David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“But they know I’ve got a daughter! What if they hurt her?”

“Look, look, look. Look at this.” Unalaq passes her a slate. “Aoife’s blog. Today she found three shards of a Phoenician amphora and some cat bones. Posted forty-five minutes ago, at sixteen seventeen Greek time. She’s fine. You can message her, but don’t, don’t , refer to any of today’s events. That would risk embroiling her.”

Holly reads her daughter’s entry and her panic subsides a notch. “But just ’cause those people haven’t hurt her yet, it doesn’t—”

“This week the Anchorites’ attention is focused on Manhattan,” says Ōshima. “But to be safe, your daughter has a bodyguard. Roho’s one of us, too.” And one that the Second Mission can ill spare , Ōshima subreminds me.

Again, Holly is all at sea. She tucks some loose strands of hair under her head-wrap. “Aoife’s on an archaeological dig, on a remote Greek island. How … I mean, why … No.” Holly looks for her shoes. “Look, I just want to go home.”

I break the brutal truth gently: “You’d get as far as the Empire Hotel, but you wouldn’t leave the building alive. I’m sorry.”

“Even if you slip through that net,” Ōshima extends the brutal truth more bluntly, “the next time you used an ATM card, your device, your slate, an Anchorite would find you within a few minutes. Even without using those methods, unless you’re hidden by a Deep Stream cloak, they could get to you with a quantum totem.”

“But I live in the west of Ireland! That’s not gangster country.”

“You’d not be safe on the goddamn International Space Station, Ms. Sykes,” says Ōshima. “And the Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk belong to a higher order of threat than gangsters.”

She looks at me. “So what must I do to be safe? Stay here forever?”

“I think,” I tell her, “you’ll only be safe if we win our War.”

“If we don’t win,” says Unalaq, “it’s over for all of us.”

Holly Sykes shuts her eyes, giving us one last chance to vanish and to return to her life as it was at Blithewood Cemetery before a slightly chubby African Canadian psychiatrist strolled into view.

Ten seconds later, we’re still here.

She sighs and tells Unalaq, “Tea, please. Splash of milk, no sugar.”

“ ‘HOROLOGY’?” REPEATS Holly in Unalaq’s kitchen. “Isn’t that clocks?”

“When Xi Lo founded our Horological Society,” I say, “the word meant ‘the study of the measurement of time.’ It was a sort of self-help group, you could say. Our founder was a London surgeon in the 1660s — he appears in Pepys’s diary, by the by — and acquired a house in Greenwich as a headquarters, a storage facility, and a noticeboard to help us stay connected down through time, from one self to the next.”

“In 1939,” says Unalaq, “we shifted to 119A — where you visited this morning — because of the German threat.”

“So Horology is a social club for you … Atemporals?”

“It is,” says Unalaq, “but Horology has a curative function, too.”

“We assassinate,” states Ōshima, “carnivorous Atemporals — like the Anchorites — who consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality. I thought Marinus told you this earlier.”

“We do give them a chance to mend their ways,” says Unalaq.

“But they never do,” says Ōshima, “so we have to mend their ways for them, permanently.”

“They are serial killers,” I tell Holly. “They murder kids like Jacko, and teenagers like you were. Again and again and again. They don’t stop. Carnivores are addicts and their drug is artificial longevity.”

Holly asks, “And Hugo Lamb is one of these serial killers?”

“Yes. He’s sourced prey eleven times since … Switzerland.”

Holly swivels her eternity ring. “And Jacko was one of you?”

“Xi Lo founded Horology,” says Ōshima. “Xi Lo led me to the Deep Stream. To psychosoterica. He was irreplaceable.”

Holly thinks of a small boy with whom she shared only eight Christmases. “How many of there are you?”

“Seven, definitely. Eight, possibly. Nine, hopefully.”

Holly frowns. “Quite a small-scale war, then, isn’t it?”

I think of Oscar Gomez’s wife. “Was there anything ‘small-scale’ about Jacko’s disappearance for the Sykes family? Eight is very few, but we were only ten when we inoculated you. We build networks. We have allies and friends.”

“And how many Carnivores are there?”

“We don’t know,” says Unalaq. “Hundreds, worldwide.”

“But whenever we find one,” Ōshima inserts a meaningful pause, “there soon becomes one less.”

“The Anchorites endure, however,” I say. “The Anchorites are our enemy through time. Can we prevent all the Carnivores in the world from committing animacide? No. But whom we save, we save, and every one is a victory.”

Pigeons croon and huddle on Unalaq’s window boxes.

“Let’s say I believe you,” says Holly. “Why me? Why do these Anchorites want to — Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this — want to kill me? And what am I to you?” She looks around the table. “Why do I matter in your War?”

Ōshima and Unalaq look at me. “Because you said ‘Yes,’ forty years ago, to a woman named Esther Little, who was fishing off a rickety wooden pier jutting out over the Thames.”

Holly stares at me. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Esther told me about the encounter. That day, in 1984.”

“ You were in Gravesend? That Saturday Jacko went?”

“My body was. My soul was in Jacko’s skull, as Jacko lay in his bed in the Captain Marlow. Esther Little’s soul was there too, as was the soul of Holokai, another colleague. With Xi Lo’s soul, that made four Greeks hiding in the belly of the Trojan Horse. Miss Constantin appeared in the room, through the Aperture, and ushered Jacko up the Way of Stones into the Chapel of the Dusk.”

“The place the Blind Cathar built?” Holly’s voice is dry.

“The place the Blind Cathar built.” Good, she’d taken it in. “Jacko was Constantin’s bait. We’d poked her eye by inoculating you, and we gambled on her not being able to resist poking ours in return by grooming and abducting the saved sister’s brother. That part worked, and for the first time Horologists gained access to the oldest, hungriest, and best-guarded psychodecanter in existence. Before we could figure out a means of destroying the place, however, the Blind Cathar awoke. He summoned all the Anchorites and, well, it’s hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters …”

“Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand grenades,” offers Ōshima, “trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.”

“It was the worst day in Horology’s history,” I say.

“We killed five Anchorites,” says Ōshima, “but they killed Xi Lo and Holokai. Killed-killed.”

“Didn’t they just get … resurrected?” asked Holly.

“If we die in the Dusk,” I explain, “we die. Terms and conditions. Somehow the Dusk prevents resurrection. I survived because Esther Little fought her way to and fled down the Way of Stones with my soul enwrapped in hers. Alone, I would have perished, but even in Esther’s safekeeping I suffered grievous damage, as did Esther. She opened the Aperture very near where you were, Holly, in the garden of a certain bungalow near the Isle of Sheppey.”

“I’m guessing the location was no accident?” asks Holly.

“It was not. While Esther’s soul and mine were reraveling, however, the Third Anchorite, one Joseph Rhîmes, arrived on the scene. He had followed our tracks. He slew Heidi Cross and Ian Fairweather for the hell of it, and was about to kill you, too, when I reraveled myself enough to animate Fairweather. Rhîmes kineticked a weapon into my head, and I died. Forty-nine days later I was resurrected in this body, in a broken-down ambulance in one of Detroit’s more feral zip codes. For a long time I assumed Rhîmes had killed you in the bungalow, and that Esther’s soul had been too badly damaged to reravel. But when I next made contact with 119A, Arkady — in his last self, not the self you met earlier — told me that you hadn’t died. Instead, Joseph Rhîmes’s body had been found at the crime scene.”