China Mieville

by The City

  “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

  BREACH

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  IT WAS NOT A SOUNDLESS DARK. It was not without intrusions. There were presences within it that asked me questions I could not answer, questions I was aware of as urgencies at which I failed. Those voices again and again said to me, Breach. What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena where I was quarry.

  I REMEMBERED THAT LATER. In the moment I woke it was without a sense of time having passed. I closed my eyes in the crosshatched streets of the Old Towns; I opened them again and gasped for breath and looked into a room.

  It was grey, without adornment. It was a small room. I was in a bed, no, on it. I lay on top of the sheets in clothes I did not recognise. I sat up.

  Grey floor in scuffed rubber, a window admitting light at me, tall grey walls, stained in places and cracked. A desk and two chairs. Like a shabby office. A dark glass half-globe in the ceiling. There was no sound at all.

  I was blinking, standing, nowhere near as groggy as I felt I should have been. The door was locked. The window was too high for me to see through. I jumped up, which did send a little spin through my head, but I saw only sky. The clothes I wore were clean and terribly nondescript. They fit me well enough. I remembered what had been with me in the dark, then, and my heart and my breath began to speed.

  The soundlessness was enervating. I gripped the lower rim of the window and pulled myself up, my arms trembling. With nothing on which to brace my feet I could not stay in the position long. Roofs spread out below me. The slates, satellite dishes, flat concrete, ajut girders and antennae, the onion domes, corkscrew towers, gasrooms, the backs of what might be gargoyles. I could not tell where I was, nor what might be listening beyond the glass, guarding me from outside.

  “Sit.”

  I dropped hard at the voice. I struggled to my feet and turned.

  Someone stood in the doorway. Light behind him, he was a cutout of darkness, a lack. When he stepped forward he was a man fifteen or twenty years my senior. Tough and squat, in clothes as vague as my own. There were others behind him: a woman my age, another man a little older. Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.

  “Sit.” The older man pointed to a chair. “Come out of the corner.”

  It was true. I was flattened into the corner. I realised it. I slowed my lungs and stood straighter. I took my hands away from the walls. I stood like a proper person.

  After a long time I said, “How embarrassing.” Then, “Excuse me.” I sat where the man indicated. When I could control my voice I said, “I’m Tyador Borlú. And you?”

  He sat and looked at me, his head to one side, abstract and curious like a bird.

  “Breach,” he said.

  “BREACH,” I SAID. I took a shaky breath. “Yes, Breach.”

  Finally he said, “What were you expecting? What are you expecting?”

  Was that too much? Another time I might have been able to tell. I was looking around nervily as if to catch sight of something almost invisible in the corners. He pointed his right hand at me fork-fingered, index and middle digits one at each of my eyes, then at his own: Look at me. I obeyed.

  The man glanced at me from under his brows. “The situation,” he said. I realised we were both speaking Besź. He did not sound quite Besź, nor Ul Qoman, but was
certainly not European or North American. His accent was flat.

  “You breached, Tyador Borlú. Violently. You killed a man by it.” He watched me again. “You shot from Ul Qoma right into Besźel. So you are in the Breach.” He folded his hands together. I watched how his thin bones moved under his skin: just like mine. “His name was Yorjavic. The man you killed. Do you remember him?”

  “You knew him from before.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You told us. It’s up to us how you go under, how long you stay there, what you see and say while you’re there, when you come out again. If you come out. Where did you know him from?”

  I shook my head but—“The True Citizens,” I said suddenly. “He was there when I questioned them.” Who had called Gosz the lawyer. One of the tough, cocky nationalist men.

  “He was a soldier,” the man said. “Six years in the BAF. A sniper.”

  No surprise. It was an amazing shot. “Yolanda!” I looked up. “Jesus, Dhatt. What happened?”

  “Senior Detective Dhatt will never fully move his right arm again, but he’s recovering. Yolanda Rodriguez is dead.” He watched me. “What hit Dhatt was intended for her. It was the second shot that went through her head.”

  “God damn.” For seconds I could only look down. “Do her family know?”

  “They know.”

  “Was anyone else hit?”

  “No. Tyador Borlú, you breached.”

  “He killed her. You don’t know what else he’s—”

  The man sat back. I was already nodding an apology, a hopelessness, when he said, “Yorjavic didn’t breach, Borlú. He shot over the border, in Copula Hall. He never breached. Lawyers might have an argument: was the crime committed in Besźel where he pulled the trigger, or Ul Qoma where the bullets hit? Or both?” He held out his hands in an elegant who cares? “He never breached. You did. So you are here, now, in the Breach.”

  WHEN THEY LEFT, food came. Bread, meat, fruit, cheese, water. When I had eaten I pushed and pulled at the door, but there was no way I could move it. I fingertipped its paint, but it was only splitting paint or its messages were in a more arcane code than I could decrypt.

  Yorjavic was not the first man I had shot, nor even the first I had killed, but I had not killed many. I had never before shot someone not raising a gun at me. I waited for shakes. My heart was slamming but it was with where I was, not guilt.

  I was alone a long time. I walked the room every way, watched the globe-hidden camera. I pulled myself up to stare out of the window at the roofs again. When the door opened again, it was twilight looking down. The same trio entered.

  “Yorjavic,” the older man said, in Besź again. “He did breach in one way. When you shot him you made him. Victims of breach always breach. He interacted hard with Ul Qoma. So we know about him. He had instructions from somewhere. Not from the True Citizens. Here’s how it is,” he said. “You breached, so you’re ours.”

  “What happens now?”

  “Whatever we want. Breach, and you belong to us.”

