The Bone Clocks (70 page)

“If our defector is fake, and his promise to show us how to safely demolish the Chapel is a lie and a trap, then that contingency is real.”

“Marinus means yes,” says Ōshima. “A suicide mission.”

“Christ,” says Holly. “So are you going up alone, Esther?”

Esther shakes Unalaq’s head. “If D’Arnoq is luring the last Horologists up the Way of Stones, he’ll want
all
of the last Horologists, not just one. If the Second Mission
is
an ambush, I’ll need the others to buy me time. Detonating your soul isn’t a beginner’s party trick.”

I hear the piano, faintly. Inez is playing “My Wild Irish Rose.”

Holly asks, “So
if
Esther has to blow up this—enemy HQ, say, and assuming she succeeds …” She looks at the rest of us.

“Dusk dissolves living tissue,” says Ōshima. “The End.”

“Unless,” I venture, “there was a way back to the Light of Day that we don’t yet know about. One built by an ally. On the inside.”

Half a mile above us, a cloud passes between our skylight and our nearest star and the oblong of sunshine fades away.

Holly reads me. “What is it you still haven’t told me?”

I look at Esther, who shrugs Unalaq’s shoulders:
You’ve known her the longest
. So I say what I won’t be able to unsay later: “On the First Mission, neither I nor Esther actually saw Xi Lo die.”

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. Holly shifts in her seat. “What did you see?”

“Not a lot in my case,” I say. “I was pouring all my psychovoltage into our shield. But Esther was next to Jacko when Xi Lo’s soul egressed and …” I look at my colleague.

“And ingressed the chakra-eye on the icon of the Blind Cathar. He wasn’t being dragged like a victim. Xi Lo transversed in, like a bullet. And … the instant before he vanished, I heard Xi Lo subtell me three words:
I’ll be here
.”

“We don’t know,” I admit, “if this was a spur-of-the-moment act, or a plan that Xi Lo hadn’t shared, for reasons of his own. If Xi Lo hoped to sabotage the Chapel, he failed. One hundred and sixty-four people have lost their lives and souls in the Chapel of the Dusk since 1984. One poor man was abducted from a secure psychiatric ward in Vancouver only last week. But … Esther thinks that Xi Lo has been preparing the way for the Second Mission. Holly? Are you okay?”

Holly dabs the sleeves of Inez’s shirt against her eyes. “Sorry, I … That ‘I’ll be here,’ ” she says. “I heard it too. In my daymare, in the underpass, outside Rochester.”

Esther is fascinated. “Your voices, your certainties, are silent for you now, but do you remember when it used to insist on something? Maybe the sense was obscure, but the Script refused to change. Do you remember how that felt?”

Holly swallows and composes herself. “I do.”

“The Script insists that Xi Lo is, somehow, alive. To this day.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “if you view Xi Lo as a body snatcher or”—a fierceness is growing in Holly’s whole demeanor—“as a bookshelf, say, of many books, the newest of which is called
Jacko Sykes
. None of us is saying, ‘If you join the Second Mission, you’ll get your brother back,’ because we’re so much in the dark ourselves, but—”

“Your Xi Lo,” Holly interrupts, “is my Jacko. You loved your founder, your friend, as I loved—
love
—my brother. Dunno, maybe that makes me an idiot. I mean, you’re a club of immortal professors who’ve probably
read
these books”—she indicates the four walls of bookshelves, rising to the skylight—“while I left school without one A-level, even. Or maybe I’m even sadder than that, maybe I’m just clutching at straws, magic straws, hoping,
hoping
, pathetically, like a mother paying her life savings to a psychic shyster to ‘channel’ her dead son … But y’know what? Jacko’s still my brother, even if he
is
better known as Xi Lo and older than Jesus, and if the shoe was on the other foot, he’d come and find me. So, Marinus, if there’s one chance in a thousand that Xi Lo or Jacko is in this Chapel of the
Dusk or Dunes or wherever and this Second Mission of yours’ll get me to him, I’m in. You’re not stopping me. Just you bloody try.”

The oblong of light is back and motes of dust swirl in the sunshine slanting down the wall of books. Golden pollen.

“Our War must strike you as otherworldly, but dying in the Chapel is just as final as dying in a car crash here. Consider Aoife—”

“Earlier, you said you can’t guarantee Aoife’s safety, or mine, unless these Anchorites are taken down. That
is
right, yeah?”

