The Bone Clocks

He smiles, showing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of American dental care, paid for by Horology, of course. Sadaqat owns very little not earned from or given by Horology. How could he? He spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital outside Reading, England. A freelance Carnivore had got herself employed as a secretary in the hospital, and had groomed a psychovoltaic patient who had shared confidences with Sadaqat before the poor woman’s soul was decanted. I disposed of the Carnivore after quite a strenuous duel in her sunken garden, but rather than redact what Sadaqat had learned about the Atemporal world, I set about isolating the section of his brain harboring his schizophrenia and severing its neural pathways to the unimpaired regions. This cured him, after a fashion, and when he declared his undying gratitude I brought him over to New York to be the warden of 119A. That was five years ago. One year ago our faithful retainer was turned during a series of incorporeal encounters and rendezvous in Central Park, where Sadaqat exercises daily, whatever the weather. Фshima, who first noticed the Anchorites’ fingerprints on our warden, was all for redacting the last six years from Sadaqat’s memory and suasioning him aboard a container ship to the Russian Far East. A mixture of sentimentality and a reluctant intuition that we could deploy the Anchorites’ mole against his new masters persuaded me to stay Фshima’s hand. It has been a perilous twelve months of second- and third-guessing our enemy’s intentions, and L’Ohkna had to recalibrate 119A’s sensors to detect toxins in case Sadaqat was ordered to poison us, but it all comes to an end this very morning, for good or for ill.

How I loathe this war.

“Come,” Фshima tells Sadaqat. “Let’s check the circuitry in our box of tricks one last time …”

They go upstairs to ensure the hardware needs no last-minute adjustments. Arkady goes up to the garden to do Tai Chi in the halfhearted drizzle. Unalaq retreats to the common room to send instructions to her Kenyan network. I go to the office to transfer the Horology protocols to L’Ohkna. The task is soon done. The young Horologist shakes my hand and tells me he hopes we’ll meet again, and I tell him, “Not as much I do.” Then he departs 119A through the secret exit. Thirty minutes remain before D’Arnoq’s appearance. Poetry? Music? A game of pool.

I go down to the basement, where I find Holly setting up. “I hope it was okay to help myself. Everyone sort of vanished, so I just …”

“Of course. May I join you?”

She’s surprised. “You play?”

“When not battling with the devil over a chessboard, nothing calms the nerves like the click of cue tip on phenolic resin.”

Holly lines up the pack of balls and removes the triangle. “Can I ask another question about Atemporals?” I give her a fire-awayface. “Do you have families?”

“We’re often resurrected into families. A Sojourner’s host usually has blood relatives around like Jacko did. We form attachments, like Unalaq and Inez. Until the twentieth century, traveling alone as an unmarried woman was problematic.”

“So you’ve been married yourself?”

“Fifteen times, though not since the 1870s. More than Liz Taylor and Henry the Eighth combined. You’re curious to know if we can conceive children, however.” I make a gesture to brush her awkwardness away. “No. We cannot. Terms and conditions.”

“Right.” Holly chalks her cue. “It’d be tough, I s’pose, to …”

“To live, knowing your kids died of old age decades ago. Or that they didn’tdie, but won’t see this loon on the doorstep who insists he’s Mom or Dad, reincarnated. Or discover you’ve impregnated your great-great-grandchild. Sometimes we adopt, and often it works well. There’s never a shortage of children needing homes. So I’ve never borne or fathered a child, but what you feel for Aoife, that unhesitating willingness to rush into a burning building, I’ve felt that too. I’ve gone into burning buildings, as well. And one sizable advantage of infertility was to spare my female selves getting banged up as breeding stock all their lives, as was the fate of most women between the Stone Age and the Suffragettes.” I gesture at the table. “Shall we?”

“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”

“Throw me a heads.”

She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.

“I’m guessing that wasn’t beginner’s luck.”

“Brendan, Jacko, and me played at the Captain Marlow, on Sundays when the pub was shut. Guess who usually won?”

I copy Holly’s shot, but play it less well. “He’d been playing since the 1750s, remember. More recently, too. Xi Lo and I played daily on this very table, for most of 1969.”

“Seriously? On this very table?”

“It’s been reupholstered twice since, but yes.”