Текст книги "The Bone Clocks"

Автор книги: David Mitchell

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 40 страниц)

“She was, yes,” says Holly. “That’s grand, thanks.”

Sadaqat places a matching willow-pattern teapot and teacup, a jug of milk, and a bowl of sugar on a mat. My green tea is brewing in a black iron teapot owned by Choudary Marinus, two selves ago. Arkady drinks coffee from a bowl. Sadaqat puts a lit candle in a stained-glass cup as a centerpiece. “To brighten the place up. It can get a little tomblike in here.”

In a parallel universe the man’s a design fascist, subsays Arkady.

“Just what we need, Sadaqat,” I say. He leaves, pleased.

Holly folds her arms. “You’d better begin. I’m too …”

“We’ve invited you here this morning,” I say, “to learn about us and our cosmology. About Atemporals and psychosoterics.”

This sounds like a business seminar, Marinus, subsays Arkady.

“Hold on,” says Holly. “You lost me at ‘Atemporals.’ ”

“Prick us, we bleed,” says Arkady, cupping his coffee bowl, “tickle us, we laugh, poison us, we die, but afterwe die, we come back. Marinus here has gone through this—thirty-nine lives, is it?”

“Forty, if we include poor Heidi Cross at her bungalow by the Isle of Sheppey.” I notice Holly watching me for signs of a second head or a maniacal cackle.

“I’m still a newbie,” says Arkady, “on my fifth self. Dying still reallyfreaks me out, in the Dusk, looking over the Dunes …”

“What dusk?” asks Holly. “What dunes?”

“ TheDusk,” Arkady says, “between life and death. We see it from the High Ridge. It’s a beautiful, fearsome sight. All the souls, the pale lights, crossing over, blown by the Seaward Wind to the Last Sea. Which, of course, isn’t really a sea at all, but—”

“Wait wait wait.” Holly leans forwards. “You’re saying you’ve died? That you’ve seen all this yourselves?”

Arkady drinks from his coffee bowl, then wipes his lips. “Yes, Ms. Sykes, to both your questions. But the Landward Wind blows our souls back, like it or not. Back over the High Ridge, back into the Light of Day, and then we hear a noise like … a town being dropped, and everything in it smashing to bits.” Arkady asks me, “Fair description?”

“It’ll do. Then we wake up in a new body, a child’s, usually in need of urgent repair, just vacated by its previous owner.”

“At the cafй,” Holly turns to me, “you said that Hugo Lamb’s lot, the Anchorites, are immortal ‘with terms and conditions.’ Are you and they the same?”

“No. We live in this spiral of resurrections involuntarily. We don’t know how, or why us. We never sought it. Our first selves died in one of the usual ways, we saw the Dusk as Arkady just described, then forty-nine days later we came back.”

“From then on,” Arkady unthreads and rethreads his ponytail, “we’re stuck on repeat. Our second body grew, matured, died; bam, we’re back in the Dusk; then, whoosh, forty-nine days later, we’re waking up back on earth—in a body of the opposite gender, just to well and truly screw your head up.”

Swearing won’t make you more credible, I subreprimand him. “What matters,” I tell Holly, “is that no one pays for our atemporality. Its cost we alone pay. Our phylum, if you will, is herbivorous.”

From the street below we hear the screech of brakes.

“So,” asks Holly, “the Anchorites are all carnivores?”

“Every last one.” Arkady runs his finger round his bowl.

Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking … vampires?”

Arkady groans. “Oh, the V-word! Here it comes again.”

“Carnivores are only metaphorically vampiric,” I tell Holly. “They look as normal, or as abnormal, as any other subset of the population—plumbers, bankers, diabetics. More’s the pity they don’t all look like David Lynch villains. Our work would be easier by far.” I breathe in the bitter green-tea steam and anticipate Holly’s next question. “They feed on souls, Ms. Sykes. Carnivores decant souls, which means abducting people, ideally children,” I hold her freshly unsettled gaze as she thinks about Jacko, “which means killing them, I’m afraid.”

