David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“And when your boyish good looks ebb away, D’Arnoq?”

“Then I’d be alive again, and not … what I am now.”

Something creaks on the decking outside.

Am I being set up? I peer out: a raccoon.

“Did you share your new views with Mr. Pfenninger?”

“If you’re going to sit there and take the piss, Marinus, I’ll hang up on you. Apostasy is a capital crime in the Shaded Way Codex. A fact you ought to use, by the way — my only chance of survival is to help you annihilate your enemy before they kill me.”

Damn Elijah D’Arnoq, but I have to ask: “How, exactly, do you suggest we annihilate our enemy?”

“By psycho-demolishing the Chapel of the Dusk.”

“We tried that. You’ll be aware of how it ended.” Though I’m less sure I am, after tonight’s box from Norway.

“Defeat for Horology, but on your First Trespass, you didn’t know what you were dealing with. Did you?”

“Will you cure us of that ignorance?”

D’Arnoq’s pause goes on a long, long time. “Yes, I will.”

I’d give Elijah D’Arnoq’s defection a five percent chance of being genuine, but Esther Little glimpsed it, and if I’m not mistaken, she wants me to treat D’Arnoq as an ally, or at least let him think I believe him. “I’m all ears.”

“No. We need to meet face-to-face, Marinus.”

Down to one percent. He’ll propose a meeting in a man-trap, and its jaws will snap shut. “Where do you suggest?”

The raccoon turns its Zorro-masked face my way.

“Don’t go all Deep Streamy on me, but I’m speaking from your car, on the drive. My balls are freezing. Get a fire going, will you?”

THE AIR IS SHARPER at the Poughkeepsie station than it was at Grand Central Station, but the sun is out and melting the last of the winter-long snow on the platform. With a cohort of students discussing skiing trips to Europe, internships at the Guggenheim, and viral zoonoses, I walk over the footbridge and through the turnstiles, the churchlike 1920s waiting room, and out to the curbside, where a woman a few years older than I is waiting in a black bodywarmer by a hybrid Chevrolet and holding a board for DR I. FENBY. Her foamy hair is dyed auburn but the gray is showing through, and her turquoise-framed glasses only heighten her sickly pallor. An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody’s turned up to. “Good morning,” I tell her. “I’m Dr. Fenby.”

The driver tenses: “ You ’re Dr. Fenby? You?”

Why the surprise? Because I’m black? In a campus town in the 2020s? “Ye-es … There’s no problem, I trust?”

“ No . No. No. Climb in. That’s all the luggage you got?”

“I’m only a day-tripper.” Still puzzled, I get into the Chevrolet. She climbs in behind the wheel and puts on her seatbelt. “So it’s up to Blithewood campus today, Dr. Fenby?” Her voice is stippled with bronchial issues.

“That’s right.” Did I misgrade her reaction just now? “Drop me off by the president’s house, if you know it.”

“Not a problem. I must’ve driven Mr. Stein up and down a hundred times. Is it the president you’re visiting today?”

“No. I’m meeting … someone else.”

“Right.” Her driver ID tag reads WENDY HANGER. “Off we go, then. Chevrolet: ignition.” The car turns itself on, the indicator blinks, and we pull away. Wendy Hanger looks jumpy on her ID photo, too. Maybe life’s never allowed her to lower her guard. Maybe she’s just clocked up a fourteen-hour shift. Maybe she just drank too much coffee.

We pass parking lots, a tire-and-exhaust fitters, a Walmart, a school, and a plastic moldings unit. My driver is the silent type, which suits me fine. My thoughts go back to last night’s meeting held in the gallery at 119A. Unalaq, the local, arrived before me; Ōshima flew up from Argentina; Arkady, able to travel more freely now that he is eighteen, came over from Berlin, Roho from Athens, and L’Ohkna from Bermuda. It’s been years since we were all gathered in the same place. Sadaqat submitted to an Act of Hiatus and we began. My five colleagues listened as I set out the facts of Elijah D’Arnoq’s visit two nights ago to my Kleinburg house, his wish to defect, and the proposed Second Mission. Naturally, they were all skeptical.

“So soon?” asked Roho, peering over a canopy of interlaced fingers as slim, dark, and bony as the rest of him. Smooth-shaven, Egyptian-bodied Roho looks designed to slip through narrow spaces nobody else would even think of. He’s young for an Horologist, on only his fifth resurrection, but under Ōshima’s tutelage is becoming a formidable duelist. “The First Mission was five years in the planning, and it ended in disaster. To plan a Second Mission in a matter of days would be …” Roho wrinkles his nose and shakes his head.

“D’Arnoq makes it sound all too easy,” remarked Unalaq. Her first life as an Inuit in northern Alaska dyed her soul indelibly with the far north, but her current midthirties body is pure Boston Irish redhead, though with skin swarming with so many freckles that her ethnicity is far from obvious. “Far too easy.”

“We appear to agree,” said Ōshima. Ōshima is one of the oldest Horologists in both his soul, dating back to thirteenth-century Japan, and body, dating back to 1940s Kenya. He dresses to accentuate what Roho calls his “unemployed jazz drummer” look, in an old trenchcoat and shabby beret. In a pyschoduel, however, Ōshima is more dangerous than any of us. “D’Arnoq’s proposal has the word ‘trap’ written all over it. In flashing neon.”

“But D’Arnoq did let Marinus scansion him,” remarked Arkady. In stark contrast to his last, East Asian self, Arkady’s soul now occupies a big-boned, gangly, blond, acne-prone, Hungarian male body whose teenage voice is not quite settled. “And the self-disgust, the grief about the Brazilian kid,” Arkady double-checks with me, “you did locate them, in his present-perfect memory? And you’re sure they were genuine?”

“Yes,” I conceded, “although they could be implanted memories. The Anchorites would know that we wouldn’t take a defector at face value without a frame-by-frame scansion. It’s perfectly possible that D’Arnoq volunteered to be turned against the Shaded Way by Pfenninger himself, so that D’Arnoq is a true believer in his own false defection …”

“All the way to another firing squad in the Chapel,” agreed Ōshima, “where Pfenninger would redact D’Arnoq’s artificial remorse and psychoslay the Horologists it lured there. I have to admit, it’s clever. It sounds like a Constantin ploy.”

“My vote would be no.” L’Ohkna is residing in a pale, balding, and puffy Ulsterman’s body in its midthirties. L’Ohkna is the youngest Horologist, having been found by Xi Lo in a New Mexico commune in the 1960s during his first resurrection. While L’Ohkna’s psychovoltage is still limited, he has become the principal architect of the Deep Internet, or “Nethernet,” and his dozens of aliases are being fruitlessly hunted by every major security agency on earth. “One misstep and Horology dies. Simple as.”

“But isn’t the enemy taking a big risk, too?” asked Unalaq. “Turning one of their own strongest psychosoterics against the Anchorites and the Blind Cathar?”

“Yes,” agreed Ōshima, “but they know what they’re doing. They need to offer us a shiny prize and a juicy bait. But tell us, Marinus: What are your thoughts about this unexpected overture?”

“I think it’s an ambush, but we should accept it anyway, then, between now and the Second Mission, engineer a means of ambusing the ambush. We’ll never win the War by force. Every year, we save a few, but look at Oscar Gomez, snatched from a secure unit headed by one of my own students. Social media flag up active chakras before we can inoculate them. Horology’s drifting towards irrelevance. There aren’t enough of us. Our networks are fraying.”