“You have to forgive me, Councillor,” I said eventually. “I don’t know what to say to that. This young woman lived in Ul Qoma. Officially, I mean, we have the records. She disappears. She turns up dead in Besźel.” I frowned. “I’m not really sure … What else would you suggest was evidence?”
“Circumstantial, though. I mean, have you checked the Foreign Office? Have you found out, for example, whether perhaps Miss Geary left Ul Qoma for some event in Budapest or something? Maybe she did that, then came to Besźel? There’s almost two weeks unaccounted for, Inspector Borlú.”
I stared. “As I say, she wouldn’t have got back into Besźel after her little performance …”
He made an almost regretful face and interrupted me. “Breach is … an alien power.” Several of the Besź and some of the Ul Qoman members of the committee looked shocked. “We all know it’s the case,” Syedr said, “whether it is polite to acknowledge it or not.
“Breach is an I say it again alien power , and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a—apologies if I offend, but—a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.”
“Are you joking, Councillor?” someone said.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Buric began.
“We don’t all cosy up to enemies,” Syedr said.
“Chair,” Buric shouted. “Will you allow this slander? This is outrageous …” I watched the new nonpartisan spirit I had read about.
“Of course where its intervention’s necessary I fully support invocation,” Syedr said. “But my party’s been arguing for some time that we need to stop … rubber-stamping the ceding to the Breach of considerable authority. How much research have you actually done, Inspector? Have you spoken to her parents? Her friends? What do we actually know about this poor young woman?”
I should have been more prepared for this. I had not expected it.
I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn’t? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes . I was not used to seeking permissions, invoking, this arcane way. Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Besźel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.
When I was fourteen I saw the Breach for the first time. The cause was the most common of all such—a traffic accident. A boxy little Ul Qoman van—this was more than thirty years ago, the vehicles on Ul Qoma’s roads were much less impressive than they are now—had skidded. It had been travelling a crosshatched road, and a good third of the cars in that area were Besź.
Had the van righted, the Besź drivers would have responded traditionally to such an intrusive foreign obstacle, one of the inevitable difficulties of living in crosshatched cities. When an Ul Qoman stumbles into a Besź, each in their own city; if an Ul Qoman’s dog runs up and sniffs a Besź passerby; a window broken in Ul Qoma that leaves glass in the path of Besź pedestrians—in all cases the Besź (or Ul Qomans, in the converse circumstances) avoid the foreign difficulty as best they can without acknowledging it. Touch if they must, though not is better. Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it. (Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish from the other city, it’s just rubbish, and it drifts across borders, like fog, rain and smoke.)
The van driver I saw did not recover. He ground diagonally across the tarmac—I do not know what the street is in Ul Qoma, it was KünigStrász in Besźel—and thudded into the wall of a Besź boutique and the pedestrian window-shopping there. The Besź man died; the Ul Qoman driver was badly hurt. People in both cities were screaming. I did not see the impact, but my mother did, and grabbed my hand so hard I shouted in pain before I even registered the noise.
The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.
I was older than that when I looked up to see the bloody result of that breaching accident, and remember remembering those arcana, and that they were bullshit. In that moment when my mother and I and all of us there could not but see the Ul Qoman wreck, all that careful unseeing I had recently learned was thrown.
In seconds, the Breach came. Shapes, figures, some of whom perhaps had been there but who nonetheless seemed to coalesce from spaces between smoke from the accident, moving too fast it seemed to be clearly seen, moving with authority and power so absolute that within seconds they had controlled, contained, the area of the intrusion. The powers were almost impossible, seemed almost impossible, to make out. At the edges of the crisis zone the Besź and, I could still not fail to see, Ul Qoman police were pushing away the curious in their own cities, taping off the area, closing out outsiders, sealing off a zone inside of which, their quick actions still visible though child-me so afraid to see them, Breach, organising, cauterising, restoring.
These kind of rare situations were when one might glimpse Breach, performing what they did. Accidents and border-perforating catastrophes. The 1926 Earthquake, a grand fire. (There had once been a fire grosstopically close to my apartment. It had been contained in one house, but a house not in Besźel, that I had unseen. So I had watched footage of it piped in from Ul Qoma, on my local TV, while my living room windows had been lit by the fluttering red glow of it.) The death of an Ul Qoman bystander from a stray Besź bullet in a stickup. It was hard to associate those crises with this bureaucracy.
I shifted and looked about the room at nothing. Breach has to account for its actions to those specialists who invoke it, but that does not feel like a limitation to many of us.
“Have you spoken to her colleagues?” Syedr said. “How far have you taken this?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to them. My constable has, of course, to verify our information.”
“Have you spoken to her parents? You seem very keen to divest yourself of this investigation.” I waited a few more seconds before speaking over the muttering on both sides of the table.
“Corwi’s got word to them. They’re flying in. Major, I’m not sure you understand the position we’re in. Yes I am keen. Don’t you want to see the murderer of Mahalia Geary found?”
“Alright, enough.” Yavid Nyisemu. He galloped his fingers on the table. “Inspector, you might not take that tone. There’s a concern, both reasonable and growing, among representatives that we’re too quick to cede to Breach in situations where we might actually choose not to, and that doing so’s dangerous and potentially even a betrayal.” He waited until eventually his requirement was clear and I made a noise that could be thought apology. “However,” he continued. “Major, you might also consider being less argumentative and ridiculous. For goodness’ sake, the young woman’s in Ul Qoma, disappears, turns up dead in Besźel. I can hardly think of a more clear-cut case. Of course we’ll be endorsing the surrender of this to Breach.” He cut the air with his hands as Syedr began to complain.