“My, well, Breach, my partner, was right,” I said. “Even if Buric could have thought this up, he didn’t have the expertise or the patience to put it together so it would have fooled Mahalia. She was smart. That took someone who knew the archives and the secrets and the Orciny rumours not just a bit but totally. Completely. You told the truth, like you say: there’s no such place as Orciny. You said it again and again. That was the point, wasn’t it?
“It wasn’t Buric’s idea, was it? After that conference where she made such a nuisance of herself? It certainly wasn’t Sear and Core—they would have hired someone to smuggle more efficiently, a little nickel-and-dime operation like that, they just went along with an opportunity that was presented. Sure you needed Buric’s resources to make it work, and he wasn’t going to turn down a chance to steal from Ul Qoma, pimp Besźel out—how much investment was tied to this?—and make a mint for himself. But it was your idea, and it was never about the money.
“It was because you missed Orciny. A way to have it both ways. Yes, sure you were wrong about Orciny, but you could make it so you were right, too.”
Choice artefacts had been excavated, the details of which only the archaeologists could know—or those who had left them there, as poor Yolanda had thought. Supposed-Orciny sent their supposed-agent sudden instructions, not to be delayed, no time to think or rethink—only, quickly, liberate, hand over.
“You told Mahalia she was the only one you’d tell the truth. That when you turned your back on your book, that was just you playing politics? Or did you tell her it was cowardice? That would be pretty winning. I bet you did that.” I approached him. His expression shifted. “‘It’s my shame, Mahalia, the pressure was too much. You’re braver than me, keep on; you’re so close, you’ll find it…’ Your shit messed up your whole career, and you can’t have that time back. So the next best thing, make it have been true all along. I’m sure the money was nice—can’t tell me they didn’t pay—and Buric had his reasons and Sear and Core had theirs, and the nats’ll do for anyone with a way with words and a buck. But it was Orciny that was the point for you, right?
“But Mahalia figured out that it was nonsense, Doctor Bowden.”
How much more perfect that unhistory would be, second time around, when he could construct the evidence not only from fragments in archives, not from the cross-reference of misunderstood documents, but could add to those planted sources, suggest partisan texts, even create messages—to himself, too, for her benefit and later for ours, that all the while he could dismiss as the nothings they were—from the nonplace itself. But still she worked out the truth.
“That must have been unpleasant for you,” I said.
His eyes were unhitched from wherever we were. “It got… That’s why.” She told him her deliveries—so all secret payments—would end. That was not why his rage.
“Did she think you were fooled too? Or did she realise you were behind it?” It was amazing that such a detail should almost be epiphenomenal. “I think she didn’t know. It wasn’t her character to taunt you. I think she thought she was protecting you. I think she arranged to meet you, to protect you. To tell you that you’d both been duped by someone. That you were both in danger.”
The rage of that attack. The task, that post-facto vindication of a dead project, destroyed. No point scoring, no competition. Just the pure fact that Mahalia had, without even knowing it, outsmarted him, realised that his invention was invention, despite his attempts to seal up the creation, to watertight it. She crushed him without guile or bile. The evidence destroyed his conception again, the improved version, Orciny 2.0, as it had the last time, when he had actually believed it. Mahalia died because she proved to Bowden that he had been a fool to believe the folktale he created.
“What is that thing? Did she …?” But she could not have got that out, and had she delivered it it would not be with him.
“I’ve had this for years,” he said. “This I found myself. When I was first digging. Security wasn’t always like now.”
“Where did you meet her? A bullshit dissensus? Some old empty bollocks building you told her was where Orciny did their magic?” It did not matter. The murder site would just be some empty place.
“… Would you believe me if I told you I really don’t remember the actual moment?” he said carefully.
“Yes.”
“Just this constant, this …” Reasoning, that broke his creation apart. He might have shown her the artefact as if it were evidence. It’s not Orciny! she perhaps said. We have to think! Who might want this stuff? The fury at that.
“You broke it.”
“Not irreparably. It’s tough. The artefacts are tough.” Despite being used to beat her to death.
