The Ministry of Time

Chapter Six

I returned home in the New Year. Something had shifted in the narrow landscape of the house. The rooms felt connected where they had felt merely contiguous. Graham smiled at me sometimes, a vague confused smile as if I was a task he needed to complete but had forgotten the genesis of. One afternoon in the kitchen he took me by the shoulders and moved me so that he could get to the cups. He touched me so rarely that he might as well have wrapped my hair around his fist and cut it off with sewing scissors. I felt him on me all afternoon.

This increase in pleasant vagueness was a typical Graham response to intense internal pressure. The Ministry, in light of his repeated requests to rejoin the Royal Navy, was granting him admission into the field agent training program, under close supervision. Cardingham, a career soldier, was also retraining for the field. We had to create identities and backstories for both of them, generating a migraine-inducing number of fake files. Cardingham was forced to retake the acclimatization exam. The whole setup was a nervy compromise with Defence, details still being darned and sellotaped even as it was announced to the bridge teams.

“It’s better that we continue to work closely with Eighteen-forty-seven,” Adela had said, “given that he seems likely to survive the year.”

“So he’s staying in London?”

“He’ll have to live independently, of course. Out of bridge accommodation.”

“But he’ll stay.”

I should have developed tinnitus from the alarm bells. Why were the Ministry so interested in making Graham and Cardingham field-worthy? Why weren’t they expending the same energy on Margaret and Arthur? But all I heard was that Graham was staying. I’d been so thrilled I’d torn a flake of skin from my thumb with pinced nails.

“That’s still a tell,” said Adela, but she did a DVD-player motion with her mouth and chin that was probably a smile.

At the crux of all the time-travel hypotheses was the question: How do you measure a person? Graham scored very high on spatial-reasoning tests and well on verbal-reasoning tests. He was, according to his psychoanalyst, dangerously repressed; but then again, according to the acclimatization examiners, he was gregarious and confident. He was the eldest of five children, after the death of his older brother at sea. He was an inch below average height, though in his own era he had been two inches above it. He had hazel eyes, a mass of curly dark hair, and a remarkable nose. He was thirty-seven years old and had been thirty-seven for nearly two hundred years. I expect, when you finish this account, that you will have a clear image of him, enough to pastiche and anticipate him. I’m glad of it. I need him to be alive to someone else.

Over the course of the bridge year, I amassed enough statistical information about Graham that I could have programmed a convincing Graham Gore AI. I dreamed along these lines, occasionally. My hands on silicone flesh. Keeping it somewhere where I could always see it, keeping it clean, forearm-deep in its motherboards. The dreams always went rancid when I tried to mimic Graham’s voice, because I would dream him cool and martial, slur-saying and gun-shooting, Oxford English with a dash of naval salt, and he wasn’t like that. It was some of what he was like, but not all.

I had access to his file, as we say. To have access to a file on someone is a simultaneously erotic and deadening experience. When you study a person, as I studied Graham, you enter a pornographic fugue state. All the things that should be intimate become molecular. Their body, which you have never touched, lies against the back of your eyelids every night. You begin to know them, except time always leaves you one moment behind, and so you have to know them more, more and more, chasing them through time, at the limit where their life meets their future, and you need to have it, 360 degrees of what they see and feel and sense, or else your file is incomplete. Who did they love, before you? What hurt them the most? What will cause the most useful harm?

I was obsessed with him. I see that now. I was doing my job, and I loved my job. Do you understand what I mean?

“I’m going to take Maggie clubbing,” I announced one afternoon.

Graham and I were in the kitchen. He was flicking through a cookbook. There was a shelf of cookbooks in the kitchen. I had never used any of them.

“Very good. I am not sure whether to warn her of your bad influence or warn you of hers.”

“Maybe you could just give us your blessing to misbehave.”

“I withhold my blessings. How do you pronounce this word, please?”

“?‘Sichuan.’ Oh. Graham, you know you can’t handle spice.”

“Bold new frontiers. You can play a mournful violin while I expire of the ‘explorer’s disease.’?”

“The…?”

“Indigestion.”

Margaret, alone of the expats, had tried to develop a circle of friends outside of the Ministry, mostly people she met through apps I’d never heard of, Lex and Zoe and so on. The Ministry had subtly and then overtly discouraged this. Margaret was too much of a liability—she sounded too bizarre, and she ran her mouth. Besides which, she picked up antiestablishment lesbian anarchists (whatever she or they thought those words meant) with suspicious frequency. She was under flintily compassionate surveillance from the Wellness team.

Ralph was still her bridge, but he found her so challenging that I’d quietly suggested to Adela that I might cross-report on Margaret. This was partly because I wanted to impress Adela. Since our conversation about Quentin, she’d taken me under her armored wing. It was eye-opening. I craved her way of seeming so steel-plated that it left no obvious vulnerability. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a woman whose mother’s trauma had shaped so much of her inner landscape, I imprinted on my intense female boss big-time.

But, anyway, Margaret liked me. She might invite me to join her and Arthur—whom she adored and bullied lovingly—for a gallery visit or a game of mini-golf while Graham was away at the Ministry, preparing to retrain for the field. (Arthur loved mini-golf, and over the course of the expat year wrote a really rather funny series of reviews masquerading as assimilation test material of the mini-golf courses of London. I don’t think Arthur understood the terms “kitsch” or “camp,” but they delighted him. I once witnessed him doubled over, tears of laughter sparkling on his cheeks, because a ball had to be putted inside a miniature Ferris wheel and travel all the way round, to drop into a hole.)

Margaret went to the cinema twice a week, religiously. She bounced around music venues looking for obsessions. She was probably London’s last avid reader of Time Out. She would often invite me along. Not always—Margaret also liked to be a woman wafting through the city alone—she hadn’t had much opportunity to live unstructured time back in the seventeenth century. But we might go out together and see a riot grrrl punk band whose drummer she’d been texting; and then I, Ministry operative, would have to supervise them both at dinner (Margaret had a mania for customizable pizzas with nonsense toppings); then Margaret might see that the drummer and I were one barbed sentence away from a fight about politics, which she didn’t understand. She’d say her good nights and take me for a walk to point at neon signs and lavish window displays and bubble tea shops and demand playfully of me: How? But also: Why? She was work and play for me. I liked Margaret. Being around her made me want to run across crosswalks without looking, that sort of thing, I found everything funnier than it was, et cetera.

We planned our clubbing outing with military precision. She sent me a dozen photos of different outfits. She’d learned the grammar of the mirror selfie. The crop top!!!!!!!! I texted, though I removed every exclamation mark but one before I sent the message.

We arranged to meet Arthur and Graham for a drink in Dalston first—a situation so twenty-first century I felt not a little proud of their progress. Margaret and Arthur were already drinking when we arrived. They had both ordered stupid-looking cocktails.

