The City & the City - China Mieville [94]
“Come on,” I interrupted. “You know most foreigners who breach are just ejected—” But she interrupted back.
“Even if I knew what they’d do, which neither of us do, think about it. A secret for like more than a thousand years, in between Ul Qoma and Besźel, watching us all the time, whether we know it or not. With its own agenda. You think I’d be safer if Breach had me? In the Breach? I’m not Mahalia. I’m not sure Orciny and the Breach are enemies at all.” She looked at me then and I did not disdain her. “Maybe they work together. Or maybe when you invoke you’ve been handing power to Orciny for centuries, while you all sit there telling each other it’s a fairy tale. I think Orciny is the name Breach calls itself.”
Chapter Twenty
FIRST SHE HAD NOT WANTED ME TO ENTER; then Yolanda did not want me to leave. “They’ll see you! They’ll find you. They’ll take you and then they’ll come for me.”
“I can’t stay here.”
“They’ll get you.”
“I can’t stay here.”
She watched me walk the width of the room, to the window and back to the door.
“Don’t—you can’t make a phone call from here—”
“You have to stop panicking.” But I stopped myself, because I was not sure that she was wrong to do so. “Aikam, are there other ways out of this building?”
“Not the way we came in?” He looked intently and emptily a moment. “Some of the apartments downstairs are empty, and maybe you could go through them …”
“Okay.” It had begun to rain, fingertipping against the obscured windows. Judging by the halfhearted darkening of the white windows, it was only just overcast. Washed out of colour, perhaps. Still it felt safer to escape than if it had been clear or coldly sunny, as it had that morning. I paced the room.
“You’re alone in Ul Qoma,” Yolanda whispered. “What can you do?” I looked at her at last.
“Do you trust me?” I said.
“No.”
“Too bad. You’ve no choice. I’m going to get you out. I’m not in my element here, but…”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to get you out of here, back to home ground, back to where I can make things happen. I’m going to get you to Besźel.”
She protested. She had never been to Besźel. Both cities were controlled by Orciny, both were overlooked by Breach. I interrupted her.
“What else are you going to do? Besźel’s my city. I can’t negotiate the system here. I have no contacts. I don’t know my way around. But I can get you out from Besźel, and you can help me.”
“You can’t—”
“Yolanda, shut up. Aikam, don’t move another step.” No time for this immobility. She was right, I could promise her nothing but an attempt. “I can get you out, but not from here. One more day. Wait here. Aikam, your job’s finished. You don’t work at Bol Ye’an any more. Your job’s to stay here and look after Yolanda.” He would provide little protection, but his continued interventions at Bol Ye’an would eventually attract other people’s attention than my own. “I will be back. You understand? And I’ll get you out.”
She had food for some days, a diet of tins. This little living room/bedroom, another, smaller, filled with only damp, the kitchen with its electricity and gas supplies disconnected. The bathroom was not good but it would not kill them another day or two: from some standpipe Aikam had brought buckets that stood ready to flush. The many air fresheners he had bought made a stink different than it would otherwise have been.
“Stay,” I said. “I’ll be back.” Aikam recognised the phrase, though it was in English. He smiled and so I said the words again for him in an Austrian accent. Yolanda did not get it. “I will get you out,” I said to her.
On the ground floor a few shoves at doors yielded me an empty apartment, a long time since fire-damaged but still smelling of carbon. I stood in its glassless kitchen and watched the hardiest girls and boys outside refuse to get out of the rain. I watched for a long time, looking into all the shadows I could see. I saw only those children. My sleeves pulled over my fingertips in case