The Bone Clocks

We’re still outnumbered nine to three, penned in with a malign demigod whom Фshima surely cannot occupy for much longer. Holly crouches by the wall. I don’t have time to guess what she’s thinking. Unalaq shudders as the enemy’s red shield slams into hers with the force of a freight train and the shriek of an angle-grinder. The Deep Stream blue turns a leprous purple at the point of contact, and Unalaq is shoved back a pace, and another, another, another, reducing our little triangle of territory to a few square meters. I don’t have time to check that Holly has shuffled back with us to stay on Horology’s side of the shield, because two more Anchorites now raise their palm-chakras and, through a rattle of psychobullets, I hear Constantin’s cry: “Crush them like ants!”

Arkady now pours his voltage into Unalaq’s shield, which bolsters it temporarily, but the Anchorites’ cascade of fire doubles, trebles, quadruples in intensity. The psychoduel becomes too magnesium-bright to look at, so it is through my chakra-eye that I see the long table rise ten feet into the air, hang there for a second like a bird of prey, then hurtle straight at Arkady and Unalaq. On reflex, I handsign the fastest countermand of my life, and stop it a fist’s width from Arkady’s clenched face, the two ends of the table on either side of the jammed-together shields. Now begins not a tug-of-war but a push-of-war, in which Pfenninger tries to bludgeon Unalaq or Arkady and so knock out the shield, while I try to stop him. We wrestle for control of the table for a long, slippery moment, but fresh Anchorites join Pfenninger, and suddenly I’m overpowered and the table smashes into the head of Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. Luckily, the table has fallen on our side of the shield so it can no longer be used as a weapon, but my body’s skull is half staved in so I egress before my brain shuts down. Cause of death: flying table. That’s a first and, after I die-die in the Dusk, a last.

Through an ever-redder shade of purple I see Pfenninger, Constantin, and other outlines just a few paces away directing their fire at Unalaq until a puncture rips our shield wide open. Baptiste Pfenninger smiles like a proud father, raises his palm at Unalaq, and a pinprick of brilliant light scorches a line in the air between his hand and Unalaq’s heart. The psychodumdum semi-inverts my colleague’s body, my dead colleague’s ex-body, until it deflates in a withered mess of bones and viscera. Pfenninger and Constantin’s eyes shine with delight. Arkady is trying desperately to repair our pale blue barrier and all the while Фshima is locked into a losing one-to-one duel with the Blind Cathar’s shining icon.

Seeing my dead body against the wall, the Anchorites reason that no psychosoteric can now attack them, and their red shield flickers out. They’ll pay for this mistake. Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants. It smacks into Imhoff and Westhuizen, the Fifth and Seventh Anchorites, respectively, and down they go. Three against seven. I ingress into Arkady to help him repair the shield, which turns a stronger blue and pushes back the remaining Anchorites. When Arkady glances back at Фshima, however, I see his fight is lost. His body is evaporating as we look. Go to Holly, suborders Arkady. I obey without even thinking to bid him goodbye, an omission I regret even as I transverse to Holly, ingress, evoke an Act of Total Suasion, and … Now what?

Infuriated by the loss of Imhoff and Westhuizen, the seven remaining Anchorites cannon Arkady with everything they have, and the blue shield dies. Arkady’s spent. He straightens up and gives Baptiste Pfenninger the finger. The Blind Cathar evaporates him from behind with a short, sharp psychobolt. The battle’s over. They’ll kill Holly or try to decant her, perhaps. I can neither see nor communicate with Esther, but in seconds the Blind Cathar will psycholocate her soul, annihilate it, and Horology will have lost its hundred-year War with the Anchorites who—

THE LIGHT FILLS the Chapel, passing through hands pressed over eyes, through the eyelids behind those eyes, through corneas and vitreous humors, through bodies, through souls … The white is so white it’s black. Esther did it. Esther won. I wait for the bonesnapping crack as the Chapel splits down the middle. I wait for the screams of the Anchorites as their immortality machine disintegrates about them.

Seconds unspool … Many seconds.

The black beyond white fades back to white.

The white slips off its layers, back to milky flint-gray.

Vision returns. I open Holly’s eyelids and look up from where her body lies, up at the Chapel roof. It hasn’t fallen in.

I think, Esther’s Last Act wasn’t powerful enough.

I think, The Blind Cathar took countermeasures.