by The City
“We’re not going to be able to get every day Mahalia did the keys. You heard Buidze: half of them weren’t planned.”
“Let me call Corwi and Dhatt; they’d know how to sift them.”
“You.” Ashil spoke hard. “Are in Breach here. Don’t forget. You don’t get to demand things. Everything we’re doing is an investigation into your breach. Do you understand?”
They would not give me a computer in the cell. I watched the sun rising, the air beyond my window growing light. I had not realised how late it was. I fell asleep at last, and woke with Ashil back in the room with me. He drank something—it was the first time I had seen him eat or drink anything. I rubbed my eyes. It was morning enough to be day. Ashil did not seem an iota tired. He tossed papers onto my lap, indicated a coffee and a pill by my bed.
“Wasn’t as hard as that,” he said. “They sign off when they put the keys back, so we got all the dates. You’ve got the original schedules there, that changed, and the signings sheets themselves. But there are loads. We can’t put a bead on Yorjavic let alone Syedr or any other nat for this many nights. This stretches over more than two years.”
“Hold on.” I held the two lists against each other. “Forget when she was scheduled in advance—she was obeying orders, don’t forget, from her mysterious contact. When she wasn’t down to take the keys but did it anyway, that’s what we should be looking at. No one loves the job—you have to stay late—so those are the days she suddenly turns around and says to whoever’s turn it is ‘I’ll do it.’ These are the days she got a message. She got told to deliver. So let’s see who was doing what then. Those are the dates. And there aren’t nearly so many.”
Ashil nodded—counted the evenings in question. “Four, five. Three pieces are missing.”
“So a couple of those days nothing happened. Maybe they were legitimate changes, no instructions at all. They’re still the ones to chase.” Ashil nodded again. “That’s when we’re going to see the nats moving.”
“How did they organise this? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait here.”
“This would be easier if you’d just let me come with you. Why are you shy now?”
“Wait.”
More waiting, and though I did not shout at the unseen camera, I glared at all the walls in turn, so it would see me.
“No.” Ashil’s voice came from a loudspeaker I could not see. “Yorjavic was under policzai observation at least two of those nights. He didn’t go near the park.”
“What about Syedr?” I addressed the emptiness.
“No. Accounted for on four of the nights. Could be another of the nat bigwigs, but we’ve seen what Besźel has on them all, and there’s nothing red-flagging.”
“Shit. What do you mean Syedr’s ‘accounted for’?”
“We know where he was, and he was nowhere near. He was in meetings those evenings and the days after them.”
“Meetings with whom?”
“He’s on the Chamber of Commerce. They had trade events those days.” Silence. When I did not speak a long time he said, “What? What?”
“We’ve been thinking wrong.” I pincered my fingers in the air, trying to catch something. “Just because it was Yorjavic who shot, and because we know Mahalia pissed off the nats. But doesn’t it seem like a hell of a coincidence that those trade things would happen on the very nights that Mahalia volunteers to lock up?” Another long quiet. I remembered the delay before I could see the Oversight Committee, for one of those events. “There are receptions afterwards, for the guests, aren’t there?”
“Guests.”
“The companies. The ones Besźel’s schmoozing—that’s what those things are for, when they bicker for contracts. Ashil, find out who was there on those dates.”
“At the Chamber of Commerce …”
“Check the guest lists for the parties afterwards. Check press releases a few days afterwards and you’ll see who got what contract. Come on.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said minutes later in silence, when I still stalked back and forth in my room without him. “Why the fuck don’t you just let me out? I’m policzai, god damn it, this is what I do. You’re good at being bogeymen but you’re shit at this.”
“You’re a breacher,” Ashil said, pushing open the door. “It’s you we’re investigating.”
“Right. Did you wait outside till I said something you could make an entrance to?”
“This is the list.” I took the paper.
Companies—Canadian, French, Italian and British, a couple of smaller American ones—next to the various dates. Five names were ringed in red.
“The rest were there on one or other fair, but the ones in red, those ones are the ones that were there on every one of the nights Mahalia did the keys,” Ashil said.
“ReddiTek’s software. Burnley—what do they do?”
“Consultancy.”
“CorIntech are electronics components. What’s this written next to them?” Ashil looked.
“The man heading their delegation was Gorse, from their parent company, Sear and Core. Came to meet up with the local head of CorIntech, guy runs the division in Besźel. They both went to the parties with Nyisemu and Buric and the rest of the chamber.”
“Shit,” I said. “We … Which time was he here?”
“All of them.”
“All? The CEO of the parent company? Sear and Core? Shit …”
“Tell me,” he said, eventually.
“The nats couldn’t pull this off. Wait.” I thought. “We know there’s an insider in Copula Hall but… what the hell could Syedr do for these guys? Corwi’s right—he’s a clown. And what would be his angle?” I shook my head. “Ashil, how does this work? You can just siphon this information, right, from either city. Can you … What’s your status internationally? Breach, I mean.