“I tried to stop her—” Arthur began.

“Look here! ’Tis known as ‘sex on the beach’! The spark behind the taps did take such care over its compaction, I must assume it is a potion to summon its namesake.”

“Well,” I said, sitting down, “it’s made with cranberry juice, which is supposed to be good for UTIs, which is what you’re going to get if you have sex on an English beach.”

“?‘UTI’?” asked Margaret. “Forty-seven! Sit down! Stop rubbing at your temples with that malodorous expression.”

“Everyone is so cruel to me,” said Graham, deadpan, “even though I’m very handsome and brave and I have never done anything wrong. Sixty-five, where are the rest of your clothes?”

“Banished. I am never more bravely clad than when I go skyclad.”

I started to laugh, a real, happy, unglamorous laugh. As true laughter does, it summoned smiles from the others. Margaret leaned toward me, grinning, and I saw Graham catch Arthur’s eye and roll his. It was a moment among moments, but everyone was held in it, captured in a small and easy joy. I return again and again to this memory. It’s proof, you see. Not everything I did was wrong.

Graham’s passage from petri dish to lab coat, as it were, was marked by a small, pretty ceremony that required No. 1 dress blues, alongside twenty-six other new agents who were joining, variously, from the army, the air force, the police, and the civil service. On the day of the ceremony, the sky was crisp cerulean, and the grass was rimed with silver. The entire city looked like an extravagant piece of confectionery, particularly in the Westminster courtyard where uniformed recruits were lined up. All around us, the buildings reared up and leaned down. A breeze scrubbed the courtyard, made its colors fresh and raw.

At the bark of a man in epaulettes, the procession shifted, and I saw Graham—light glinting from the polished brim of his cap—standing to attention like a cat stretching for an upper shelf—his narrow hips and his faint smile—There he is—that magnificent topmast sail of a nose—There he is—I saw him in the highlights that the sun picked out—the sword at his waist, the shiny black shoes—There he is, there he is. I wish I could tell you how it felt to see him. He’d always lived inside me, years before I’d known him. I’d been trained to love him.

“Don’t turn around,” hissed a familiar voice behind me.

I flinched so hard that my shoulder blades almost met. I blushed too. Internal rhapsodizing makes people hold their heads funny. Probably I’d been giving it away.

“I said don’t turn around.”

“I didn’t,” I seethed. “Jesus.”

“Quiet!”

“Quentin,” I muttered, “where the fuck have you been?”

“Shh.”

This didn’t come from behind me, but beside me—a woman about my age in a much more expensive coat and with weirdly greenish-blond hair. Everyone in the crowd was intent on the ceremony, their faces locked forward.

“Put your hands behind you,” whispered Quentin into the back of my head. He’d moved closer. He bustled against me, as people in crowds do. It was just authentic enough to be annoying.

“Right.”

“Take this. Carefully. Do not lose it.”

He pressed what felt like a piece of card into my palm. Its edge dug into my lifeline. I shuffled it across my hips and tried to discreetly karate-chop it into my bag. It struggled to fit.

“Why is your bag shaped like a chicken?”

“Don’t.”

I punched and bullied the card into chicken bag. Poor chicken bag. It looked like a kebab by the time I was done.

Another imperceptible shift—easily dismissed as someone inching toward a better view—and Quentin was beside me. His cheek was streaked with what I assumed was psoriasis, and his chin was grizzled with a strange, not quite organic patchy stubble.

“You look… tired,” I murmured.

“Don’t try to speak out of the corner of your mouth like that. Too obvious.”

“Mm?”

“Just. Turn and talk to me. Like I’m a stranger in the crowd. Lower your shoulders. Look more relaxed. This stuff on my face throws off the recognition software.”

“Oh.”

I tilted my head toward him, polite as a cockatoo. I hoped it looked realistic.

“Quentin,” I murmured, “what’s going on? Has Genghis Khan broken through the time-door from the past or something?”

“Not the past. I don’t think from the past. What have you been told about the time-door?”

“?‘None of your business,’ as far as I recall.”

I turned to look at him. He smiled—a real, rueful smile that made his eyes crinkle. Then there was a noise like a snapping wishbone and his head jerked.

“Quentin?” I muttered. He pitched forward, and I caught him instinctively. Beside me, the woman with greenish hair started screaming, a single word, like a broken fire alarm:

“Gun! Gun! Gun!”

Blood was spurting from Quentin’s temple, brilliantly crimson. Someone shoved against me, and I lost my grip on him. He slid downward, and his body vanished like he was going underwater. Screams rose up all around me. If you’ve ever been in a terrified crowd, you won’t forget it. People in real terror scream in a long, flat, oddly toneless way.

Another rough push, and I was staggering sideways. My ankle rolled, and I clawed at the nearest pair of shoulders for balance. The crowd was scrambling for the gates. Bodies bashed my ribs. I caught an elbow in the stomach and heaved. Everyone was running in a crouch, covering their heads. I righted myself, wiped red matter off my cheek, and lumbered forward.

Time dilated. There were sirens and blue lights seemingly instantaneously, but I couldn’t be persuaded to let go of a traffic post for hours and hours (it transpired to be slightly less than a minute). I’d worn my black stilettos for the ceremony, and one of the heels had snapped. I was standing lopsided in a farce of my very own.

“Can you tell me what you saw?” asked a uniform in front of me. In-house security, I think. The police of the police.

“Must have been a sniper,” I managed.

“Sorry?”

“Sniper,” I repeated, with difficulty. I was close to incomprehensible because my teeth were chattering so hard.

“Did you see the sniper?”

“No. Angle.”

The uniform turned away. “Can I get a shock blanket for this lady, please?” she shouted to the paramedics.

She turned back to me and said, “Do you want to sit down, madam?”

I thought of Quentin going under. Had my foot rolled on the bony yield of his wrist? I bit my inside cheek and tasted iron.

“No. Thank you,” I said. “I think it was a sniper on the roof. Based on the angle of entry. I was standing in Section A.”

I spat this out, gristle and bark, and she gave me a refrigerated reappraisal.

“Are you friends and family?”

“I’m Ministry.”

Over her shoulder, I could see Graham striding toward us, his face blank. A police officer jolted into his path and tried to stop him; he simply stepped around them. When he reached me, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and jerked me toward him.

“Are you hurt?” he asked flatly.

“No.”

“Excuse me, sir, it’s medical personnel onl—”

“Give me your bag,” he said.

I gave him chicken bag and he slung the strap across his body. The chicken perched absurdly on his waist. He looked me up and down, then got onto one knee and grasped my ankle.

“Your shoe.”

