The Ministry of Time

Chapter Seven

I put the pad of my thumb to my lip and flattened it. Pulled it back. Stared. No blood, though it felt like there should have been. Not even the sensation of burning. The kiss had gone with the dawn.

“Don’t,” murmured Adela.

“I wasn’t biting.”

She made a conciliatory noise in her throat, the sort you make to ratty old cats who are trying to climb up the stairs. It was the closest she’d ever come to kindness, and it bowled me over, literally. My forehead bounced gently off my knees.

I was sitting on a horrible, cheek-thin mattress in a Ministry safe house. After I’d heard Graham’s door lock, I’d shivered dumbly against the wall until a handful of brain cells formed a committee to remind me that the man my boss had identified as a spy had tried to assassinate us in broad lamplight, using a futuristic weapon that put the late Quentin’s cryptic hint about “not the past” into perspective.

I’d called Adela, who had answered immediately and stepped in to fix things. The night had teemed. There had been some logistical kerfuffle—vans with blackout windows, decoy vehicles, even a brief but impressive subterranean roadway. I was given to understand that the other bridges and expats were also being moved, into off-the-books safe houses in considerably worse nick than our original abodes. Graham and I had been placed in a knackered flat in the garret of an old government building, stifled from all sides by the city. The beautiful heath where I’d taught him to ride a bike was far away. The window in my room looked out onto a jungle of chimneys and vent fans, turning silvery in the proleptic dawn light. I could hear something dripping and I knew, with resignation, that I would always hear something dripping for as long as I lived here. The adrenaline high had worn off, and I was feeling tired to my marrow.

Graham’s room was along from mine, reached via a long corridor that had abandoned-asylum energy. Back at our old house he’d been bundled into a separate van with his motorbike and a shoulder bag of clothes. He’d glanced at me once, a quick searching look to check that I was being wrangled, and then he hadn’t been able to meet my eyes again. As he ducked into the car, I saw how slight he was, how much shorter than the field heavies they’d sent into my now ex-neighborhood. He was diminished in some way; he’d seemed to hold his charm close to his body, like a broken arm. I hadn’t seen him since we’d been brought to the safe house.

Adela was opening the top drawer of the bedside table. It was old, and it stuck. She coaxed it out with far more patience than I had ever seen her exhibit.

“You trained on a Walther?” she asked.

I turned my head, on my knees, to look. She was holding a handgun. I noted this with the same resignation as I’d noted the dripping.

“When I failed the field exams, I was using a Walther, yes.”

“This is yours now.”

“Oh. Cool.”

“I’m putting it in this top drawer.”

“Okay.”

“But first I’d like to see you unload and reload,” she added, passing me the handgun.

It weighed as much as a gun did, neither heavier nor lighter than what I was expecting.

“I haven’t done this for a while,” I said, but I did it anyway.

Adela nodded approvingly and took it back off me to settle it in the drawer. My thoughts fired sluggishly—electricity through ooze.

“Ma’am. The Brigadier. I think he’s from the future.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I lifted my face to drop it into my hands—a childish urge to vanish my problems by shutting off my eyes.

“What do you mean ‘yes’? You knew? The Ministry knew?”

“We’ll talk about this the day after tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll send a car. You’ll receive a phone call from a withheld number to let you know when it’s coming—”

“Day after tomorrow? After I’ve been shot at? Why not tomorrow? Why not now?”

“Because I said so,” snapped Adela, so quickly she can’t have intended to say it. She sucked her teeth and her strange face wobbled. “You need to rest,” she added, more neutrally.

“Yes, Mai.”

We sat in a rubble of silence. “A joke,” I mumbled. “It means ‘Mum’ in Khmer.”

She rocked back like I’d spat at her, then got up quietly and left the room.

I slept deeply and briefly, a plunge pool of REM. I was not familiar with how people sleep after someone has tried to kill them, so I assumed this was within the bounds of normal. When I woke up, it was already the afternoon, and Graham was gone. The flat held his absence like a hole in the earth.

I reloaded the Walther, stuck it into a coat pocket, and sat in the mold-framed window of my bedroom like a gargoyle, staring at the view.

The local area felt hostile to human engagement. There was not much space for pedestrians and far too many cars. Every other turning gave onto the blank stare of concrete or glass buildings. It was the kind of area that makes pigeons extra ugly. But it was crowded with people, living on top of one another, working around one another, some in suits and some in uniforms. I could see why the Ministry thought we’d be hidden here. There were so many unhappy people that a gun wouldn’t suffice. You’d have to drop a bomb to ensure I was the right sad soul to die.

