I ran for as long as I could, and then I stopped. I’d sweated through my clothing and the sweat encased me like cheap plastic. I stank and I was thirsty. I was still in bastard, bastard Greenhithe, and I didn’t have enough battery on my phone to call an Uber.
I had to take a bus, trains, another bus, and eventually the tube to get into the Ministry. The day cracked open around me. I waded through its rancidly vivid yolk, feeling damaged by the sheer color and depth of normal vision. In a spy movie, this would have been done in a montage. Instead, I had to clamber to my narrative conclusion, step by staggering step.
I took the escalator to Adela’s office. I did not, however, make it all the way there. Simellia was waiting at the top.
“Oh my God. Simellia. Oh God. You have to help me. Arthur—”
“Come on,” she hissed. I jogged obediently after her. I caught sight of myself in the glass of the doors as she pushed through to unfamiliar rooms, tapping in unfamiliar passcodes. I was the color of a recently hatched baby bird, and just as ugly. Panic has never become me.
Finally, Simellia seemed to have found a suitably private room.
“Oh fuck,” I croaked, Aopping into a chair. “Simellia. Arthur is dead.”
I started to cry, big messy sobs which had been gathering in the reservoir of my lungs since the day before. I was so busy snotting and heaving that it was a
full minute before I wiped my face on my sleeve and realized that Simellia was pointing a gun at me.
“Is that a gun?” I said stupidly. “Yes.”
“Oh.”
I looked around. We were in a beautiful little room, with soothing cream and mustard furniture and what looked, to my eyes, like reinforced walls, wallpapered exquisitely. There were no windows.
“Where are we?” “The vestibule.” “The—?”
“Before the time-door.”
“I thought bridges weren’t allowed near the time-door.” “We aren’t.”
I blinked gummily. “Oh. Hell. You’re the mole.” Simellia grimaced. “Yes.”
“Jesus.”
Heat and rage barreled up through my chest, enormous as a sun, shrank to a tennis ball by the time it gained my throat, and came out as another “Oh.” Eventually, I managed a further syllable: “Why?” When she didn’t respond, her forehead gathering and ruching with the ePort of not crying herself, I said, “But you must have known what would happen to Arthur?”
“They told me what happens to sub-Saharan Africa.” “What are you talking about?”
“Two hundred years from now. It’s 1nished. South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ships in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa. No refugees. They died there or they turned back and died of disease and starvation and the heat. Billions died, billions. Then the backlash, when water started running scarce, against immigrant communities. Salese told me—”
“Did you believe them?”
Simellia smiled sadly. “‘Did I believe them?’” she echoed. “How hard did you try to be a white girl that you’re asking me whether racism exists?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? Do you know what you become?” “A Ministry employee. Which you are as well.” “You’re a murderer.”
“A civil servant.”
“They showed me. What the Ministry did. Does. Will do. In the future. Once I knew, I had to help them. Of course I didn’t want Arthur to die, but if I’d blocked the Ministry in any way, then they’d have known it was me and they’d have detained me and done God knows what to me and found Salese and the Brigadier and—”
She broke oP, her lips shaking. She rolled her eyes upward quickly but she could no more have shoveled a waterfall than she could have stopped that tear falling.
“You are pointing a gun at me,” I said carefully. “Why have you brought me here? If it’s to kill Adela by killing me, it won’t work. We’ve changed history, apparently. Or the details, anyway.”
“I’m not shooting you unless you make a break for it. I just need you in my sights.”
She shifted from one foot to the other. She was wearing a bias-cut skirt in muted yellow linen, which fell elegantly around her calves. Its grace was noticeable because it contrasted so dramatically with her uneasiness holding a gun.
“You really think all that stuP about me?” I said at last. “I believe it could happen.”
Of all the things I felt, weapon in my face, life fraying at its end point, I felt hurt. I gave Simellia a bitter little frown, like I was handing it to her on a plate with a cake fork. She sighed and sniPed enormously.
“I think you think you’re doing the right thing,” she said. “You’ve always been so careful round me. Worried about what you’ll say or how I’ll take it. You really thought you were onto something with Eighteen-forty-seven, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“You let him oP the hook again and again. I watched you. He came up through the empire. He believed in it. And you did too. I read your 1le. The
things that happened to your family. That’s why you joined up. Getting behind the biggest bully in the playground.”
