“I’m … really sorry about her. Buric must have thought she and I were … that Mahalia or I’d told her something.”

“You hadn’t, though. Nor did Mahalia—she protected her from all that. In fact Yolanda was the only one who believed in Orciny all the way along. She was your biggest fan. Her and Aikam.” He stared, his face cold. He knew that neither of them were the smartest. I did not say anything for a minute.

“Christ you’re a liar, Bowden,” I said. “Even now, Jesus. Do you think I don’t know it was you who told Buric Yolanda’d be there?” I spoke and I could hear his shaking breath. “You sent them there in case of what she knew. Which as I say was nothing. You had her killed for nothing. But why did you  come? You knew they’d try to kill you too.” We faced each other for a long silence.

“… You needed to be sure, didn’t you?” I said. “And so did they.”

They wouldn’t send out Yorjavic and organise that extraordinary cross-border assassination for Yolanda alone. They did not even know for sure what if anything she knew. Bowden, though: they knew what he knew. Everything.

They thought I believed it too , he had said. “You told them she’d be there, and that you were coming too because Qoma First were trying to kill you. Did they really think you’d believed it? … But they could check, couldn’t they?” I answered myself. “By if you turned up. You had  to be there, or they’d know they were being played. If Yorjavic hadn’t seen you he’d have known you were planning something. He had to have both targets there.” Bowden’s strange gait and manner at the hall. “So you had to turn up and try and keep someone in his way …” I stopped. “Were there three targets?” I said. I was the reason it had gone wrong, after all. I shook my head.

“You knew they’d try to kill you, but it was worth the risk to get rid of her. Camouflage.” Who would suspect him of complicity, after Orciny tried to kill him?

He had a slowly souring face. “Where is Buric?”

“Dead.”

“Good. Good …”

I stepped towards him. He pointed the artefact at me like some stubby Bronze Age wand.

“What do you care?” I said. “What are you going to do? How long have you lived in the cities? Now what?

“It’s over. Orciny’s rubble.” Another step, he still aiming at me, mouth-breathing and eyes wide. “You’ve got one option. You’ve been to Besźel. You’ve lived in Ul Qoma. There’s one place left. Come on. You going to live anonymous in Istanbul? In Sebastopol? Make it to Paris? You think that’s going to be enough?

“Orciny is bullshit. Do you want to see what’s really in between?”

A second held. He hesitated long enough for some appearance.

Nasty broken man. The only thing more despicable than what he had done was the half-hidden eagerness with which he now took me up on my offer. It was not bravery on his part to come with me. He held out that heavy weapon thing to me and I took it. It rattled. The bulb full of gears, the old clockworks that had cut Mahalia’s head when the metal burst.

He sagged, with some moan: apology, plea, relief. I was not listening and don’t remember. I did not arrest him—I was not policzai , not then, and Breach do not arrest—but I had him, and exhaled, because it was over.

BOWDEN HAD STILL NOT COMMITTED to where he was. I said, “Which city are you in?” Dhatt and Corwi were close, ready, and whichever shared a locus with him would come forward when he said.

“Either,” he said.

So I grabbed him by the scruff, turned him, marched him away. Under the authority I’d been granted, I dragged Breach with me, enveloped him in it, pulled him out of either town into neither, into the Breach. Corwi and Dhatt watched me take him out of either of their reaches. I nodded thanks to them across their borders. They would not look at each other, but both nodded to me.

It occurred as I led Bowden shuffling with me that the breach I had been empowered to pursue, that I was still investigating and of which he was evidence, was still my own.

Coda

Breach

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I DID NOT SEE THAT MACHINE AGAIN. It was funnelled into the bureaucracy of Breach. I never saw whatever it was it could do, whatever Sear and Core wanted, or if it could do anything.

Ul Qoma in the aftermath of Riot Night was buoyed up with tension. The militsya , even after the remaining unifs had been cleared out or arrested, or hidden their patches and disappeared, kept up high-profile, intrusive policing. Civil libertarians complained. Ul Qoma’s government announced a new campaign, Vigilant Neighbours, neighbourliness referring both to the people next door (what were they doing?) and to the connected city (see how important borders are?).

In Besźel the night led to a kind of exaggerated mutedness. It became almost bad luck to mention it. The newspapers massively played it down. Politicians, if they said anything, made circuitous mention of recent stresses  or similar. But there was a pall. The city was subdued. Its unif population was as depleted, the remnants as careful and out of sight, as in Ul Qoma.

Both cleanups were fast. The Breach closure lasted thirty-six hours and was not mentioned again. The night led to twenty-two deaths in Ul Qoma, thirteen in Besźel, not including the refugees who died after the initial accidents, nor the disappeared. Now there were more foreign journalists in both sets of streets, doing more and less subtle follow-up reports. They made regular attempts to arrange an interview—“anonymous, of course”—with representatives of Breach.

“Has anyone from Breach ever broken ranks?” I said.

“Of course,” said Ashil. “But then they’re breaching, they’re insiles, and they’re ours.” He walked carefully, and wore bandages below his clothes and his hidden armour.

The first day after the riots, when I returned to the office dragging a semicompliant Bowden with me, I was locked into my cell. But the door had been unlocked since then. I had spent three days with Ashil, since his release from whatever hidden hospital it was where Breach received care. Each day he spent in my company, we walked the cities, in the Breach. I was learning from him how to walk between them, first in one, then the other, or in either, but without the ostentation of Bowden’s extraordinary motion—a more covert equivocation.

“How could he do it? Walk like that?”

“He’s been a student of the cities,” Ashil said. “Maybe it took an outsider to really see how citizens mark themselves, so as to walk between it.”

“Where is he?” I had asked Ashil this many times. He evaded answering in various ways. That time he said, as he had before, “There are mechanisms. He’s taken care of.”

It was overcast and dark, lightly raining. I turned up the collar of my coat. We were west of the river, by the crosshatched rails, a short stretch of tracks used by the trains of both cities, the timetable agreed internationally.

“But the thing is, he never breached.” I had not voiced this anxiety to Ashil before. He turned to look at me, massaged his injury. “Under what authority was he … How can we have him?”

Ashil walked us around the environs of the Bol Ye’an dig. I could hear the trains in Besźel, north of us, in Ul Qoma to the south. We would not go in, or even near enough to Bol Ye’an to be seen, but Ashil was walking through the various stages of the case, without saying so.

“I mean,” I said, “I know Breach doesn’t answer to anyone, but it… you have to present reports. Of all your cases. To the Oversight Committee.” He raised an eyebrow at that. “I know, I know they’ve been discredited because of Buric, but their line’s that that was the makeup of the members, right, not the committee itself. The checks and balances between the cities and Breach is still the same, right? They have a point, don’t you think? So you’ll have to justify taking Bowden.”