“Which is not nice,” says Arkady. “So Marinus, me, and a few other unthanked individuals—Atemporals for the most part, with some mortal collaborators—make it our business to … take them down. Individual Carnivores rarely give us that much bother—they tend to think they’re the only ones, and operate as carelessly as shoplifters who refuse to believe in store detectives. The problems begin—our War started—when they hunt in a pack.”

“Which is why we’re here, Ms. Sykes,” I sip my tea, “because of one particular pack. ‘The Anchorites of the Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Order of Sidelhorn Pass.”

“Too long for business cards.” Arkady interlaces his fingers, inverts his hands, and lifts his arms. “Just ‘Anchorites,’ to friends.”

“The Sidelhorn’s a mountain,” says Holly. “In Switzerland.”

“Quite a climb it is, too,” I remark. “Sidelhorn also lends its name to a pass in northern Italy, a road that was old even when Roman legions used it. A Thomasite monastery served as a hostelry on the pass, on the Swiss Valais side, from the ninth century to the last year of the eighteenth. There, in the 1210s, a figure known as the Blind Cathar ontologized into being a conduit into the Dusk.”

Holly scans this blast of history. “The Dusk that lies between …”

“Life and death,” says Arkady. “Good, you’re listening.”

Holly asks, “What’s a Cathar?”

“The Cathars were twelfth– and thirteenth-century heretics,” I say, “in Languedoc. They preached that the world was created not by God but the devil, that matter was evil, that Jesus, as a man, was therefore not the Son of God. The papacy did not approve. In 1198 Pope Innocent III proposed a landgrab that became known as the Albigensian Crusade. The King of France was otherwise engaged, but he gave barons from the north of France his blessing to ride south, kill Cathars, confiscate their lands, and subdue a disloyal region for the French Crown. Heresy is fissiparous, however. What was smashed, splintered. Our Blind Cathar had settled at a Thomasite monastery in distant Valais by, we guess, 1205, 1206. Why he chose the Sidelhorn, we do not know. His name, we do not know. His impetuses for delving into matter, noumena, logos, mind, the soul, the Dusk, we do not know. He appears in only one historical source. Mecthild of Magdeburg’s history of the Episcopal Inquisition dates from the 1270s and describes how, in 1215, the Inquisition sentenced the ‘Blind Cathar’ of Sidelhorn monastery to death for witchcraft. The night before his execution, he was locked in a cell in the monastery. By dawn,” I think of Oscar Gomez, “he had vanished. Mecthild arrived at the conclusion that the heretic’s liege lord Satan had looked after his own.”

“Don’t worry,” says Arkady. “We don’t do Satan.”

“The history lesson’s almost over,” I promise. “Earth spun on its axis, despite the Inquisition’s insistence to the contrary, until the year 1799.” I rest my fingertips on the iron teapot. “A stroke of Napoleon’s pen merged the proud Swiss cantons into a single Helvetican Republic. Not all the Swiss approved of being a client state of France, however, and when promises of religious freedom were reneged upon, many began burning churches and turning on their Paris-appointed masters. Napoleon’s enemies fanned the flames, and in early April a company of Austrian artillery came over the Sidelhorn Pass from Piedmont. Two hundred kegs of gunpowder were stored in the monastery’s cowshed and, by carelessness or sabotage, exploded. Much of the monastery was destroyed, and a rock-fall swept away a bridge crossing the chasm below. Which is only a footnote in the Revolutionary Wars, but that explosion, in ourWar, equates to the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Shock waves from it ricocheted up to the Chapel of the Dusk, you see, and the Blind Cathar’s long slumber ended.”

The mantelpiece clock measures out eight delicate chimes.

“The Thomasite Order was by then a ghost of its pre-Reformation self, and lacked the money, means, and the will to rebuild its Alpine redoubt. The Helvetican government in Zьrich, however, voted to repair the Sidelhorn bridge and position a barracks to guard the strategically vital pass. One Baptiste Pfenninger, an engineer from Martigny, was dispatched to the site to oversee the work, and on a night in late summer, as Pfenninger lay in his room at the barracks trying to sleep, he heard a voice calling his name. The voice sounded both miles away and inches away. His door was bolted on the inside, but Pfenninger saw a strip of air swaying at the foot of his bed. The engineer touched it. He found that the strip of air parted, like a curtain, and through it he saw a round floor and a person-high candle of the type one still finds before Catholic or Orthodox altars. Beyond were slabs of stone, climbing up into darkness. Baptiste Pfenninger was a pragmatic man, not drunk, and of sound mind. His room was on the second floor of a two-story building. Yet he passed through the impossible curtain in the air, known, by the way, as the Aperture, and climbed up the impossible steps. How are you holding up so far, Ms. Sykes?”