“It’s broken.”

“Step out of this one and I’ll snap the other heel. Or else you will fall over.”

“Sir—” said the uniform heatedly. We ignored her. I kicked my shoe off and put my stockinged foot on his thigh. He broke the heel and then guided my foot back into the aftermath. On the top of his head was a patch, smaller than the base of a wineglass, where his riotous black curls had started to thin. When he looked up at me, I was struck by the starkness of his crow’s-feet. It unnerved me to see how human a body he inhabited.

“My hero,” I muttered.

He smiled coldly. “Not this time,” he said.

Quentin died at the scene, I was told, though I knew that the moment I’d caught him; he’d had the slack weight of an abandoned thing. At least his death was instantaneous.

I was the last person to speak to him before he was killed, and so I was questioned for hours at the discretion of the police and the Ministry. Graham was sent home under supervision.

Graham took my bag with him. I didn’t think to take it back from him because I was too busy blinking back the memory of Quentin’s face dropping. I assumed the item that Quentin pushed into my hands would come up in my interrogation, until one of the officers let slip that there had been a CCTV malfunction, and the entire courtyard was unmonitored for the duration of the ceremony. I didn’t mention it. I had enough to think about. The pretty way that blood fountains from a head wound. The way Quentin had smelled, hauntingly, of cologne.

When I got home, I was curdling with exhaustion. I’d stress-sweated, and the sour smell had leaked through to my jacket. My stockings, apparently in sympathy with the rest of my mood, had laddered on both legs. I shut the front door, and Graham came out of the kitchen, chased by whiffs of slow-cooked tomato broth, garlic, and balsamic vinegar.

“Hello. Are you hungry?” he asked lightly.

I burst into tears. It seemed a proportionate reaction. I got onto the floor, very slowly, kneecaps first, and wept.

“Oh,” he said.

He stood over me for a few moments, then awkwardly squatted down beside me.

“Cigarette?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but lit two between his lips, then lifted my chin and poked one into my mouth. He settled back against the wall of the hallway, and we smoked, me through tears, he through silence.

I wiped my nose roughly on my cuffs—he didn’t comment—and I croaked, “You’ve seen people die.”

“Yes.”

“In battle?”

“Or in the aftermath. On long voyages too, but—I think you are asking me about violent death.”

“Am I supposed to feel like I’ve thrown up, but on the inside of my skin?”

He looked around for somewhere to ash. Chicken bag was by the door—he must have dropped it there, awaiting my attention—and he stretched out a leg to hook the strap and drag it closer.

“Very vivid,” he said, unzipping the chicken. “No, you’re not reacting wrongly or hysterically. It’s understandable that you are distressed, especially if you’ve never witnessed sudden death before.”

“He just. Went. One minute looking at me. And then.”

“Mm. May I use this?”

He was flourishing a recyclable document holder, misshapen from being mashed into chicken bag, which fastened with cardboard flaps. Its DO NOT BEND legend was creased into cryptic poetry. When I nodded distractedly, he tore a long strip from the flap and fashioned a small cup for the ash, which he caught just in time.

“Here,” he said—holding it up to me like a man trying to feed a cat a treat—but I was peering into the document holder. There was a distinctive manila folder in there, rattling with papers.

“You’re going to burn your skirt,” he said, tugging the cigarette from my lips.

I wasn’t listening. I was staring at the folder. It was an incident report, dated eighteen months before the time-travel project began. When I opened it and pulled out the papers, I found it detailed a “disturbance” in a shuttered youth center in south London. Five local teenagers. They’d been there engaging in criminal activity—poppers, breakdancing, and a boom box in the main hall. They’d broken in through a window because the youth center had been closed for six months. Neighbors had reported loud music and laughter, then a beam of blue light, and screams. The police had gone in, eventually, to deal with anticipated gang violence.

According to the incident report, what the police had found were bodies, serrated with massive, bizarre injuries, and a glowing blue door. The doorway was generated by some form of machine, which was visible through it. The police had assumed something involving capital “T” Terrorism had taken place, and had called MI5, who sent field agents. A brave officer reached through the doorway and seized the machine, which they must have thought was a weapon. The door immediately collapsed, like a knot undone by a judicious tug on the rope. This, I learned, was how the Ministry received the power of time-travel. Not through invention but through the fine British tradition of finders keepers.

At the bottom of the report was a handwritten addendum.

Field agent Quentin Carroll has raised several internal complaints about the disposal of the bodies of the deceased minors. Recommend that he be kept under surveillance.

I laughed miserably. Quentin had been right. What a way to prove a point.

The Ministry launched an internal investigation. The Ministry was cooperating with the intelligence services. The Ministry encouraged its affected employees to seek assistance from the on-site counselors.

One of the things we’d abandoned on joining the time-travel project—in addition to annual leave allowance and choice of accommodation—was trade union membership. The Ministry wouldn’t recognize any of the existing unions. There was some semantic trickery that meant we weren’t technically managers and so couldn’t join the FDA, and as time-travel was too newly established and too secret an industry, we couldn’t join the Public and Commercial Services Union. As a ministry we were small, we made consistent eye contact with most of our colleagues. Our personal lives were our work lives. We were that awful thing: a family. One doesn’t unionize in a family, because from whom would you be making demands?

It was bad, though, after Quentin. I had no one I could talk to who wasn’t feeding my words to the paperwork. So I wrote report after report, sat through interrogation after interrogation, with my heart clear and gray, like rinsed fog.

Adela summoned me to headquarters four days after Quentin’s death. She spoke to me with a new intimacy. This was not the same as being spoken to with affection.

“There will be twenty-four-hour guards on the bridge houses,” she said. “We’re revoking movement privileges for the expats—”

“No.”

“Yes. We’re still working to ascertain what relationship Quentin had with the Brigadier and Salese, but until we do, we must assume the expats are in danger. You need to keep Eighteen-forty-seven close.”

Adela’s voice contracted on that last sentence. She wiped her gaze, concentrated in her one working eye, up and down my face, to see if I’d noticed, and continued, “Our first priority is protecting the expats and the time-door. The time-door has been moved to a secure location. I suggest you retake the physical aptitude assessment, and then we can work on your lateral-reasoning scores—”

“I’ve failed the field exams twice,” I said slowly, but my finger was already curling around an invisible trigger.

“You will improve. You do not have a choice. This is a war,” said Adela.

“There’s always a war,” I said.

The frost turned sloppy. Cold gray days drove down on the city. Between the sullen rain and the cloy of the street-slung cobwebs, I felt as if I was forever in a spit-filled, cavity-bogged mouth. I was listless with duty. Circumstances had pressed too hard on my head, and now I was part-sunk in a depression. I was, in fact, depressed—I would venture to suggest I was suffering from PTSD—although because I couldn’t be signed off or share my workload, there didn’t seem to be much point in acknowledging this.