I knew he’d come back when the rich emerald smell of tobacco filled the hall. Something twitched in my chest—a muscle, a nerve, I wasn’t sure, but it hurt.

He was sitting at the noisome kitchen table, staring at nothing. Rogue Male was lying splayed and face down by the ashtray. The thing in my chest kicked again as I realized he must have grabbed it as we left our home. When I came in, he didn’t move anything but his gaze, which swung up like a whip.

“Where have you been?” I asked sharply.

“I went out on the bike.”

“I don’t know if this is some kind of shock reaction, or if you’re just completely bloody-minded, but are you aware two people from the future tried to kidnap you and kill me yesterday?”

“It did not escape my notice.”

“And you went on a solo road trip?”

He had the grace to look embarrassed, though the expression was half shielded by the hand that held the cigarette. “I needed to think,” he said carefully. “And I do not think so well when I am static.”

I walked four trembling, stork-stiff strides to stand in front of him. His gaze wavered again. I vibrated furiously. My knees were jumping like a pair of boxed frogs. I said, “We were almost murdered, in cold blood, in the street, and you’re acting weirdly because you regret kissing me. Is that right? Have I got it right?”

He cleared his throat awkwardly and ashed without looking, missing the ashtray. “I rather think you kissed me,” he suggested.

“Whatever. You’re about to tell me that it was an awful mistake, that it shouldn’t have happened, et cetera.”

He pulled hard on the cigarette, so that its tip glowed like a warning signal, then plucked nervily at his packet for another. He used the burning cigarette to light the next one and glumly swapped them. At length he said, “It should not have happened. And I’m terribly sorry for the way that it did.”

“Right.”

“You’re angry.”

“No shit. It’s humiliating to be treated like a child after being kissed like a—”

“Please—”

He colored and blew a long stream of smoke at me. At length he muttered, “I have been trying to court you.”

I blinked.

“What?”

He frowned at me over the cigarette. “Evidently I mismanaged this. I don’t have very much experience in courting.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither, it must be said, do I. I don’t understand what you want, nor what any woman of this era wants. I don’t know what I have to offer you. You are perfectly independent. You’re occupied to an almost violent degree by your own career. But, well, I thought, you do eat everything I cook… so perhaps…”

“You were planning on feeding me until I… what?”

He frowned more deeply. He looked as if he was having a bad time.

“I was hoping you might be able to explain that to me. If you found me suitable.”

“Suitable for what?” I exclaimed, exasperated.

“Well, I thought, maybe—I don’t know. In my time, you know, things progressed very differently. I didn’t know what you wanted.”

I gawped at him. I said, “Graham. Not to labor the point here. But I kissed you. Very enthusiastically. Is that not maybe the tiniest hint about what I wanted?”

“We were in our cups, and you were frightened. I took advantage of your reaction, and the time it took to bring myself under control—”

“In this era, you don’t have to go around controlling yourself if it’s coming at you on a silver platter—”

“I am not from this era!” he cried—one of the very few times I ever heard him raise his voice. He leaned forward, gesturing agitatedly with the cigarette. “Understand that, as far as I’m concerned, you would have been in your rights to strike me, or chase me from the house, or vanish without a trace—”

“Well, I don’t want to. I certainly didn’t want you locking yourself in your room. What the hell? What were you doing in there?”

“Praying.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

He leaned back. He was wildly flushed, but he’d brought his voice under control, and his smoking hand hid the lower half of his face. “Well, yes, ‘kidding’ somewhat,” he muttered.

We stared at each other. The room was embarrassingly quiet after our joint outburst. I said, as levelly as I could manage, “Tell me what you want. Not what might or could happen or go wrong. Just, right now. What do you want?”

I watched the smoke beckon the air. He took a slow, deep breath, like a man preparing to leap from a windowsill.

“Will you take off your gansey,” he said.

I pulled my wool jumper over my head. Its neck was narrow and on its departure it disarrayed my makeshift chignon. I felt my hair unsettle slowly down my neck.

“Your chemise.”

It was a T-shirt. I removed that too, dropped it to the floor.

He cleared his throat nervously and said, “Your, uh,” then gestured at my bra with the nonsmoking hand.

I took off my bra.

He’d only moved to pull on the cigarette. His head was wreathed in the smoke. I could just see that his eyes were bright and feverish.

“I wondered…” he murmured.

“Yes?”

“If they would be the same color as your mouth.”

