The third voice made us both jump. I turned to see a bulky, somewhat shambling figure dressed in a coat that looked even heavier than my duffel. Linda flinched away from him, and I felt the tentative mood between us evaporate.

“Peter. What are you doing here?”

Peter McLachlan came around the bench and sat down, with me between him and Linda. “You mentioned doing the walk.” So I had, in an email. “I thought you’d end up here. I waited.”

“How long?”

He checked his watch. “Only about three hours.”

“Three hours?”

I could see Linda’s expression. “Listen, George, it’s been good, but I think—”

“No. Wait, I’m sorry.” I introduced them quickly. “Peter, why did you want to see me?”

“To thank you. And tell you I’m going to be away for a while. I’m off to the States.”

“Visiting the Slan(t)ers?” Linda caught my eye again; I pursed my lips. Don’t ask.

“I feel the need to catch up. Be refreshed.”

“Refreshed with what?”

He shrugged. “The energy. The belief. That’s why I want to thank you. Somehow you have shaken me out of my rut. Your bit of mystery with your sister. Layers upon layers … That and Kuiper, of course.” He leaned past me and thrust his face toward Linda. “Of course you know about the Kuiper Anomaly. Have you seen the latest developments?” He produced his handheld and started thumbing at its tiny controls, and Web pages flashed over its jewel-like screen.

Linda plucked my sleeve. “This guy is seriously weird,” she whispered.

“He’s an old school friend. He helped my dad. And—”

“Oh, come on. Your dad’s buried. He’s followed you to London. And all this spooky stuff — what does it have to do with you and your sister?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, George, I changed my mind. It’s as if the people around you are parts of your personality. Your family was the clingy, oppressive, Catholic part, and you need to get away from all that, not indulge it. And this guy, he’s like your—”

“My anus.”

That brought a stifled laugh. “George — go back to work. Or paint your house. Get away from memories, George. And get away from this guy, or you’ll end up on a park bench muttering about conspiracies, too …”

“Here.” Peter thrust his handheld before my face; data and diagrams chattered across it. “The Kuiper Belt is a relic of the formation of the solar system. We see similar belts around other stars, like Vega. The outer planets, like Uranus and Neptune, formed from collisions of Kuiper Belt objects. But according to the best theories there should have been many more objects out there — a hundred times the mass we can see now, enough to make another Neptune. And we know that such a swarm should coalesce quickly into a planet.”

“I don’t understand. Peter, I think—”

“ Something disturbed the Kuiper Belt. Something whipped up those ice balls, about the time of the formation of Pluto — so preventing the formation of another Neptune. Since then the Kuiper objects have been broken up by collisions, or have drifted out of the belt.”

“When was this disturbance?”

“It must have been around the time the planets were forming. Maybe four and a half billion years ago.” He peered at me, eyes bright. “You see? Layers of interference. The Anomaly, the Galaxy core explosions, now this tinkering with the very formation of the solar system. This is what we’re going to investigate.”

“We?”

“The Slan(t)ers, in the States. You read my emails.”

“Yes …” I turned. Linda had gone. I stood up, trying to see her, but as the rush hour approached the crowds pouring into the Tube station were already dense.

Peter was still in midflow, sitting on the bench, talking compulsively, bringing up page after page of data. He was hunched forward, his posture intense.

Standing there, I could either go after Linda, or stay with Peter. I felt that somehow I was making a choice that might shape the whole of the rest of my life.

I sat down. “Show me again,” I said.

TWO

Chapter 17

For Lucia it had begun eleven months before the death of George Poole’s father. And it began, not with death, but with stirrings of life.

It came at night, only a few days after her fifteenth birthday. She was woken by a spasm of pain in her belly, and then an ache in her thighs. When she reached down and touched her legs she felt wetness.

At first she felt only hideous embarrassment. She imagined she had wet her bed, as if she were a silly child. She got out of bed and padded down the length of the dormitory, past the bunk beds stacked three high, the hundred girls sleeping in this great room alone, to the bathroom.

And there, in the bathroom’s harsh fluorescent light, she discovered the truth: that the fluid between her legs, and on her fingers and her nightclothes, wasn’t urine at all, but blood — strange blood, bright, thin. She knew what this meant, of course. Her body was changing. But the shame didn’t go away, it only intensified, and was supplemented now by a deep and abiding fear.

Why me? she thought. Why me ?

She cleaned herself up and went back to bed, past the stirring ranks of the girls, many of them turning and muttering, perhaps disturbed by her scent.

Lucia was able to conceal that first bleeding from the other girls, from Idina and Angela and Rosaria and Rosetta, her crowding, chattering sisters with their pale gray eyes, all so alike. You weren’t supposed to keep secrets, of course. Everybody knew that. There were supposed to be no secrets in the Crypt. But now Lucia had a secret.

And then her second period came, during a working day. The stab of pain warned her in time for her to rush to the bathroom again. The cubicles had no doors, of course — though before her menarche it had never occurred to Lucia to notice the lack — but she was lucky to find the room empty, and was able again to conceal what had happened, even though she vomited, and this time the pain lasted for days.

But now she had compounded her secret.

She hated the situation. More than anything she cared what the people around her thought of her. The other girls were her whole world. She was immersed in them night and day, surrounded by their scent and touch and kisses, their conversation and their glances, their judgments and opinions; she was shaped by them, as they, she knew, were shaped in turn by her. But ever since she had started growing taller than the average, at the age of ten or so, barriers between her and her old friends had subtly grown up. That got worse at age twelve or thirteen, when her hips and breasts started to develop, and she had started to look like a young woman among children. And now this.

She didn’t want any of it. She wanted to be the same as everybody else; she didn’t want to be different. She wanted to be immersed in the games, and the gossip of what Anna said to Wanda, and how Rita and Rosetta had fallen out, and Angela would have to choose between them … She didn’t want to be talking about blood between her legs, pain in her belly.

She had to tell somebody. So she told Pina.

It was during a coffee break at work.

This was November, and Lucia’s regular schooling was in recess. For the second year she had come to work in the big office called the scrinium. This was an ancient Latin word meaning “archive.” Despite the antique name, it was a modern, bright, open-plan area with cubicles and partitions, PCs and laptops, adorned with potted plants and calendars, and with light wells admitting daylight from the world above. This bright, anonymous place might have been an office in any bank or government ministry. Even the ubiquitous symbol of the Order, two schematic face-to-face kissing fish, was rendered on the wall in bronze and chrome, like a corporate logo. Quite often you would even see a contadino or two in here — literally “countryman” or “peasant,” this word meant “outsider; not of the Order.”