The Bone Clocks

“What about the War?” I ask. “Did you—did we—win?”

The young man’s smile is ambivalent. Yes. One could say we won. The Anchorites no longer exist. Hugo Lamb helped me escape the Dusk, in fact, though what fate befell him I do not know. His psychodecanting days are over and his body will be middle-aged, if indeed he has survived this long.

“Holly?” Mo’s got an is-she-losing-her-marbles face. “What war?”

“This is an old friend,” I reply, “from … my, uh, author days.”

For some reason, Mo looks more worried, not less.

“The sonof an old friend, Holly means, of course,” says Marinus. “My mother was a psychiatrist colleague of Holly’s, back in the day.”

Commander Aronsson receives a luckily timed message and turns away, speaking Icelandic into his headset. He checks his watch, signs off, then turns back to us: “The captain of the Sj б lfst жр iwants to depart in forty-five minutes. Not long for a big decision, Lorelei, but we do not wish to attract attention. Please. Discuss matters with your family. We”—he glances at Lieutenant Eriksdottir—“will check you are not disturbed.”

Voles, hens, sparrows, a dog. A garden’s full of eyes.

“You’d better come in,” I tell Harry Marinus Veracruz.

The gate squeaks as he opens it. He crosses the yard. How do you greet a resurrected Atemporal you’ve not seen for twenty years? Hug? A double-sided cheek kiss? Harry Veracruz smiles and the Marinus within subsays, Weird, I know. Welcome to my world. Or welcome back to it, albeit briefly. I stand aside to let him into the cottage, and something occurs to me. “Commander Aronsson? I have one question for you.”

“Ask it,” says Commander Aronsson.

“D’you still have insulin in Iceland?”

The man frowns, but Marinus calls over his shoulder: “It’s the same in Icelandic, Commander. Ins ъ l н n. The drug for diabetes.”

“Ah.” The officer nods. “Yes, we manufacture this drug at a new unit, near the airbase at Keflavнk. Two or three thousand of our citizens require it, including our minister of defense. Why do you ask? Does your granddaughter have diabetes?”

“No,” I reply. “I was just curious.”

BACK IN OUR kitchen, I put on the solar lamp. It flickers like a candle. Di

This’ll be one of the hardest sells of my life.

“You’ve gotto, Lol!” says Rafiq, and I bless him. “You’ll have a good life there. Won’t she, Mr. Vera—Verac—”

Marinus is already peering at the books on the shelves. “Those whom I respect I ask to call me ‘Marinus,’ Rafiq, and, yes, your sister will enjoy an incomparably better-nourished, better-educated, and safer life than on Sheep’s Head. As today has proven, I believe.”

“Then, Lol,” Rafiq says for me, “that ship’s your lifeboat.”

“A one-way lifeboat,” Lorelei asks Marinus. “Right?”

The young man frowns. “Lifeboats don’t do return tickets.”

“Then I’m not going to sail off and leave you all here.” Lorelei sounds so like Aoife when she’s making a stand, it wakes up my old grief. “If you were in my shoes, Raf, you wouldn’t go.”

Rafiq takes a deep breath. “If you were in myshoes, you’d be diabetic in a country without insulin. Think about it.”

Lorelei looks away miserably and says nothing.

“I have a question,” Mo says, lowering herself onto a chair at the kitchen table and hooking her stick over its edge. “Three, in fact. Holly knew your mother, Mr. Marinus, which is all well and good, but why should she trust you to do the right thing by Lorelei?”

Marinus puts his hands into his pockets and rocks on his heels, like a young man with supple joints. “Professor, I can’t prove to you that I’m the trustworthy, honorable human being that I claim to be, not in forty minutes. I can only refer you to Holly Sykes.”

“It’s a long, long story,” I tell Mo, “but Marinus—or his mother, I mean, it’s complicated, she saved my life.”

“There’s a Marinus in The Radio People,” says Mo, the careful and retentive reader, “who plays quite a major role. The doctor in Gravesend.” Mo looks at me. “Any relative?”

“Yes,” I admit, badly not wanting to get into Atemporals now.

“That Dr. Marinus was my grandfather,” Marinus only sort of lies, “on my Chinese side. But Holly did a great service to my mother, Iris, and her friends back in the twenties. Which may preempt another of your questions, Professor. I owe Holly Sykes a debt of honor, and giving her granddaughter the chance of a pre-Endarkenment life is one way to repay it.”

Mo nods at Marinus’s correct guess. “And you’re so up to speed with current events on Sheep’s Head because?”

“We hack into spy satellites.”

Mo nods coolly, but the scientist within inquires: “Whose?”

“The Chinese array is the best, and the Russian satellites work well in clear conditions, but we stream our images from the last functioning American Eyesat. The Pentagon’s given up on security.”

Rafiq’s incredulous. “You can see what’s going on on Sheep’s Head, from space? That’s like … being God. That’s like magic.”

“It’s neither.” Marinus smiles at the boy. “It’s technology. I saw the fox attack on your chickens, the other night, and you,” he fondles the ears of Zimbra, who clearly trusts this stranger, “you killer.” He looks at me. “Some months ago L’Ohkna, our IT specialist, detected a tab signal from this area that corresponded to recordings of your voice, Holly, and of course I remembered that you’d retired here, but a chain of crises in Newfoundland distracted us. After the Hinkley Point reactor went critical, though, and we learned about the POC’s withdrawal, I acted with greater urgency, and here we are.” Lorelei’s fiddle catches Marinus’s eye. “Who is the musician?”

“I play a bit,” says Lorelei. “It was Dad’s.”

Marinus picks it up and examines it, like an instrument maker, which for all I know he once was. “Beautiful lines.”

I ask, “What are you doing in Iceland, Marinus?” My feet are hurting too, so I join Mo at the table.

“We operate a think tank. L’Ohkna named it—modestly—‘Prescience’ before I arrived. Roho, who kept an eye on Aoife during your Manhattan week twenty years ago, is with us, plus a handful of others. We have to be more interventionist politically than—than my mother used to be. By and large, the president values our advice, even if we occasionally put the military’s nose a little out of joint.” Marinus plucks the strings on Lorelei’s fiddle, one by one, testing its tone. “Only thirty minutes to settle Lorelei’s future, Holly.”

“It’s already settled,” my granddaughter declares. “I can’t leave Gran and Raf. Or Mo.”

“A noble and worthy response, Lorelei. May I play a few bars?”

Taken a bit aback, Lorelei says, “Sure.”

Marinus takes up the bow, puts the fiddle under his chin, and skims through a few bars of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” “Warm tone. Is the E-string a little … flat? Holly, a possibility is occurring to you.”

I’d forgotten how Marinus knows, or half knows, what you’re thinking. “If Lorelei left with you— if, Lol—she really would be safer?”

“Indubitably, yes.”

“So that ship in the bay isa lifeboat to civilization?”

“Metaphorically, yes.”

“Commander Aronsson said only Lorelei can go?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Could you turn that one space to two spaces? Using your … y’know …” I do a spell-casting gesture with my hands.

Marinus resembles a lawyer whose line of questioning is proceeding as pla