“You know what,” I said, “I really held you in high esteem, Simellia.”
“You know what? No you didn’t. You liked me, and you couldn’t work out why, you little freak. You kept wondering when we would start competing. Or when I’d test you. I never wanted to test you.”
“What did you want?”
“To not watch you become a fascist in slow motion.”
During this conversation, I’d been thinking about Ministry training. Speci1cally, the 1rearms training and unarmed combat training. Simellia’s training was in psychiatry and psychopathology, not 1eldwork. I could see from where I was sitting that she hadn’t taken the safety catch oP the gun. So, rather than attempt repartee, I kicked her hard enough in the knee that I heard her patella crack.
“Fuck!”
“Aaa—”
“Give me—”
“Let go—!”
At the end of this ungainly little tussle, I was holding her gun, and mine, and bleeding lightly from the mouth, and Simellia was sitting on the Aoor cradling her leg.
“You little bitch,” she said, seemingly both amused and enraged. “Are you going to kill me now?”
“No. Ministry’ll do that, probably. Or 1re you.” “Oh, 1red from the Ministry. Fate worse than death.”
“God! Will you just—I’m going to put a stop to this, okay?” “We are on the path to total climate destruction.”
“We can change it. I’m starting to suspect history changes all the time. How do I get to the time-door? I’m asking as the person now holding the guns.”
Simellia dragged herself upright and limped across the Aoor. She touched a panel in the wall that was seemingly like all the other panels in the wall, and it brightened into a screen. She tapped at a keypad then slid aside.
“The Brigadier’s in there,” she said. “So I’d take the safety catch oP, if I were you.”
I managed a sour little chuckle. I put her gun away in my holster and seized her hand. It probably looked like an allegorical picture for friendship for a moment, but then I wrenched her arm up behind her back and put my gun between her shoulder blades. Part two in a triptych: friendship weaponized. Arthur, after all, had died on her watch. That he had also died on mine, I didn’t really want to contemplate.
“Shall we?” I said, and Simellia, who never laughed, laughed.
In the middle of the room was a metal frame. It was the height and shape of a door. When I 1rst saw it, I deAated. Had I really gone through the past twenty- four hours of horror, pandemonium, and violence to be faced with a low- production cliché?
Then I took in the squat, awful machine on the far side of the frame.
I could try to describe it, but words Aex and disperse when I think about it. It had a mouth, I think. Around it, color was not. Around it, shape was not. Threat radiated from its carapace, which itself appeared both constructed and grown. Though I cannot pretend to know how the time-door worked, I could imagine what it would look like when it was switched on. That monstrous machine belched its belly-deep cosmos outward, and the doorframe captured it and channeled it to a particular time and place. The machine 1red time as a riAe 1res bullets. No wonder, when it was seized, they thought it was a weapon. No wonder every time it was switched on, it had accidentally killed people. That must have been what Quentin actually saw: not a handheld weapon, but the time-door itself, slicing a path through time out of the air and the bodies of those teenagers.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Our 1nest work, with our last resources.”
The Brigadier was crouched near the time-door—the actual machine, not the frame. He was touching it, though the nature of the time-door made it hard to
understand exactly what he was doing. He looked awful. He was probably the only person I’d seen all day who looked as bad as me.
“You will kill me now,” he said simply.
“Mm,” I said, as “no” seemed like it might knock a few inches oP my advantage but “yes” was just rude. “What happens if I let you go home?”
“Home,” repeated the Brigadier quietly. “In my era we say ‘bunk.’ From ‘bunker,’ which in this era I know you imagine are frightful, Spartan, wartime things. But”—and here his BBC accent dropped, and he sounded like Salese
—“better bunk than airside when the air’s full tox. If I’m back to bunk, I’ll 1ght again.”
Simellia said, “The atmosphere around his part of England is full of toxic waste from chemical weapons experiments. Ministry-authorized in the twenty- one hundreds. So he’s saying he’ll just keep 1ghting—”
“Thank you. I had gathered.”