Holly’s thumb sits in her clavicle. “I don’t know.”

Arkady is stroking his zits, content to let me talk.

“Baptiste Pfenninger became the first visitor to the Chapel of the Dusk. He found a portrait, or an icon of the Blind Cathar. It had no eyes, yet as Pfenninger stood there, and gazed at it, or was gazed at by it, he saw a dot appear in the icon’s forehead and grow into the black pupil of a lidless eye and …”

“ Isaw that! Where’s it from?”

I look at Arkady, who shrugs slightly in reply. “It’s what the icon of the Blind Cathar does, shortly before it decants a soul.”

Holly addresses me with a fresh urgency. “Listen. The weekend Jacko went missing. That dot-to-eye on a forehead thing. I—I—I had a—a daymare in an underpass, near Rochester. I left it out of The Radio People, it just read like a bad description of an acid trip. But it happened.”

Arkady subasks me, What if Xi Lo was cording images to her during the First Mission?

Why keep that from us? I hunt for a better idea. What if Jacko and Holly were already corded, as two psychosoteric siblings?

Arkady’s biting his thumb knuckle, a habit from his last life. Possibly. The cord’s remnants may have led Esther to Holly as you fled the Chapel. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.

“ ’Scuse me,” Holly’s saying, “but I amstill here. What’s Jacko got to do with this medieval monk and a Napoleonic engineer?”

The candle flame in its stained-glass jar is tall and still.

“The Blind Cathar and the engineer talked,” I say, “and agreed upon a covenant, a pact of mutual assistance. We can’t be sure—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. This monk had been in his Chapel of the Dusk for, what, six hundred years? Now he’s inviting up visitors and making deals. What’s he been eating since the Middle Ages?”

“Naturally, the Blind Cathar had transubstantiated,” I explain.

Holly leans back. “Is transwhateveritis even a word?”

“The Blind Cathar’s body had died,” says Arkady, “but his mind and soul—which, for the purposes of our chat, are the same—had entered into the fabric of the Chapel. The Blind Cathar interfaced with Pfenninger via the icon.”

Holly considers this. “So the builder became the building?”

“After a fashion,” Arkady replies. “You could say so.”

“The bridge and the garrison at the Sidelhorn Pass were finished ahead of winter,” I pick up the thread, “and Baptiste Pfenninger returned to his family in Martigny. But the following spring he went on a fishing trip up to Lake d’Emosson, where, one evening, he took a boat onto the water. The boat was found, the body never was.”

“I get it,” Holly says. “The same as Hugo Lamb.”

Rain is softly muttering at 119A’s windows. “Jump forward six years to 1805. A new orphanage opened its doors in the Marais district of Paris. Its founder and director was a sturdy Frenchman called Martin Leclerc, whose father had amassed a colonial fortune in Africa, and who now wished to give sustenance, shelter, and scripture to the capital’s war orphans. 1805 was a bad time to be a foreigner in Paris, and Leclerc’s French had a Germanic slant, but his friends attributed his foreignness to a Prussian mother and a Hamburg education. These same friends, many of whom were the cream of imperial society, did not know that Martin Leclerc’s real name was Baptiste Pfenninger. One imagines the accusations of insanity that would have greeted the idea that Leclerc had set up his orphanage to source and groom Engifted children. That is, children who showed evidence of psychosoteric voltage or an active chakra-eye.”

Holly looks at Arkady, who narrows his eyes like a pondering interpreter. “Psychic gifts. Like you, aged seven.”

“Why would a … a Swiss engineer, who faked his own death and is now a French orphanage owner—right?—want psychic children?”

Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match. Around every equinox and solstice, the soul’s owner has to be lured up the Way of Stones into the Chapel. Once there, the hapless visitor stares at the icon of the Blind Cathar, who then decants the visitor’s soul into Black Wine. The body is disposed of through a Chapel window, and the Twelve Anchorites assemble at a ritual known as a Rebirthday where they drink the Black Wine, and for a season—three months or so—no cellular subdivision occurs in their bodies. Which is why Hugo Lamb’s body has remained in its midtwenties state, while his mind and soul are over fifty years old.”

Holly suspends judgment, for now. “Why’s Pfenninger now in Paris when you get to the ‘Chapel’ via a ruined Swiss monastery?”

“Any Anchorite can summon the Aperture anywhere.” Arkady lowers his palm over the candle flame. “And open it anywhere, too, from the inside. The Aperture’s why this War’s gone on for 160 years. For all intents and purposes the Anchorites are able to teleport themselves from place to place. It’s both the ultimate getaway car and a method of surprise attack.”

Holly’s voice cracks as she realizes something: “Miss Constantin?”

“Immaculйe Constantin is Pfenninger’s deputy. We don’t know why the First Anchorite recruited her as the Second, but she was the governess of the girls’ wing of the Marais orphanage. No less a personage than Talleyrand referred to Madame Constantin as ‘a Sword-wielding Seraphim in a Woman’s Form.’ Eighteen decades pass and we find her in Gravesend, grooming Holly Sykes. She made a rare error in your case, however, by spooking you, so that one of my ex-students brought you to my attention. I inoculated you by draining off your psychosoteric voltage and rendering you unfit for Black Wine. Miss Constantin was annoyed, of course, and although she never forgot Holly Sykes or her promising brother Jacko, she moved on.”

“The arithmetic keeps them busy,” says Arkady. “The Anchorites keep their numbers to twelve, so each individual member must source a decantible guest once every three years. Their prey can’t be drugged, bagged, and dragged up to the Chapel. Anchorites must befriend their prey, like Constantin befriended you. If the prey isn’t conscious and calm during decanting, the Black Wine’s tainted. It’s a delicate vintage.”

The figures in the painting watch us. The stories they could tell.

“Am I to understand,” Holly gathers her strength, “that Miss Constantin and the Anchorites abducted Jacko and … drank his soul? Is this what you’re really saying?”

The clock’s tick is either loud or quiet, depending.

“The thing about Jacko is …” I close my eyes and subsay Wish me luckto Arkady, “… he was one of us.”

Maybe it’s thunder somewhere, or maybe a garbage truck.

“Jacko was my brother.” Holly speaks slowly. “He was seven.”

“His body was seven,” says Arkady. “But his body was the vehicle for the soul of Xi Lo, an Horologist. Xi Lo was much, mucholder.”

Holly’s shaking her head, wrestling with this outrage.

I ask, “Remember when Jacko had meningitis, when he was five?”

“Of course I do. He damn nearly died.”

The only way is on. “Ms. Sykes, Jacko diddie that day.”

This is an affront, a trampling, and Holly’s at breaking point. “ Er, sorry—but he bloody didn’t die! I was bloody there!”

There’s no way to make this easier. “Jack Martin Sykes’s soul left his body at two twenty-three A.M. on the sixteenth of October, 1981. By two twenty-four, the soul of Xi Lo, the oldest and best of Horologists, was in possession of your brother’s body. Even as your father was yelling for a medic, Jacko’s body was out of danger. But Jacko’s soul was crossing the Dusk.”

Ominous silence. “So …” Holly’s nostrils dilate, “… my little brother’s a zombie, you’re saying?”

“Jacko wasJacko’s body,” says Arkady, “with Jacko’s habits of mind, but with Xi Lo’s soul and memories.”

She shudders, lost. “Why saysuch a thing?”

“Good question,” says Arkady. “Why would we, if it wasn’t true?”

Holly stands up and her chair topples backwards. “It usually comes down to an attempt to get money.”

“Horology was founded in 1598,” Arkady says aloofly. “We’ve made a few investments down the years. Your nest eggs are safe.”

Behave, I suborder Arkady. “Consider Jacko’s oddities,” I ask Holly. “Why would a British boy listen to Chinese radio?”

