Rewriting Under Pressure

The pursuit began in the bakers' alley, which had been, until Thursday afternoon at approximately a quarter past three, the kind of alley a person could walk down without being chased through; and the conversion of it, in the space of a single in-breath, from a walking-alley into a being-chased-through alley was, Iyla noted even as her legs began to do the running, a useful demonstration of how quickly the function of a place could change without any of its physical particulars changing at all.

There were three of them behind her. She had not, at the moment of turning, taken a proper count, because the taking of proper counts was a thing one did from a stopped position, but she had registered, in the small peripheral way the body registered such things when it was about to be required to run, a configuration of three: two she did not know, in the loose grey coats the Society favoured for fieldwork, and behind them, walking — not running, walking, which was worse — a third figure whose unhurried gait she recognised, with the small cold recognition reserved for unwelcome competences, as Saroya's.

She ran. She ran in the direction of the river, because the river was, on the map she had drawn in her notebook in October, the longest straight feature in the city, and a long straight feature was the kind of thing a pursued person wanted available, on the grounds that turnings were where pursuers caught up. She ran for perhaps thirty seconds before she understood that running was someone else's strategy. This was her city.

She stopped at the corner of bakers' alley and the small unnamed lane that ran down to the dye-pits. She took out the notebook. She wrote, fast, in a hand that was not her best hand but was legible enough for the purpose: the lane behind me ends in a wall. The wall is brick. The wall is taller than a person. There is no door in the wall.

She did not look up to check. She was already running again, toward the river, because the checking would have cost her the second and a half during which the lane was deciding, in whatever way a lane decided, what it was now going to be; and she had learned, from the experiment with naming, that the deciding happened faster when she did not stand and watch it happen.

She heard, behind her, a sound that was very nearly funny, although she did not, in the moment, laugh: the sound of three pairs of boots arriving, at speed, at a place that had — judging by the small confused shuffle and the sharp exhalation of a person who has run into masonry — recently acquired a wall. Then, a beat later, Saroya's voice, calm and slightly amused, saying something to the two grey coats that Iyla could not make out but whose tone she could, which was the tone of a person noting an interesting development for later analysis rather than the tone of a person dismayed by it.

The river was four streets away. Iyla took the second street rather than the first, because the first street ran past the Fountain of the Civil Argument, and around the Fountain of the Civil Argument no voice could be raised — she had built the convention into the stone of the basin, and the stone held it: within thirty feet of the water a shout came out of a person as a murmur, a command as a request. It was a fine thing to have made and a poor thing to be chased past, because today she wanted the option of a raised voice — to call out, if it came to that, for Tev — and a street that would not let her have one was a street to avoid.

She wrote, on the run, jolting: the second street has, at its midpoint, a market stall selling rope. The stall has been here for years. The rope is good rope. There is a coil of it on the left side of the stall, at hand height.

She arrived at the midpoint of the second street. The stall was there. It had, around it, the small settled dustiness of a stall that had been there for years, which was, she thought even in passing, a nice touch on the city's part; the city was, she noted, getting good at the years-ness of things she had only just specified. She took the coil. The stall-keeper, a woman she had not invented and did not know, said something brisk and disapproving about payment, and Iyla said, over her shoulder, "I'll come back with a story," and the woman said, with the small dry humour of a person who had heard that before, "they all say that," and Iyla, despite everything, found that she had, in the running, smiled.

She reached the river. She had written, into the river in October, three bridges; the nearest was a low stone one. She did not want stone — stone was permanent, and she wanted a bridge she could cross fast and then unmake.

She stopped at the bridge. She wrote, in the notebook: this bridge is made of wood. The planks are loose in the particular way that means a person crossing fast in a group of three will find the third plank from the far end give way under the third person to cross it.

She read it. The sentence was trying to be clever and would, she could see, fail in some way she did not have time to discover. She crossed it out and wrote underneath: this bridge is made of wood, and as I cross it, it is sound; and after I have crossed it, the far end of it is no longer attached to its bank, and any person attempting to cross after me will find the bridge swinging, gently, against the near bank, and will have to find another crossing.

The bridge, when she ran across it, was sound. She felt it hold under her boots. On the far side, she turned. She watched the first of the grey coats arrive at the near bank, set a foot on the first plank, and watch the far end of the bridge detach itself from the stone with a small almost apologetic sound, like a door closing in a house where someone was asleep. The grey coat stepped back. The grey coat looked, briefly, irritated. Behind the grey coat, Saroya arrived at the bank, took in the bridge, and looked across at Iyla with an expression that contained, Iyla saw, a small note of professional appreciation and a larger note of patience.

Iyla ran on. She ran along the far bank, which was, she now realised, a bank she had not described in any particular detail, and the underdescription of it was beginning to tell: the ground was vague underfoot, the buildings on her left a kind of approximate frontage that did not, when she glanced at it, quite resolve into doors and windows. This, she understood, was a problem. The vague places were the easiest places for the Society to enter, because vague places, she had decided in her rules in October, were the places that had not yet been named into permanence; and she did not want, today, to be running through the part of her city that the Society could most easily walk into from the side.

She stopped. She was breathing badly. She made herself breathe properly, because the writing of useful sentences required the kind of breath that was not currently available to her, and she had perhaps a minute, perhaps less, before Saroya found the other bridge.

She wrote: the far bank of the river, from the old wooden bridge down to the bend, is a row of seven houses. The houses are painted, from north to south, in the following colours: blue, blue, yellow, white, white, green, red. The red house has a black door. The black door is locked. The key to the black door is in my left coat pocket.

She put her hand in her left coat pocket. The key was there. It had the small specific weight of a key she had carried for years, although she had, of course, carried it for approximately four seconds; and she noted, with the part of her mind that was still, even now, taking notes, that the city had once again done the years-ness of a thing better than she would have thought to ask for.

She ran to the red house. She unlocked the black door. She went in. She locked the door behind her, and then — because locking a door behind her was a thing the Society could simply unwrite, given a few minutes and a willing hand — she wrote, fast, on the inside of the notebook page she had been using: the red house has, on its ground floor, one room. The room has no windows. The room has, in its far wall, a small hatch. The hatch opens onto the bend in the river, downstream of the bridge. The hatch is big enough for a person.

She looked up. The room was as she had written it. The hatch was where she had said it would be, big enough for a person and not a millimetre bigger; the city had read her sentence as a contract rather than as a suggestion, and she filed the fact away — that a loose word would be honoured as loosely as she had written it — for a later she hoped to have.

She climbed through the hatch. She came out on the river bend, downstream as promised, with the city's afternoon light coming sideways across the water in the dust-gold she had described in her very first paragraph in October. She paused. She had perhaps two minutes before they worked out the geometry. She used the first of them badly, trying to write a single long sentence that would do four things at once — close the hatch, make the river uncrossable, summon Tev, hide her footprints — and the sentence, trying to do all four, did none.

She crossed the sentence out. She wrote, in its place, three short sentences, in an order. One: the hatch closes and the wall behind it is brick. Two: my footprints, from the river bend to the place I am about to go, are the footprints of a person who walked here yesterday and not today. Three: Tev knows I am here.

The three sentences held where the long one had not. She did not stop to wonder why.

She heard, somewhere behind her, the small sound of brick where a hatch had been. She heard, somewhere ahead of her, footsteps that were not the footsteps of the grey coats, because they were unhurried in a different way; they were the unhurried of a person walking toward her on purpose, and the purpose was, she understood without looking, Tev's. She walked on, into the part of the city she had not yet had to revise, with the notebook open in her hand and the pen uncapped, because she was not, she now understood, going to be allowed to put either of them down for some time.