The Bone Clocks

“Oh, you swear, do you? To God, no less?” Immaculйe Constantin looks concerned. “But God’s dead. Why don’t we check if I’ll regret my promises with our friends the Radio People, shall we?” She cups her diamonded ear and pretends to listen. “No, Holly, no. You’re misinformed. I’ll regret nothing; you, however, are going to writhewith remorse that you deserted your secret friend Miss Constantin when you were sweet, seven, and psychic. Think about it. Only one Sykes would have died, instead of five Sykeses plus a Brubeck. You’ll positively screamwith regret! Well, Mr. Anyder? Was this brittle-boned widow a screamer in her pliable, pheromonal days?”

Hugo Lamb steps into view. Cleft-chinned, his body preserved at twenty-five years of age, and scornful-eyed. “She was the silent type. Hello, Holly. Funny how things turn out, isn’t it?”

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. “What did they doto you?”

Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. “They”—he looks about the Chapel—“cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”

“ ‘Betrays’?” Pfenninger steps up. “A segue, Marinus. Did you know we have a supergrass among your Inner Circle?”

I resist the temptation to say, “Yes, we’ve known for a year now.”

“Not Mr. D’Arnoq,” Pfenninger continues. “He only duped you for seven days. Someone who’s been making a monstrous bloody tit of you for a whole year.”

I’ve been dreading this scene. “ Don’t, Pfenninger.”

“Yes, it hurts, but veritas vos liberabit—and remember, amusing me is your only means of squeezing out a few extra minutes …”

True. I think of incorporeal Esther, invoking a real psychoferno inside Фshima’s head. Every second matters. “Amaze and dismay me.”

Pfenninger clicks his fingers at the Umber Arch, and in strolls Sadaqat. His demeanor has changed from humble warden to captain of firing squad. “Hello again, dear friends. Here was my choice: twenty more years of housework, laundry, weeding, growing old, catheters, prostate trouble, oreternal life, free training in the Shaded Way, and the deeds to 119A. Mm. Let me think. For about twenty seconds. Well, well, well, the Way of the Butler just wasn’t for me.”

Holly is shocked: “They trusted you! They were your friends!”

“If you’d known Horology for longer than five days, Ms. Sykes,” Sadaqat walks up to the far end of the long table and leans on it as if he owns it, “you would e ventually wake up to the fact that Horology is a club for immortals, who prevent others from attaining their own privileges. They are aristocrats. They are verylike a white country—so sorry to bring race into this, but the analogy is spot on—a rich, white, imperial, exploitative bastion, which torpedoes the refugee boats coming from the Land of the Huddled Brown Masses. What I have done is to choose survival. Any living being would do the same.”

“Congratulations on the new job, Sadaqat.” Arkady’s sincerity is flawless. “ ‘Soul-harvester.’ Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Sadaqat sneers: “Fancy your servile little Pakistani butler spotting your subtle Arkadian irony.”

Фshima asks, “What’s your hipster new name going to be, Sadaqat? Major Integrity? Mr. Snitchfink? Judas McJanus?”

“Here’s what my name is not—Mr. Don’t-Worry-About-Sadaqat-He’s-Happy-to-Have-the-Privilege-of-Blowing-Himself-Up-on-the-Stairs-to-Save-Our-Pious-Atemporal-Asses.”

“Sadaqat’s played his part,” I tell Pfenninger. “Let him go.”

Pfenninger flicks his bow tie. “Don’t pretend to know my mind, Marinus. You’d not knowingly nurture a spy.”

“Fine, I had no idea. He followed your orders. Spied on us. Threw away his ten kilos of Blu Tack. Let him go.”

Sadaqat snarls in a way he hasn’t done since I first treated him at Dawkins Hospital in Berkshire, England: “It wasn’t Blu Tack! It was N9D. Hyperexplosives, which youas good as strapped to my chest!”

“Actually, Marinus, he’s half right,” Arkady tells me. “The Blu Tack people make it, but technically its brand-name is White Tack.”

Sadaqat stands on the bench. “Liar! You dragged me along as your human land mine!”

“Three times I tried to persuade you not to join the Second Mission, Sadaqat,” I remind him.

“You could’ve suasioned me, if you cared so much. And Mr. Pfenninger isn’t going to ‘let me go’! I’m the Twelfth Anchorite.”

“Forgive me for raising the specter of race,” Arkady says, “but look at Anchorites One through Eleven. Any ethnic commonalities jump out at you?”

Sadaqat is immune to doubt. “I’ve been recruited to improve the—the—the balance of the Anchorites.”

Arkady’s snorting laugh turns into a cough. “Sorry, a bit of saliva went down the wrong way. And whydid the All Whites choose you?”