Nancy here and Brzycki have curarequinoline in their tranq guns. We can conclude it isn’t for self-defense.

“I’ll call my office again,” says Brzycki, helpfully. “See if they can’t get the name of your daughter’s hospital in Athens. Then at least you’ll have a direct line.”

“I can’t thank you enough.” Holly’s pale and sick-looking.

Brzycki flips down his wraparounds. “Anchor Two? Unit twenty-eight, you copying, Anchor Two?”

Unexpectedly, the earpiece in Nancy’s helmet comes to life, and through it I hear Immaculйe Constantin. “Clear as a bell. All things considered, let’s play safe. Eliminate your guest.”

Shock boils up but I rally myself: Ф shima, get her out!But my only reply is a blast of blizzard down the overstretched cord. Фshima can’t hear me, or he can’t respond, or both.

Clarity returns. “Copy that, Anchor Two,” Brzycki is saying, “but our present location is Fifth and East Sixty-eighth, where the traffic’s still at a dead halt. Might I advise that we postpone the last order as per—”

“Give the Sykes woman a tranq in each arm,” orders Constantin in her soft voice. “No postponement. Do it.”

I subshout hard, Ф shima, get her out get her out!

But no answer comes either from his soul or his inert body, propped up by mine on the bench, a block from the police car. All I can do is watch via the cord as an innocent woman, whom I lassoed into our War, is killed. I can’t transverse this distance, and even if I could I’d arrive too late.

“Understood, Anchor Two, will proceed as advised.” Brzycki nods at Lewis in the mirror, and at Nancy.

Holly asks, “Any luck with the hospital number, Detective Marr?”

“Our secretary’s on it.” Brzycki unholsters his tranq gun and flicks off the safety catch, while left-handed Nancy, through whose viewpoint I must watch, does the same.

“Why,” Holly’s voice changes, “do you need your guns?”

On reflex, I try to suasion Nancy to stop, but one cannot suasion down a cord and I just watch in horror as Nancy fires the tranq—at Brzycki’s throat, where a tiny red dot appears, on his Adam’s apple. The Anchorite touches it, astonished, then looks at the red dab on his fingers, looks at Nancy, utters, “What the …”

Brzycki slumps, dead. Lewis is shouting, as if under water, “Nancy, you outta your fuckin’ MIND?” or that’s what Nancy thinks she hears, as she finds herself taking Brzycki’s gun and firing it point-blank into Lewis’s cheek. Lewis huffs out a falsetto vowel of disbelief. Nancy, whom Фshima is suasioning ruthlessly, then finds herself clambering over Holly and onto the passenger seat as Lewis gibbers his last breath. She now cuffs herself to the steering wheel and unlocks the rear doors. As a parting gift, Фshima redacts a broad swath of Nancy’s present perfect and induces unconsciousness before egressing her and ingressing the traumatized Holly. Фshima psychosedates his new host immediately, and I watch Holly in the first person as she puts on her sunglasses, checks her head-wrap, climbs out of the squad car, and calmly walks back up Park Avenue toward the Frick. With a rip of corded feedback Фshima’s voice returns: Marinus, can you hear me?

I dare feel relief. Breathtaking, Ф shima.

War,subreplies the old warrior, and now, logistics. We have a retired author in distinctive headgear leaving a patrol car containing two dead fake cops and one living fake cop. Ideas?

Get Holly back here and rejoin your body,I subadvise Фshima. While you’re doing that, I’ll call L’Ohkna and ask for a catastrophic wipeout of all street cameras on the Upper East Side.

Фshima-in-Holly strides along. Can that dope fiend do that?

If a way exists, he’ll find it. If no way exists, he’ll make one.

Then what? 119A evidently isn’t the fortress it once was.

Agreed. We’ll go to earth at Unalaq’s. I’ll ask her to come and rescue us. I’m uncording now, see you soon. I open my eyes. My umbrella is still half hiding Фshima’s body and me, but a gray squirrel is sniffing my boot with curiosity. I swivel my foot. The squirrel is gone.

