David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

DON’T WALK turns to WALK and I miss my chance. Crossing Madison, I taste paranoia, and glance at people in the waiting vehicles, half expecting to see Pfenninger or Constantin staring back with hunters’ eyes. The last block to the park is busier with foot traffic so I’m even jumpier. Is that iShaded jogger with the baby stroller really a jogger? Didn’t that curtain twitch as Holly passed by? Why would a young surveyor with his tripod watch a gaunt woman in her fifties so closely? He eyes me up as well, so maybe he’s just not fussy. Ōshima keeps pace on the pavement opposite, blending into the morning bustle far better than me. We pass Saint James’s Church, whose red-brick steeple once towered above this rural neighborhood of Manhattan. Yu Leon Marinus attended a wedding here in 1968. The bride and groom will be in their eighties now, if they’re still alive.

On Fifth Avenue traffic is lumbering and foul-tempered. Holly stands behind a cluster of Chinese tourists. They’re agreeing in loud Cantonese how New York is smaller, tattier, and crappier than they’d expected. Across the road, Ōshima is leaning casually against the corner of the Frick Collection, his face hooded. A bus passes with a digital ad for the newly released movie of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die , but Holly is staring blankly at the park. I calm down. My instinct says we’re safe from the enemy until we reach her hotel on Broadway. If she hasn’t turned around by then, I’ll have to ignore my scruples and perform an Act of Suasion on Holly for her own safety. The Anchorites won’t try anything rash. The fallout from public assassinations is too messy. Reality on Fifth Avenue this drizzly morning is exactly as it appears.

A CHUNKY NYPD 4×4 pulls up onto the pavement, and a young black female officer swings out onto the sidewalk, holding her ID. “Ma’am? Are you Holly Sykes?”

Holly is yanked back to the here and now: “Yes, I — yes, is—”

“And you are the mother of Aoife Brubeck?”

I look for Ōshima, who’s already crossing the street. A large male officer has joined his colleague. “Holly Sykes?”

“Yes.” Holly’s hand goes to her mouth. “Is Aoife okay?”

“Ms. Sykes,” says the female officer in rapid-fire speech, “our precinct had a call earlier from the British consular office asking for us to put out an all-unit alert for you — we missed you by minutes at your hotel earlier. I’m afraid your daughter was involved in an auto collision in Athens last night. She’s undergone surgery, she’s stable for now, but you’re being asked to fly home on the next plane. Ms. Sykes? You hearing me?”

“Athens?” Holly supports herself on the hood of the patrol car. “But Aoife’s on an island … What … How badly—”

“Ma’am, we really don’t have any details, but we’ll drive you to the Empire Hotel so you can pack. Then we’ll take you to the airport.”

I step forward to do I don’t know what, but Ōshima pulls me back: I’m sensing intense psychovoltage in the car; if it’s a high Anchorite and we engage in full combat on Fifth Avenue, every hippocampus within a fifty-meter radius’ll get shredded, including Holly’s. Feds, Homeland Security, who knows who’ll be scouring footage of us, looking suspicious as all hell, tracking Holly from 119A?

Ōshima’s right, but: We can’t just let them take her.

Meanwhile Holly’s being half coaxed, half herded into the squad car. She’s trying to ask more questions, but she’s had a mind-bending morning and is scared into passivity. Perhaps she’s being suasioned, too. In an agony of indecision, I watch the door slam shut and the vehicle pull off into the traffic, surging over the intersection just before the lights turn red. The windows are blacked out so I can’t see who or what numbers we’re dealing with. The sign says WALK and the pedestrians begin to cross. Sixty seconds was all it took to drop and smash our Second Mission.

ŌSHIMA LEADS ME over the crossing. “I’ll do the transversing.”

“No, Ōshima, it was my error of judgment so—”

“Strap on your horsehair shirt later. I’m the better transverser, and I’m just nastier. You know I am.” There’s no time to argue. We step over the low wall of the park by the Hunt Monument, where we sit on a damp bench. He grips one arm of the bench with one hand, and my hand with the other. Cord yourself into my stream , Ōshima subsuggests. I’ll need your advice, like as not .

“Whatever that’s worth. But I’ll be with you.”

He squeezes my hand, shuts his eyes, and his body slumps a little as his soul egresses through his chakra-eye. Even to psychosoterics, the soul is on the edge of what’s visible, like a clear glass marble in a jar of water, and Ōshima’s soul is lost in a second as it transverses upwards between the dripping twigs and the weather-stained old monument. I pull Ōshima’s hat down to hide his face and shield both of us under my umbrella. A vacated body looks like a medical emergency, and at various points across my metalife I’ve ingressed myself only to find smelling salts up my nose, an artery being bled, or a stranger with halitosis administering inept CPR. Moreover, as I sync up our hand-chakras, Ōshima and I resemble a pair of lovers. Even by New York’s laissez-faire standards, we would be worth a gawp.

I connect with Ōshima’s cord …

… and images from Ōshima’s soul stream directly into my mind. He’s gliding through a Cubist kaleidoscope of brake lights, roof racks, the tops of cars, branches, and budding leaves. Down we swoop, passing through the rear door of a van, between pig carcasses swinging on hooks, through the driver’s tarry lung, then out through the windscreen, arcing over a United Parcels van, and still higher, scaring a collared pigeon off its streetlight perch. Ōshima hangs for a moment, searching for the squad car: Are you with me, Marinus?

I’m here , I subreply.

Can you see the squad car?

No . A garbage truck edges forward and I see the yellow of the school bus: Try near that school bus .

Ōshima flies down, through the back window of the bus, along the aisle, between forty children arguing, talking, clustered round a 3D slate, staring into space, and out past the driver and …

… the klaxon and lights of the police car, shunting along slowly. Ōshima enters through the rear windscreen and hovers for a moment, circling, to stream me a view of what we’re dealing with. To Holly’s left sits the female cop — or alleged cop. The driver is the burly male who helped hustle Holly into the car. Sitting on Holly’s right is a man wearing a suit and a Samsung wraparound that half hides his face, but we know him. Drummond Brzycki , substates Ōshima.

An odd choice. Brzycki’s the newest and weakest Anchorite.

Maybe they’re not expecting trouble, guesses Ōshima.

Maybe he’s a canary in a coal mine, I subreply .

I’ll ingress the woman , subsays Ōshima, and see if I can find out her orders . He enters the female officer’s chakra-eye and I now have access to her sensory input. “All we know, honey,” she’s telling Holly, “is what I already told ya. If I knew more I’d tell ya. I’m achin’ for ya, honey, I am. I’m a mom too. Two little ones.”

“But is Aoife’s spine okay? How — how serious is the—”

“Don’t distress yourself, Ms. Sykes.” Drummond Brzycki flips up his wraparounds. Brzycki has Mediterranean-goalkeeper good looks, lush black hair, and a nasal voice, like a wasp trapped in a wineglass. “The consul’s out of his meeting at ten. We’ll device him direct, so whatever facts he has, you’ll get from the horse’s mouth. Okay?”