The City & the City - China Mieville [134]
“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