My conscience wants a recess, but I must agree. “Yes, I stand by that statement. But our enemy is dangerous.”

“Look, I’m a cancer survivor, I’m in my fifties, and I’ve never shot an air pistol even, and I’ve got no”—her hand dances—“psychopowers. Not like you, anyway. But I’m Aoife’s mother and Jacko’s sister and these—these individuals have harmed, or threatened, people
I
love. So here’s the thing:
I’m
dangerous.”

For what it’s worth,
subremarks Ōshima,
I believe her.

“Sleep on it,” I tell Holly. “Decide in the morning.”

I
NEZ DRIVES
. She’s wearing dark glasses to hide the effects of a sleepless abysmal night. The wipers squelch every few seconds. We don’t say much and there’s not a lot to say. Unalaq sits up front, and Ōshima, Holly, Arkady, and I are squashed into the back. Ōshima’s hosting Esther today. New York is damp, in a hurry, and indifferent to the fact that we Horologists plus Holly are risking our metalives and life for total strangers, their psychovoltaic children, and for the unborn whose parents have not yet met. I notice details I ordinarily overlook. Faces, textures, materials, signs, flows. There are days when New York strikes me as a conjuring trick. All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know. I’ve seen it with my eyes. Today, however, New York’s
here
-ness is incontestable, as if time is subject to it, not it subject to time. What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks, and more bricks than there are stars? Who could ever have predicted these vertical upthrusts and squally canyons in Klara Koskov’s lifetime, when I first traveled here with Xi Lo and Holokai—my friends the Davydovs? Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepôt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen. If consciousness exists beyond the Last Sea and I go there today, I’ll miss New York as much as anywhere.

Inez turns off Third Avenue into our street. For the last time? These thoughts don’t help. Will I die without ever reading
Ulysses
to the end? Think of the case files I’m leaving back in Toronto, the paperwork, the emails, the emotions that my colleagues, friends,
neighbors, and patients will pass through as I change from being “the AWOL Dr. Fenby” to “the Missing Dr. Fenby” to “Dr. Fenby, presumed dead.” No, don’t think. We pull up to 119A. If Horology has a home, it’s this place, with its oxtail-soup red bricks and darkframed windows of differing shapes. Inez tells the car, “Park,” and the hazards lights flick on.

“Be careful,” Inez says to Unalaq. Unalaq nods.

“Bring her back,” Inez says to me.

“I’ll do my best,” I say. My voice sounds thin.

119
A
RECOGNIZES
H
OROLOGISTS
and lets us in. Sadaqat greets us behind the inner shield on the first floor. Our faithful warden is dressed like a parody survivalist, with army fatigues and a dozen pockets, a compass around his neck. “Welcome home, Doctor.” He takes my coat. “Mr. L’Ohkna’s in the office. Mr. Arkady, Miss Unalaq, Mr. Ōshima. And Ms. Sykes.” Sadaqat’s face drops. “I only hope you have recovered from the vicious and cowardly attack by the enemy. Mr. Arkady told me what happened.”

Holly: “I’ve been well taken care of. Thank you.”

“The Anchorites are abominable. They are vermin.”

“Their attack persuaded me to help Horology,” says Holly.

“Good,” says Sadaqat. “Absolutely. It is black and white.”

“Holly is joining our Second Mission,” I tell our warden.

Sadaqat shows surprise, and a gram of confusion. “Oh? I was not aware that Ms. Sykes had studied Deep Stream methodology.”

“She hasn’t,” says Arkady, hanging up his coat. “But we all have a role to play in the hours ahead, don’t we, Sadaqat?”

“True, my friend.” Sadaqat insists on collecting everyone else’s coat for the closet. “So true. And are there any other last minute … modifications to the Mission?”

Sadaqat’s been well prepared, but he can’t quite keep the hunger out of his voice.

“None,” I say. “None. We will act with acute caution, but we will take Elijah D’Arnoq at face value—unless he betrays us.”

“And Horology has its secret weapon.” Sadaqat glows. “Myself. But it is not yet ten o’clock, and Mr. D’Arnoq is not due to appear until eleven, so I made some muffins. You can smell them, I think?” Sadaqat smiles like a buxom chocolatier tempting a group of dieters who know they want to. “Banana and morello cherries. An army cannot march on an empty stomach, my friends.”