“Because … Jacko found it soothing.”

“Mandarin was Xi Lo’s mother tongue,” I explain.

“ Englishwas Jacko’s mother tongue! My mum was his mum! The Captain Marlow was his home. His family’s us. We loved him. We still do.” Holly’s blinking back tears. “Even today.”

“And Xi Lo–in–Jack loved you too,” I say gently. “Very much. He even loved Newky, the smelliest dog in Kent. None of that love was a lie. But none of what we’re telling is a lie, either. Xi Lo’s soul was older than your pub. Older than England. Older than Christianity.”

Holly’s heard enough. She picks up the knocked-over chair. “My plane flies back to Dublin this afternoon, and I’ll be on it. As you spoke, there were … bits I believed, bits I can’t. A lot of it, I just don’t know. The dreamseeding stuff was incredible. But … it’s taken me so long to stop blaming myself for Jacko, and you’re ripping that scar tissue off.” She puts on her coat. “I lead a quiet life with books and cats in the west of Ireland. Little, local, normal stuff. The Holly Sykes who wrote The Radio People, she might’vebelieved in your Atemporals, in your magic monks, but I’m not her anymore. If you are Marinus, good luck with … whatever.” Holly retrieves her handbag, puts the green key on the table, and goes to the door. “Goodbye. I’m off.”

Shall I suasion her to stay?subasks Arkady.

If her cooperation is coerced, it’s not cooperation.

“We understand,” I tell Holly. “Thanks for visiting.”

Arkady subreminds me, What about Esther?

Too much, too fast, too soon. Say something nice.

“Sorry I was rude,” says Arkady. “Growing pains.”

Holly says, “Tell Batman’s butler goodbye.”

“I will,” I answer, “and au revoir, Ms. Sykes.”

Holly has closed the door. By now the Anchorites’ll know she’s here, substates Arkady. Shall we have Ф shima shadow her?

I’m unconvinced. Pfenninger won’t abort his meticulous plans on a premature strike.

If they suspect that Esther Little is walled up inside Holly’s head, Arkady’s fingers make a gun, they’ll strike all right, and hard.

I drink cooled tea, trying to see this morning from the Anchorites’ view. How could they know that Esther’s in Holly?

They can’t know for sure. Arkady cleans his glasses on the sleeve of his Nehru shirt. But they could guess, and off her to be safe.

“ ‘Off her’? Too many gangster films, Arkady.” My device trills. The screen reads PRIVATE CALLER and I intuit it’s bad news even before I hear Elijah D’Arnoq: “Thank God, Marinus. It’s me, D’Arnoq. Look, I just found out: Constantin dispatched a cell to abduct and scansion Holly Sykes. It won’t be consensual. Stop them.”

The words sink in. “When?”

“Right now,” answers D’Arnoq.

“Where?” I ask.

“Probably at her hotel. Hurry.”

ФSHIMA’S WAITING ACROSS the road as I emerge, his collar up and his rain-spotted porkpie hat angled low. He points with a jerk of his head in the Park Avenue direction, subsaying, I guess we failed the interview.

I recognize Holly from behind by her long black coat and head-wrap. My fault. I told her that Jacko was older than Jesus. I step aside for a skateboarder. More urgently, D’Arnoq was just in touch, I subreply, to say that a cell has been sent to pick her up for scansioning. I put up my rainbow umbrella as a shield and we set off, Фshima matching my pace and position on the south side of the street, me on the north.

Remind me, subsays Фshima, why we don’t just suasion her into a nice deep sleep and then go in subhollering for Esther?

One, it’s against the Codex. Two, sheis chakra-latent, so she may react badly to scansion and redact her own memories, unraveling anyone who is in residence. Three … Well, that’s enough for now. But we’ll need her goodwill, and should only suasion her as a last resort.

The green man flashes as Holly reaches Park Avenue, so Фshima and I rush, dodge traffic, and get honked at to avoid being stranded on the island in the middle. We lengthen our strides and get to within twenty paces of Holly. Фshima asks, Do we have a strategy here, Marinus, or are we just following her like a pair of stalkers?

