David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

“I heard,” Ōshima appears in the doorway, “that Rip van Winkle was honoring us with an appearance.”

Esther-in-Unalaq looks at her on-and-off partner. “I’d say, ‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Ōshima, but it wouldn’t be true.”

“If you’d let us know that you’d be dropping by, I’d have gone out and found me a prettier body. But we all thought you were dead.”

“I damn near was dead, after finishing with Joseph Rhîmes.”

“A teacher in Norway got the truth! A Milwaukee junkie got the truth! Or was not telling me ‘obeying the Script’?”

“No, it was common bloody sense, Ōshima.”

Arkady subasks me, Can you believe these two?

“If the Anchorites even suspected I’d survived the First Mission,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “they would have gone after any possible asylum-giver. Back in 1984, Xi Lo agreed that if our foray to the Chapel ended badly, Pfenninger and Constantin might wipe out all remaining Horologists to give themselves an open field for a decade. That meant you were a target, Ōshima. You would’ve only died, you Returnee, but as an unraveled Sojourner I would’ve died -died. The safest play was to seek asylum in a tough Temporal kid who’d survive a few decades, and let nobody know until it was time to wake me up.”

“Holly’s been tough,” I say. “We should let her go now.”

Esther runs Unalaq’s ruby thumbnail up the stem of a purple tulip. “You miss purple, after a few years …”

When Esther dodges a question, I worry. “Holly’s paid enough, Esther. Please. She deserves to be left in peace.”

“She does,” says Esther. “But it’s not that simple.”

“According to the Script?” asks Ōshima.

Esther fills Unalaq’s lungs and slowly exhales. “There’s a crack.”

None of us understands. Arkady asks, “A crack in what?”

“A crack in the fabric of the Chapel of the Dusk.”

THE LIBRARY IN Unalaq and Inez’s apartment is a deep square well, walled with bookshelves. Its parquet floor has just enough room for the round table, but a corkscrew staircase winds up not to one but two narrow balconies that give access to the upper bookshelves, and the Monday-morning sunshine enters through a skylight twenty feet above us. It illuminates an oblong of book spines. Ōshima, Arkady, Esther-in-Unalaq, and I sit around the table and talk about Horology business until there’s a knock at the door and Holly enters, fed, freshly showered, and dressed in baggy clothes borrowed from Inez. Her new head-wrap is deep blue, scattered with white stars. “Hi,” says the tired, lined woman. “I hope I haven’t kept you all waiting.”

“You hosted me for forty-one years, Ms. Sykes,” says Esther-in-Unalaq. “A few minutes is the least I owe you.”

“Make it Holly. Everyone. Wow. Look at all these books. It’s rare to see so many, these days.”

“Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the late 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”

Holly asks, “Is that, like … an official prophecy?”

“It’s the inevitable result,” I say, “of population growth and lies about oil reserves. But please. This chair’s for you.”

“What a beautiful table,” remarks Holly, sitting down.

“It’s older than the nation we’re in,” says Arkady.

Holly runs her fingers for a moment over the grain and knots of the yew wood. “But younger than you lot, right?”

“Age is a relative concept,” I say, rapping my knuckles on the old, old wood.

Esther-in-Unalaq pushes back Unalaq’s bronze hair from her face. “Holly. Years ago you made a rash promise to a fisherwoman on a jetty. You couldn’t know the true consequences of that promise, but you kept it anyway. Doing so pulled you into Horology’s War with the Anchorites. When Marinus and me egressed from you earlier, your first role in our War ended. Thank you. From me, from Horology. I owe you my life.” The rest of us signed our agreement. “The good news is this. By six o’clock tomorrow evening, according to the world’s clocks, the War will be over.”

“A peace treaty?” asks Holly. “Or a fight to the death?”

“A fight to the death,” answers Arkady, raking his fingers through his lush hair. “Poachers and gamekeepers don’t do peace treaties.”

“If we win,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “you’re home free, Holly. If not, we won’t be able to stage any more dramatic rescues. We’ll be dead-dead. And we won’t lie. We can’t know how our enemy’d respond to victory. Constantin, specially, has a long memory.”

Holly’s troubled, naturally. “Aren’t you precognitive?”

“ You know precognition, Holly,” says Esther. “It’s a flicker of glimpses. It’s points on a map, but it’s never the whole map.”

Holly considers this. “My first role in your War, you just said. Implying there’s a second.”

“Tomorrow,” I take over, “a high-ranking Anchorite named Elijah D’Arnoq is due to appear in the gallery at 119A. D’Arnoq proposes to escort us to the Chapel of the Dusk and to help us destroy it. He claims to be a defector who can no longer stomach the moral evil of decanting innocent ‘donors.’ ”

“You don’t sound as if you believe him.”

Ōshima drums his fingers on the table. “ I don’t.”

Holly asks, “Can’t you enter the defector’s mind to check?”

“I did,” I explain, “and what I found backed his story up. But evidence can be tampered with. All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”

Holly asks the obvious: “Then why take the risk?”

“Because now we have a secret weapon,” I answer, “and fresh intelligence.”

We all look at Esther-in-Unalaq. “Back in 1984,” she tells Holly, “on what we call our First Mission to our enemy’s fastness, I detected a hairline crack running from the apex to the icon. I believe that I … may be able to split this crack open.”

“Dusk,” I explain further, “would then flood the Chapel, and destroy it. The Blind Cathar, whose half-sentient vestiges reside within the Chapel, would perish. Any Anchorites touched by the Dusk would die. Any Anchorites elsewhere would have lost their psychodecanter, and be as susceptible to the aging process as the rest of humanity.”

Holly asks the less-than-obvious: “You said the Blind Cathar was a genius, a mystic Einstein who could ‘think’ matter into being. Why didn’t he notice his masterpiece has a chink in its armor?”

“The Chapel was built by faith,” replies Esther. “But faith requires doubt, like matter requires antimatter. That crack, that’s the Blind Cathar’s doubt. It dates from before he became what he later became. Doubt that he was doing God’s work. Doubt that he had the right to take the souls of others so that he could cheat death.”

“So you plan to … stick dynamite into the crack?”

“Nitroglycerin won’t scratch the paintwork,” says Ōshima. “The place has withstood the Dusk for centuries. A nuclear explosion might do the job, but warheads aren’t very portable. What’s needed is psychosoteric dynamite.”

Esther clears Unalaq’s throat. “That would be me.”

Holly checks with me: “A suicide mission?”

“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.”