“Seven days.” I put the felt cover over the piano keys. “I wonder where we’ll be in seven days. To work, then, before Holly’s snatched from under my nose again.”
“Фshima said you’d be flagellating yourself.”
“He’s not up and about already, is he? He didn’t go to bed last night, and he spent the morning being an action hero.”
“Sixty minutes’ shut-eye and he’s up and off like a cocaine bunny. He’s eating Nutella with a spoon, straight from the jar. I can’t watch.”
“Where’s Inez? She shouldn’t leave the apartment.”
“She’s helping Toby, the bookshop owner. Our shield covers the shop, but I’ve warned her not to go further afield. She won’t.”
“What must she think of all this insanity and danger?”
“Inez grew up in Oakland, California. That gave her a grounding in the basics. C’mon. Let’s go Esther-hunting.” So I follow her downstairs to the spare room, where Holly is lying hiatused on a sofa bed. Waking her up seems cruel. Фshima appears from the library. “Sweet tinkling, Marinus.” He mimes piano fingers.
“I’ll pass my hat around later.” I sit down next to Holly and take her hand, pressing my middle finger against the chakra on her palm.
I ask my colleagues, “Is everyone ready?”
HOLLY JERKS UPRIGHT, as if her torso is spring-loaded, and struggles to make sense of a present perfect of homicidal policemen, of my Act of Hiatus, of Фshima, Unalaq, and me, and of this strange room. She notices she’s digging her nails into my wrist. “Sorry.”
“It’s perfectly all right, Ms. Sykes. How’s your head?”
“Scrambled eggs. What part of it was real?”
“All of it, I’m afraid. Our enemy took you. I’m sorry.”
Holly doesn’t know what to make of this. “Where am I?”
“154 West Tenth Street,” says Unalaq. “My apartment, mine and my partner’s. I’m Unalaq Swinton. And it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, on the same day. We figured you needed a little sleep.”
“Oh.” Holly looks at this new character. “Nice to meet you.”
Unalaq sips her coffee. “The honor’s all mine, Ms. Sykes. Would you like some caffeine? Any other mild stimulant?”
“Are you like … Marinus and the—the other one, that …?”
“Arkady? Yes, though I’m younger. This is only my fifth life.”
Unalaq’s sentence reminds Holly of the world she’s fallen into. “Marinus, those cops … they … I think they wanted to kill.”
“Hired assassins,” states Фshima. “Real flesh-and-blood people whose job is not to fix teeth or sell real estate or teach math but to murder. I made them shoot each other before they shot you.”
Holly swallows. “Who are you? If it’s not rude …”
Фshima’s mildly amused. “I’m Фshima. Yes, I’m another Horologist, too. Enjoying my eleventh life, since we’re counting.”
“But … youweren’t in the police car … were you?”
“In spirit, if not in body. For you, I was Фshima the Friendly Ghost. For your abductors, I was Фshima the Badass Sonofabitch. Won’t deny it, that felt good.” The city’s hiss and boom are smudged by steady drizzle. “Though our long cold War just got hotter.”
“Thank you, then, Mr. Фshima,” says Holly, “if that’s the appropri—” A barbed thought snags her: “ Aoife!Marinus—those police officers, theytheythey said Aoife’d been in an accident!”
I shake my head. “They lied. To lure you into the car.”
“But they know I’ve got a daughter! What if they hurt her?”
“Look, look, look. Look at this.” Unalaq passes her a slate. “Aoife’s blog. Today she found three shards of a Phoenician amphora and some cat bones. Posted forty-five minutes ago, at sixteen seventeen Greek time. She’s fine. You can message her, but don’t, don’t, refer to any of today’s events. That wouldrisk embroiling her.”
Holly reads her daughter’s entry and her panic subsides a notch. “But just ’cause those people haven’t hurt her yet, it doesn’t—”
“This week the Anchorites’ attention is focused on Manhattan,” says Фshima. “But to be safe, your daughter has a bodyguard. Roho’s one of us, too.” And one that the Second Mission can ill spare, Фshima subreminds me.
