The passenger-side window exploded into a thousand tiny hailstones, and the mirror above my head was a brittle supernova of plastic and glass. One shard of plastic shrapnel, the size and shape of a fingernail clipping, lodged itself in my cheek.
I crouched, afraid. A logical portion of my mind was arguing that if the marksman had intended to kill me I would now be staring across the Dusk. But I stayed down for several minutes longer. Atemporality neutralizes death’s poison, but it doesn’t defang death, and old habits of survival linger on, even in us.
THAT IS WHY we prosecute the War, I remind myself in 119A, four days later. The window in my room turns under-ice gray. We bother because of Oscar Gomez, Oscar Gomez’s wife, and his three children. Because nobody else would believe in the animacides committed by a syndicate of soul thieves like the Anchorites or by “freelancers” hunting alone. Because if we spent our metalives amassing the wealth of empires and getting stoned on the opiates of wealth and power, knowing what we know yet doing nothing about it, we would be complicit in the psychoslaughter of the innocents.
My device buzzes. It’s Ōshima’s tone. I fumble the thing like a panicky contestant, drop it, retrieve it, and read:
Done. No incidents.
Arkady returning now.
Will shadow Slim Hope.
I fill my lungs with oxygen and blessed relief. The Second Mission is one step closer. Daylight now leaks in around the window. 119A’s ancient plumbing shudders and clanks. I hear feet, a toilet cistern, and cupboard doors. Two or three rooms away, Sadaqat is up.
“SAGE, ROSEMARY, THYME …” Sadaqat, our warden, minder, and would-be traitor, plucks a weed from the raised beds. “I planted parsley too, so we could dine on ‘Scarborough Fair’ but late frost killed it. Some herbs are feebler than others. I’ll try again. Parsley’s rich in iron. Here I planted the onions and leeks, tough customers, and I have high hopes for the rhubarb. Do you remember, Doctor, we grew rhubarb at Dawkins Hospital?”
“I remember the pies,” I tell him.
We’re speaking quietly. Despite the fine-sieved rain and his busy night, Arkady, my fellow Horologist, is practicing Tai Chi among the myrtle and witch hazel across the rooftop courtyard. “This will be a strawberry patch,” Sadaqat points, “and the three fruiting cherry trees I’ll fertilize with the tip of a paintbrush, due to a scarcity of bees here in the East Side. Look! A red cardinal, on the momiji maple. I bought a book about birds, so I know. Those birds on the cloister roof, those are mourning doves. We have starlings nesting under the eaves, up there. They keep me busy with the scrubbing brush, but their droppings make a nutritious fertilizer, so I don’t complain. Here we have the fragrant quarter. Wintersweet, waxflower, and these thorny sticks will become scented roses. The trellis is for honeysuckle and jasmine.”
I notice that Sadaqat’s up-and-down British-Pakistani accent is flattening out. “You’ve worked magic up here, truly.”
Our warden purrs. “Plants want to grow. Just let them.”
“We should have thought of a garden up here decades ago.”
“You are too busy saving souls to think of such things, Doctor. The roof had to be reinforced, which was a challenge …”
Watch out, subwarns Arkady, or he’ll tell you about load-bearing walls and girders until you lose the will to live.
“… but I hired a Polish engineer who proposed a load-bearing—”
“It’s an oasis of calm,” I interrupt, “that we’ll cherish for years.”
“For centuries,” says Sadaqat, brushing droplets of mist off his vigorous but graying hair, “for you Horologists.”
“Let’s hope so.” Through an ornate wrought-iron screen in the cloister wall, we look down on the street four floors below. Cars crawl along and honk in vain. Umbrellas overtake them, parting for joggers running contraflow. Level with us on the much taller building across the road, an old woman with a neck brace waters the marigolds in her window boxes. New York’s skyscrapers vanish in cloud at about the thirtieth storey. If King Kong were up on the Empire State today, no one at our lowly altitude would believe the truth.
“Mr. Arkady’s Tai Chi,” Sadaqat murmurs, “reminds me of your magickings. How your hands draw on air, you know?” We watch him. Arkady may be gangly, Hungarian, and ponytailed, but the Vietnamese martial-arts master of his last self is still discernible, somehow.
I ask my former patient, “Are you still content with life here?”
Sadaqat is alarmed. “Yes! If I’ve done anything wrong …”
“No. Not at all. I just worry, sometimes, that we’re depriving you of friends, a partner, family … The trappings of normal life.”
Sadaqat removes his glasses and wipes them on his corduroy shirt. “Horology is my family. Partner? I am forty-five. I prefer to go to bed with The Daily Show on my slate, or a Lee Child novel and a cup of chamomile tea. Normal life?” He sniffs. “I have your cause, a library to explore, a garden to tend, and my poetry is becoming a little less awful. I swear, Doctor, every day when I shave I tell myself in the mirror, ‘Sadaqat Dastaani, you are the luckiest schizophrenic, middle-aged, balding, British Pakistani in all Manhattan.”
“If you ever,” I strive to sound casual, “think differently …”
“No, Dr. Marinus. My wagon is hitched to Horology’s.”
Careful, Arkady subwarns me, or he’ll smell a guilty rat.
I can’t quite let it go. “The Second Mission, Sadaqat. We can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. Not yours, not ours.”
“If you want me to go from 119A, Doctor, use your magickery-pokery because I won’t jump ship of my own accord. The Anchorites prey on the psychiatrically vulnerable, yes? If I’d had the correct type of”—Sadaqat taps his head—“soul, they might have taken me, yes? So. Horology’s War is my War. Yes, I am only a pawn, but a game of chess may hinge upon the conduct of a single pawn.”
Marinus, our guest’s arriving, Arkady subinforms me.
With a bruised conscience I tell Sadaqat, “You win.”
Our warden smiles. “I am glad, Doctor.”
“Our guest has arrived.” We walk back to the ironwork to look down on Holly in her Jamaican head-wrap. Across the road, Ōshima shows his outline in the room we have above the violin maker’s: I’ll watch the street, he subsuggests, in case any interested parties pass by. Holly approaches the door with the green key I gave her yesterday at the Santorini Café. The Englishwoman’s having a very strange morning. On a wand of willow very near my shoulder, a puffed-up red-winged blackbird performs a loop of arpeggios.
“Who’s a handsome devil, then?” whispers Sadaqat.
I SPEAK FIRST. “We’ve been expecting you, Ms. Sykes. As they say.”
“Welcome to 119A.” Arkady’s voice has a teenage croaky waver.
“You’re safe, Ms. Sykes,” says Sadaqat. “Don’t be afraid.”
Holly is flushed after her climb, but upon seeing Arkady her eyes widen: “It is you … you … you … isn’t it?”
“Yes, I have some explaining to do,” agrees Arkady.
Down in an alley, a dog is barking. Holly’s trembling. “I dreamt you. This morning! You — you’re the same. How did you do that?”
“The acne, right?” Arkady brushes his cheek. “Unforgettable.”
“My dream! You were at my desk, in my room, in my hotel …”
“Writing this address on the jotter.” Arkady picks up the sequence. “Then I asked you to bring Marinus’s green key here and go in. I said, ‘See you in two hours.’ And here we are.”