THE WINTER OF 1816 was pitiless. Dmitry buried about fifteen peasants in the iron-hard sod, the Kama River froze, the wolves grew bold, and even priests and their families went hungry. Spring refused to show until the middle of April, and the mail coach from Perm didn’t resume its regular visits to Oborino County until May 3. Klara Marinus’s journal marks this as the date when two official-looking letters were delivered to the Koskovs’ cottage. They stayed on the mantelpiece until Dmitry returned in the late afternoon from administering last rites to a woodcutter’s son, who had died of pleurisy several miles away. Dmitry opened the first letter with his paper knife and his face reflected the momentousness of its news. He puffed out his cheeks, said, “This affects you, Klara, my dear,” and read it aloud: “ ‘Kiril Andreyvich Berenovsky, Master of the Berenovksy Estate in the Province of Perm, hereby grants to the female serf Klara, daughter of the deceased serf Gota, full and unconditional liberty as a subject of the Emperor, in perpetuity.’ ” In my memory, cuckoos are calling across the river and sunshine floods the Koskovs’ little parlor. I asked Dmitry and Vasilisa if they would consider adopting me. Vasilisa smothered me in a tearful hug while Dmitry coughed, examined his fingers, and said, “I dare say we could manage that, Klara.” We knew that only Pyotr Ivanovich could have brought about this administrative miracle, but some months would pass before we learned exactly how. My freedom had been granted in exchange for Uncle Pyotr settling my owner’s account with his vintner.
In our excitement, we’d forgotten the second envelope. This contained a summons from the Episcopal Office of the Bishop of Saint Petersburg, requesting Father Dmitry Koskov to take up his new post as priest at the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin on Primorsky Prospect, Saint Petersburg, on or before July 1 of that year. Vasilisa asked, quite seriously, if we were dreaming. Dmitry handed her the letter. As Vasilisa read it, she grew ten years younger before our eyes. Dmitry said he shuddered to think what Uncle Pyotr had paid for such a plum post. The answer was a consignment of Sienna marble to a pet monastery of the patriarch’s but, again, we didn’t hear this from Pyotr Ivanovich’s lips. Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
NOT SINCE THE late 1780s had I lived in a sophisticated European capital, so once we were installed in our new house by Dmitry’s church in Saint Petersburg, I engorged myself on music, theater, and conversation, as best a thirteen-year-old freed serf girl could. While I was expecting my lowly origins to be an obstacle in society, they ended up enhancing my status as an event of the season on the novelty-hungry Petersburg salon circuit. Before I knew it, “Miss Koskov the Polymath of Perm” was being examined in several languages on many disciplines. I gave my foster mother due credit for my “corpus of knowledge,” explaining that once she had taught me to read I could harvest at will the fruits of the Bible, dictionaries, almanacs, pamphlets, suitable poetry, and improving literature. Emancipationists cited Klara Koskov to argue that serfs and their owners differed only by accident of birth, while skeptics called me a goose bred for foie gras, stuffed with data I merely regurgitated without understanding.
One day in October a coach pulled by four white thoroughbreds pulled up on Primorsky Prospect, and the equerry of Tsarina Elizabeth delivered to my family a summons to the Winter Palace for an audience with the Tsarina. Neither Dmitry nor Vasilisa slept a wink and were awed by the succession of sumptuous chambers we passed through on our journey to the Tsarina’s apartment. My metalife had inoculated me against pomp centuries ago. Of Tsarina Elizabeth, I best recall her sad bass clarinet of a voice. My foster parents and I were seated on a long settle by a fire, while Elizabeth favored a high-backed chair. She asked questions in Russian about my life as a serf, then switched to French to probe my grasp of a variety of subjects. In her native German, she supposed that my round of engagements must be rather tiresome? I said that while an audience with a tsarina could never be tiresome, I would not be sorry when I was yesterday’s news. Elizabeth replied that I now knew how an empress feels. She had the newest pianoforte from Hamburg and asked if I cared to try it out. So I played a Japanese lullaby I’d learned in Nagasaki, and it moved her. Apropos of I’m not sure what, Elizabeth asked me what sort of husband I dreamed of. “Our daughter is still a child, Your Highness,” Dmitry found his tongue, “with a headful of girlish nonsense.”
“I was wedded by my fifteenth birthday.” The Tsarina turned to me and Dmitry lost his tongue again.
Matrimony, I remarked, was not a realm I yearned to enter.