“It was a good idea to take her through the checkpoint.”
“When I called him Buric wasn’t happy sending the driver, but he understood. It’s never been militsya or policzai that are the problem. We couldn’t let Breach notice us.”
“But your maps are out of date. I saw it on your desk, that time. All that junk you or Yorj picked up—was that from where you killed her?—was useless.”
“When did they build that skate park?” For a moment he managed to make it sound as if he was genuinely humourous about it. “That was supposed to be direct to the estuary.” Where the old iron would pull her down.
“Didn’t Yorjavic know his way around? It’s his city. Some soldier.”
“He never had reason to go to Pocost. I hadn’t been over since the conference. I bought that map I gave him years ago, and it was right last time I was there.”
“But goddamn urban renewal, right? There he was, van all loaded up, and there’s ramps and half-pipes between him and the water, and light’s coming. When that went wrong, that was when Buric and you … fell out.”
“Not really. We had words, but we thought it had blown over. No, what got him troubled was when you came to Ul Qoma,” he said. “That was when he realised there was trouble.”
“So … in a way I owe you an apology …” He tried to shrug. Even that motion was urbanly undecidable. He kept swallowing but his tics gave away nothing about where he was.
“If you like,” he said. “That’s when he set his True Citizens on hunt. Even tried to get you blaming Qoma First, with that bomb. And I think he thought I believed it, too.” Bowden looked disgusted. “He must’ve heard about the time it happened before.”
“For real. All those notes you wrote in Precursor, threatening yourself to get us off you. Fake burglaries. Added to your Orciny.” How he looked at me, I stopped myself saying Your bullshit. “What about Yolanda?”
“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.”
“No one cares about Bowden,” he said at last. “Not Ul Qoma, not Besźel, not Canada, not Orciny. But yes, we’ll present a form to them. Maybe, after he dumped Mahalia, he got back into Ul Qoma by Breach.”
“He didn’t dump her; it was Yorj—” I said.
“Maybe that’s how he did it,” Ashil continued. “We’ll see. Maybe we’ll push him into Besźel and pull him back to Ul Qoma. If we say he breached, he breached.” I looked at him.
Mahalia was gone. Her body had at last gone home. Ashil told me on the day her parents held her funeral.
Sear and Core had not left Besźel. It would risk attention to pull out after the creeping, confused revelations of Buric’s behaviour. The company and its tech arm had come up, but the chains of connection were vague. Buric’s possible contact was a regrettable unknown, and mistakes had been made, safeguards were being put in place. There were rumours that CorIntech would be sold.
Ashil and I went by tram, by Metro, by bus, by taxi, we walked. He threaded us like a suture in and out of Besźel and Ul Qoma.
“What about my breach?” I asked it at last. We had both been waiting for days. I did not ask When do I get to go back home? We took the funicular to the top of the park named for it, in Besźel at least.
“If he’d had an up-to-date map of Besźel you’d never have found her,” Ashil said. “Orciny.” He shook his head.
“Do you see any children in the Breach?” he said. “How would that work? If any were born—”
“They must be,” I interrupted, but he talked over me. “—how could they live here?” The clouds ove
r the cities were dramatic, and I watched them, rather than him, and pictured children given up. “You know how I was made Breach,” he suddenly said.
“When do I get to go home?” I said pointlessly. He even smiled at that.
“You did an excellent job. You’ve seen how we work. Nowhere else works like the cities,” he said. “It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it’s not your fault, for more than the shortest time … you can’t come back from that.”
“Accidents. Road accidents, fires, inadvertent breaches …”
“Yes. Of course. If you race to get out again. If that’s your response to the Breach, then maybe you’ve got a chance. But even then you’re in trouble. And if it’s any longer than a moment, you can’t get out again. You’ll never unsee again. Most people who breach, well, you’ll find out about our sanctions soon. But there is another possibility, very occasionally.
“What do you know about the British Navy?” Ashil said. “A few centuries ago?” I looked at him. “I was recruited the same as everyone else in Breach. None of us were born here. We were all once in one place or the other. All of us breached once.”
The City & the City Page 31
