At the Ministry, Adela stared at me with wild eyes. She looked like her edges had been improperly 1lled in, and I realized it was the 1rst time I’d ever seen her without makeup. A palm-size clump of hair frizzed out from her head.
“There’s a mole,” she barked. “A—”
“I thought it was Quentin. It was last time. That’s why he was neutralized.” “Neutra—”
“You’re in danger, do you understand?” she said, seizing my arms. I stared at her, hot with shock. Adrenaline slimed under my skin. I felt like overhandled putty.
“I know I’m in danger. The Brigadier—”
“Someone inside the Ministry is feeding him information,” she said. “And I don’t know who.”
I had a feeling like I’d always assumed I was a real girl but someone had Aicked me in the eye and it had produced no pain, only a glassy click: I was just a doll, with no more inner intelligence than a bottle of water.
“How do you know there’s a mole in the Ministry?” I asked. Adela threw her hands up.
“There was a breach!” she said. I’d never heard her talk in exclamation points before. It took a decade oP her. “The time-door’s location was leaked! And I still can’t 1nd the Brigadier! I’ve looked everywhere he ought to be!”
We were looking at each other, neither with much of a grip on our expressions. Something was washing over Adela’s face. I thought, at 1rst, I was witnessing a rare example of high emotion, but the longer I looked, the more I
became convinced that the weird battlements of her chin and cheekbones were moving again. She looked viscous, recently shaken.
I stared, fascinated, at her expression’s bending scaPolding.
“You said the mole was Quentin ‘last time.’ What did you mean?”
Adela combed her 1ngers through her hair. The big kink at the side of her head began to Aatten, in an oily, exhausted way.
“One day,” she said, “you will have to stop asking stupid questions for the sake of conversational presenteeism. It endears you to no one. You know exactly what I meant.”
After my meeting with Adela, I went back to our wretched dripping Aat and sat in our miserable kitchen, trying to read a report—though really I just stared at the same page for twenty minutes. Graham was out on the motorbike, a permission that hadn’t yet been rescinded. I heard him pull up in the forsaken courtyard that hid the entrance to the Aat, and then, a few minutes later, I heard the key in the door. He stumbled over the doorstep, and called my name in a strangled voice.
I was on my feet with my heart blistering with panic. He almost never used my name, my real name, not “little cat” or “my bridge,” but my name, which he pronounced right, which he’d known from the beginning. I slammed into the hallway. He looked awful. His face was white and smeared with sweat.
“Something has happened to Maggie,” he said.
He’d been feeling concerned, responsible, since our gallery trip. A good officer takes care of his crew. He had been out to visit her. When he’d arrived at the door of the shrouded ex-shopfront that concealed their safe house, he’d been puzzled by a line of darkness at the edge of it, like a pole of paint. A curious optical illusion. The door had been kicked in and left very, very slightly ajar, so that a single inch of the dark hallway beyond was visible. He walked in and called out for Margaret. His voice landed strangely in the penumbral air.
He’d found stairs. He’d gone up the stairs, which he would never normally do. Something felt rotten, shattered. In the bathroom, crazed with part- uprooted Aoor tiles, a 1lled bath. Ralph under the water. A semi-submersible thing that had once been Ralph. Eyes wide, unseeing. Already the face was beginning to bloat. He backed out, took the landing to the splintered door of the bedroom. He saw the 1gure on the bed. A dead woman. Strangled. For a few seconds, the chewy purple of her face made her features indistinguishable. Then he realized: not Margaret, but another woman. Ash blond and taller. Someone she’d been dating, illicitly kept in touch with. A now former lover. The room had been knocked about by unkind hands. Margaret herself was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh God,” I croaked.
“I know where she would have gone,” he said. “Where?”
He told me there was a tunnel system, half-collapsed, near Greenhithe, in Rainham. Industrial estates had burrowed their foundations into it, the Thames had drowned a signi1cant portion of it, but his investigations over the past year, biking at the very edge of the boundary lines, had proven it was still there. It was in use when he was in the navy, he explained, when it was not so secret, but it appeared to be a secret now. He had always told Arthur and Margaret to go there if anything went wrong and he would come for them.
I was scratching at my throat, compulsively marking it with white lines of breaking skin. “Why did you tell them that?” I babbled. “What did you expect would go wrong? When did you plan this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He only answered the last question.
“I assumed you would be with me,” he replied. “And that I would take care of you. We must go to Arthur’s 1rst. He won’t know what’s happened. Then we will move to the tunnels.”
I wanted to say something, but I made a noise like a tin whistle being crushed underfoot.
“Pack,” he said. “Warm clothes. Waterproofs. Wear them if you can, to save space. We need water and emergency rations.”
“Right. Okay. Okay. I can get access to Spartan supplies at the Ministry. I— yes—if we take the bike I can—”
“Box hidden in the toilet cistern,” he said.
I gasped so abruptly I choked on my own spit. When I’d stopped coughing, I rasped: “Did you plan this?”
“I planned for this. You told me you were in danger. And I wouldn’t be much of an officer if I hadn’t. Hurry. We only have the tank bags and the top box for storage, so be prudent.”