Between here and her hotel, let’s just secure her some head space to let her consider what she’s just learned.New leaves and old trees drip, gutters slosh, drains gargle. With luck, the park will work itsmagic on her. If not, we may have to use ours. A doorman peers up at the rain from under an awning. We reach Madison, where Holly waits in the drizzle while I stand in the doorway of a boutique, watching that dog walker, those Hasidic Jews, the Arab-looking businessman over there. A couple of cabs slow down, hoping to lure a fare, but Holly is gazing into the small green rectangle of Central Park at the far end of the block. Her mind must be in turmoil. To write a memoir in which psychic events irrupt occasionally is one thing, but for psychic events to dreamseed you, serve you Irish tea, and spin you a whole cosmology, that’s another. Maybe Фshima’s right; maybe I should suasion her back to 119A. A metalife of 1,400 years is no guarantee that you always know the right thing to do.

DON’T WALK turns to WALK and I miss my chance. Crossing Madison, I taste paranoia, and glance at people in the waiting vehicles, half expecting to see Pfenninger or Constantin staring back with hunters’ eyes. The last block to the park is busier with foot traffic so I’m even jumpier. Is that iShaded jogger with the baby stroller really a jogger? Didn’t that curtain twitch as Holly passed by? Why would a young surveyor with his tripod watch a gaunt woman in her fifties so closely? He eyes me up as well, so maybe he’s just not fussy. Фshima keeps pace on the pavement opposite, blending into the morning bustle far better than me. We pass Saint James’s Church, whose red-brick steeple once towered above this rural neighborhood of Manhattan. Yu Leon Marinus attended a wedding here in 1968. The bride and groom will be in their eighties now, if they’re still alive.

On Fifth Avenue traffic is lumbering and foul-tempered. Holly stands behind a cluster of Chinese tourists. They’re agreeing in loud Cantonese how New York is smaller, tattier, and crappier than they’d expected. Across the road, Фshima is leaning casually against the corner of the Frick Collection, his face hooded. A bus passes with a digital ad for the newly released movie of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die, but Holly is staring blankly at the park. I calm down. My instinct says we’re safe from the enemy until we reach her hotel on Broadway. If she hasn’t turned around by then, I’ll have to ignore my scruples and perform an Act of Suasion on Holly for her own safety. The Anchorites won’t try anything rash. The fallout from public assassinations is too messy. Reality on Fifth Avenue this drizzly morning is exactly as it appears.

A CHUNKY NYPD 4Ч4 pulls up onto the pavement, and a young black female officer swings out onto the sidewalk, holding her ID. “Ma’am? Are you Holly Sykes?”

Holly is yanked back to the here and now: “Yes, I—yes, is—”

“And you arethe mother of Aoife Brubeck?”

I look for Фshima, who’s already crossing the street. A large male officer has joined his colleague. “Holly Sykes?”

“Yes.” Holly’s hand goes to her mouth. “Is Aoife okay?”

“Ms. Sykes,” says the female officer in rapid-fire speech, “our precinct had a call earlier from the British consular office asking for us to put out an all-unit alert for you—we missed you by minutes at your hotel earlier. I’m afraid your daughter was involved in an auto collision in Athens last night. She’s undergone surgery, she’s stable for now, but you’re being asked to fly home on the next plane. Ms. Sykes? You hearing me?”

“Athens?” Holly supports herself on the hood of the patrol car. “But Aoife’s on an island … What … How badly—”

“Ma’am, we reallydon’t have any details, but we’ll drive you to the Empire Hotel so you can pack. Then we’ll take you to the airport.”

I step forward to do I don’t know what, but Фshima pulls me back: I’m sensing intense psychovoltage in the car; if it’s a high Anchorite and we engage in full combat on Fifth Avenue, every hippocampus within a fifty-meter radius’ll get shredded, including Holly’s. Feds, Homeland Security, who knows who’ll be scouring footage ofus, looking suspicious as all hell, tracking Holly from 119A?

Фshima’s right, but:We can’t just let them take her.

