The crowds got out of my way; they saw me coming with my militsya emblazoning, saw the pistol I held, and scattered. The militsya saw one of their own, in pursuit of something, and did not stop me. I turned the emergency lights on and started the engine.
I sent the car breakneck, dodging local and foreign cars, screaming outside the length of Copula Hall. The siren confused me, I was not used to Ul Qoman sirens, a ya ya ya more whining than our own cars’. The shooter was, must be, fighting his way through the terrified and confused thronging tunnel of travellers. My lights and alarm cleared the roads before me, ostentatiously in Ul Qoma, on the topolganger streets in Besźel with the typical unstated panic of a foreign drama. I yanked the wheel and the car snapped right, bumped over Besź tram tracks.
Where was Breach? But no breach had occurred.
No breach had occurred though a woman had been killed, brazenly, across a border. Assault, a murder and an attempted murder, but those bullets had travelled across the checkpoint itself, in Copula Hall, across the meeting place. A heinous, complex, vicious killing, but in the assiduous care the assassin had taken—to position himself just so at the point where he could stare openly along the last metres of Besźel over the physical border and into Ul Qoma, could aim precisely down this one conduit between the cities—that murder had been committed with if anything a surplus of care for the cities’ boundaries, the membrane between Ul Qoma and Besźel. There was no breach, Breach had no power here, and only Besź police were in the same city as the killer now.
I turned right again. I was back where we had been an hour before, in Weipay Street in Ul Qoma, which shared the crosshatched latitude-longitude with the Besź entrance to Copula Hall. I drove the car as close as the crowds let me, braked hard. I got out and jumped on its roof—it would not be long before Ul Qoman police would come to ask me, their supposed colleague, what I was doing, but now I jumped on the roof. After a second’s hesitation I did not stare into the tunnel at the oncoming Besź escaping the attack. I looked instead all around, into Ul Qoma, and then in the direction of the hall, not changing my expression, giving away nothing that suggested that I might be looking anywhere other than at Ul Qoma. I was unimpeachable. The car’s stuttering police lights turned my legs red and blue.
I let myself notice what was happening in Besźel. Many more travellers were still trying to enter Copula Hall than leave it, but as the panic within spread there was a dangerous contraflow. There was commotion, lines backing up, those behind who did not know what it was they had seen or heard blocking those who knew very well and were trying to flee. Ul Qomans unsaw the Besź melee, looked away and crossed the road to avoid the foreign trouble.
“Get out, get out—”
“Let us in, what’s …?”
Among the clots and grots of panicked escapees I saw a hurrying man. He caught my attention by the care with which he tried not to run too fast, not to be too large, to raise his head. I believed it was, then that it was not, then that it was, the shooter. Pushing his way past a last shouting family and a chaotic line of Besź policzai trying to impose order without knowing what it was they should do. Pushing his way out and turning, walking with his hurried careful step away.
I must have made a sound. Certainly those scores of yards away the killer glanced backwards. I saw him see me and reflexively unsee, because of my uniform, because I was in Ul Qoma, but even as he dropped his eyes he recognised something and walked even faster away. I had seen him before, I could not think where. I looked around desperately, but none of the policzai in Besźel knew to follow him, and I was in Ul Qoma. I jumped off the roof of the car and walked quickly after the murderer.
Ul Qomans I shoved out of the way: Besź tried to unsee me but had to scurry to get out of my path. I saw their startled looks. I moved faster than the killer. I kept my eyes not on him but looking at some spot or other in Ul Qoma that put him in my field of vision. I tracked him without focusing, just legally. I crossed the plaza and two Ul Qoman militsya I passed called some tentative query at me which I ignored.
The man must have heard the sound of my step. I had come within a few tens of metres when he turned. His eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of me, which, careful even then, he did not hold. He registered me. He looked back into Besźel and sped up, trotting diagonally away toward ErmannStrász, a high street, behind a Kolyub-bound tram. In Ul Qoma, the road we were on was Saq Umir Way. I accelerated too.
He glanced back again and went faster, jogging through the Besź crowds, looking quickly to either side into the cafés lit by coloured candles, into the bookshops of Besźel—in Ul Qoma these were quieter alleys. He should have entered a shop. Perhaps he did not because there were crosshatched crowds he would have to negotiate on both pavements, perhaps his body rebelled at dead ends, cul-de-sacs, while pursued. He began to run.
The murderer ran left, into a smaller alley, where still I followed him. He was fast. He was faster than me now. He ran like a soldier. The distance between us grew. The stallholders and walkers in Besź stared at the killer; those in Ul Qoma stared at me. My quarry vaulted a bin that blocked his way, with greater ease than I knew I would manage. I knew where he was going. The Old Towns of Besźel and Ul Qoma are closely crosshatched: reach their edges, separations begin, alter and total areas. This was not, could not be, a chase. It was only two accelerations. We ran, he in his city, me close behind him, full of rage, in mine.
I shouted wordlessly. An old woman stared at me. I was not looking at him, I was still not looking at him, but fervently, legally, at Ul Qoma, its lights, graffiti, pedestrians, always at Ul Qoma. He was by iron rails curled in traditional Besź style. He was too far. He was by a total street, a street in Besźel only. He paused to look up in my direction as I gasped for breath.
For that sliver of time, too short for him to be accused of any crime, but certainly deliberate, he looked right at me. I knew him, I did not know from where. He looked at me at the threshold to that abroad-only geography and made a tiny triumphant smile. He stepped toward space where no one in Ul Qoma could go.
I raised the pistol and shot him.
I SHOT HIM IN THE CHEST. I saw his astonishment as he fell. Screaming from everywhere, at the shot, first, then his body and the blood, and almost instantly from all the people who had seen, at the terrible kind of transgression.
“Breach.”
“Breach.”
I thought it was the shocked declaration by those who had witnessed the crime. But unclear figures emerged where there had been no purposeful motion instants before, only the milling of no ones, the aimless and confused, and those suddenly appeared newcomers with faces so motionless I hardly recognised them as faces were saying the word. It was statement of both crime and identity.
“Breach.” A grim-featured something gripped me so that there was no way I could break out, had I wanted to. I glimpsed dark shapes draped over the body of the killer I had killed. A voice close up to my ear. “Breach.” A force shoving me effortlessly out of my place, fast fast past candles of Besźel and the neon of Ul Qoma, in directions that made sense in neither city.
“Breach,” and something touched me and I went under into black, out of waking and all awareness, to the sound of that word.
Part Three