I moved in shock. I found the box in our cavernous Edwardian cistern, uprooting the valves as I dragged it out. It wouldn’t matter, because if the Brigadier and Salese knew where Margaret lived, then they knew where we were. They probably had access to the microchip data—if not the live feed, then certainly the summary data reports. We wouldn’t be coming back here.
If Graham had asked the expats to gather in one place, that made it easier for me to herd them into protective custody. I just had to be fast—faster than the blue-light weapon, faster than the speed of information from a mole. Good God. I kicked the box of iron rations into my room so I could grab my gun. Holster, box, quick march to Graham’s bedroom. Adrenaline fuzzed all my edges.
He was loading a handgun. He had pulled the bottom drawer out of his bedside table, scattering its meager contents. I assumed it had been hidden beneath it.
“Why the fuck do you have that?”
He raised his eyebrows but didn’t look over. I edged closer. “Jesus, Graham, it’s Ministry-issue.”
“Yes.”
“The quartermasters—”
“Do not know that I have it,” he said briskly.
He stamped his foot through the discarded drawer. The board at the bottom splintered, and I saw a Aash of dark blue. Passports. I was prepared to bet my emergency rations that they were under fake names.
I recalled the amount of time he had spent at the Ministry, charming people with his chatter and his questions. I thought about how well he played innocuous, how utterly opaque he could render his eyes. I remembered that he
didn’t set oP alarms, he didn’t register as a human presence when recorded by modern technology. I stared at him and I wondered if I knew him at all.
He met my eyes at last. He didn’t say anything. But he did kiss me, quickly and urgently, which was something.
I spent the bike ride Aush against Graham, near tearful, rattling with an internal ticker tape of questions, ribboning through me in an abundance of disorder.
What had Simellia said to me? I’m being blocked by Arthur’s own Wellness team. Ivan stood down—what had become of him? Ralph dead. Ed “removed” after Anne Spencer—why hadn’t I checked on him? I hadn’t seen the Secretary in weeks. I worked exclusively, even conspiratorially, with Adela. Had the Secretary had an agreement with Defence? With the Brigadier? Was the “mole” not a mole but a series of mole tunnels undermining the project, an anti-project, a 1nal lobby from Defence to collapse us and absorb us in the name of national security? Had I, in fact, backed the wrong institution? Nausea, panic, the crushed-velvet crump of a migraine.
I’d never been to the safe house (a former doctor’s office, porcupined with scaPolding) that Arthur and Simellia shared, and I was in no state to take it in, except to note that the front door was slightly open and the lock was broken.
“Simellia?” I croaked, at the same time Graham called, “Arthur?”
Graham went ahead of me into the building, along a series of chemical- redolent, gray-carpeted corridors that gave on to hardly furnished rooms walled in chipboard. I saw a large mirror leaning against the wall, casting a bilious slanted reAection, piles and piles of books for which Simellia had not yet found a case. I imagined the blue-light weapon in every shadow and alcove. Kicking open another anonymous, pockmarked door, I mistook a Basquiat print, a coat stand, and a curtain for the Brigadier, my gun arm swinging round each time.
Upstairs, I heard a noise like a sudden downstroke on violin strings. It took me a few seconds to realize it was a human cry.
“Graham?”
I ran up the stairs and went gun 1rst into the nearest room.
Graham was crouching down. The expression on his face was one I’ve never been able to forget.
Arthur was lying on the Aoor, his eyes clouded and open. His head was turned to one side—he was facing me as I entered the room. Blood and vomit pooled from his lips. It looked almost like a speech bubble on the carpet. The air had an acrid, sickly tang.
“No—”
This can’t be happening, I thought. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. Graham was running his hand down Arthur’s face, closing his eyes.
“Careful, you’ll startle him,” I wanted to say. “Is he—”
“Yes.”
“Oh my God.”
“We need to leave,” said Graham Aatly. “Wait downstairs.”
I backed out of the room. I saw Graham lean down and press his forehead to Arthur’s temple. Then I turned and walked back down the stairs, legs trembling. There was a table by the front door, stacked with umbrellas, Ayers, keys, small change, and other by-the-entrance ephemera. There was a small notebook, which I picked up and opened. I Aipped through it. Arthur’s handwriting. I put it in my pocket. I’ll give it back to him later, I thought. I recognized the thought
as one of a person in shock, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking it.
Behind me, Graham came quickly down the stairs. He was pushing Arthur’s signet ring over one of his 1ngers. As I watched, he pulled his bike glove over it.
“Let’s ship out,” he said. His voice was toneless and his eyes were dry.
The ride to the tunnels passed in a blur. We took the motorways, which were thundering and anonymous. This is what the road to hell is like, I thought. Not paved with good intentions, but tarmacked and screaming with vehicles driven by people who don’t know and don’t care that Arthur is dead.
Greenhithe, like a long gray throat, regurgitated us by the docks. We abandoned the motorbike and our helmets behind a warehouse, taking the bags.
“It’s not far,” he told me. “The entrance is concealed by the marsh.”
