The Bone Clocks

ESTHER’S SOUL EGRESSES from Holly’s forehead first and I follow, into a new morning. Holly is still lying on the couch, motionless, with my body next to her, motionless. They haven’t seen us. Unalaq is reading a book and Arkady, over from 119A, is writing on his slate. I ingress Iris Marinus-Fenby and rethread my soul to my brain. My nose smells burned toast, my ears hear traffic, my calves and toes are cramped, my stomach’s empty, and my mouth feels like a rodent died in it. Finding my optic nerves always takes longer. Suddenly Unalaq is laughing with astonishment and delight and says, “Be my guest!” so I know where Esther’s soul went. My eyes, when I manage to lift the lids, see Arkady peering up close. “Marinus? Are you back?”

“You’re supposed to be minding Sadaqat.”

“L’Ohkna flew back in last night. Did you find Esther?”

“Why don’t you ask Unalaq if she’s seen her?”

Arkady turns around in time to see Esther-in-Unalaq drop her book, lift her hand, and stare at it, as if freshly fitted. “Fingers,” she says, sounding a little drunk. “You forget. Hell, listen to me.” She flexes the muscles around her mouth. “Arkady. Apparently.”

Arkady leaps to his feet like a guilty character in a melodrama.

“I turn my back for a few paltry decades,” growls Esther-in-Unalaq, “and you go from being a Vietnamese neurologist to a … a power forward with the New York Knicks?”

Arkady looks at me. I nod. “My God. My God. My God.”

“You’ll have to lose that ponytail. And what’s that you’re holding? Don’t tell me that’s what televisions have evolved into?”

“It’s a tab, for the Internet. Like a laptop, minus keyboard.”

Esther-in-Unalaq looks at me. “Was that English? What else has changed since 1984?”

“Oil’s running out,” I say, checking Holly’s pulse and the second hand of the clock. “Earth’s population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse—though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state—and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it’s Sunni versus Shi‘a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel’s garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharaonic. The world’s twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there’s more computing power in Arkady’s slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.” I check the clock again. “Holly’s pulse is okay, but we should unhiatus her. She’ll be dehydrated. Where’s Фshima?”

“I heard,” Фshima 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,’ Фshima, 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 Rhоmes.”

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

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

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, Фshima. 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 Фshima.

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.”