One weekend morning I came down at half past eleven, having woken at eight and stared at the ceiling for hours. I had not dressed, and I had not bathed. I bought packs of the same oversize cotton T-shirt to sleep in and would wear them all day long. Over time the gelid touch of loose cotton on protruding segments of my body would come to feel like misery. Even now, if I brush against my breasts in the shower with the inside of my wrist, I feel abrupt unhappiness.

I thought I might have the energy to perform every action required to make a cup of tea, but I was surprised to remember how many there were: kettle boiling, mug fetching, milk sniffing, tea bag choosing, teaspoon handling. I poured a glass of tap water and sat at the kitchen table, staring into the soggy garden.

Upstairs, Graham was working on an arrangement for his flute, but he stopped when he heard me moving around, and came down.

“Good… morning,” he said carefully.

“Mm.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“No.”

“Are you feeling poorly?”

“I guess.”

He paused at the countertop. I waited for him to correct my “I guess” for “I suppose,” which was one of his most picked-over points of vocabulary, but instead he said, “How so?”

“Just. Not feeling good. Not contagious or anything like that. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not.”

Later that afternoon, he came in from whatever errand he had been on and handed me a small plastic bottle.

“What’s this?”

“Vitamin D tablets. I think you should take them.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. You should dress now. It’s three o’clock.”

“Give it a few more hours and I’ll be appropriately dressed for bedtime.”

He considered me, his expression as mild and unreadable as ever. If I’d had space for despair, my desire for him and his cool lack of desire would have triggered—like blood following a cut—despair, but I was at capacity and couldn’t feel worse. I lay in my own body like a wretched sandbank, and he went upstairs to practice the flute with studied, A major good humor.

I didn’t even tease him for his supplement obsession. Graham was a supplement fiend: his obsession had been brought on by discovering what caused scurvy and how small and fun vitamin C gummies could be. I’d been living with him for months before I discovered his tendency toward small, charming, infuriating smiles was not only because he was a restrained, charming, infuriating man, but also because he was a bit self-conscious about a tooth he’d lost to scurvy, the replacement for which shone like a silver penny in a crematorium.

Two days later I pulled the abed-for-hours trick again, this time watching my digital clock flick through its cue cards to midday. As soon as the clock showed 12:00, as if he had been waiting for this to happen, he called up the stairs, “Come for a run.”

“Have you not been yet?”

“No.”

I lay back and dozed for about a quarter of an hour. I was woken by the sound of him saying, “Come on!” at my bedroom door. He spoke briskly and clearly—not unkindly, but not with much gentleness or indulgence. I imagined he once spoke to the ship’s company of Erebus like that. It was perhaps two tones away from a reprimand.

I dragged myself from the bed and went for a run with him. It was very pleasant, which I allowed with bad grace. I went at the pace of an unhappy thought, and when we reached the end of our route, he’d barely broken a sweat keeping step with me. He was almost certainly training for the physical aptitude assessment himself.

As January stumbled on, I fell into lethargy, and he fell into caretaking. It was my job to take care of, and look after, him. He was not forced through time and space to play nurse for a depressed civil servant. Yet here we were, and I couldn’t find the energy to remedy the situation. I was beginning to hate everything: the house, my job, the oily stink of my unwashed hair.

One afternoon, I made a cursory tour of the landing and the bathroom, then went back to bed. I lay there long enough that my parted mouth made a wet oval on the pillow. He knocked at my bedroom door. I rolled over so that I was face up.

“Hi?”

He opened the door.

“I’ve wept the eggplants. I think dinner will be ready in about three quarters of an hour.”

“I’m not hungry, really. Thanks though. Sorry to make you cook.”

“I wasn’t ‘made’ to do anything. You ought to eat.”

“I’m just not hungry.”

He leaned against the doorjamb. There was no expression on his face at all—just his features, neatly set.

“I understand that cats, culturally, enjoy spending much of their time in bed. Perhaps cat dreams are more dramatic than human dreams. Since I never remember mine, I can’t compare. I certainly don’t wish to interfere with your work or your busy napping schedule. But you will come down for meals.”

“I don’t—”

“That was not a request.”

I blinked, slowly, then, finding that I preferred the part of the blink where my eyes were closed, I kept them closed. I heard the floor creak softly, and then he must have been close to me, because the smell of him made me ache—tobacco, soap, radiator-warmed wool, the mellow leafy scent of his skin. When I opened my eyes, he was kneeling by the bed, his face close to mine. I stared at the longbow of his lips.

“I think it would be better,” he said, “if you did not embarrass us both by forcing me to drag you to the kitchen.”

His mouth had left me vulnerable. I felt shame, green and new, and it was more efficacious than any other emotion I’d experienced for weeks. I went downstairs for dinner.

He put on the radio to break the silence that had joined us at the dining table. A news announcer dryly described the Australian wildfires. I say “Australia” with cavalier non-specificity because most of the continent was on fire. Graham perked up when a journalist interviewed a citizen of Goulburn in New South Wales, who cussed out his prime minister with so many metaphors he sounded Homeric. Hundreds of people had been internally displaced by grass fires, and the air was poisoned with smoke. I pressed the points of my fork into my tongue and waited to hear what Graham would have to say about this new example of egregious weather.

But all he said was, “I’ve been to Goulburn. It’s where my family moved.”

I thought about Quentin all the time. It would be accurate to say I was blocked by Quentin—not the man but the corpse and its creation. Sometimes I knew I’d failed him, and at other times I knew I’d fumbled a catch and failed myself. I missed him, mourned for him; and I hated him and the irrevocability of his death.

Margaret and Arthur visited me in my doldrums. At first they were dulcet and bedside-benign, but I sulked so acidly they soon stopped that. Purportedly they were in our house to see Graham. The regularity of their visits was such that I came to believe Graham was running a schedule.

Arthur was gentle, no matter how grotty my behavior. He had found out about Scrabble, and he sometimes brought his travel set along—my inner competitive bitch could stave off a black mood for half an hour or so.

“Simellia loves this game,” he told me once. “She has introduced me to so many ‘bored’ games. She ran a games club when she was at university, isn’t that jolly?”

“Mm.”

“But her old friends left the country or started popping out sprogs so alas, the ‘bored’ game gang is no more. She says our next step is ‘arcade’ games. For a terribly long time I thought she meant the Games of Arcadia. Perhaps you’d discovered the lost text of Aristotle’s Comedy and had used your spiffing machines to rescue the pages and write up his theory.”

“Nope.”

“She says that we will play Space Invaders.”

“Oh. Good.”