I reached out and clasped his shoulder, to steady myself as much as anything. He turned and dragged me toward him, curling 1sts into my waterproof coat. He squeezed me so tightly that it hurt. I could feel him shaking, he who never moved without a perfect clarity of intent. The whole time, I was thinking: The microchips, the microchips. They found Arthur because of the microchips. Let me out of your arms: I need to think about what to do about the microchips.
The journey into the tunnels felt like a descent into a nightmare. Brine and rotting seaweed smells 1lled the air, which contrived to be both clammy and frigid. We had to wade through a Aooded room, holding the bags over our heads, before the passage sloped up again. We began to pick our way through neater, more carefully paved catacombs, ribbed with iron struts. I squinted at the walls, lit by the Aashlights we each clutched. As far as I could tell, these were utility tunnels for the dockyard.
We came out in a crude bunker, drier than the rest of the tunnel and divided by stone walls.
“Maggie?” whispered Graham. “Gray!”
Margaret burst from the ceiling. She had been hiding in a disused vent. She was covered with slime, and her eyes were wild. She fell, landing heavily, scrambled upright and threw herself into Graham’s arms. He swept her oP the Aoor, his face in her 1lth-thickened hair.
“I Aed,” Margaret sobbed. “I abandoned her—I Aed—not knowing—if you’d come—”
“Of course I would. I told you that I would.” “I was—so—afraid—”
I lurched toward them. My limbs felt like they’d been boiled for too long. Margaret saw me and cried out. She kicked free of Graham and embraced me ferociously. I kissed her forehead and spat the mud onto the Aoor.
When Margaret had got her sobbing under control, she twisted to look over my shoulder.
“Arthur?” she asked.
I looked at Graham. He took a breath. His shoulders jumped. “We were too late,” I said, so that he didn’t have to. “He’s gone.”
We didn’t have long to grieve. Graham and I changed from our soaked clothes into fresh ones. He explained the layout of the room, such as he understood it. There were three entrances, one of which was underwater. The other two were the long catacomb walk that we’d just come through, and a signi1cantly more damaged and dangerous crawl space, whose entrance was set into the hollow of a dual-carriageway bridge.
With narrative inevitability, we heard scuAing and grunting somewhere in the roof.
Margaret and I instinctively crouched. Graham straightened up and cocked one of the handguns.
There was a black square cut into the wall near the ceiling, on which Graham’s gun was now trained. Something appeared in and 1lled the square. It dropped to the Aoor, like a laid egg, at the same moment that Graham 1red. The gunshot echoed so loudly that Margaret and I both shrieked.
“God’s blood, Commander, ’tis me!”
A gray canvas bag—the egg—lay beneath the square. Cardingham’s face appeared in the hole. He looked sick to his stomach.
“You!” shouted Margaret. “How were you privy to this place?” Cardingham clambered gracefully to the Aoor.
“Our commander told me of it, i’faith. Though I had much trial 1nding this den. How wouldst thou have me be? Killed, like the captain? Lower thy weapon, sir.”
“How did you know Arthur was dead?” asked Graham.
“My bridge has been absent for too long. I hied to his dwelling, as I thought that Moorish woman wouldst know best where my keeper hid. I discovered his
body. Lower thy weapon.”
At last, Graham brought his arm down.
“You saw nobody else there? A tall man with dark gray hair and a military bearing? Goes by the rank of brigadier—”
“Nay, sir. Thou thinkest this the work of professional men? May this not be a lover’s revenge? Didst thou know he was a sodomite, Commander?”
Graham silently thumbed the safety catch and put the gun away. Then he said:
“Sixty-1ve’s friend was murdered too, probably accidentally and in her place. Two months ago the Brigadier and his companion attempted to kill my bridge and take me. We’re safe for now, but we must plan our escape—”
“You’re not safe,” I blurted out. They looked round at me.
“You’re microchipped,” I said. “Er. There are tiny machines implanted in your backs, just under the skin. It doesn’t matter that you don’t show up on modern scanning equipment. You’re like the Invisible Man holding a Aaming torch. The Ministry know exactly where you are, all the time, and there’s someone feeding that info to the Brigadier.”
For a second or so, there was nothing but the renegade slap of the distant water on stone. I could almost feel the chill of his blood retreating from his face before Graham quietly asked me:
“How long have you known this?”
“You were all released to your bridges microchipped. So. I suppose. The whole time.”
Margaret and Cardingham just stared, dumbstruck, but Graham’s face twisted. His mouth convulsed with fury and contempt. He got it under control, but not before I felt its impact bruise me. He said to Cardingham, “Thomas, do you have a blade with you?”
“I have a ‘1rst aid kit,’ among the instruments of which is a scalpel, a curved needle, and a catgut. We are of accord, I wager.”
“Do you know where the ‘microchips’ are?” he asked me, without looking at me.
“Yes.”
“You’ll cut mine out and sew up the wound. I’ll cut Lieutenant Cardingham’s, and you’ll do Margaret’s. Then I’m going to take them and drop them in the river. Thomas, give me the scalpel.”
He led me into an alcove on the left of the room, separated by a rotting wood door. It was dry and pitch-black. Some quirk of its construction stiAed noise, and when I spoke or moved, the shadows swallowed the sound.