“The war won’t stop,” she said, her voice squeaking on the last word. She swallowed. “History will repeat itself, literally. The door means we just keep going back and forth, back and forth, again and again and again—”
I gave her a rough shake and she stopped. In my defense, I meant it kindly. I wasn’t sure if I could bear to see Simellia start to break down. If I strained my ears, I could hear synchronized boots, hitting the Aoor with belligerent intent. The heavies were arriving. Adela had either escaped with the expats and triggered a martial response, or else she was under arrest and I was about to be as well. I’d 1nd out when they got here. The Brigadier glanced up.
“You killed Sal.”
“No, Adela—well. Yes. Was Salese your—”
“Was mine. We don’t use the words you use in this era. Sal was mine, and I was Sal’s, that’s all.”
“I’m… sorry. Though you did also try to kill me.” “You don’t know who you become, to us.”
The Brigadier stood up slowly. The sound of boots was getting closer.
“At least we saw London,” he said. “I had read so much about it. Teenaged goths in Camden Market. Office workers with their shoes oP on the lawns of the parks. Big Ben. All the life here.”
“Why, what’s London like in your era?”
The Brigadier shrugged. Outside, I could hear shouting. “It’s gone,” he said.
The trouble with private, singular power is that it narrows the world to an arrowhead. Your heart beats at the tip, an encased and uncommunicative sole reference point. Falter for a moment from a forward trajectory, consider for a second the myriad pressure of outside forces, and the arrow will slow, wobble, begin to fall. Your heart will wind up nailed to the dust. If you wield power for yourself, the only way is outward and onward, away from the ground-bound world of shared concerns.
I hope you will forgive me, or at least that you will understand me. I was the only person in the room with a gun. The Brigadier was 1nished, defeated. Simellia too. It had never been my duty to save them. As for Adela, if I thought of her, it was only to remember what she’d said about getting it right—which she hadn’t, poor wretch. And I thought of Graham. I thought, I will never let them take him away from me. My beloved portable object. As if only I had choice.
So I unloaded the clip of the gun at the machine.
The room Aooded with red light. An alarm tore through the air: ee ee ee ee ee. The Aoor vibrated in1nitesimally, and I imagined that, all over the building, bulletproof metal gates were slamming down on exits. Around the time-door, color was and shape was but neither were colors or shapes that I recognized. The sight of a brand-new color terri1ed me. I dropped the gun.
“Good God,” I said. “Fucking Christ. What happens now?” “You don’t know?” shouted Simellia, above the noise.
“No! Is it going to kill us?” “I don’t bloody know!”
Just as abruptly as it started, the alarms, the clamor, and the shaking stopped. The machine made a noise like a sinister burp. The Brigadier scrabbled at it. There were a series of questioning beeps, a burst of red. I saw a screen—an operating system, I assumed. Then something absolutely god-awful happened to the Brigadier, a form of implosion-explosion, a rip in the air as if the whole room was scenery and a knife had been plunged into it. If a black hole could sneeze, it
might have looked like this. Then—something—small, and yet peculiarly 1lled with stars—hung in the air. The Brigadier was gone.
While I was staring at this pendant galaxy and wondering if I would be sick again, Simellia dived for the other gun in my holster.
It had been an enervating twenty-four hours. I’d slept on a stone Aoor with my heart broken and my friend dead. I do, therefore, try to forgive myself, that Simellia simply snatched the gun oP me and put the muzzle to my temple. The heavies burst through to 1nd a hostage situation among the machinery.
“You let me out of here, or I’ll shoot her,” Simellia rasped. “Do you know who she is? Do you know what might happen if she dies? Because I don’t, but I’m the only one desperate enough to 1nd out.”
“What?” I squeaked.
“You’re uniquely duplicate in space-time,” hissed Simellia. “They’ve probably got orders to keep you safe, in case your death damages the time-door. Now shut up.”
Someone shouted to stand down from behind a mask. Automatic riAes pointed at the ceiling. We edged into the vestibule, into the corridor. The air was 1lled with stinging smoke, which we, without masks, struggled horribly to negotiate—I recognized the tactic from my basic training. It was the most bungled, choking, excruciating escape attempt in the Ministry’s short history. And it worked.
In a car park near the Ministry, Simellia released me but kept the gun pointed at me. She was shaking and the muzzle weaved in the air like a drunken bee.
“I’m going now,” she said. “Where?”
“I’m not telling you. Be serious.”