He smiled kindly at me. “I had a lieutenant,” he said, “who’d sit in the dugout chewing his pencil and drumming out meter on his notebook. With the mortars wheedling overhead. I said to him, ‘Owen, old chap, how can you think of poetry at a time like this? Your blasted trochees and dactyls and so on, when the Hun’s trying to turn you to bully beef?’ And he told me that poetry was the last thing that still made sense to him. And if you listened closely enough, you could still hear the birdsong.”

He shifted. We were sitting at the kitchen table, alone for a brief quarter of an hour while Graham went down to the corner shop to buy more milk for the tea.

“You think I’m ridiculous,” he said, in the same gentle voice.

“No, Arthur, I—”

“I don’t blame you. I think I’m ridiculous too. But I am trying very hard to be happy. Though it’s damned difficult to see what Owen saw. He didn’t see it for much longer after I—er—left. The Marne, you know. This ring is his. He gave it to me after—”

We heard Graham’s key in the door. Arthur looked very keenly at his letters. “Forty-seven,” he called, “do you know if ‘zigbo’ is a word?”

Margaret, in her visits, was a bit more direct.

“You smell pestilent,” she might say conversationally. “Have you bathed?”

Or: “If you mun sleep, you mun play the good hostess and give me leave to join. Heave up!”

One Saturday we ate an entire triple-layered box of chocolates in bed, watching The Simpsons on my laptop. Margaret loved The Simpsons. She thought it was a much better cultural education than anything the Ministry could provide.

In her own era, Margaret had been under the protection of her older brother, a draper named Henry Kemble, whom she loved deeply. She was unmarried, though she’d had liaisons with other women (mistaken by the household, and some of the women, for friendships). She helped her brother’s wife keep the house, helped her brother with the accounts. But after Henry’s untimely death from flu, the gilt rubbed off her star. She became a stone in a shoe, a hole in the road. She became, in that slow domestic way, hated.

When the Ministry had come through time to fetch her, they’d found Margaret locked in a tiny attic room with a chamber pot and a nest of rags for bedding. She was in recovery from the bubonic plague. As far as they could tell, her sister-in-law had sent a scullery girl to deliver food to the door until she too was struck down with the pestilence. It wiped out the entire house but Margaret in three days. Margaret, hungry and terrified, had tried to leave through the window, but the neighbors had thrown stones and broken bottles at her. Their house was a plague house, and none were suffered to leave it. She’d caught and eaten sparrows. She’d drunk rainwater. And then when she was given a second chance, she caught the sword and came up singing.

Simellia came by, once. By then the gulf of experiences between us was universes deep, but she came nevertheless. She put the kettle on and made the tea herself. She badly harassed the tea bags, I think because she couldn’t look at my face.

“I don’t want to drop a piano on your head,” I said, “but I know I’m traumatized. You don’t have to be embarrassed about it.”

She smiled coolly at me, fathomless as always. “You look terrible,” she said.

“So do you.”

This was true. Chic Simellia was no more. She wore leggings that concertinaed at the backs of her knees, and a hoodie so forgettable that I couldn’t focus on its color. It was like she’d hung up her sense of self in a cupboard somewhere.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I’m a trained mental health professional.”

“Physician, heal thyself.”

She gave me tea, in my own mug—Alice peering up at the Cheshire cat. She must have remembered from last time. That made me feel something, but too distantly for me to recognize what.

“Why are you here, Simellia?”

She took some time with that. “Is there anything,” she said, “you want to talk about? At all?”

I put my finger in the tea. It was too hot to drink, scalding. I left my finger in there for a couple of seconds.

“Control knew about the Brigadier,” I said. “Did they tell you? That they were the ones to let him in? Enemies closer, et cetera.”

“Do you want to talk about him?” she asked quietly. “Conversations you might have had with him?”

I was deep in the gray room on the bottom floor of my skull. I wasn’t watching her face or hearing her voice when she asked. I didn’t really notice that she wasn’t talking to me the way psychiatrists talk; she was talking to me like someone desperate to talk herself. But I didn’t catch what she was trying to draw out of me. I said, “No,” and we sat in silence and watched my tea get cold until she remembered there was something she had to do somewhere else and left.

One early Saturday evening, when the sky looked like the underside of a sea-soaked barge and the cold was grimy and constant, Graham failed to make a cake. I heard him making domestic noises and the clack-thud of the oven. Half an hour later, he knocked on my door.

“Well,” he announced, “I have ruined a cake.”

He was wearing a rare expression of irritation. He was trying to flatten it, and it kept springing back into his face, as unruly as his hair. I don’t know why but this cheered me up a bit. He was carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses.

“Would you like a drink?”

“All right, then. What’s wrong with the cake?”

“It’s damp. And not cake-shaped.”

“What shape is it?”

“Puddle-shaped.”

He sat on the floor and leaned against the chest of drawers, pouring us each a glass of wine.

“To failure.”

“To failure!”

“I have renewed respect for the Erebus cook Mr. Wall, who produced our Christmas pudding under far less tranquil conditions.”

“I’m sure it’s less terrible than you’re letting on.”

“It is far worse. I’m trying to be charmingly self-deprecating, but I am very annoyed.”

“I can see that. It’s not like you to spend any time on my floor.”

“Hmm. I suppose there are other rooms in this house in which we could sit upright and drink, but I notice you rarely venture beyond the banisters these days.”

“We could go to your room.”

“Certainly not. You will destroy my virtuous reputation.”

“No one can see us.”

“God can see us,” he said severely.

“Do you really believe in God?” I asked, without really expecting an answer.

He shifted his shoulders against the wood.

“What a peculiar thing to ask me. Of course I do.”

“Heaven and hell and all that?”

“Of the life eternal I have no sense. I understand it is very fashionable, in your era, to suppose there is nothing but oblivion after death.”

“It’s not ‘fashionable.’ It’s just a lot of people don’t see any rationale for believing in it. Seems like a fairy tale.”

He shrugged.

“Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?”

I didn’t have an answer for this, so I had some wine. It tasted vile, like chewing geraniums. Wetly, my brain connected action and consequence: he had brought up “tonic” wine, since he regarded me as unwell, and was gamely drinking it with me so I would not realize how unwell I was. I’m sure if he could have sourced laudanum, he would have done.

“Remind me,” he said, “of the religion you were brought up in.”

The neutrality of this request, from a man who until recently was still using “heathen” as a genuine descriptor, made me realize he truly was a Ministry trainee. They must have put him through bias and sensitivity training.

I said, “Why?”

“I’m curious. You mentioned there is a form of, how can I put this, reflective morality?”

“Eh?”

“A cruel action will be repaid with cruelty, a kind one with kindness.”