“We need to go for the company.”
I’M AN AVATAR OF BREACH, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.
No, they can’t sell it, I said, that’s not what this is about. We had all heard rumours about Precursor artefacts. Their questionable physics. Their properties. They want to see what’s true. They’ve got Mahalia to supply them. And to do it they’ve got her thinking she’s in touch with Orciny. But she realised.
Corwi had said something once about the visitors’ tours of Besźel those companies’ representatives endured. Their chauffeurs might take them anywhere total or crosshatched, any pretty park to stretch their legs.
Sear and Core had been doing R&D.
Ashil stared at me. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Who’d put money into superstitious nonsense …?”
“How sure are you? That there’s nothing to the stories? And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said. “Sear and Core pay, what, a few thousand dollars to set this up? They don’t have to believe a word of it: it’s worth that kind of money just on the off chance that any of the stories turn out to have anything at all to them. It’s worth that for curiosity.”
Ashil took out his cell and began to make calls. It was the early part of the night. “We need a conclave,” he said. “Big stake. Yes, make it.” “Conclave. At the set.” He said more or less the same many times.
“You can do anything,” I said.
“Yes. Yes… We need a show. Breach in strength.”
“So you believe me? Ashil, you do?”
“How would they do it? How would outsiders like that get word to her?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what we have to find out. Paid off a couple of locals—we know where that money came to Yorj from.” They had been small amounts.
“They could not possibly, not po
ssibly create Orciny for her.”
“They wouldn’t have the CEO of their parent here for these piddling little glad-handers, let alone every time Mahalia locks up. Come on. Besźel’s a basket case, and they’ve already thrown us a bone by being here. There’s got to be a connection …”
“Oh, we’ll investigate. But these aren’t citizens nor citizens, Tye. They don’t have the …” A silence.
“The fear,” I said. That Breach freeze, that obedience reflex shared in Ul Qoma and Besźel.
“They don’t have a certain response to us, so if we do anything we need to show weight—we need many of us, a presence. And if there’s truth to this, it’s the shutdown of a major business in Besźel. It’ll be a crisis for the city. A catastrophe. And no one will like that.
“It isn’t unknown for a city or a city to argue with Breach, Tye. It’s happened. There’ve been wars with Breach.” He waited while that image hung. “That doesn’t help anyone. So we need to have presence.” Breach needed to intimidate. I understood.
“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”
But the ingathering of Breach avatars from wherever they had posted themselves, the attempt with that diffuse authority, a corralling of chaos, was not efficient. Breach answered their phones, agreed, disagreed, said they would come or said they would not, said they would hear Ashil out. This was to judge from his side of the conversations.
“How many do you need?” I said. “What are you waiting for?”
“We need a presence, I said.”
“You feel what’s going on out there?” I said. “You’ve felt it in the air.”
There had been more than two hours of this. I was wired by something in the food and drink I had been given, pacing and complaining of my incarceration. More calls began to come in to Ashil. More than the messages he had left—word had gone viral. In the corridor was commotion, quick steps, voices, shouting and responding to shouts.
“What is it?”
Ashil was listening on his phone, not to the sound outside. “No,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing. He said it again several times until he closed the phone and looked at me. For the first time that set face looked like an evasion. He did not know how to say what he had to say.
“What’s happened?” The shouting outside was greater, and now there was noise from the street too.
“A crash.”
“A car crash?”
“Buses. Two buses.”
“They breached?”
He nodded. “They’re in Besźel. They jackknifed on Finn Square.” A big crosshatched piazza. “Skidded into a wall in Ul Qoma.” I did not say anything. Any accident leading to breach obviously necessitated Breach, a few avatars gusting into view, sealing off the scene, sorting out parameters, ushering out the blameless, holding any breachers, handing authority back as quickly as possible to the police in the two cities. There was nothing in the fact of a traffic breach to lead to the noise I heard outside, so there must be more.
“They were buses taking refugees to camps. They’re out, and they haven’t been trained; they’re breaching everywhere, wandering between the cities without any idea what they’re doing.”
I could imagine the panic of bystanders and passersby, let alone those innocent motorists of Besźel and Ul Qoma, having swerved desperately out of the path of the careening vehicles, of necessity in and out of the topolganger city, trying hard to regain control and pull their vehicles back to where they dwelt. Faced then with scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders. Approaching people they saw, not attuned to the nuances of nationality—clothes, colours, hair, posture—oscillating back and forth between countries.
“We’ve called a closure,” Ashil said. “Complete lockdown. Clearing both the streets. Breach is out in force, everywhere, until this is finished.”
“What?”
Martial Breach. It had not happened in my lifetime. No entrance to either city, no passage between them, ultrahard enforcement of all Breach rules. The police of each city on mopping-up standby under Breach injunctions, adjuncts for the duration to the shutdown of borders. That was the sound I could hear, those mechanised voices over the growing roar of sirens: loudspeakers announcing the closure in both languages. Get off the streets.