I looked into her gray-tinged, exhausted face. “You don’t know, do you?” I said. “You think you’re going on the run. Where will you run to, Simellia? Where can you go where they can’t 1nd you? And if they can’t 1nd you, they’ll 1nd
your brother. Your sister. Come on. Give me the gun. We’ll go and 1nd Adela and—”
Simellia shook her head, hard. “No,” she said. “No more compromises. I’m not going to be a part of this anymore.”
“Then what will you do?” I shouted, exasperated. “Who do you think will help you now, except the Ministry?”
“I’ll tell the truth about what happened here. There will be so many more of me. So many more, you won’t believe it. Your problem always was that you’d given up on other people.”
“Simellia, be sensible,” I said, but she was backing into the shadows, gun raised. The yellow of her skirt licked at the darkness.
“Go home,” she said. “Just go home. We end here, you and me. Go home.” So I did.
I got on the tube. My hair was tangled, my clothes were dirty and rucked, I smelled powerfully of sweat, and I wasn’t even the weirdest-seeming person in the carriage.
When I got home, I unlocked the door, stepped through, took oP my shoes. I was breathing as if I’d forgotten how and kept having to manually restart myself. I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, because why not make a cup of tea at the end of the world?
Graham was in the kitchen.
He was sitting at the table, and he had a gun trained on me.
“Oh,” I said. A pity I hadn’t yet come up with a new line, given the frequency with which people had been pointing guns at me.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” “What are you doing?”
“Be quiet. Were you followed?”
“I don’t—think so? I tried to destroy the door. I thought if I destroyed it, then this would all be over. Graham, why are you pointing a gun at me?”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
He stood up, and I Ainched. His arm was perfectly steady. Arthur’s ring glinted on his 1nger. He didn’t even look angry. He was just, indisputably, unutterably, holding me at gunpoint. The safety catch was oP—of course. I said, “You’ll kill me if you shoot that thing at point-blank range.”
“I know.”
“Oh my God. What are you doing? I tried to help you.”
“You hid things from us. All the Ministry’s plans. Adela told me everything before she died.”
“Died?”
“I assume that’s what happened to her.” “I don’t understand.”
“I am not especially interested in what you do and don’t understand.” “Where’s Maggie?”
“Safe.”
“Can I see—”
“No. I am keeping her safe from you.”
The panic erupted, blossomed in my chest.
“Graham, I—you have to understand—I was just doing my job—” “How can you think that?”
“I had orders—I thought I could 1x it—” I said. In fact, I wailed it. I was learning that I was a sniveling wretch when I thought I might die.
“You had orders,” he repeated. “How fascinating that you should have been born and raised in the twenty-1rst century and not hear how you sound. All that ambition, all that maneuvering, and it amounts to ‘following orders.’ I used to 1nd you so extraordinarily subtle, a tactician, a magician. To think it was because you were a coward. Do you understand that Arthur is dead because of you?”
“Listen—”
“Shut up. Adela said you had the passcodes.” “Yes—”
He jerked his chin to the laptop on the table. Mine, not his. I had a painful mental image of him taking it carefully from my room, setting it up on the kitchen table, gun tucked in his belt.
“I want you to delete everything,” he said.
“I will, I will. Please put the gun down.” “No. Sit.”
Shaking, I lowered myself into the chair. “Graham—listen—did Adela tell you who she was?” “Delete everything related to this project.”
“Yes—look—I am—but—do you know who she was? In the future, you and I—”
“There is no ‘you and I,’” he said sharply. “There was you, and there was a hobby that you had. Stop talking. Destroy all trace of this project. Or by God I will pull this trigger and send you to Arthur to make your apologies on behalf of the Ministry directly.”
I rattled at the keyboard and watched 1les Aash up, one after the other. Sweat and tears rimmed my eyelids. He shifted position and the gun grazed my hair, very lightly. I cried out in terror. From the corner of my eye, I saw him Ainch. I looked at him quickly and, for a moment, we held each other’s eyes. His mouth trembled.
“Just do it quickly,” he whispered. “Graham—”
“Stop saying my name!”
I typed and clicked and shivered uncontrollably. The little device Adela had given me unscrambled access codes, but I was so terri1ed I kept seeing 1ves as sevens and almost locked myself out. I saw, for a few seconds, my own psych 1les
—the Wellness team had kept tabs on every bridge—and it felt like a death sentence when I rubbed myself out. The screen kept pulsing a sickly eighties green. I could hear him breathing—erratically, and trying to keep steady, like a man working through appalling pain.