He stripped to the waist, facing away from me, and knelt. I wedged a Aashlight into a crack in the wall and reached out. As soon as I touched him, he shuddered. I wondered if he was thinking, as I was thinking, of all the times my hand had lain here, on his naked back.
“What did you want from me?” he asked softly. “What?”
“Why did you bring me back from the dead? Why did you come into my life like this?”
“We—we saved you. I wanted to know you.” His head tipped forward into his hands.
“Well,” he said. “Did you satisfy your curiosity?” “Graham.”
“For a while, I really did believe that you—What were you planning to do with me? Put me in a 1ling system, I suppose. Where you could keep me boxed up.”
“I never wanted to—”
“Yes, you did!” he shouted. It was loud enough that it burred with echoes. He scrambled around to face me, enraged, eyes Aashing. “Yes, you did. You had a very clear idea of who I was supposed to be. You’ve been going hammer and tongs to get me there.”
I was breathing fast and hard. It wasn’t quite hyperventilating, but it wasn’t far oP. “That’s not fair,” I said. “I made you my life.”
“And in the heat of your obsession,” he said, “did it occur to you to remember that I am a person too?”
His color cooled. Whatever was burning in his eyes, he tamped it down. He turned away.
“Scalpel,” he said. “Stop crying. You won’t be able to do it properly if you are crying.”
Margaret wept the whole way through her operation. When I’d sewn her up, she turned to face me and grabbed my wrist. Her skin was perfect and opalescent under the dirt of the tunnels. She held my chin and forced me to look into her eyes, still jeweled with tears.
“Mark me,” she said, “and never forget it. I forgive you.”
I bent and put my face in her neck, pulling her—tiny and warm and trembling—into my arms. “I’m sorry,” I said wetly to her throat. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Graham took the microchips out somewhere, with the intention of letting them Aoat downriver, I think—he’d stopped telling me what his plans were. On his return, he divided us into three-hour watches, to be taken at the furthest edge of the catacomb corridor. Cardingham went 1rst. Graham would follow him, then me, then, by morning, Margaret.
“Why can’t we leave now?” I asked tremulously.
“Tide,” he said brusquely, without looking at me. “Until it’s farther out, tomorrow morning, our escape channels are so limited that stirring would be suicide. At this moment there’s only one safe route we can take, along the river, and I’m sure they’re monitoring the banks.”
Margaret and I folded spare clothes under our heads for pillows and hunkered down under coats for blankets. We lay in each other’s arms, wakeful and anxious. Graham, in the side room, worked on something by Aashlight— something to do with the passports. He hadn’t looked at me since I’d cut the microchip from his back.
“How did they dispatch Arthur?” Margaret whispered.
“Poison, I think.”
“Did he suPer overlong?”
I thought of the vomit, the blood. But Arthur’s face had been glazed and loose. Perhaps it had been quick. Each time I thought about it, my body was 1lled with insectile chatter, a desperate urge to get up and shake and move and 1x the situation. But there was no 1xing to be done. Arthur was dead.
“Should I e’er 1nd this Brigadier,” whispered Margaret, “I will break him, bone by bone. Sixteen would have wanted me at peace, but I cannot obey it. He was as a brother to me. A man of marble where all others are of clay.”
She started to weep again, sluggish little tears like liquid mercury, her face barely moving. I touched one and watched it spread against her skin.
“He was a good person,” I said.
Eventually I felt her twitching as her body succumbed to an uneasy sleep. I must have slept too because the room withdrew from me. I dreamed, inevitably, of Arthur. I dreamed in layers of dreams where I woke in the dream and he was there and I said, “Oh, thank God, I dreamed you’d died,” and I’d wake again in the dream, and know him dead, and wake again in the dream, and think him still alive. My consciousness split like chapped skin, worried to the point of blood.
I was woken by rough shaking. I came to with a belligerent yelp. “Your watch,” said Graham, above me.
I sat up in 1ts and starts, like a balloon animal inAating. Everything ached, especially my neck. I wasn’t quite awake, and so I reacted to Graham’s presence as I would have done a day before. I Aopped against him and buried my face in his shoulder. He stiPened but otherwise didn’t move.
“Happy anniversary,” I muttered. “What?”
“It’s one year today. That you came here.”
He was still and silent for a moment longer. I breathed in the familiar scent of him, felt the familiar passage of his breath. Then he pushed me away.
“Your watch,” he repeated.
When I’d 1rst interviewed for the bridge role, Adela had said to me, “Your mother was a refugee.” But my mother never described herself as a refugee. It was a narrative imposition, along with “stateless” and “survivor.”
My sister and I grew up, as many children of immigrants do, half parented and half parenting. Our mother needed our help to navigate her new country. Her need pinched us in diPerent ways. My sister became invested in cataloging, in retelling and remembering, in what she called the truth. I became obsessed with control, which I suppose is another way of saying I wanted command of the narrative.