“Cupid’s aim is unerring,” Elizabeth said. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
After a thousand years, dear Tsarina, I did not retort, his arrows tend to bounce off me. I agreed that no doubt Her Highness spoke the truth. She knew a fudged answer when she heard it, and suggested that I preferred books to husbands. I agreed that books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them. Dmitry and Vasilisa shifted in their borrowed finery. The jaded queen of a court in which adultery was a form of entertainment looked through me, the gold of the fire toying with the gold of her hair. “What an old sentence,” she said, “from such youthful lips.”
OUR VISIT TO the royal court triggered a new wave of gossip about Klara Koskov’s true paternity that caused embarrassment for my foster father, so we brought my brief career as a salon curiosity to a timely close. Our decision coincided with Uncle Pyotr’s return from a half year in Stockholm, and the Chernenko residence on Dzerzhinsky Street became a second home for us. Pyotr’s ex-actress wife, Yuliya Grigorevna, became a loyal friend and held dinners where I met a broader cross section of Petersburgers than I had in the higher stratum of the salons. Bankers, chemists, and poets rubbed shoulders with theater managers, clerks, and sea captains. I continued to read voraciously, and wrote to many authors, signing myself “K. Koskov” to conceal my age and gender. Horology’s archives still contain letters to K. Koskov from the physician René La?nnec, the inventor Humphrey Davy, and the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi. University was not yet a possibility for women, but as the years passed, many of the liberal-leaning Petersburg intelligentsia visited the Chernenkos to discuss their papers with the cerebral bluestocking. In time, I even received a few marriage proposals, but neither Dmitry nor Vasilisa Koskov was eager to lose me, and I had no desire to become a man’s legal property for a second time.
KLARA’S TWENTIETH CHRISTMAS came, and her twelfth with the Koskovs. She received fur-lined boots from Dmitry, piano music from Vasilisa, and a sable cloak from the Chernenkos. My journal records that on January 6, 1823, Dmitry gave a sermon on Job and the hidden designs of Providence. The choir of the Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin gave only a mediocre performance due to sore throats and colds. Snow lay deep in the gutters, fog and smoke filled the alleyways, the sun was a memory, icicles hung from the eaves, steam snorted white from the horses’ frozen nostrils, and ice floes as big as boats floated on the thundercloudgray Neva River.
After our midday meal, Vasilisa and I were in the parlor. I was writing a letter in Dutch about osmosis in giant trees to a scholar at Leiden University. My foster mother was marking the French compositions of some of her pupils. The fire gnawed logs. Galina, our housekeeper, was lighting the lamps and tutting about my eyesight when we heard a knock at our door. Jasper, our little dog of uncertain pedigree, went skating and yapping down the hall. Vasilisa and I looked at each other but neither of us was expecting a caller. Through the lace curtain we saw an unknown coach with a veiled window. Galina brought in a card, given to her by a footman at the door. Dubiously, my mother read it aloud: “Mr. Shiloh Davydov. ‘Shiloh’? It sounds foreign to me. Does it sound foreign to you, Klara?” Davydov’s address, however, was the respectable Mussorgky Prospect. “Might they be friends of Uncle Pyotr’s?”
“Mrs. Davydov is in the coach, too, I’m told,” added Galina.
With a sudden change of mind that I would later recognize as an Act of Suasion, Vasilisa’s doubts evaporated. “Well, invite them in, Galina! What must they think of us? The poor lady’ll be freezing!”
“PARDON OUR UNANNOUNCED intrusion,” said a spry man with expansive whiskers, a plangent voice, and dark clothes of a foreign cut, “Mrs. and Miss Koskov. The fault is all mine. I had my letter of introduction written before church, but then our stable boy got kicked by a horse and we had to summon a doctor. With all this brouhaha afoot, I quite neglected to ensure that the letter I had written had in fact been brought to you. My name is Shiloh Davydov, and I am at your service.” He handed his hat to Galina with a smile. “Of Russian extraction from my father, but resident in Marseille, in so far as I am ‘resident’ anywhere. And may I,” even then, I noticed a Chinese cadence to his Russian, “may I present my wife, Mrs. Claudette Davydov, who, Miss Koskov, is better known to you”—he waggled his cane—“by her maiden and pen-name ‘C. Holokai.’ ”
This was unexpected. I had corresponded with “C. Holokai,” author of a philosophical text on the Transmigration of the Soul, several times, never dreaming that he might be a she. Mrs. Davydov’s dark, inquisitive face hinted at Levantine or Persian extraction. She was dressed in dove-gray silk and wore a necklace of black and white pearls. “Mrs. Koskov,” she addressed Vasilisa, “thank you for your hospitality to two strangers on a winter’s afternoon.” She spoke Russian more slowly than her husband, but enunciated with such great care that her listeners paid close attention. “We should have waited until tomorrow before inviting you to our house, but the name of ‘K. Koskov’ came up only an hour ago at the house of Professor Obel Andropov and I took it as a—as a sign.”