“There! It’s done! Put the gun down and let me—”
“I’m leaving,” he said. “I’m taking Maggie with me. You will not attempt to track us. I know when I became your lover you used me as you liked and now you hold me in contempt, but I think you still care for Maggie. If they capture her, they’ll kill her. If you love her, you won’t help them.”
“Did you ever love me?” I asked helplessly.
“Stay here. Don’t follow me,” he said. He backed out of the kitchen, keeping me in his sights. He bolted up the hallway, ducked quickly out the front door. Slammed it.
I sat quite still at the kitchen table. There was a clock above the door, and I watched it tell 1ve minutes, ten minutes, 1fteen. Half an hour passed. Forty-1ve minutes. It was only when I saw the small hand tick relentlessly onto the next number that I realized: that was it. There would be no dramatic prime-time- movie turnback, no changed hearts and reconciliation kisses. He was gone.
I was still sitting at the table, watching the clock face blur as tears rose and fell, when Ministry officers arrived to place me under arrest. Since I was already at the far edge of the scale of misery, I said to the arresting officer, “Oh, hello,” as if he was the post deliverer. He looked at me like I’d peeled my own face oP to reveal a Scooby-Doo villain. It was such a bizarre expression that, despite myself, I started to laugh.
It turned out that surprisingly few people knew that the late Adela Gore was from the future. Revealing that to the wrong interrogating officer got me placed under house arrest in a new safe house. I was there for less than a week. I cannot describe how long a day feels when you think you might have to sit with it inde1nitely. It’s a form of torture, I realize that now. Holding someone in a cage against their will is like 1sting your hand in their hair and directing their every motion. And I’d been so busy—so worker bee, so good drone—that not hearing from me for six days would hardly register with my family and friends. I’d made myself an island of one, and now I was going under the waves.
On day six, a car arrived to take me to the Ministry. It had blacked-out windows. A woman with a discreet gun bulge in her violently unchic trouser suit sat opposite me for the journey.
I was taken to Control’s Aoor, into a light, lovely room with rich green curtains. The Secretary sat behind a spy-thriller-villain desk. He poured me a
whiskey. It was three in the afternoon. I looked in vain for a AuPy white cat. “Oh dear,” said the Secretary, sympathetically.
I put the whiskey to my lips and let it burn the nail-size patch I’d bitten into them. It was the same whiskey that Graham drank—of course—the whiskey was Ministry-provided—and it tasted like talking to him. I wanted a cigarette, very badly.
“You knew I was Adela,” I said into the glass. “I did. She told us.”
“When?”
“Long before you joined us. Before the project began, even. I think it was about a month after the time-door was seized. Oh, that wretched door. We had no idea how to work it. We put it in the experimental weapons facility in Defence.”
“Is that the exploding pens department?”
He gave me an indulgent smile. “It’s mostly chemical and biological weapons,” he said, “and malware development, but we all like a good Bond, don’t we? Anyway, one afternoon, a lab technician came screaming down the corridor with his entrails down his trousers, poor lad. He’d stood in the line of the beam at just the wrong moment. She’d come through.”
“She?”
“The woman you knew as Adela Gore.”
I put the whiskey glass down hard. The Secretary had a Aighty fountain pen arrangement involving a stand and a brass holder and I upset the lot.
“I was in Defence before this,” he said, picking his fountain pen up. “Advisory board to Westminster. She chose me herself.”
I saw glass rupture and blossom outward, a momentary amber-and-crystal 1rework by the bookcase. A couple of seconds later I realized I’d thrown my glass at the wall. The Secretary hadn’t moved and I felt very tired all of a sudden. I sat back down, having not been aware of standing up.
“So she came through,” I said, “and explained that she was from 2040- whatever and you had to make the history happen, using the time-door. Pick up the right expats from the right eras to get the right future, like making a cake. Is that about it?”
“You are correct.”
“Why kill them, then? Why Maggie and Arthur?”
The Secretary waved grandly at the window, in a gesture that apparently took in the whole city.
