He tapped my chest. “Breathe.”
HE TOOK US BY METRO IN UL Qoma, where I sat still as if the remnants of Besźel clung to me like cobwebs and would frighten fellow passengers, out and onto a tram in Besźel, and it felt good, as if I were back home, misleadingly. We went by foot through either city. The feeling of Besźel familiarity was replaced by some larger strangeness. We stopped by the glass-and-steel frontage of UQ University Library.
“What would you do if I ran?” I said. He said nothing.
Ashil took out a nondescript leather holder and showed the guard the sigil of Breach. The man stared at it for seconds, then jumped to his feet.
“My God,” he said. He was an immigrant, from Turkey judging from his Illitan, but he had been here long enough to understand what he saw. “I, you, what can I …?” Ashil pointed him back to his chair and walked on.
The library was newer than its Besź counterpart. “It will have no classmark,” Ashil said.
“That’s the point,” I said. We referred to the map and its legend. The histories of Besźel and Ul Qoma, carefully separately listed but shelved close to each other, were on the fourth floor. The students in their carrels looked at Ashil as he passed. There was in him an authority unlike that of parents or tutors.
Many of the titles we stood before were not translated, were in their original English or French. The Secrets of the Precursor Age; The Literal and the Littoraclass="underline" Besźel, Ul Qoma and Maritime Semiotics . We scanned for minutes—there were many shelves. What I was looking for, and there at last on the second-to-top shelf three rows back from the main walkway found, pushing past a confused young undergraduate as if I were the one with authority here, was a book marked by lack. It was unadorned at the bottom of its spine with a printed category mark.
“Here.” The same edition I had had. That psychedelic doors-of-perception-style illustration, a long-haired man walking a street made patchwork from two different (and spurious) architectural styles, from the shadows of which watched eyes. I opened it in front of Ashil. Between the City and the City . Markedly worn.
“If all this is true,” I said quietly, “then we’re being watched. You and me, now.” I pointed to one of the pairs of eyes on the cover.
I riffled the pages. Ink flickers, most pages annotated in tiny scrawclass="underline" red, black, and blue. Mahalia had written in an extra-fine nib, and her notes were like tangled hair, years of annotations of the occult thesis. I glanced behind me, and Ashil did the same. No one was there.
NO , we read in her hand. NOT AT ALL , and REALLY? CF HARRIS ET AL , and LUNACY!! MAD!!! and so on. Ashil took it from me.
“She understood Orciny better than anyone,” I said. “That’s where she kept the truth.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“THEY’VE BOTH BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT what’s happened to you,” Ashil said. “Corwi and Dhatt.”
“What did you tell them?”
A look: We don’t speak to them at all . That evening he brought me colour copies, bound, of every page, and inside and outside covers, of Mahalia’s Ul Qoma copy ofBetween . This was her notebook. With effort and attention, I could follow a particular line of reasoning from each tangled page, could track each of her readings in turn.
That evening Ashil walked with me in that both-cities. The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel –continental and middle-history brickwork of Besźel, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Besźel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing. Being in both cities had gone from being in Besźel and Ul Qoma to being in a third place, that nowhere-both, that Breach.
Everyone, in both cities, seemed tense. We had returned through the two crosshatched cities not to the offices where I had woken—they were in Rusai Bey in Ul Qoma or TushasProspekta in Besźel, I had back-figured-out—but to another, a middling-smart apartment with a concierge’s office, not too far from that larger HQ. On the top floor the rooms extended across what must be two or three buildings, and in the warrens of that, Breach came and went. There were anonymous bedrooms, kitchens, offices, outdated-looking computers, phones, locked cabinets. Terse men and women.
As the two cities had grown together, places, spaces had opened between them, or failed to be claimed, or been those controversial dissensi . Breach lived there.
“What if you get burgled? Doesn’t that happen?”
“Time to time.”
“Then …”
“Then they’re in Breach, and they’re ours.”
The women and men stayed busy, carrying out conversations that fluctuated through Besź, Illitan, and the third form. The featureless bedroom into which Ashil put me had bars on its windows, another camera somewhere, for sure. There was an en-suite toilet. He did not leave. Another two or three Breach joined us.
“Look at this,” I said. “You’re evidence this could all be real.” The interstitiality which made Orciny so absurd to most citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma was not only possible but inevitable. Why would Breach disbelieve life could thrive in that little gap? The anxiety was now rather something like We have never seen them , a very different concern.
“It can’t be,” Ashil said.
“Ask your superiors. Ask the powers. I don’t know.” What other, higher or lower, powers were there in Breach? “You know we’re watched. Or they were—Mahalia, Yolanda, Bowden—by something somewhere.”
“There’s nothing linking the shooter to anything.” That was one of the others, speaking Illitan.
“Alright.” I shrugged. I spoke in Besź. “So he was just a random, very lucky right-winger. If you say so. Or maybe you think it’s insiles, doing this?” I said. None of them denied the existence of the fabled scavenging interstitial refugees. “They used Mahalia, and when they were done they killed her. They killed Yolanda, in a way exactly so you couldn’t chase them. As if of all the things in Besźel, Ul Qoma, or anywhere, what they’re most scared of is Breach.”
“But”—a woman pointed at me—“look what you did.”
“Breached?” I had given them a way in to whatever this war was. “Yes. What did Mahalia know? She worked something out about what they had planned. They killed her.” The overlaid glimmer of nighttime Ul Qoma and Besźel lit me through the window. I made my ominous point to a growing audience of Breach, their faces like owls’.
They locked me in overnight. I read Mahalia’s annotations. I could discern phases of annotation, though not in any pagewise chronology—all the notes were layered, a palimpsest of evolving interpretation. I did archaeology.
Early on, in the lowest layers of marks, her handwriting was more careful, the notes longer and neater, with more references to other writers and to her own essays. Her idiolect and unorthodox abbreviations made it hard to be sure. I started page on page trying to read, transcribe, those early thoughts. Mostly what I discerned was her anger.
I felt a something-stretched-out over the night streets. I wanted to talk to those I had known in Besźel or Ul Qoma, but I could only watch.
Whatever unseen bosses, if any, waited in the Breach’s bowels, it was Ashil who came for me again the next morning, found me going over and over those notes. He led me the length of a corridor to an office. I imagined running—no one seemed to be watching me. They would stop me, though. And if they did not, where would I go, hunted in-betweener refugee?