Again, Holly is all at sea. She tucks some loose strands of hair under her head-wrap. “Aoife’s on an archaeological dig, on a remote Greek island. How … I mean, why … No.” Holly looks for her shoes. “Look, I just want to go home.”
I break the brutal truth gently: “You’d get as far as the Empire Hotel, but you wouldn’t leave the building alive. I’m sorry.”
“Even if you slip through that net,” Фshima extends the brutal truth more bluntly, “the next time you used an ATM card, your device, your slate, an Anchorite would find you within a few minutes. Even without using those methods, unless you’re hidden by a Deep Stream cloak, they could get to you with a quantum totem.”
“But I live in the west of Ireland! That’s not gangster country.”
“You’d not be safe on the goddamn International Space Station, Ms. Sykes,” says Фshima. “And the Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk belong to a higher order of threat than gangsters.”
She looks at me. “So what must I do to be safe? Stay here forever?”
“I think,” I tell her, “you’ll only be safe if we win our War.”
“If we don’t win,” says Unalaq, “it’s over for all of us.”
Holly Sykes shuts her eyes, giving us one last chance to vanish and to return to her life as it was at Blithewood Cemetery before a slightly chubby African Canadian psychiatrist strolled into view.
Ten seconds later, we’re still here.
She sighs and tells Unalaq, “Tea, please. Splash of milk, no sugar.”
“ ‘HOROLOGY’?” REPEATS Holly in Unalaq’s kitchen. “Isn’t that clocks?”
“When Xi Lo founded our Horological Society,” I say, “the word meant ‘the study of the measurement of time.’ It was a sort of self-help group, you could say. Our founder was a London surgeon in the 1660s—he appears in Pepys’s diary, by the by—and acquired a house in Greenwich as a headquarters, a storage facility, and a noticeboard to help us stay connected down through time, from one self to the next.”
“In 1939,” says Unalaq, “we shifted to 119A—where you visited this morning—because of the German threat.”
“So Horology is a social club for you … Atemporals?”
“It is,” says Unalaq, “but Horology has a curative function, too.”
“We assassinate,” states Фshima, “carnivorous Atemporals—like the Anchorites—who consume the psychovoltaic souls of innocent people in order to fuel their own immortality. I thought Marinus told you this earlier.”
“We do give them a chance to mend their ways,” says Unalaq.
“But they never do,” says Фshima, “so we have to mend their ways for them, permanently.”
“They are serial killers,” I tell Holly. “They murder kids like Jacko, and teenagers like you were. Again and again and again. They don’t stop. Carnivores are addicts and their drug is artificial longevity.”
Holly asks, “And Hugo Lamb is one of these serial killers?”
“Yes. He’s sourced prey eleven times since … Switzerland.”
Holly swivels her eternity ring. “And Jacko was one of you?”
“Xi Lo founded Horology,” says Фshima. “Xi Lo led me to the Deep Stream. To psychosoterica. He was irreplaceable.”
Holly thinks of a small boy with whom she shared only eight Christmases. “How many of there are you?”
“Seven, definitely. Eight, possibly. Nine, hopefully.”
Holly frowns. “Quite a small-scale war, then, isn’t it?”
I think of Oscar Gomez’s wife. “Was there anything ‘small-scale’ about Jacko’s disappearance for the Sykes family? Eight is very few, but we were only ten when we inoculated you. We build networks. We have allies and friends.”
“And how many Carnivores are there?”
“We don’t know,” says Unalaq. “Hundreds, worldwide.”
“But whenever we find one,” Фshima inserts a meaningful pause, “there soon becomes one less.”
“The Anchorites endure, however,” I say. “The Anchorites are our enemy through time. Can we prevent all the Carnivores in the world from committing animacide? No. But whom we save, we save, and every one is a victory.”