“The professor is a friend,” said my foster mother.
“And a classical linguist of the first rank,” I added.
“Indeed. Well, Professor Andropov told me that the ‘K’ stood for ‘Klara’; and then, on our way home, by chance I glanced out of our coach and saw your father’s church. A hobgoblin told me to see if you were at home, and I’m afraid that I”—Claudette Davydov asked her husband in Arabic how to say the word “succumbed” in Russian, and Shiloh Davydov repeated it for her—“I succumbed.”
“My, my,” said Vasilisa, blinking at the exotic strangers whom she’d apparently invited into her house. “My. You’re both welcome, I’m sure. My husband will be home presently. Make yourselves as comfortable as you can, I beg you. This is not a palace but …”
“No palace I ever saw was half so friendly.” Shiloh Davydov looked around our parlor. “My wife’s been excited about meeting ‘K. Koskov’ since the day I resolved to visit Petersburg.”
“Indeed I have.” Claudette Davydov handed Galina her muff of white fur with murmured thanks. “And to judge from Miss Koskov’s surprise, we both wrote to the other in the mistaken belief that the other was a man—do I surmise correctly, Miss Koskov?”
“I cannot deny it, Mrs. Davydov,” I said, as we all sat down.
“Is it not too much like an absurd farce for the stage?”
“A wrongheaded world,” sighed Shiloh Davydov, “where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed.”
We considered the truth of this. “Klara dear,” said Vasilisa, remembering her duty as hostess, “would you feed up the fire while Galina brings refreshments for our guests?”
“THE SEA IS my business, sir,” replied Shiloh Davydov. Dmitry found the Davydovs’ unexpected company to his liking, and for the men the tea and cakes were superseded by brandy and the box of cigars Shiloh had presented to my foster father. “Shipping, freight, shipyards, shipbuilding, maritime insurance …” He waved a hand vaguely. “I’ve journeyed to Petersburg at the behest of the Russian Admiralty, so naturally I must be discreet about details. We shall be employed here for a year at least, however, and I’ve been granted the use of a government house on Mussorgsky Prospect. Mrs. Koskov, how difficult will it be to engage domestic staff who are both capable and honest? In Marseille, I’m sorry to say, the combination is as rare as hen’s teeth.”
“The Chernenkos will help,” said Vasilisa. “For Dmitry’s uncle, Pyotr Ivanovich, and his wife, finding a few hen’s teeth is a small matter. Is it not, Dmitry?”
“They’ll come wrapped in a Golden Fleece, knowing Pyotr.” Dmitry puffed appreciatively on his cigar. “How do you intend to wile away your months in our frozen northern wastes, Mrs. Davydov?”
“Like my husband, I have the soul of an explorer,” said Claudette Davydov, as if that were a full answer. The fire spat sparks. “First, though, I intend to finish a commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I had even entertained hopes that ‘K. Koskov’ would pay me the honor of casting her eye over my scribblings, if …”
I said that the honor would be mine, and that we clandestine female scholars were duty-bound to band together. Then I asked if “C. Holokai” had received my last letter, sent the previous August to the Russian legate in Marseille.
“Indeed I did,” said Claudette Davydov. “My husband, whose love of philosophy is, as you see, as deep as my own, was as fascinated as I was to read about your notion of the Dusk.”
Now Vasilisa was curious. “What dusk would that be, dear?”
I disliked lying even by omission to my foster parents, but Atemporality in a Godless, godless universe was not a profitable topic of discussion in our pious household. As I fabricated a prosaic explanation, my glance fell on Shiloh Davydov. His eyes had half closed and a spot glowed in what I knew from my Eastern resurrections was a chakra-eye. I looked at Claudette Davydov. The same spot glowed. Something was happening. I looked at my foster parents and saw that Vasilisa and Dmitry Koskov were as still as living waxworks. Vasilisa still wore her look of concentration, but her mind appeared to have shut down. Or have been shut down. Dmitry’s cigar smoked in his fingers, but his body was motionless.
