The Bone Clocks

Killed a 250-year-old Atemporal Carnivore with a fifty-dollar kitchen implement, after putting on a fine impersonation of a sniveling, scared middle-aged woman.

“The sniveling part was easy.”

The Dusk’s coming, Holly. Which way now?

She pulls herself together. “A bit of light, please.” I half egress and glow, illuminating the narrow crossroads where the woman lying dead or dying ambushed us. “Which way were we going?”

We spun as we fell, I remember. And Constantin moved around us before she threatened us. I glow brighter, but this just enhances our view of a dead ambusher and a puddle of vomit. I can’t be sure.

Panic surges through Holly. I psychosedate it back down.

Then we hear the hum of the approaching Dusk. Shall I drive?

“Yeah,” Holly croaks. “Please.”

I look at the four passageways. They’re identical.

They’re not. One looks a little lighter. Holly, there’s only one way through the labyrinth, right?

“Yeah.”

I take the passage that leads to the light, turn right, and ten paces in front of us is the Dusk, filling the tunnel like starry, slow-motion water. There are voices in its smothered ululation. It doesn’t hurt, they say in unlabeled languages, it doesn’t hurt …

“What are we doing?” Holly’s voice rings out.

I turn back. This is the way we came in. The Dusk’s following us. We came to the crossroads—here.I step us over Constantin’s body. Picture Jacko’s maze in your head again. The pendant.

“I’ve got it. Straight on.” I obey. “Left. There’ll be a turning to the right, but ignore it, it’s a dead end … Keep going. Through the next right.” I pass through the tunnel, thinking of the Dusk spilling over Constantin’s body. “Left. On a few paces … On a few more, we’re near the middle, but we have to go out in a circle to avoid a trap ahead. That’s this next left. Go on, through the arch … Now turn right.” I walk a few paces, still hearing the slosh of the Dusk catching up as the ever-shortening side tunnels and dead ends drain off less and less of its mass and energy. “Ignore that gap to your left … Now turn right. Over the crossroads. Hurry! Turn right, turn left, and we should be—” The archway before us is black, not black with shadow, but solid black, black like the Last Sea is black, a blackness that absorbs the chakra-light I shine from Holly’s palms and bounces nothing back.

I step into—

—A DOMED ROOM of the same dead Mars-red walls as the labyrinth, but alive with the sharp shadows of many birds. The room is lit by the evening light of a golden apple. “My …” Despite all we’ve seen today, Holly’s breath catches in her throat. “Look at it, Marinus.” The apple hangs in the middle of the chamber, at head-height, with no means of support. “Is it alive?” asks Holly.

I would say, I subspeculate, it’s a soul.

Golden apples I’ve heard of in poems and tales throughout my metalife. Golden apples I’ve seen in paintings, and not just the one Venus holds in the Bronzino original that Xi Lo knew so well, though that golden apple strengthens my suspicions about this one. I’ve even held an apple wrought from Kazakh gold in the eleventh century by a craftsman at the court of Suleiman VI, with a leaf of emerald-studded Persian jade and dewdrops of pearl from the Mauritius Islands. But the difference between those golden apples and this one is the difference between reading a love poem and being in love.

Holly’s eyes are welling. “Marinus …”

It’s our way back, Holly. Touch it.

“ Touchit? I can’t touch it. It’s so …”

Xi Lo created it for you, for this moment.

She takes a step closer. We hear air in feathers.

One touch, Holly. Please. The Dusk’s coming.

Holly reaches out her well-worn, grazed hand.

As I egress from my host, I hear a dove trill.

Holly is gone.

THE SHADOW-BIRDS VANISHED with the apple, and the domed chamber feels like a rather dingy mausoleum. Now I die. I die-die. But I die knowing that Holly Sykes is safe, knowing that a debt Horology owed her has been paid. This is a good way to finish. Aoife still has a mum. I invoke a pale gleam and subask Hugo Lamb, Why die alone?

He uncloaks and melts out of the air. “Why indeed?” He touches his badly gashed cheek. “Oh, shit, look at the state of me! Bloody dinner jackets. My tailor’s this Bangladeshi chap in Savile Row, and he’s a genius, but he only makes twenty suits a year. Why did Xi Lo only leave the one magic ticket back to the world?”