“My dear girl,” he said, “I’m sure you’ve worked out how valuable the expats are to us. But only if they can be trained. Alas, Sixteen-sixty-1ve and Nineteen- sixteen were valuable data sets but would have made useless agents. Don’t blame yourself—present or future. Adela Gore didn’t know. She ran the future-making project competently, but that’s all she ran. She was never, so far as I understand it, a leadership-level decision maker, though she was an indubitably efficient 1eld agent. And you, I’m afraid, are not even Adela Gore. You have failed, in every permutation, to achieve her. Which brings me to the matter you have been brought here to discuss today.”
I felt two cold circles open in the palms of my hands. “Your redundancy package,” he said.
“The way Maggie and Arthur were made ‘redundant.’”
He gave me a puzzled look and pushed a closely typed piece of paper across the desk. There was a startlingly large number near the top, cherry-topped by a pound sterling symbol.
“Wait. You’re actually making me redundant?”
“The expats are either dead, missing, or in custody. I don’t know who you’re going to become, but it doesn’t look like Mrs. Graham Gore, agent of the Ministry. Regardless, due to your unique relationship to the time-door, it is prudent to leave you be. For now.”
My wrist jerked up about an inch. The urge to chew my thumb skin was as bad as the craving for a cigarette. I sat, as subtly as I could, on my hand.
“So. You’re not going to kill me?”
The Secretary sighed. “Come with me,” he said.
He led me to the far wall—it was a big enough office that I can describe one of the walls as “far.” A wood panel made a very unwooden beeping noise and swung open. I was beyond surprise at this point. I trotted after him down a reinforced steel-and-glass corridor, passing armed guards and diverse alarms.
Eventually, I was brought to a spare, enormous room, like a recently plundered laboratory. On an autopsy table in the middle was—
“That was Adela Gore,” said the Secretary. “We think it happened when Simellia tried to sabotage the door. I’m told by the men on the scene that it looked like she exploded, but in reverse, and with light instead of viscera. Nevertheless, her passage into—whatever this is—functioned as quite a distraction, which allowed Eighteen-forty-seven, Sixteen-sixty-1ve, and Sixteen- forty-1ve to Aee.”
“Yes, that’s what happened to the Brigadier too…” I said slowly. There were some covered pits ahead in the conversation that I needed to negotiate. “So. Simellia destroyed the door?”
The Secretary looked thoughtfully at me. “I understand she attempted to. The SWAT team found bullets matching a Ministry-issue 1rearm embedded in the Aoor and wall, and it seems that she absconded with another.”
He waited. I edged out into the conversation again. “Yes. She did… have a gun. What do you mean, attempted to destroy the door?”
“It’s an extraordinary machine. It can pierce the very fabric of space-time. I don’t think it can be destroyed by something as prosaic as a handheld gun. It is… damaged. I am not at liberty to say more. I would advise you not to pursue this line of questioning, in case I 1nd I am interested in a new line of my own.”
“And all the expats are missing?” I asked hurriedly.
“Gore and Kemble are. Cardingham has been found and detained. He is cooperating. I understand he’s always cooperated with us, whatever the timeline.”
“Simellia,” I said suddenly.
“You know what will happen to her when we 1nd her,” he said, quite gently. “Jesus. You can’t—”
“But I can. Not only that, I must. I’ve often heard you people use the term ‘solidarity.’ A word which describes the unity of a group with a common interest. A group which protects itself from external dangers that threaten its safety. I am describing citizens, and a country. Do you see that?”
I was still holding the piece of paper with my redundancy terms on it, and I began to twist it into a sweaty cone. I still think about this little speech, by the
way. I think about how annoyed Simellia would have been by the term “you people,” and by the illegibility of describing us both under the same umbrella term, even an oPensive one.
“You’re evil.”
“I am happy that you have the luxury of thinking that. It means your life is so safe you are pleased to play with the notion of individual morality. Individuals are not important. A country is.”
I stared at the boxable galaxy on the table, or rather, hovering slightly above it. It didn’t seem to have all its planes in the dimensions I was used to viewing and it made my eyes water. I wondered if I’d killed Adela, or if her timeline had simply ceased to exist.
I imagined Graham somewhere in the future, waiting for his wife to come home, sinking into grief as the years racked up; a teenage boy growing into a young man, regretting not hugging his mother more often. But maybe I’d vanquished them too, wiped out their timeline. My son, who I never got to meet, conquered by atrophy before he ever existed.