“Oh. Karma. Yeah. That works across lifetimes. If you’re wretched in this life, you’ll come back as a slug.”

He sipped his wine and barely grimaced. “That seems cruel,” he said.

I bristled despite myself.

“I don’t think so. Actions have consequences. Every tiny decision you make, every choice of expression, affects someone else. We’re all chained up together. Arthur stopped going to church, you know. He didn’t see God in the trenches. Do you really have faith in a God who let the western front happen? Or Auschwitz?”

“Yes. I’m not telling you that I like it or that I understand it. God is a captain whose orders I must trust. He knows this ship better than I.”

“Is the world a ship?”

“Everything is a ship. This little house is a ship.”

He was so good at it: making his voice soft and pleasant and soothing me out of argument. It worked every time. We smiled unsurely at each other. Then he said, “What is ‘Auschwitz’?” I thought, Ah fuck. What a stupid thing to say, after my little speech about consequences.

After he left, I dropped into another doze, precipitated by the sudden exhaustion I felt when I imagined doing anything more taxing than rolling onto my side. I napped for hours. When I woke, my saliva had the scummy consistency of old tofu. It was coming up to midnight. I dragged myself to the kitchen for a glass of water.

He was sitting up at the dining table, curled like a pot-bound root over the laptop. There was a cigarette between his lips, and six more stubbed out in the ashtray. He looked up when I came in. His expression had a scraped-clean bareness to it.

“You’re up late,” I croaked, fumbling for a glass. “Wh—”

“You didn’t tell me about the Holocaust.”

Tap water overflowed the glass and ran down my fist. “Well,” I said slowly, “the Ministry thought it might be detrimental to your adjustment—”

“I asked the machine to search for that word you used.”

“Auschwitz.”

“There were photographs—”

He broke off. I gulped down half a pint of water and watched him. What I had mistaken for unadorned expressionlessness on his face was hollowed-out horror. He must have been looking at the screen for hours.

“Children,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Piles of shoes.”

“Yes.”

He ground the cigarette out. “How could this have been allowed to happen?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“People know,” I mumbled, “and then they choose not to know. What happened to the freed slaves?”

“Pardon?”

“The slaves that you freed. From the Rosa. And the other ships.”

“Oh. Well, it depended. Some joined the Royal Navy or the regiments. Or they were apprenticed to places in the West Indies—”

“Apprenticed.”

“Yes.”

“Put to work, you mean.”

“What are you insinuating?” he asked, reaching for his cigarettes. Even from where I was standing in the dark kitchen, I could see the packet was empty. He crushed it, seemingly absentmindedly.

“Plenty died on the return journeys, didn’t they? Or while they were kept on those ships, waiting for their cases to be heard. You said yourself—”

“I know what I said.”

He got up and closed the laptop. Every move he made was slow, calm, unobtrusive. Nothing banged or scraped. We could have been having a conversation about what brand of bread to buy.

“The Preventative Squadron was intended as a moral service to humanity,” he said quietly. “To consider its actions comparable to what was done at Auschwitz. That’s impossible. If you believed that, how could you bear to live in this house with me?”

“I wasn’t saying that they were comparable.”

“Really.”

“I’m trying to say that you were following what you thought were good orders.”

He stared at me. His eyes were unlit. He turned without saying anything, unlocked the back door, and strode into the midnight-colored garden. Cold air barked at my legs. I came to the threshold and stared out after him, shaking in frigid winter wind. He was standing in the middle of the lawn, arms folded, and staring up at the sky.

When I was still a teenager, building my personality from the films and the books and the songs I later tried to give to Graham, the chief monk of one of Cambodia’s largest wats announced that he could not rule out that the victims of the Khmer Rouge were not the final link in a chain of karmic cause and effect. If they had behaved with integrity in past lives, perhaps they would not have had to lie in mass graves at the end of this.

My mother never went back to our temple after that. She kept flowers and fruit on the shrine at home, but it became a place she put her thoughts to dry out. All her honoring she gave to her new country, which told her she was welcome as long as she worked. In terms of karmic cause and effect, that was far more palatable.

As for me, I was callow with youth and ready to commit to obsession. I picked up my first book about the golden age of polar exploration, and I coalesced around it. I came to believe in the possibility of heroic death, and from there it was easy to believe in heroism. Heroism laid the groundwork for righteousness, and righteousness offered me coherency. If I’d got really into punk rock, maybe I’d be a different woman. But I didn’t.

One of the first comparisons we made on the bridge project was to the work of the Kindertransport. No one—not even Ralph, whose father had arrived on it—mentioned that though we rescued children, we’d refused to take their parents. Graham knew, at the end of his extensive Google search, what had happened to the parents. We frame the Kindertransport as an act of heroism, a coherent example of Britain’s intrinsic charity and anti-fascism. It’s not all untrue—those orphans were grateful, often, thrived, sometimes.

You think I was clumsy. You think I could have handled it better. No doubt you’re right. It was a teaching moment that I fumbled; worse, it was a moment I’d created, and my actions had consequences. But what could I have said? That the Holocaust was one of the most appalling, most shameful stains on the history of humanity, and it could have been prevented? Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.

The next morning, he brought me a snowdrop in a glass tumbler and set it on my desk.

“First of the season,” he said. “From the garden.”

I touched its sad white head. “You’ve been here for nearly a year, then,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I’m glad you’ll get to see this garden in the spring before you move.”

He touched the place on the snowdrop where I’d laid my fingers. “Yes,” he said, and there was, as there so often was, nothing in his voice.

We entered the season of rains. A great graphite pencil inscribed the diagonal journey of water on the air.

In February, there was another violent storm, but the worst of it passed over southwest England. He didn’t like what happened to Devon. He’d been born there, hung on to fond memories.

Our little house held up. He walked from room to room, peering out the windows. When he came into the office, where I was hunched like a cooked prawn at my computer, he said, “I will allow this. Your era’s sewage system is a miracle of engineering.”

“It’s all nineteenth-century pipes down there.”

“It’s all nineteenth-century pipes in here,” he said, gesturing at himself. I smiled wanly.

My email made a chiding noise. Adela was the originator, and she’d put me in blind copy. It was a short email. Adela had a real gift for cramming apoplexy into a couple of lines.

“Bad news?” he asked.

I coughed.

Anne Spencer had been shot dead attempting to escape the Ministry wards. She’d almost managed it. Toward the end, she had stopped showing up on CCTV cameras.

The email told us that her death would be reported to the expats as a suicide. “This cannot be emphasized enough,” Adela had written, with a double underline.