Graham hadn’t been all wrong when he said I’d been trying to shape him. How could I resist it? He came to me as a story. Now I’d let the story slip out of my grip. I’d panicked, and he’d had to look after me. I’d let slip something I shouldn’t have and now he was angry at me. I should have taken charge of the situation, and instead here we were: hiding in a cellar and expecting to take on the Brigadier and the mole by ourselves. But someone had put a gun in my hands, a platform beneath my feet. Where was she, to add the 1nal underline?
In the catacomb corridor, swinging my pocket Aashlight, I turned on my phone. Six missed calls from Adela. I texted:
help
She responded within seconds.
Where are you?
dockside service tunnels rainham can u track phone?
Accept phone call when it arrives do not speak do not move even a foot
In 1ve minutes a track call came through. I accepted it and waited. I even held my phone in the air to get a better signal, although experience had taught me this
was a futile gesture.
I have location
Weapons? Any sign of Brig?
2 guns w 47 no brig
what should i do low battery
I can get them into protective custody. Will send a SWAT team. Meet me here. NO FURTHER CONTACT mole still loose don’t know if they’re tracking
She sent me a location—about half an hour’s walk away, right by the river. Probably the microchips Graham had disposed of were tracked that far down the water.
I pulled Arthur’s notebook from my coat pocket. There was a tiny gold pen in the spine. I held the Aashlight in my teeth and wrote:
I know what this looks like, but please don’t be afraid. I’ve gone to get help.
I tore the page out and left it on the Aoor, held in place and lit by my Aashlight. Then, using my phone’s light, I made my way to meet Adela.
I began my trek across the marshes in the thin, frost-tipped light of predawn, but the sun soon leaked into the air. The birds went wild for it. I’d never realized how psychotic the dawn chorus sounded—its scrabbling high notes, its melismas of desperation. Then again, I’d never been that exhausted or frightened.
Adela was standing in the debris-strewn mud at the bottom of a stone staircase streaked rot brown with rusted metal posts. The Thames churned behind her.
I was all the way down the stairs and at Adela’s side before I realized that the Brigadier and Salese were also there, and the Brigadier was pointing the blue- light weapon at Adela.
“Oh,” I said.
“‘Oh’ indeed,” said Adela dryly.
“You will not move,” said the Brigadier, “or I will shoot.”
“I’m wearing a reAector,” said Adela. “Good for at least 1ve shots. How much power do you have left in that thing? I know you emptied half the battery on Eighteen-forty-seven’s attempted capture. And you haven’t managed to get back to your era to recharge.”
“I don’t need to shoot you,” replied the Brigadier. “I will shoot her, and that will be the end of both of you.”
“Wrong again,” said Adela. “She’s already on a diPerent timeline. She told Eighteen-forty-seven about the Holocaust instead of 9/11, and I think it’s sent him down a diPerent path. The link’s broken.”
“Why would shooting me kill you anyway?” I asked. I didn’t mean to blurt it out. It was just that I was so frightened I could feel my heart in my bowels. Cold sweat was dripping down my rib cage, tickling me unpleasantly.
Adela sighed. “I knew I was naive when I was a young woman,” she said. “But I didn’t realize I was this naive.”
“You’re one,” barked Salese. “Future self and past self.”
I was too intent on the weapon to turn to Adela, but I said, “You’re me?” “Don’t parrot. Yes. I’m amazed you hadn’t worked that out already. I’m
from, let’s see, twenty-odd years in your future. These two are from the twenty- two hundreds.”
There was blood in my nose and in the back of my throat. In my panic, my body was putting beats in all the wrong places. “Arthur’s dead,” I said, just to stop her talking.
Adela’s face dropped horribly for a moment—a truly incredible sight on her mobile features. Then she arrested its slide and pinned a blank expression in place.
“Arthur Reginald-Smyth. Yes. And Margaret Kemble.” “Maggie’s alive,” I said.
This time her face opened, and she didn’t stop it. “She’s alive?” Adela croaked.
“This timeline’s Ministry being less efficient than the original,” the Brigadier broke in. I realized the hand holding the weapon was trembling slightly. The more I looked, the more I noted signs of exhaustion, sickness, and 1lth about the futurists. Whatever mission had brought them here, it wasn’t going to plan.
Adela was gawping at the Brigadier. “Less efficient?” she said. “You didn’t kill Sixteen-sixty-1ve this time—the Ministry saved her.”
Salese gawped back. “We didn’t kill her?”
“Yes,” said Adela. “You murdered my friends. Last time it was Arthur and Maggie, both. But this time round, you only got one.”
“No. You types nulled. We breathed a paper.”
“There are declassi1ed records,” the Brigadier translated, “that show the Ministry had the noncombatant expats killed once they realized the door only supported a limited number of people.”
I did gold1sh faces for a few seconds, then managed to say to Adela, “The Ministry killed them? Did you do this? Did you know about this?”
But she was staring back at me, shivering oddly. “Arthur’s the name of my son,” she said.
“What?”
“Arthur John Gore.”
I was about to say something cravenly stupid, such as, I’m not even sure if I want children, when Adela stepped forward and stabbed Salese in the throat.
