The City & the City - China Mieville [133]
“You knew they’d try to kill you, but it was worth the risk to get rid of her. Camouflage.” Who would suspect him of complicity, after Orciny tried to kill him?
He had a slowly souring face. “Where is Buric?”
“Dead.”
“Good. Good …”
I stepped towards him. He pointed the artefact at me like some stubby Bronze Age wand.
“What do you care?” I said. “What are you going to do? How long have you lived in the cities? Now what?
“It’s over. Orciny’s rubble.” Another step, he still aiming at me, mouth-breathing and eyes wide. “You’ve got one option. You’ve been to Besźel. You’ve lived in Ul Qoma. There’s one place left. Come on. You going to live anonymous in Istanbul? In Sebastopol? Make it to Paris? You think that’s going to be enough?
“Orciny is bullshit. Do you want to see what’s really in between?”
A second held. He hesitated long enough for some appearance.
Nasty broken man. The only thing more despicable than what he had done was the half-hidden eagerness with which he now took me up on my offer. It was not bravery on his part to come with me. He held out that heavy weapon thing to me and I took it. It rattled. The bulb full of gears, the old clockworks that had cut Mahalia’s head when the metal burst.
He sagged, with some moan: apology, plea, relief. I was not listening and don’t remember. I did not arrest him—I was not policzai, not then, and Breach do not arrest—but I had him, and exhaled, because it was over.
BOWDEN HAD STILL NOT COMMITTED to where he was. I said, “Which city are you in?” Dhatt and Corwi were close, ready, and whichever shared a locus with him would come forward when he said.
“Either,” he said.
So I grabbed him by the scruff, turned him, marched him away. Under the authority I’d been granted, I dragged Breach with me, enveloped him in it, pulled him out of either town into neither, into the Breach. Corwi and Dhatt watched me take him out of either of their reaches. I nodded thanks to them across their borders. They would not look at each other, but both nodded to me.
It occurred as I led Bowden shuffling with me that the breach I had been empowered to pursue, that I was still investigating and of which he was evidence, was still my own.
Coda
BREACH
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I DID NOT SEE THAT MACHINE AGAIN. It was funnelled into the bureaucracy of Breach. I never saw whatever it was it could do, whatever Sear and Core wanted, or if it could do anything.
Ul Qoma in the aftermath of Riot Night was buoyed up with tension. The militsya, even after the remaining unifs had been cleared out or arrested, or hidden their patches and disappeared, kept up high-profile, intrusive policing. Civil libertarians complained. Ul Qoma’s government announced a new campaign, Vigilant Neighbours, neighbourliness referring both to the people next door (what were they doing?) and to the connected city (see how important borders are?).
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,