The City & the City - China Mieville [91]
“You don’t know!” She turned to me. “I don’t trust you—”
“Okay, okay, I never said you did.” A strange reassurance. Aikam watched us jabbering. “So do you never leave?” I said. “What do you eat? Tins? I guess Aikam comes, but not often …”
“Can’t come often. How did you even find me?”
“He can explain. He got a message to come back. For what it’s worth he was trying to look after you.”
“He does that.”
“I can see.” Dogs began to fight outside, noise told us. Their owners joined in. My phone buzzed, audible even with the ringer off. She started and backed away as if I might shoot her with it. The display told me it was Dhatt.
“Look,” I said. “I’m turning it off. I’m turning it off.” If he was paying attention, he would know his call was rerouted to voicemail before the rings had all sounded out. “What happened? Who got to you? Why did you run when you did?”
“I didn’t give them the chance. You saw what happened to Mahalia. She was my friend. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going down like that, but she’s dead.” She said it with what sounded almost like awe. Her face collapsed and she shook her head. “They killed her.”
“Your parents haven’t heard from you …”
“I can’t. I can’t, I have to …” She bit her nails and glanced up. “When I get out…”
“Straight to the embassy next country along? Through the mountains? Why not here? Or in Besźel?”
“You know why.”
“Say I don’t.”
“Because they’re here, and they’re there too. They run things. Looking for me. It’s just ’cause I got away when I did that they haven’t found me. They’re ready to kill me like they killed my friend. Because I know they’re there. Because I know they’re real.” Her tone alone was enough reason for Aikam to hug her then.
“Who?” Let’s hear it.
“The third place. Between the city and the city. Orciny.”
A WEEK OR SO would have been long enough ago for me to tell her she was being foolish or paranoid. The hesitation—when she told me about the conspiracy, there were those seconds when I was tacitly invited to tell her she was wrong, during which I was silent-vindicated her beliefs, gave her to think I agreed.
She stared and thought me a co-conspirator, and not knowing what was occurring I behaved like one. I could not tell her her life was not in danger. Nor that Bowden’s was not—perhaps he was dead already—nor mine, nor that I could keep her safe. I could tell her almost nothing.
Yolanda had stayed hidden in this place, that her loyal Aikam had found and tried to prepare, in this part of town that she had never intended to so much as visit and of which she did not know the name the day before she arrived here, after an arduous, circuitous and secret midnight dash. He and she had done what they could to make the place bearable, but it was an abandoned hovel in a slum, that she could not quit for terror of being spotted by the unseen forces she knew wanted her dead.
I would say that she could never have seen the like of this place before, but that may not be true. Maybe she had once or twice watched a documentary named something like The Dark Side of the Ul Qoma Dream or The Sickness of the New Wolf or what have you. Films about our neighbour were not generally popular in Besźel, were rarely distributed, so I could not vouch, but it would not be surprising if some blockbuster had been made with the backdrop of gangs in the Ul Qoma slums—the redemption of some not-too-hardcore drug-runner, the impressive murder of several others. Perhaps Yolanda had seen footage of the failed estates of Ul Qoma, but she would not have meant to visit.
“Do you know your neighbours?”
She did not smile. “By voice.”
“Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”
“They got Mahalia, they got Doctor Bowden, now they’re going to get me.”
“I know you’re afraid, but you have to help me. I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know what happened. If I don’t know, I can’t help you.”
“Help me?” She looked around the room. “You want me to tell you what’s up? Sure, you ready to bunk down here? You’ll have to, you know. If you know what’s going