The impact wasn’t smooth. A greenish screen 1zzled and Aickered over Salese’s body—some kind of shield. But Adela grunted and pushed past its vivid static, driving the knife home. I hadn’t seen the knife appear, but now it was center stage. Blood sprayed, hit the casing of green, dripped lushly down the inside. Salese gagged, eyes rolling back. This all took less than three seconds.
In that time, I’d thrown myself at the Brigadier with my brain all gray. He was a big man but hollow with it. He’d been hungry for some time, I could feel that in the baggy give of his Aesh when my knuckles connected. He wasn’t afraid of pain. I kicked his shins and heard a crack, and I punched his mouth and felt a tooth turn in his livid gum, and he took it all grimly, without breaking attention. He had his hand on my hand, and my hand was wrestling his for the blue-light
weapon. Then he turned his head, just for a moment, and he must have seen what had become of Salese, because his grip unAexed. I wrenched. When I was done, I was holding the blue-light weapon, two of my 1ngers appeared to be dislocated, and the Brigadier was backing away.
“You killed Sal,” he said. His voice was raw. To my horror, there were tears tracking down his face.
At Adela’s feet, the corpse that had been Salese bled out onto the sand, turning it not red, as I’d expected, but a color that was closer to black.
The Brigadier ran. I lifted the blue-light weapon. It was very like a gun, or what a gun might dream about becoming. I understood, instinctively, the sight and the trigger. So I 1red.
There was a brief cyan Aicker, then the weapon made exactly the same noise a vacuum cleaner makes when you turn it oP. After that it was completely unresponsive, which is just as well really, because my brain caught up with what I’d just done and tried to do and I threw up.
When I straightened, Adela was looking at me sympathetically. “I used to puke every time. You get used to it.”
“Why did you—”
“ReAectors are designed to screen the wearer from plasma bullets. They weren’t designed with metal knives in mind.”
She reached out and, without ceremony, snapped my dislocated 1ngers back into place. The birds sang over my screaming.
We walked back toward the hideout. I stared at her, and she stared at the way ahead. She looked like her organs had been removed and placed in cold storage; worse, like it had happened when she was on her way to what she thought was a birthday party.
Eventually, she said: “You want to ask me about the future.” “Well. Yes.”
“What do you want to know?” “What’s it like?”
“What an anodyne question. The United Kingdom has been at war with the Tiger Territories for about a decade. Mai almost got deported right at the beginning. The Ministry stepped in though. She’s dead now. Mai and Dad are both dead. Did you want to know how they died?”
“No,” I said, shocked. “Why would you tell me that?”
“I’m still processing. It wasn’t that long ago. If that’s any comfort.” “Jesus fucking—What are the Tiger Territories?”
“Stupid media nickname, I shouldn’t have used it. Countries that used to have tigers, more or less. China, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal. Couple of others. They want us toppled. US and Brazil are on our side. Russia’s in the middle of a civil war—they started using chemical weapons in the early 2030s without rationalizing what it would do to crops. Tigers are extinct.”
“And where did you say the Brigadier and Salese come from?”
“Further ahead. The twenty-two hundreds. We believe they made the time- door. Apparently the planet is not in a good way, climate-wise, so they’re trying to change history. Targeted assassinations, mainly, a bit of intelligence gathering. I don’t think they have the resources or infrastructure for much else. They got stuck here when we seized the door.”
We walked in silence. I’d become so hot and tearful that my personal radius had expanded several inches from my body.
“Why ‘Adela?’” I asked her.
“It was really close to the top of the baby name book, and I was in a hurry,” she said.
“Ah. Did you really lose your eye in Beirut in 2006?” “No. Battambang, 2039.”
“And your—face?”
Another grim hiccup. “Ah. It turns out time-travel does come with side ePects. Even your body forgets your ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness,’ if you do it often enough. We thought it would be a tactical advantage, but I suppose the same claim was made for crop-destroying chemical weapons. You were right when you called my surgery reconstructive. I would venture to call it life-saving. Failure to
correct for ‘hereness’ shifting was how we lost Agent Cardingham, back in ’thirty-four. Poor man. I never liked him but that was a dreadful way to go.”
“And you said that. Well. We have—or—you have a son?” “Yes.”
“With—?”
“Yes.”
We rejoined the road. Two sets of boot heels thudded martially on the tarmac. The manic scrubland loomed around us.
“We married not long after all this happened the 1rst time round,” Adela said. “After the—funerals. It was—hard. Graham put Arthur’s ring on my 1nger. That was—too much. I gave up wearing it. I think he understood, but it was—difficult. I really thought I might be able to spare you all that, if I got the mole this time.”
“What about all the stuP you said about not changing history?”
“People aren’t history,” said Adela scornfully. “Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.”
“And, your, uh, our—?”
“Arthur was born a year later. He’s a teenager now.”
That threw me oP. When I’d heard “my son,” I’d imagined him in mystical terms—a pink-cheeked, wide-eyed kid of three or so, radiating his innocence like a plutonium rod. To know that Arthur Gore was a person, with opinions and articulated thoughts, was unnerving.
“What’s he like?”
“Oh, he hates us. As teenagers do. He’s a gobby little shit,” she added, and I noted the pride in her voice. “Of course, it’s not easy being a twenty-1rst-century teen with a Victorian patriarch for a father.”
