Free The City & the City by China Miéville

did, and we were right, and fidgety.
    When we drove out, I took Corwi—a provocation I admit though not aimed at her but at the universe in some way—for lunch in Besźel’s little Ul Qomatown. It was south of the park. With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the buildings’ designs, a squat self-parody. You can see the trimmings in the shade called Besźel Blue, one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma. These properties are local.
    These few streets—mongrel names, Illitan nouns and a Besź suffix, YulSainStrász, LiligiStrász, and so on—were the centre of the cultural world for the small community of Ul Qoman expatriates living in Besźel. They had come for various reasons—political persecution, economic self-betterment (and how the patriarchs who had gone through the considerable difficulties of emigrating for that reason must be rueing it now), whim, romance. Most of those aged forty and below are second and now third generation, speaking Illitan at home but Besź without an accent in the streets. There is maybe an Ul Qoman influence to their clothes. At various times local bullies and worse break their windows and beat them in the streets.
    This is where pining Ul Qoman exiles come for their pastries, their sugar-fried peas, their incense. The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons or wolves). But those smells are in Besźel.
    Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.
    “Boss,” Corwi said. We sat at a corner café, Con ul Cai, that I frequented. I had made a great show of greeting the proprietor by name, like doubtless many of his Besź clientele. Probably he despised me. “Why the fuck are we here?”
    “Come on,” I said. “Ul Qoman food. Come on. You know you want it.” I offered her cinnamon lentils, thick sweet tea. She declined. “We’re here,” I said, “because I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere. I’m trying to get into the spirit of Ul Qoma. Shit. You’re smart, Corwi, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. Help me with this.” I counted off on my fingers. “She was here, this girl. This Fulana, Byela.” I almost said Marya. “She was here—what?—three years ago. She was around dodgy local politicos, but she was looking for something else, which they couldn’t help her with. Something even they thought was dodgy. She leaves.” I waited. “She was going to Ul Qoma.” I swore, Corwi swore.
    “She’s been researching stuff,” I said. “She goes over.”
    “We think.”
    “We think. Then suddenly she’s back here.”
    “Dead.”
    “Dead.”
    “Fuck.” Corwi leaned in, took and began thoughtfully to eat oneof my pastries, stopped mouth full. For a long time neither of us said anything.
    “It is. It’s fucking breach, isn’t it?” Corwi said eventually.
    “… It looks like it might be breach, I think—yes I think it does.”
    “If not to get over, to come back. Where she gets done. Or postmortem. Gets dumped.”
    “Or something. Or something,” I said.
    “Unless she crossed