After twelve hundred years I had come to think of myself as immune to shock, but I was wrong. Time had not stopped. The fire still burned. I could still hear Galina chopping vegetables out in the kitchen. By instinct, I searched for a pulse in Vasilisa’s wrist and found it, strong and steady. Her breathing was slow and shallow but steady. The same was true for Dmitry. I said their names. They didn’t hear me. They weren’t here. There could be only one cause or, more likely, a pair of causes.
The Davydovs, meanwhile, had returned to normal and were awaiting my response. Standing, feeling out of my depth but furious, I grabbed the poker and told the Davydovs, or whatever the Davydovs were, in a manner not at all like a twenty-year-old Russian priest’s daughter, “If you’ve harmed my parents, I swear—”
“Why would we harm these sincere people?” Shiloh Davydov was surprised. “We’ve performed an Act of Hiatus on them. That’s all.”
Claudette Davydov spoke next: “We were hoping for a private audience with you, Klara. We can unhiatus your foster parents like that”—she clicked her fingers—“and they won’t know they were gone.”
Still viewing the Davydovs as threats, I asked whether a “hiatus” was a phenomenon akin to mesmerism.
“Franz Mesmer is a footling braggart,” replied Claudette Davydov. “We are psychosoterics. Psychosoterics of the Deep Stream.”
Seeing that these words only baffled me, Shiloh Davydov asked, “Have you not witnessed anything like this before, Miss Koskov?”
“No,” I replied. The Davydovs looked at each other, surprised. Shiloh Davydov removed the cigar from Dmitry’s fingers before it scorched them, and rested it in the ashtray. “Won’t you put that poker down? It won’t help your understanding.”
Feeling foolish, I replaced the poker. I heard horses’ hoofs, the jink of bridles, and the cries of a coalman on Primorsky Prospect. Inside our parlor my metalife was entering a new epoch. I asked my guests, “Who are you? Truly?”
Shiloh Davydov said, “My name is Xi Lo. ‘Shiloh’ is as close as I can get in Europe. My colleague here, who is obliged to be my wife in public, is Holokai. These are the true names we carry with us from our first lives. Our souls’ names, if you will. My first question for you, Miss Klara Koskov, is this: What is your true name?”
In a most unladylike way, I drank a good half of Dmitry’s brandy. So long ago had I buried the dream that I’d one day meet others like me, other Atemporals, that now it was happening, I was woefully, woefully unprepared. “Marinus,” I said, though it came out as a husky squeak, thanks to the brandy. “I am Marinus.”
“Well met, Marinus,” said Claudette Holokai Davydov.
“I know that name,” frowned Xi Lo–in–Shiloh. “How?”
“You would not have slipped my mind,” I assured him.
“Marinus.” Xi Lo stroked his sideburns. “Marinus of Tyre, the cartographer? Any connection? No. Emperor Philip the Arab had a father, Julius Marinus. No. This is an itch I cannot scratch. We glean from your letter that you’re a Returnee, not a Sojourner?”
I confessed that I didn’t understand his question.
The pair looked unsettled by my ignorance. Claudette Holokai said, “Returnees die, go to the Dusk, are resurrected forty-nine days later. Sojourners, like Xi Lo here, just move on to a new body when the old one’s worn out.”
“Then, yes.” I sat back down. “I suppose I am a Returnee.”
“Marinus.” Xi Lo–in–Shiloh watched me. “Are we the first Atemporals you ever met?”
The lump in my throat was a pebble. I nodded.
Claudette-Holokai stole a drag of her companion’s cigar. “Then you’re handling yourself admirably. When Xi Lo broke my isolation, the shock drove away my wits for hours. Some may say they never returned. Well. We bear glad tidings. Or not. There are more of us.”
I poured myself more brandy from Dmitry’s decanter. It helped to dissolve the pebble. “How many of you—of us—are there?”
“Not a large host,” Xi Lo answered. “Seven of us are affiliated in a Horological Society housed in a property in Greenwich, near London. Nine others rejected our overtures, preferring isolation. The door to them stays open if they ever wish for company. We encountered eleven—or twelve, if we include the Swabian—‘self-elected’ Atemporals down the centuries. To cure these Carnivores of their predatory habits is a principal function of us Horologists, and this is exactly what we did.”
Later I would learn what this puzzling terminology entailed.
“If you’ll pardon the indelicate question, Marinus,” Claudette-Holokai’s fingers traced her string of pearls, “when were you born?”
“640 A.D.,” I answered, a little drunk on the novelty of sharing the truth about myself. “I was Sammarinese in my first life. I was the son of a falconer.”