  They could disappear me without difficulty. There were only rumours about what that would mean. No one ever heard even stories about those who had been taken by Breach and—what?—served their time. Such people must be impressively secretive, or never released.

  “Because you may not see the justice of what we do doesn’t mean it’s unjust, Borlú. Think of this, if you want, as your trial.

  “Tell us what you did and why, and we might see ways to perform actions. We have to fix a breach. There are investigations to be carried out: we can talk to those who haven’t breached, if it’s relevant and we prove it. Understand? There are less and more severe sanctions. We have your record. You’re police.”

  What was he saying? Does that make us colleagues? I did not speak.

  “Why did you do this? Tell us. Tell us about Yolanda Rodriguez, and tell us about Mahalia Geary.”

  I said nothing for a long time but had no plan. “You know? What do you know?”

  “Borlú.”

  “What’s out there?” I pointed at the door. They had left it a little open.

  “You know where you are,” he said. “What’s out there you’ll see. Under what conditions depends on what you say and do now. Tell us what got you here. This fool’s conspiracy that’s recurred, for the first time in a long time. Borlú, tell us about Orciny.”

  THE SEPIA ILLUMINATION from the corridor was all they let light me, in a wedge, a slice of inadequate glow that kept my interrogator in shade. It took hours to tell them the case. I did not dissemble because they must already know everything.

  “Why did you breach?” the man said.

  “I hadn’t meant to. I wanted to see where the shooter went.”

  “That was breach then. He was in Besźel.”

  “Yes, but you know. You know that happens all the time. When he smiled, the look he had, I just… I was thinking about Mahalia and Yolanda …” I paced closer to the door.

  “How did he know you’d be there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a nat, and a crazy one, but he’s obviously got contacts.”

  “Where is Orciny supposed to be in this?”

  We looked at each other. “I’ve told you everything I know,” I said. I held my face in my hands, looked over my fingertips. It looked as if the man and woman in the doorway weren’t paying attention. I ran hard at them, I thought without any warning. One—I do not know which—hooked me in midair and sent me across the room into the wall and down. Someone hit me, the woman it must be, because my head was tugged up and the man stood leaning still in the doorway. The older man sat at the table waiting.

  The woman straddled my back and held me in some neck-lock. “Borlú, you are in Breach. This room is where your trial is taking place,” the older man said. “This can be where it’s finished. You’re beyond law now; this is where decision lives, and we are it. Once more. Tell us how this case, these people, these murders, connects to this story of Orciny.”

  After many seconds he said to the woman, “What are you doing?”

  “He’s not choking,” she said.

  I was, so far as her hold would allow, laughing.

  “This isn’t about me,” I said at last, when I was able. “My god. You’re investigating Orciny.”

  “There is no such place as Orciny,” the man said.

  “So everyone tells me. And yet things keep happening, people keep disappearing or dying, and there’s that word again and again, Orciny.” The woman got off me. I sat on the floor and shook my head at it all.

  “You know why she never came to you?” I said. “Yolanda? She thought you were Orciny. If you said How could there be a place between the city and the city? she’d say Do you believe in the Breach? Where’s that? But she was wrong, wasn’t she? You’re not Orciny.”

  “There is no Orciny.”

  “So why are you asking all this? What have I been running from for days? I just saw Orciny or something a lot like it shoot my partner. You know I’ve breached: what do you care about the rest of it? Why aren’t you just punishing me?”

  “As we say—”

  “What, this is mercy? Justice? Please.

  “If there’s something else between Besźel and Ul Qoma, where does that leave you? You’re hunting. Because it’s suddenly back. You don’t know where Orciny is, or what’s going on. You’re …” Hell with it. “You’re afraid.”

  ***

  THE YOUNGER MAN AND WOMAN left and returned with an old film projector, trailing a lead into the corridor. They fiddled with it and it hummed, and made the wall a screen. It projected scenes from an interrogation. I scooted back to see better, still sitting on the floor.

  The subject was Bowden. A snap of static and he was speaking in Illitan, and I saw that his interrogators were militsya.

  “… don’t know what happened. Yes, yes I was hiding because someone was coming after me. Someone was trying to kill me. And when I heard Borlú and Dh
att were getting out, I didn’t know if I could trust them but I thought maybe they could get me out too.”

  “… have a gun?” The voice of the interrogator was muffled.

  “Because someone was trying to kill me, is why. Yes, I had a gun. You can get one on half the street corners in East Ul Qoma, as well you know. I’ve lived here for years, you know.”

  Something.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” That was audible.

  “Because there is no such thing as Orciny,” Bowden said.

  Something. “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think, or what Mahalia thought, or what Yolanda said, or what Dhatt’s been insinuating, and no I have no idea who called me. But there’s no such place.”

  A big loud crack of distressed image-sound, and there was Aikam. He was just weeping and weeping. Questions came, and he ignored them to weep.

  The picture changed again and Dhatt was in Aikam’s place. He was not in uniform and his arm was in a sling.

  “I fucking do not know,” he shouted. “Why the fuck are you asking me? Go get Borlú, because he seems to have a damn sight more of an idea what the fuck is going on than I do. Orciny? No I fucking don’t, because I’m not a child, but here’s the thing, even though it’s goddamn obvious Orciny’s a pile of shit, something is still going on, people are still getting hold of information they should not be able to, and other people are still being shot in the head by forces unknown. Fucking kids. That is why I agreed to help Borlú, illegal be fucked, so if you’re going to take my badge go the fuck ahead. And be my guest—disbelieve in Orciny all you want, I fucking do. But keep your head down in case that nonexistent fucking city shoots you in the face. Where is Tyador? What’ve you done?”

  The picture went still on the wall. The interrogators looked at me in the light of Dhatt’s oversized monochrome snarl.