“For a bus crash …?”
“It was deliberate,” Ashil said. “It was ambushed. By unificationists. It’s happened. They’re all over. There’s reports of breaches everywhere.” He was regaining himself.
“Unifs in which city …?” I said, and my question petered out as I guessed the answer.
“Both. They’re working in concert. We don’t even know if it was Besź unifs who stopped the buses.” Of course they worked together; that we knew. But that those little bands of eager utopians could do this? Could untether this breakdown, could make this happen? “They’re everywhere in both cities. This is their insurrection. They’re trying to merge us.”
ASHIL WAS HESITATING. That kept me talking, only that, that he was there in the room minutes more than he needed to be. He was checking the contents of his pockets, preparing himself into soldierly alertness. All Breach were called out. He was expected. The sirens continued, the voices continued.
“Ashil, for Christ’s sake listen to me. Listen to me. You think this is coincidence? Come on. Ashil, don’t open that door. You think we get to this, you think we figure this out, get this far and all of a sudden there’s a fucking uprising? Someone’s doing this, Ashil. To get you and all the Breach out and away from them.
“How did you find out about which companies were here when? The nights Mahalia delivered.”
He was motionless. “We’re Breach,” he said eventually. “We can do whatever we need …”
“Damn it, Ashil. I’m not some breacher for you to scare; I need to know. How do you investigate?”
At last: “Taps. Informants.” Glance up at the window, at a welling-up of the crisis sound. He waited by the door for more from me.
“Agents or systems in offices in Besźel and Ul Qoma tell you what you need to know, right? So someone somewhere was going through databases trying to find out who was where, when, in the Besź Chamber of Commerce.
“It’s been red-flagged, Ashil. You sent someone looking, and them pulling up files has been seen. What better evidence do you need that we’re onto something? You’ve seen the unifs. They’re nothing. Besźel and Ul Qoma, doesn’t make a difference, they’re a tiny bunch of dewy-eyed punks. There’s more agents than agitators; someone’s given an order. Someone’s engineered this because they’ve realised we’re onto them.
“Wait,” I said. “The lockdown … It’s not just Copula Hall, right? All borders to everywhere are closed, and no flights in or out, right?”
“BesźAir and Illitania are grounded. The airports aren’t taking incoming traffic.”
“What about private flights?”
“… The instruction’s the same, but they’re not under our authority like the national carriers, so it’s a bit more—”
“That’s what this is. You can’t lock them down, not in time. Someone’s getting out. We have to get to the Sear and Core building.”
“That’s where—”
“That’s where what’s happening’s happening. This …” I pointed at the window. We heard the shattering of glass, the shouts, the frenetics of vehicles in panicked rush, the fight sounds. “This is a decoy.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
IN THE STREETS we went through the last throes, the nerve twitches of a little revolution that had died before it was born, and had not known it. Those dying flails remained dangerous, though, and we were in a soldierly way. No curfew could contain this panic.
People were running, in both cities, along the street in front of us while the barks of public announcements in Besź and Illitan warned them this was a Breach lockdown.
Windows broke. Some figures I saw run did so with more giddiness than terror. Not unifs, too small and too aimless: teenagers throwing stones, in their most transgressive act ever, little hurled breaches breaking glass in the city they did not live or stand in. An Ul Qoman fire crew sped in its bleating engine the length of the road, towards where the night sky glowed. A Besź wagon followed seconds behind it: they were still trying to maintain their distinctions, one fighting the fire in one part of the conjoined facade, the other in the other.
Those kids had better get out of the street fast, because Breach were everywhere. Unseen by most still out that night, maintaining their covert methods. Running I saw other Breach moving in what could pass as the urban panic of citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma but was a somewhat different motion, a more purposeful, predatory motion like Ashil’s and mine. I could see them because of recent practice, as they could see me.
We saw a unif gang. It was shocking to me even then after days of interstitial life to see them running together, from both chapters, in clothes which despite their transnational punk-and-rocker jackets and patches clearly marked them, to those attuned to urban semiosis, as from, whatever their desire, either Besźel or Ul Qoma. Now they were grouped as one, dragging a grassroots breach with them as they went from wall to wall spraying slogans in a rather artful combine of Besź and Illitan, words that, perfectly legible if somewhat filigreed and seriffed, read TOGETHER! UNITY! in both languages.
Ashil reached. He carried a weapon he had prepared before we left. I had not seen it closely.
“We don’t have time …” I started to say, but from the shadows around that insurgence a small group of figures did not so much emerge as come into focus. Breach. “How do you move like that?” I said. The avatars were outnumbered, but they moved without fear into that group, where with sudden not dramatic but very brutal locks and throws they incapacitated three of the gang. Some of the others rallied, and the Breach raised weapons. I did not hear anything but two unifs dropped.