“HOME,” ANNOUNCES UNALAQ. She stops the car level with her front door, next to the Three Lives Bookstore on the corner of Waverly Place and West Tenth Street. Unalaq leaves the hazard lights on and helps me as I guide Holly across the pavement while Фshima stands guard like a monk-assassin. Holly’s still doped from the psychosedation, and we’ve drawn the attention of a tall thin man with a beard and wire-framed glasses. “Hey, Unalaq, is everything okay?”

“All good, Toby,” says Unalaq. “My friend just flew in from Dublin, but she’s terrified of flying, so she took a sleeping pill to knock her out. It worked a bit too well.”

“Sure did. She’s still cruising at twenty thousand feet.”

“Next time she’ll stick with the glass of white, I think.”

“Call down to the shop later. Your books on Sanskrit are in.”

“Will do, Toby, thanks.” Unalaq’s found her keys but Inez has already opened the door. Her face is taut with worry, as if her partner, Unalaq, is the breakable mortal and not her. Inez nods at Фshima and me and peers at Holly’s face with concern.

“She’ll be fine after a few hours’ sleep,” I say.

Inez’s expression says, I hope you’re right, and she goes to park the car in a nearby underground lot. Unalaq ushers us up the steps, inside, down the hallway, and into the tiny elevator. There’s not enough space for Фshima, who lopes up the stairs. I press up.

A dollar for your thoughts, subsays Unalaq.

One’s thoughts cost only a penny when I was Yu Leon.

Inflation, shrugs Unalaq, and her hair goes boing. Could Esther really be alive somewhere inside this head?

I look at Holly’s lined, taut, ergonomic face. She groans like a harried dreamer who can’t wake. I hope so, Unalaq. If Esther interpreted the Script correctly, then maybe. But I don’t know if I believe in the Script. Or the Counterscript. I don’t know why Constantin wants Holly dead. Or if Elijah D’Arnoq’s for real. Or if our handling of the Sadaqat issue is wrongheaded.“Truly, I don’t know anything,” I tell my five-hundred-year-old friend.

“At least,” Unalaq blows the end of a strand of copper hair from her nostril, “the Anchorites can’t exploit your overconfidence.”

HOLLY’S ASLEEP, ФSHIMA’S watching The Godfather Part II, Unalaq’s preparing a salad, and Inez has invited me to play her Steinway upright, as the piano tuner came yesterday. There’s a fine view of Waverly Place from the piano’s attic, and the small room is scented with the oranges and limes that Inez’s mother sends in crates from Florida. A photograph of Inez and Unalaq sits atop the Steinway. They’re posing in skiwear on a snowy peak, like intrepid explorers. Unalaq won’t have discussed the Second Mission with her partner, but Inez is no fool and must sense that something major is afoot. Being a Temporal who loves an Atemporal is surely as thorny a fate as being an Atemporal who loves a Temporal. It’s not just Horology’s future that my decisions this week will shape, but the lives of loved ones, colleagues, and patients who will get scarred if my companions and I never come back, just as Holly’s life was scarred by Xi Lo–in–Jacko’s death on the First Mission. If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.

So I leaf through Inez’s sheet music and choose Shostakovich’s puckish Preludes and Fugues. It’s fiendish but rewarding. Then I perform William Byrd’s Hughe Ashton’s Groundas a palate cleanser, and a handful of Jan Johannson’s Swedish folk songs, just because. From memory I play Scarlatti’s K32, K212, and K9. The Italian’s sonatas are an Ariadne’s thread that connects Iris Marinus-Fenby, Yu Leon Marinus, Jamini Marinus Choudary, Pablo Antay Marinus, Klara Marinus Koskov, and Lucas Marinus, the first among my selves to discover Scarlatti, back in his Japanese days. I traded the sheet music off de Zoet, I recall, and was playing K9 just hours before my death in July 1811. I’d felt my death approaching for several weeks, and had put my affairs in order, as they used to say. My friend Eelattu cut me adrift with a phial of morphine I’d reserved for the occasion. I felt my soul sinking up from the Light of Day, up onto the High Ridge, and wondered where I’d be resurrected. In a wigwam or a palace or an igloo, in a jungle or tundra or a four-poster bed, in the body of a princess or a hangman’s daughter or a scullery maid, forty-nine spins of the earth later …