“We don’t know what happened to her,” said the Secretary, “and so we have to make sure nothing happens to you, because she was a version of you, and who knows what ePect you might have on the future. You have so much potential. Isn’t that nice? But if you come within 1ve hundred feet of this building again, security has orders to open 1re.”
I had no job, I had no home. I got most of my belongings back from the Ministry reclamation center, but for weeks I would discover I was missing a belt, a dress, a keepsake that must have been lost in the Ministry’s rapid-1re stripping of the house. Half my books were missing, Rogue Male among them. Chicken bag came back to me bent into un-avian shapes. Most frustratingly, they returned my electronics but none of the requisite chargers. It felt like a 1nal, petty little fuck-you.
They kept everything that belonged to him. Technically, his belongings were bought on the Ministry budget and so were Ministry property. But I would have
liked to have something of his.
My work laptop and work phone were con1scated. As I never used my personal phone—an ancient model with half a screen—to take photos, this also meant that I had no pictures of him. All I had left were the internet’s reproductions of the 1845 daguerreotype, just as I did before he came into my life. I wore chicken necklace, warming it between the pads of my 1ngers, and tried to recall his hands. But the image faded. One morning I woke up and I found I could no longer remember exactly what color his eyes were.
I left the city and moved back into my parents’ home. The Ministry’s agreed narrative was that I’d been made redundant in a Languages department reshuAe, and that was what I told my parents: the Ministry’s 1st up my rectum, puppeting my jaw.
Coming home hurt. They were right there, my parents—the authors of my blood and neuroses—and they were just people. Incredibly ordinary people, the sort no one writes novels about. I thought about the bargains I’d made with power, for power, paying with personhood, when all they really wanted was for me to be happy and to have a decent job.
My dad reassured me that my “redundancy” payout was a very good one and tried to jolly me into positivity; my mum took my hardship personally and promised to put “a curse” (unspeci1ed) on my former employer. She’d never shown any inclination toward hexing and hedge magic before but it was nice to see her energetic. I slumped, mostly. I became a child again, reduced to a sorry smallness against the impassivity of the adult world. He was gone, and he’d taken the woman I could have become with him.
For several weeks I was either crying or not crying. The latter state was a numb space where I should have been crying but couldn’t summon tears. I might be walking up the stairs and suddenly feel so overcome with numbness that I had to stop and sit and lean against the wall for an hour. I might be washing up and lose myself so utterly to the numbness that I would stand with my hands in the water until it turned cold and my palms were pale and puckered like the skin on milk.
One day, I read Arthur’s notebook, which the Ministry did not think to remove from me—probably because Arthur had never been a threat and was even less of one dead. “Day” is pushing it—it was 3:30 a.m., which was a normal waking hour for me at the time. Most of the notebook comprised lists of questions: What is a VPN? Who is Mussolini? Swinging Sixties—meaning? P. C. Brigade—who and where based? Usually, on the opposite page, there would be scribbled answering notes. I surmised that Arthur and Simellia would have regular meetings to go through his questions strategically. I never did that with Graham. I was, in so many ways, a bad bridge.
There were two other things in the notebook, and I almost mistook them for each other. Some were hurried, jotted notations of song lyrics. Arthur, unlike Graham, seemed to like modern music, and tried to keep track of what he was listening to. The other was poetry.
His poetry was terrible, and I think that he must have known that—he could never have been Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon—but he couldn’t stop himself from writing it. There was something impossibly noble in that, quintessentially Arthurian. I read one of his poems, and I heard it in his voice. There was a wound in me that kept unknotting its own sutures. I missed all of them so much. Now that they were gone, I felt I knew them better than I had when they were with me. I’d thought Graham was a scion of the empire, and he’d thought I was a radical nonconformist by dint of my very existence. If only we’d seen each other clearly—
I stepped outside and stood on my parents’ immaculate lawn. In the sky, like the glyphs on signal Aags, were the stars. Maggie saw these same stars, and Arthur, and Graham too. But the stars aren’t eternal. Most were already dead, and I was looking at ghosts. At some point in our planet’s future, the skyscape will change. There might not be people left by then, not if the Brigadier’s world was anything to go by. These stars were a temporary, beautiful gift of our era— the era that we all shared, a human era. I’d die one day, just like everyone else, so I had better try to live.