Holokai gripped her armchair as if hurtling forward at an incredible speed. “You’re more than twice my age, Marinus! I don’t have an exact birth year, or place. Probably Tahiti, possibly the Marquesas, I’d know if I went back, but I don’t care to. It was a horrible death. My second self was a Muhammadan slave boy in the house of a Jewish silversmith, in Portugal. King Jo?o died while I was there, tethering my stay to the fixed pole of 1433. Xi Lo, however …”
Clouds of aromatic cigar smoke hung at various levels.
“I was first born at the end of the Zhou Dynasty,” said the man I’d been calling Mr. Davydov, “on a boat in the Yellow River delta. My father was a mercenary. The date would have been around 300 A.D. Fifty lifetimes ago, now, or more. I notice you appear to understand this language without difficulty, Miss Koskov, yes?”
Only as I nodded did I realize he was speaking in Chinese.
“I’ve had four Chinese lives.” I pressed my rusted Mandarin back into service. “My last was in the middle years of the Ming, the 1500s. I was a woman in Kunming then. An herbalist.”
“Your Chinese sounds more modern than that,” said Xi Lo.
“In my last life I lived on the Dutch Factory in Nagasaki, and practiced with some Chinese merchants.”
Xi Lo nodded at an accelerating pace, before declaring in Russian, “God’s blood! Marinus—the doctor, on Dejima. Big man, red face, white hair, Dutch, an irascible know-it-all. You were there when HMS Phoebus blasted the place to matchwood.”
I experienced a feeling akin to vertigo. “You were there?”
“I watched it happen. From the magistrate’s pavilion.”
“But—who were you? Or who were you ‘in’?”
“I had several hosts, though no Dutchmen, or I might have known you for an Atemporal, and saved Klara Koskov a world of bother. You Dutch were marooned by the fall of Batavia, you’ll recall, so my route in and out of Japan was via the Chinese trading junks. Magistrate Shiroyama was my host for some weeks.”
“I visited the magistrate several times. There was a big, buried scandal around his death. But what took you to Nagasaki?”
“A winding tale,” said Xi Lo, “involving a colleague, ōshima, who was Japanese in his first life, and a nefarious abbot named Enomoto, who unearthed a pre-Shinto psychodecanter up in Kirishima.”
“Enomoto visited Dejima. His presence made my skin creep.”
“The wisdom of skin is underappreciated. I used an Act of Suasion to persuade Shiroyama to end Enomoto’s reign. Poison. Regrettably, it cost the magistrate his life, but such was the arithmetic of sacrifice. My turn will come, one day.”
Jasper the dog took advantage of Vasilisa’s immobility to jump onto her lap, a liberty that my foster mother never granted.
I asked, “What’s ‘suasion’? Is it like a ‘hiatus’?”
“Both are Acts of Psychosoterica,” said Holokai-in-Claudette. “Where an Act of Hiatus freezes, an Act of Suasion forces. I presume your only present means of improving the lots of your lowerborn lives,” she indicated the Koskovs’ warm but humble parlor, “is by acquiring patrons, patronesses, and such?”
“Yes. And the accrued knowledge of my lifetimes. I gravitate towards medicine. For my female selves, it’s one of the few ways up.”
Galina was still chopping vegetables in the kitchen.
“Let us teach you shortcuts, Marinus.” Xi Lo leaned forward, his fingers drumming his cane. “Let us show you new worlds.”
? ? ?
“SOMEONE’S MILES AWAY.” Unalaq leans on the door frame, holding a mug emblazoned with the logo of Metallica, the death-defying heavy-metal group. “The mug? A gift from Inez’s kid brother. Two updates: L’Ohkna’s paid for seven days on Holly’s hotel room; and Holly was beginning to stir, so I hiatused her until you’re ready.”
“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.”
“ōshima 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. ōshima 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 ōshima, 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 ōshima. “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 …”
ōshima’s mildly amused. “I’m ōshima. Yes, I’m another Horologist, too. Enjoying my eleventh life, since we’re counting.”
“But … you weren’t in the police car … were you?”
“In spirit, if not in body. For you, I was ōshima the Friendly Ghost. For your abductors, I was ōshima 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. ōshima,” 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 would risk 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 ōshima. “But to be safe, your daughter has a bodyguard. Roho’s one of us, too.” And one that the Second Mission can ill spare, ōshima 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,” ōshima 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 ōshima. “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 ōshima, “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 ōshima, “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 ōshima. “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,” ōshima 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.”