“Is he a patriarch?”
“He’s not as bad as he could be. But he has very high expectations and requires that they are met. And he expects obedience with good cheer. Filial devotion and all that. Honor. Achievement.”
“He’s an Asian mother.” “Ha. Yes.”
Adela checked the futuristic weapon, which she had wordlessly taken from me. “I miss Mai,” she said quietly. “You should spend as much time with her as you can. Dad too.”
“I will. Um. Does our—does your husband know you’re here?” “Who do you think ordered this mission?”
I stopped short in the road. Adela turned to me.
“That’s why the Brigadier was here—for me, and for him, as early in our timelines as possible. I understand that, in their era, the Ministry and the British government as a whole are considered culpable for what their Britain looks like. I suppose we invested in weapons and manufacturing that were not what you probably still call ‘carbon neutral.’ Charming term. It fell out of fashion—will fall out of fashion. Anyway, the situation was desperate. You’re not long oP your 1rst resource war. Or the 1rst Special Branch Coast Guard. Graham was closely involved in that. He 1nally made post-captain,” she added, with a phantom smile.
“What the hell is a Special Branch of the Coast Guard?”
“Defensive patrols. The migrants, you know. Boats. There were too many.
They started trying to enter by force.”
I stared at her. She shrugged tiredly and said, “I was worried when you said you hadn’t told Graham about 9/11, because in my timeline, that immediately converted him to the Ministry. Highly trained mercenaries attacking civilians. The necessity of belligerent tactics to prevent another attack. Neo-Crusades following the collapse of the empire. And so on. You were right about the way he reacted. I remember him bringing up the Aden expedition. Though I’m sure he’d deny it was ‘racist,’ you know he’s funny about that word. The Ministry promoted him quickly. Much quicker than they promoted you. He’s good. He was in the 1eld for a few years but he was fast-tracked into leadership. He’s— how can I put this?—extremely senior.”
“But why did he send you?”
“I insisted. I knew this mission better than anyone.” “But why?”
She looked me up and down. Her expression was a bit squishy. Not with her usual facial strangeness. I think it was nostalgia.
“When you are my age,” she said, “you will realize just how green you were. I had to make sure this all happened the right way. Most things don’t happen. Mostly the universe is parking space.”
“But—”
“The world is at war. We are running out of everything, and everyone thinks they’re owed what’s left. But as long as the Ministry exists, as long as the Ministry comes to exist in the shape it does in my era, then we have the technological advantage. That isn’t nothing, having weapons other people don’t, the kinds of soldiers other people don’t. Some other countries get left behind, but that’s how progress works. You really didn’t pay attention to anything that’s ever been said about history, did you?”
I said, “Did you kill Quentin?”
She lifted her thumb to her mouth and bit the edge of the skin. “Technically,” she said, “we both did. Since you are me.”
“I thought the Brigadier did it. Someone with my access credentials shut oP the CCTV—”
“You are aware we have the same 1ngerprints.” “Oh. Right. But why did you do it?”
“Because last time, Quentin was the mole, and I thought that he was the reason Maggie and Arthur were—were murdered. And he did pass information about the Ministry to the Brigadier and Salese. That was extremely fucking inconvenient. You can’t imagine what Britain looks like in my era. Coming back here was a shock. It’s so decadent. Like stepping into Rome before the barbarians sacked it. I seem to remember the boomers had a real hard-on for food rationing as an ideological exercise when we were your age. Let me assure you that no one enjoys food rationing.”
“You didn’t know the Ministry had Maggie and Arthur killed?” “No. None of us did. Well. I wonder. Graham is so senior now.” “Do you think he knows?”
“Hmm. There was a period when things were bad between us. Lasted a few years. Dad was very sick, and Mai was struggling to care for him, and Arthur was having a lot of trouble at school, and our workloads were… Anyway. We were… distant. I assumed he was having an aPair.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“We tried to put those years behind us. Besides, when have you ever known Graham to answer a direct question?”
Her voice was strained when she said this, but I remember the way aPection luminesced under her skin. I still love him, I thought. Even after everything that happens, at least I still love him. I asked her, “Are you happy?”
Adela considered this. “No.” “Oh.”
“Not being in the middle of a war makes you happy. Not grieving. Not being so profoundly fucking loathed by your son. Not having to kill people for your salary. Speaking of which—”
“You aren’t going to kill Graham!”
“No, I’m not going to kill him. I love him.” “I—”
“You hardly know him. It’s going to be two years before you even see him cry.”
“He cries?”
Adela’s mouth quirked at that. She fell into an agitated reverie. I felt her pulling away from the moment as the tide pulls from the shore—I mean I could feel the suck of it as her attention retreated to some inaccessible socket of “elsewhere.” It was horrible. Her “thereness” at work against her, I assume—or two decades of regret, piling up with such force it changed the shape of her thoughts. I wondered how it felt, realizing the version of history she’d lived for years was a lie. Because of the choice she made next, I never got to experience it myself.
“Here,” she said.
I looked down. She was holding a palm-size tablet and a memory card. I attempted to take them with my dominant, recently damaged hand. She shook her head, and I took it with the other.