Meanwhile Holly’s being half coaxed, half herded into the squad car. She’s trying to ask more questions, but she’s had a mind-bending morning and is scared into passivity. Perhaps she’s being suasioned, too. In an agony of indecision, I watch the door slam shut and the vehicle pull off into the traffic, surging over the intersection just before the lights turn red. The windows are blacked out so I can’t see who or what numbers we’re dealing with. The sign says WALK and the pedestrians begin to cross. Sixty seconds was all it took to drop and smash our Second Mission.

ФSHIMA LEADS ME over the crossing. “I’ll do the transversing.”

“No, Фshima, it was my error of judgment so—”

“Strap on your horsehair shirt later. I’m the better transverser, and I’m just nastier. You know I am.” There’s no time to argue. We step over the low wall of the park by the Hunt Monument, where we sit on a damp bench. He grips one arm of the bench with one hand, and my hand with the other. Cord yourself into my stream, Фshima subsuggests. I’ll need your advice, like as not.

“Whatever that’s worth. But I’ll be with you.”

He squeezes my hand, shuts his eyes, and his body slumps a little as his soul egresses through his chakra-eye. Even to psychosoterics, the soul is on the edge of what’s visible, like a clear glass marble in a jar of water, and Фshima’s soul is lost in a second as it transverses upwards between the dripping twigs and the weather-stained old monument. I pull Фshima’s hat down to hide his face and shield both of us under my umbrella. A vacated body looks like a medical emergency, and at various points across my metalife I’ve ingressed myself only to find smelling salts up my nose, an artery being bled, or a stranger with halitosis administering inept CPR. Moreover, as I sync up our hand-chakras, Фshima and I resemble a pair of lovers. Even by New York’s laissez-faire standards, we would be worth a gawp.

I connect with Фshima’s cord …

… and images from Фshima’s soul stream directly into my mind. He’s gliding through a Cubist kaleidoscope of brake lights, roof racks, the tops of cars, branches, and budding leaves. Down we swoop, passing through the rear door of a van, between pig carcasses swinging on hooks, through the driver’s tarry lung, then out through the windscreen, arcing over a United Parcels van, and still higher, scaring a collared pigeon off its streetlight perch. Фshima hangs for a moment, searching for the squad car: Are you with me, Marinus?

I’m here, I subreply.

Can you see the squad car?

No. A garbage truck edges forward and I see the yellow of the school bus: Try near that school bus.

Фshima flies down, through the back window of the bus, along the aisle, between forty children arguing, talking, clustered round a 3D slate, staring into space, and out past the driver and …

… the klaxon and lights of the police car, shunting along slowly. Фshima enters through the rear windscreen and hovers for a moment, circling, to stream me a view of what we’re dealing with. To Holly’s left sits the female cop—or alleged cop. The driver is the burly male who helped hustle Holly into the car. Sitting on Holly’s right is a man wearing a suit and a Samsung wraparound that half hides his face, but we know him. Drummond Brzycki, substates Фshima.

An odd choice. Brzycki’s the newest and weakest Anchorite.

Maybe they’re not expecting trouble,guesses Фshima.

Maybe he’s a canary in a coal mine, I subreply.

I’ll ingress the woman, subsays Фshima, and see if I can find out her orders. He enters the female officer’s chakra-eye and I now have access to her sensory input. “All we know, honey,” she’s telling Holly, “is what I already told ya. If I knew more I’d tell ya. I’m achin’ for ya, honey, I am. I’m a mom too. Two little ones.”

“But is Aoife’s spine okay? How—how serious is the—”

“Don’t distress yourself, Ms. Sykes.” Drummond Brzycki flips up his wraparounds. Brzycki has Mediterranean-goalkeeper good looks, lush black hair, and a nasal voice, like a wasp trapped in a wineglass. “The consul’s out of his meeting at ten. We’ll device him direct, so whatever facts he has, you’ll get from the horse’s mouth. Okay?”

The squad car stops at a red light, and pedestrians stream across. “Maybe I can find the hospital’s number,” Holly says, getting her device from her handbag. “Athens isn’t such a big—”

“If you speak Greek,” says Brzycki, “go ahead, and good luck. Otherwise I’d keep your device free for incoming news. Don’t jump to the bleakest conclusions. We’ll use the emergency lane to get you on the eleven forty-five flight to Athens. You’ll be with Aoife soon.”