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 over 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.”
There were many minutes of silence between us. “There are people I’d like to call,” I said.
HE WAS RIGHT. I imagined myself in Besźel now, unseeing the Ul Qoma of the crosshatched terrain. Living in half of the space. Unseeing all the people and the architecture and vehicles and the everything in and among which I had lived. I could pretend, perhaps, at best, but something would happen, and Breach would know.
“It was a big case,” he said. “The biggest ever. You’ll never have so big a case again.”
“I’m a detective,” I said. “Jesus. Do I have any choice?”
“Of course,” he said. “You’re here. There’s Breach, and there’s those who breach, those to whom we happen.” He did not look at me but out over the overlapping cities.
“Are any volunteers?”
“Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.
We walked towards my old flat, my press-ganger and I.
“Can I say good-bye to anyone? There are people I want to—”
“No,” he said. We walked.
“I’m a detective,” I said again. “Not a, whatever. I don’t work like you do.”
“That’s what we want. That’s why we were so glad you breached. Times are changing.”
So the methods may not be so unfamiliar as I feared. There may be others who proceed the traditional Breach way, the levering of intimidation, that self-styling as a night-fear, while I—using the siphoned-off information we filch online, the bugged phone calls from both cities, the networks of informants, the powers beyond any law, the centuries of fear, yes, too, sometimes, the intimations of other powers beyond us, of unknown shapes, that we are only avatars—was to investigate, as I have investigated for years. A new broom. Every office needs one. There’s a humour to the situation.