Pigeons croon and huddle on Unalaq’s window boxes.
“Let’s say I believe you,” says Holly. “Why me? Why do these Anchorites want to—Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this—want to kill me? And what am I to you?” She looks around the table. “Why do I matter in your War?”
ōshima and Unalaq look at me. “Because you said ‘Yes,’ forty years ago, to a woman named Esther Little, who was fishing off a rickety wooden pier jutting out over the Thames.”
Holly stares at me. “How can you possibly know that?”
“Esther told me about the encounter. That day, in 1984.”
“You were in Gravesend? That Saturday Jacko went?”
“My body was. My soul was in Jacko’s skull, as Jacko lay in his bed in the Captain Marlow. Esther Little’s soul was there too, as was the soul of Holokai, another colleague. With Xi Lo’s soul, that made four Greeks hiding in the belly of the Trojan Horse. Miss Constantin appeared in the room, through the Aperture, and ushered Jacko up the Way of Stones into the Chapel of the Dusk.”
“The place the Blind Cathar built?” Holly’s voice is dry.
“The place the Blind Cathar built.” Good, she’d taken it in. “Jacko was Constantin’s bait. We’d poked her eye by inoculating you, and we gambled on her not being able to resist poking ours in return by grooming and abducting the saved sister’s brother. That part worked, and for the first time Horologists gained access to the oldest, hungriest, and best-guarded psychodecanter in existence. Before we could figure out a means of destroying the place, however, the Blind Cathar awoke. He summoned all the Anchorites and, well, it’s hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters …”
“Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand grenades,” offers ōshima, “trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.”
“It was the worst day in Horology’s history,” I say.
“We killed five Anchorites,” says ōshima, “but they killed Xi Lo and Holokai. Killed-killed.”
“Didn’t they just get … resurrected?” asked Holly.
“If we die in the Dusk,” I explain, “we die. Terms and conditions. Somehow the Dusk prevents resurrection. I survived because Esther Little fought her way to and fled down the Way of Stones with my soul enwrapped in hers. Alone, I would have perished, but even in Esther’s safekeeping I suffered grievous damage, as did Esther. She opened the Aperture very near where you were, Holly, in the garden of a certain bungalow near the Isle of Sheppey.”
“I’m guessing the location was no accident?” asks Holly.
“It was not. While Esther’s soul and mine were reraveling, however, the Third Anchorite, one Joseph Rh?mes, arrived on the scene. He had followed our tracks. He slew Heidi Cross and Ian Fairweather for the hell of it, and was about to kill you, too, when I reraveled myself enough to animate Fairweather. Rh?mes kineticked a weapon into my head, and I died. Forty-nine days later I was resurrected in this body, in a broken-down ambulance in one of Detroit’s more feral zip codes. For a long time I assumed Rh?mes had killed you in the bungalow, and that Esther’s soul had been too badly damaged to reravel. But when I next made contact with 119A, Arkady—in his last self, not the self you met earlier—told me that you hadn’t died. Instead, Joseph Rh?mes’s body had been found at the crime scene.”
“Only a psychosoteric could have killed Joseph Rh?mes,” says ōshima. “Rh?mes followed the Shaded Way for seventeen decades.”
Holly understands. “So you think it was Esther Little?”
Unalaq says, “It’s the least implausible explanation.”
“But Esther Little was a … sweet old bat who gave me tea.”
“Yes,” snorts ōshima, “and I’m a sweet old boy who rides around all day on my senior citizen’s bus pass.”
“Why don’t I remember any of this?” says Holly. “And where did Esther Little go after killing this Rh?mes man?”
“The first question’s simpler,” says Unalaq. “Any psychosoteric can redact memories. It takes skill to do it with precision, but Esther had that skill. She could have done it on her way in.”
Unconsciously, Holly grips the table. “On her way in—to where?”
“Into your parallax of memories,” I say. “To the asylum you offered her. Esther’s soul was battered in the Chapel of the Dusk, flamed as she fought our way out down the Way of Stones, and drained to the last psychovolt by killing Joseph Rh?mes.”
“Her soul would have needed years to reravel,” says Unalaq. “Years when Esther was as vulnerable to attack as someone in a coma.”
“I … sort of get it.” Holly’s chair creaks. “Esther Little ‘in-gressed’ me, got me away from the crime scene, wiped my memories of what happened … Okay. But where did she go after she … recovered?”
ōshima, Unalaq, and I all look at Holly’s head.
Holly frowns, then understands. “You’re bloody joking.”