The funeral was a strange, sterile affair. It was held in a chapel in the Ministry, the first time I realized we had one. The coffin was closed, and no one except the expats went near it. The service had the box-ticking air of an administrative procedure, except for the hymn, “Bless the Lord, My Soul” in Jacques Berthier’s arrangement. It was lusciously, shockingly mournful. I couldn’t raise my head when it began. The sound of Arthur’s clear, fine tenor and Graham’s soft, coppery voice harmonizing at the turn of every verse filled my lungs like floodwater.

Afterward, I went to sit in a small courtyard that adjoined the chapel. It was waterlogged and smelled of mud. Nevertheless, I settled myself on the stone lip of a flower bed, letting the cold seep through my black coat.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Oh. Arthur. Yes, of course. It’s a bit wet, I’m afraid.”

Arthur smiled and sat down beside me, stretching out his long legs. Twisting the signet ring on his finger—a tell as clarion as my skin biting—he murmured, “We didn’t know her as well as we would have liked. I wish we had.”

“Mm.”

“Perhaps she wouldn’t have felt so—lonely.”

I didn’t say anything, because there was nothing that I could say that wouldn’t have been a lie. I touched my knuckles to the back of Arthur’s, and he took my hand in his.

He said, “When I first arrived here, once I got over the shock, I thought I had entered a sort of purgatory. A second chance, you know. You can’t imagine what it was like to be a man of—of my persuasion, in my time. Now it seems I’ve got another go of it in an era that suits me better. But, you know, you can make yourself feel lonely and miserable and out of joint just by falling in love with someone who can’t or won’t love you back. Perhaps they’ll fix that in another two hundred years. Perhaps they’ll come and get us and that’s how we’ll know we’ve reached heaven. Are you and Graham lovers?”

My hand twitched in his.

“No.”

I looked at him. I mean I really looked at him: his sad handsome face, the vulnerability flying there at half-mast.

“Are you?” I asked.

“What are you two talking about?”

We both turned to look at the door. Graham was standing there, pausing in the act of lighting a cigarette. I had no idea how much he’d heard.

“We’re plotting,” said Arthur, squeezing my hand and releasing it. “We’re going to try to get up to some really original sin.”

Graham blew a plume of smoke at us. “I see,” he said. “I’ll be sure to keep a candle burning in the window for when you come home.”

The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken.

Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that.

But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.

The Ministry’s internal CCTV system was exempt from the laws of the Information Commissioner’s Office. I couldn’t access footage without filing for permission on behalf of the bridge team, which would mean everyone from the Secretary downward would see me ratting around in the digital drywall. But I had security clearance to ask for a record of permissions requested, granted, and denied; technical faults reported; tapes scrubbed after the requisite thirty days and tapes filed for archive use; and so on. I whistled for the paperwork.

I found half a dozen invoices for services to the system hardware in the weeks leading up to Anne Spencer’s death. Apparently it took a while for people to realize the poor woman had managed to make herself invisible to surveillance cameras, and they assumed the system was malfunctioning.

Also intriguing were the maintenance files for the CCTV system that should have been monitoring the courtyard on the day Quentin was killed. The system had shut down when the power was automatically rerouted. Such rerouting was a standard emergency procedure in buildings with high-security rooms. Simply speaking, if a very important item or person was kept under electrical lock and key and that electrical lock and key failed, the building automatically rerouted power from nonessential systems (like the CCTV on a public courtyard) until the backup generator kicked in. It was a charmingly old-fashioned system that had proven bizarrely effective because it was hard to hack with contemporary malware.

What was unusual was that I couldn’t find a corresponding record of breach or failure. The “automatic” reroute had been manually input.

I filed an access request for a history of access requests. I found a record of external accesses to the reroute system, scrambled to protect the identity of the accessor. Username, clearance level, authority, and permissions were all scrambled. But there was a digital record of the fingerprint scan.

I pulled it and plugged it into the Ministry’s database.

The result pinged.

I read my own name.

I lost my body for a few moments. When I came back to it, I was kneading my chest with the heel of my hand, at the place where my speeding heartbeat flicked the skin.

I was being framed, and of all the things it felt, unfair was right at the top. I still didn’t even know who the fuck the Brigadier was or what he wanted, and no one seemed inclined to tell me, even though I was the one who’d had Quentin’s brains on my face.

I emailed Adela and asked if we could meet for a “progress report,” a term so meaningless she wouldn’t be able to prep her evasion. As I cracked my nails on the keys, I thought how much easier it would be if I could just have a gun and a clear view of the Brigadier. The harder I kicked at it, the thicker the callus on my mind became. Yes, I thought, through a plaque of dead thoughts. If I had a gun, I could clean this all up.

I became ecstatic on spite. This firstly manifested as sitting at the kitchen table, eating an entire jar of pickled onions with a pair of chopsticks. I needed vinegar. After I’d given myself stomach cramps, I threw up and went for a post-puke run.

When I came back, I showered aggressively, painting the bathroom with soapy water. I wanted to bite a train, or maybe fuck one. I wanted to beat myself bloody in the burial chamber of the pyramid of Giza. As this sort of thing was prohibited by the laws of man and the Ministry, I decided to do the next best thing, which was go to the pub.

“Graham,” I said to my unfortunate housemate, who had bought the pickled onions.

“Yes?”

“Do you want to meet some of my friends?”

He gave me one of his rare, lovely, full-dimpled smiles.

“I would. I have been wondering how to ask.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes,” he said. He seemed to be about to launch into an explanation, but arrested himself mid-exposition. The effort of stopping it made him blush a little. He contented himself with a prim “You’ve met mine, after all.”

“You’ve only got two.”

“Three,” he said pleasantly. “We are friends.”

I organized drinks at a pub near to where I used to live, before the bridge year, and invited half a dozen of my closest pals. “Closest pals,” at this stage of the bridge year, was a bit of a proximity misnomer because I hadn’t seen most of them in months. As I often glumly texted them, Work’s so busy.

I told the group chat: My housemate’s very posh and a bit weird. He used to be in the navy. I hoped this would cover all bases. But he turned up on his motorbike and parked it with the rows of other scooters and bikes. I watched him take off his helmet, lean against his bike, light a cigarette, and smoke thoughtfully at the sky, leather jacket gleaming and curls disarrayed. I didn’t know how I could explain him to anyone, least of all to myself.

The pub was opposite a kebab shop which served hot tea and coffee and was frequented by East London’s contingent of Uber Eats and Deliveroo couriers—hence the plethora of bikes and scooters. The couriers all seemed to know one another and could often be found splitting doner ’n’ chips while leaning against their vehicles.

“Hello, Graham.”

He ground out the cigarette and offered me a cautious smile. “Hello,” he said. “Shall we? What on earth is that caterwauling?”

“Ah. It’s karaoke night.”

Inside the pub, a wisp of a woman, like a mouse with ambitions, was standing on the makeshift stage, sweetly lisping her way through “The Best” by Tina Turner.

