’s not the lies she was talking about. Mahalia was killed because she stopped  believing in Orciny at all.”