The next morning, I rolled myself out of bed for breakfast, 1zzing oddly with four hours of sleep. I asked my parents if they’d like to go for a walk in the woods while the weather was nice. Their relief was visible. I remembered Adela’s plea:
You should spend as much time with them as you can. I tried to remember who I was before he arrived in my life.
Spring turned to summer. Summer burst and bedded down. My sister got me some freelance proofreading work, which meant I started getting emails again, but at least I wasn’t required to kill anyone or spy on my friends. I’d stopped crying every day, though I did still cry. I was still living with my parents, though I was mulling over moving back to London. The Ministry’s hush money gathered moss in my bank account. It was more ready cash than I’d ever had in one place and I didn’t want to touch it.
One afternoon, my dad called me downstairs while I was avoiding emails in my sister’s old bedroom, now my de facto office.
“Bit of an eccentric parcel for you.” “Oh?”
“Been at the depot for a couple of weeks. They’ve been trying to work out where the house was. Got your name though.”
“How can they have missed the house? It’s numbered.” “Well. See for yourself.”
He handed me a small parcel. I instantly felt as if the ground had erupted with crevasses. In the top corner was a US stamp, but the rest of the packet was scrawled over with Graham’s languid cursive. There was no address. Instead, he’d written a description of approximately where he thought the house was and what it looked like, based on my stories about my childhood, and put my name at the top of it.
I tore the parcel open. Inside was the missing copy of Rogue Male.
There was something wedged between the pages. I opened the book and plucked out a glossy photograph. In the foreground, there were spruce trees, thrumming emerald green, and trampled, wild earth. I thought I could pick out a lake in the background, gleaming promisingly. It was anonymous in its loveliness.
At the left-hand edge of the photograph, there was a glint of something. I tilted it, squinted and bent my neck. There were strands blowing in the wind— copper-Aushed gold, gossamer-light. Hair. There was also the barest vertical sliver of fuchsia. I was looking at long strawberry-blond hair and the edge of an arm in a hot-pink jacket, far enough away from the lens that someone else must have taken the picture. This was a photograph that showed two people, then: one just out of view, and one behind the camera. They were alive.
I started to put the photograph back into the book, when I realized that it was marking a page with an underlined passage. I read:
She knew, I suppose, that in our mixture of impulse and intelligence we were alike. Her emotions governed her brain; though she would support her side with devastating logic, logic had nothing to do with her devotion. I should never have suspected that of myself, yet it is true. I have never taken sides, never leaped wholeheartedly into one scale or the other; nor do I realize disappointments, provided they are severe, until the occasion is long past. Yet I am ruled by my emotions, though I murder them at birth.
At the bottom of the page was another note, written in the same scrambling penmanship as he’d signed the note in the cairn in 1847. It said:
Of course I loved you.
“
“You all right, kiddo?” my dad asked, looking bemused. Who knows what journey he’d just witnessed.
“Uh, yes, Dad. Do you know what kind of trees these are?”
“Hmm. Sitka spruce, maybe?”
“Where would you find those?”
“West coast of America. Probably taken in Alaska.”
“What’s the biggest city in Alaska?”
“Anchorage,” my dad answered promptly. I could see he was pleased that I was engaging with his pub quiz knowledge and not crying on the sofa. “Got some pals up there, have you?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. I was thinking about the hush money I hadn’t touched, the emails I didn’t feel like answering. I was thinking about approximate locations I could deduce from a single photograph—if I was careful.
“Yes,” I said more clearly. “Do you know, I haven’t had a holiday in over a year. I think I might take a trip.”
—
This is how you change history.
As far as you know—or as far as the you that is me knows—the time-door is broken. You might never receive this document, which details what you will become if you follow this version of yourself. But if this does reach you, I want you to understand how it happens, step by step, so you can change it. I exist at the beginning and end of this account, a sort of time-travel, but I hope you find a way to contain me. I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down, cup your face, and whisper “Don’t worry, it gets better.” The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.
I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I see how wrong my choices were. Don’t follow this path. Don’t believe yourself just a node in a grand scheme, that your past and trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first to do that in this story. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven.
Forgiveness, which takes you back to who you were and lets you reset. Hope, which exists in a future where you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