“Ministry passcodes,” she said. “For this project.” “Why are you giving me these?”
She dragged her hand through her brittle bottle-blond hair, and the black roots Aashed up with a wanton, impossible pride.
“Because I’ve been a company woman all my life and look where it’s got me. The Ministry had Arthur and Maggie killed. No one ever told me. He didn’t tell me. If I’d known—”
I said, “Maggie’s still alive.”
Another origami of emotion creased her face. “Oh, Maggie,” she murmured. “Can you go back again and save Arthur?”
I thought I might get another You’re a stupid girl, but Adela just looked sad. “Time,” she said, “is a limited resource. Like all of our resources. You only get to experience your life once. And you can travel through time, a little, though it’s like smoking cigarettes: the more you do it, the greater risk you’re at from death by its ePects. And yes, you can go back and change the details, a little, but there’s a limit to how often. Every time you dig a new pathway into time, you exhaust a little more of it, and if we go back too often and mine too deeply in the same place, again and again, pulling history from the same coal seam, it will collapse. It will obliterate us, like a black hole. You have to get it right.”
“What—good grief—what is right? In this context? Adela?”
“I should get the surviving expats. I’ll keep them safe. The Defence SWAT team are on their way, with heat scanners and infrared goggles, emergency protocols being what they are, so I can at least stay ahead of them and their tracking techniques. But you need to go to the Ministry, with those passcodes, and you need to end this project. I’m one half of Control—I do still have that authority. If we’re going to get it right, then we’re going to have to ensure I am all of Control, and for that, the project needs to be wiped.”
“If I leave now, Graham will think I betrayed them.”
“I’ll explain. I’ll bring them to you, to the safe house, and we can plan next moves. Just trust me. We’ll get it right this time.”
She smiled suddenly, the 1rst real smile I’d ever seen on her face. I saw myself in her then—her mouth, her cheeks, her eyes.
“He is wonderful, isn’t he?” she said. “I’d forgotten how handsome he was when we 1rst met. And how happy. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him as happy as I saw him that day in the shooting gallery. I’ve missed him so much. You have no idea.”
“Hands in the air, please,” said a clear, calm voice.
I whirled around. There was no one to be seen. The dense emerald vegetation of the scrubland surrounded the road. He could have been hiding anywhere. His voice carried strangely.
“Easy, little cat,” Graham said, his voice still calm. “You have some explaining to do. Madam, put your hands in the air. We have you in our sights.”
“Plugged thine ears, sir,” I heard Cardingham snarl. “Refused my counsel and now see—these whores do conspire. Thou rolled i’bed with death.”
“Shut up, Thomas.”
“Commander Gore and Lieutenant Cardingham,” said Adela, scanning the scrub. “Rest assured that we mean you no harm.”
“I suppose this depends on your interpretation of harm,” said Graham from his hiding place, quite pleasantly. “Perhaps you don’t intend to kill us. But to survey a man, to rob him of his freedom and use him like a tool—would you not consider this harmful?”
Adela leaned toward me. “If I were you, I would run before the SWAT team gets here,” she whispered. “Things are going to get very crowded, very quickly.”
I look back on this moment, and I do wonder: Should I have done something else? Stayed? Argued? Pleaded? Thrown myself toward the sound of his voice, onto his mercy? Would it have changed anything?
As I ran, a gunshot rang out. The bullet passed close enough that I heard its whistling song. And I thought, that wasn’t Graham. It wasn’t Graham who just tried to shoot me. It can’t have been Graham. Because if it was Graham, he wouldn’t have missed.
10
The people he instinctively thinks of as his captors lead him down a corridor. Through disoriented trial and error, he’s learned that the bulges beneath their short jackets conceal guns. It’s been a challenging few weeks.
“You were in the Discovery Service, right?” one of the white-robed attendants had said. “Think of this as a mission of discovery.”
So, he reframes this strange new world as a task he can either excel at or fail.
At the end of the corridor is a door. Beyond the door lies a room. Inside the room waits the officer who will be his “bridge” to the future.
As he steps in, he notices a small ghostly figure shifting on the carpet. Black hair. Brown skin, bright and clean. The sweeping arc of her dark lashes. The indescribable hue of her lips. She looks at him. He can’t meet her gaze. His eyes drop away, his blood running thin and acidic through his veins. Does everyone see her? The room is so still, he can’t be sure. Maybe she only appears to him.
There is a man he assumes to be the officer, and he tries to focus on that face. But the little ghost steps forward.
“Commander Gore?”
“Yes.”
“I’m your bridge.”
Later—he will have many days, weeks, and months of “later”—he’ll realize the resemblance to the Inuit woman is faint, more a product of guilt and imagination. Her hair isn’t as lustrous, her skin is lighter, her face more feline. Her eyes are shaped differently. She’s several inches taller and leaner too. Still, still.
As Lieutenant Irving once said, God’s ways are not our ways. His methods can be mysterious. But His intentions, He carves into the flesh.
*God gave me to you, little cat. It is His will that I am yours. In His infinite mercy, He has offered me redemption.*