My friends were sitting at a table far enough away from the karaoke carnage that their conversation was audible. They turned like a crowd of parrots in a tree when they saw me approaching.

“So you’re the famous housemate,” said one. “We’ve heard so much about you.”

“Was any of it good?” he asked.

“Not a word.”

“Oh, I am relieved. I wouldn’t want her telling lies on my account.”

I flexed my shoulder blades, forcing the tension out. He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home.

It went well. My friends seemed to like him, and I think he liked them. He was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer, and had a talent for whimsical humor that distracted them from the gaps he left.

The hours toppled past.

When I found myself considering a gin martini, in an establishment where the house wine was called Table and came in cardboard boxes, I knew it was time to leave. I stumbled over to the bar, where he was in conversation with one of my friends about his tattoos.

“What does this one say?” Graham asked.

“?‘Every love is an exercise in depersonalization.’ Deleuze. Wrote my doctoral thesis on him.”

“How interesting. And what is this? A little crab?”

“Yeah. Got him after I took acid in Dungeness. I saw this crab on the beach and thought he was God.”

“Fantastic.”

“Graham. We should get going,” I said, and reached out. I was drunk, of course. My palm cupped several warm square inches of his ribs, through his clothes. He looked down at me.

“Yes,” he said. He moved in such a way that he had straightened up but not leaned away, and my hand sweated into his jumper.

We said our goodbyes and ambled out into the street. It twinkled under the sodium papier-maché of the streetlights’ cast. There were a few couriers drinking tea and eating supper from polystyrene boxes. I didn’t see them until we’d almost walked into them: the Brigadier and Salese.

I stopped short. My boots skidded on the pavement, and Graham grabbed my arm to steady me. I was shaking. He smoothed his hands between my shoulder blades.

“Got,” said Salese, holding out a strange device. “He’s a free traveler.”

The device looked like a compass with pretensions to metal detection, and it projected a filmy white grid, on which flickered several symbols. It was, indubitably, the thing from Graham’s drawing—not a weapon after all, but some kind of monitoring device. I thought wonderful in a monotone. The ghost of a pickled onion rose in my gullet.

“Good evening, Commander Gore,” said the Brigadier.

“Sir.”

“I am sorry to approach you in this way. But you need to come with us.”

“Might I ask what for?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“My bridge?”

“If you come with us, we need not harm her.”

He didn’t like that. “I don’t think I will come with you,” he said. “And I don’t think you will harm her either. You will leave now.”

“Her read’s off,” said Salese suddenly, squinting at the display. “Time odd. Rec a null.”

“Oh, very well,” sighed the Brigadier, and pulled what was unmistakably a weapon from his jacket.

Graham grabbed my wrist and dragged me out of the way just in time for a blue light to hit the pavement where I’d stood. It went whump and gouged a shallow hole. I screamed and lunged at Salese, raking my nails down that cold face. Salese screamed too.

“Puso!” shrieked Salese. There was a nasty clatter as the projection machine hit the floor. “Puso, puso!”

I may not have understood the word exactly, but I know when I’m being called a cunt.

“Sake, Sal,” snapped the Brigadier, his BBC accent dropping. Then Graham had him by the arm, and I heard an unpleasantly biological snapping sound. Salese snarl-shrieked. I jabbed hard at an eyeball. Salese shriek-shrieked.

Graham had got the Brigadier to the floor, but the Brigadier was aiming the weapon again.

“Run,” said Graham quietly.

I ran. Behind me, there was another whump.

By the kebab shop, the couriers were scrambling. I stood quivering by Graham’s bike. He opened the back, briskly slammed a spare helmet over my head—much too large, meant for Arthur—and dragged me by the collar onto the seat.

“Hold on!” he shouted through his helmet. There was another whump and a stream of cursing in a panoply of languages. I flung my arms around his waist and banshee-shrieked as the bike revved. Around us, like a hive of enraged metal wasps, the couriers were revving their bikes too. We went howling down the street.

“Which one are they?” I heard the Brigadier bellow.

We rode.

I had never been on the back of a motorbike before, and I was not in a good place, mentally, for it to be my first time. Everything went too fast and was too loud. I sobbed every time Graham took a corner, the road rising up to threaten my knees. He sped through the city, running red lights.

The clamor of Friday night thinned out. Streetlights flashed past less frequently and trees began to lean out of the horizon. We were entering the neighborhood that we lived in.

He slowed down enough that my hyperventilating was audible and parked near the house. He got off the bike and gently helped me down, handling me as deftly as if I was the weekly shopping.

“I think they’re from the future,” I choked.

“Yes, I’d assumed as much,” he said, not unkindly.

He steered me up the front path. I fell inside and leaned against the front door, panting in a thin way that incurred a steady whine from the back of my throat. He calmly began to remove his helmet, his jacket and his aviator scarf.

“You’re fine,” he said in a low, soothing voice, tugging the helmet off me. My hair half unraveled.

“You’re fine,” he repeated, unbuttoning my coat.

I jerked my shoulders and it fell to the floor.

“They tried to kill us,” I croaked.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “You should contact the Ministry. Here. There’s a pin sticking out of your head.”

He reached out, and I felt his fingers in my hair, gently disentangling a bobby pin. His face was cool with concentration. I reached for his head with both of my hands and pulled him down to kiss him.

His whole body went rigid with tension. It arced away from me at every point except his mouth, which was slack with shock. For a couple of seconds, I felt him tremble as if charged with an opposite magnetism. Then, suddenly, it was like a rope had been cut. He flattened himself against me. He landed his fists on either side of my head and pushed against me so hard that I slid an inch up the door.

Objectively speaking, it was a bad kiss. Our teeth clashed painfully. He scraped my bottom lip. I scrabbled at the hem of his jumper, and my fingers brushed bare skin. He gasped, and the gasp seemed to startle him, because he was abruptly off me, stumbling backward into the wall. He landed in a globe of loose cream light shed through the door’s glass pane. He stared at me, wild-eyed, tousle-haired, his mouth and chin wet.

We looked at each other.

“Graham.”

“Don’t,” he said. For the first time that evening, there was panic in his voice.

I took a step toward him and he said, more urgently, “Don’t.”

I stopped. He was breathing as hard as I was. It was as if the horror of the last half an hour had just caught up with him, or else that wasn’t the only thing that horrified him—but I cut that thought off.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and reached out. I thought he would take my hand or touch my face, but he was holding out the bobby pin. I took it from him. It was warm from my head, warm from his hands. I was still staring at it when he slipped past me and fled to his room. I heard him lock the door, which he never normally did. I would have found it funny if I hadn’t found it so heartbreaking.