“I’m sorry, Sadaqat,” I step in, “but we shouldn’t eat. The Way of Stones can induce nausea. An empty stomach is in fact best.”

“But surely, Doctor, just a
tiny
mouthful can’t hurt? They are fresher than fresh. I put white chocolate chips in the mix, too.”

“They’ll be just as awesome on our return,” says Arkady.

Sadaqat doesn’t push it. “Later, then. To celebrate.”

He smiles, showing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of American dental care, paid for by Horology, of course. Sadaqat owns very little not earned from or given by Horology. How could he? He spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital outside Reading, England. A freelance Carnivore had got herself employed as a secretary in the hospital, and had groomed a psychovoltaic patient who had shared confidences with Sadaqat before the poor woman’s soul was decanted. I disposed of the Carnivore after quite a strenuous duel in her sunken garden, but rather than redact what Sadaqat had learned about the Atemporal world, I set about isolating the section of his brain harboring his schizophrenia and severing its neural pathways to the unimpaired regions. This cured him, after a fashion, and when he declared his undying gratitude I brought him over to New York to be the warden of 119A. That was five years ago. One year ago our faithful retainer was turned during a series of incorporeal encounters and rendezvous in Central Park, where Sadaqat exercises daily, whatever the weather. Ōshima, who first noticed the Anchorites’ fingerprints on our warden, was all for redacting the last six years from Sadaqat’s memory and suasioning him aboard a container ship to the Russian Far East. A mixture of sentimentality and a reluctant intuition that we could deploy the Anchorites’ mole against his new masters persuaded me to stay Ōshima’s hand. It has been a perilous twelve months of second- and third-guessing our
enemy’s intentions, and L’Ohkna had to recalibrate 119A’s sensors to detect toxins in case Sadaqat was ordered to poison us, but it all comes to an end this very morning, for good or for ill.

How I loathe this war.

“Come,” Ōshima tells Sadaqat. “Let’s check the circuitry in our box of tricks one last time …”

They go upstairs to ensure the hardware needs no last-minute adjustments. Arkady goes up to the garden to do Tai Chi in the halfhearted drizzle. Unalaq retreats to the common room to send instructions to her Kenyan network. I go to the office to transfer the Horology protocols to L’Ohkna. The task is soon done. The young Horologist shakes my hand and tells me he hopes we’ll meet again, and I tell him, “Not as much I do.” Then he departs 119A through the secret exit. Thirty minutes remain before D’Arnoq’s appearance. Poetry? Music? A game of pool.

I go down to the basement, where I find Holly setting up. “I hope it was okay to help myself. Everyone sort of vanished, so I just …”

“Of course. May I join you?”

She’s surprised. “You play?”

“When not battling with the devil over a chessboard, nothing calms the nerves like the click of cue tip on phenolic resin.”

Holly lines up the pack of balls and removes the triangle. “Can I ask another question about Atemporals?” I give her a
fire-away
face. “Do you have families?”

“We’re often resurrected into families. A Sojourner’s host usually has blood relatives around like Jacko did. We form attachments, like Unalaq and Inez. Until the twentieth century, traveling alone as an unmarried woman was problematic.”

“So you’ve been married yourself?”

“Fifteen times, though not since the 1870s. More than Liz Taylor and Henry the Eighth combined. You’re curious to know if we can conceive children, however.” I make a gesture to brush her awkwardness away. “No. We cannot. Terms and conditions.”

“Right.” Holly chalks her cue. “It’d be tough, I s’pose, to …”

“To live, knowing your kids died of old age decades ago. Or that they
didn’t
die, but won’t see this loon on the doorstep who insists he’s Mom or Dad, reincarnated. Or discover you’ve impregnated your great-great-grandchild. Sometimes we adopt, and often it works well. There’s never a shortage of children needing homes. So I’ve never borne or fathered a child, but what you feel for Aoife, that unhesitating willingness to rush into a burning building, I’ve felt that too. I’ve gone into burning buildings, as well. And one sizable advantage of infertility was to spare my female selves getting banged up as breeding stock all their lives, as was the fate of most women between the Stone Age and the Suffragettes.” I gesture at the table. “Shall we?”

“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”

“Throw me a heads.”

She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.