“They?”

He leaned forward and quickly pinched one of my nipples, hard, between the knuckles of his middle and forefinger. I made a noise like a slapped canary.

He leaned back and took another drag on the cigarette, staring thoughtfully. The fingers that had pinched me trembled, almost imperceptibly.

“Take off your shirt,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows, and for a moment, I thought he was going to refuse. But he put the cigarette between his lips and began to unbutton the serge shirt. He shrugged himself out of it without looking at me.

“Put out the cigarette.”

He ground it into the ashtray.

“Stand up.”

I was talking very softly. I gave this last instruction at such a volume I could hardly hear it myself. But he stood. He was close to me. I didn’t need to straighten my arm to touch him, which was the next thing I did. I flattened a hand on the middle of his chest. He was looking at me with the same mild, politely engaged expression that he always wore—as if this was a moment of no more import than any moment pulled from the pocket of our year—but his heart gave him away. Under my hand, it was pounding.

He had a cumulonimbus of black curls across his chest. I ran my hands over his ribs, white as bleached stone, scattered with brown moles. I scrubbed my thumbs across his nipples and he swallowed.

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

I moved my hands round and clasped the bookends of his back muscles, his winged bones.

“May I touch you? The way you are—like this—”

“Like—?”

“All over.”

“Yes. Please.”

He ran his fingertips up my arms, stroked my neck. His touch was frustratingly light. He let his fingers rest on my collarbones. We met each other’s eyes. He moved his hands down, abruptly, over my breasts. It was such a blunt motion—so much that of a man who had really, really wanted to touch my breasts—that I scoffed, then grinned, and he lit up with a smile as sudden as the winter sun. He looked relieved.

“Is that—?”

“Please just—kiss me.”

He pulled me into him.

It was a much better kiss than last time. I clung to him while pinwheels dazzled and spun in my skull. His skin was hot.

He kissed me so hard and with such tempestuousness that it bore me back across the kitchen. I hit the fridge and he broke from me, breathing unsteadily.

“Oof. Cold.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Kiss me again.”

He started to kiss me but then stopped to make a small, seared noise when I slid my thumbs under his waistband and curled them.

“Should we go somewhere else?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t move, though. I was starting to tremble, out of need, which was thrilling and embarrassing. Also because the fridge was against my back.

“You may have some… expectations,” he murmured.

“Hm?”

“That I don’t… that I have little experience in meeting. As I… as men of my time…”

“You’re worried you won’t make me come.”

“Good grief.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes. Is that how you would say it? ‘Make me come…’?”

“God,” I mumbled, because even hearing him say it experimentally, like a vocabulary exercise in a foreign language, was a lot to handle. “Yes. Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”

“I would like that,” he said earnestly, and I covered my face.

“Take me to bed, then,” I said. He quite literally picked me up and carried me down our dreary flat. He chose my room and put me down on the bed, like a parcel.

“You have a very modern body,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked. I was wrenched by burst upon burst of tiny convulsions. I wondered if I was visibly shaking.

“I can see how you are put together.”

He didn’t elucidate, just dropped his head onto my chest. I felt the rough paddle of his tongue then the edge of his teeth against my nipples. He pushed his face against my neck and found the place where the skin streamed with nerves. His head was heavy and warm.

“I want to ‘make you come,’?” he murmured, and it was exciting even with the inverted commas around it.

“You’ll have to get your face wet.”

He laughed and blushed ferociously. Even his shoulders heated under my hands. “Oh, I see.”

He stripped me of my skirt, tights, and underwear in a few neat movements.

“Show me where.”

“Here.”

“Show me how. Slowly.”

He came down of his own accord. I tangled my hands into his hair. He worked well on both instinct and instruction. He learned fast. A very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.

He lifted his head to say something to me. I was not in a state to hear it. I pushed him back down, and I felt him laugh again. He worked on me, firmly and seriously, until my thighs started to shake. When I came, my back arched off the bed. I pulled his hair, I think, and I made a fair amount of noise, I think, though I am hazy on detail.

He cupped me gently and waited for the aftershocks to pass. When he saw me refocus my eyes, he nuzzled my stomach, smearing it.

“That was… pretty good.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“What did you say, when you were—?”

“I said that you taste like the sea.” He smiled up at me, then added, “I could feel you.”

“Oh?”

“Is it possible to make you do that when I—when I am with you?”

“?‘With’ me, eh.”

“Don’t be saucy,” he said, and twisted one of my nipples. I gasped and tugged him up by his arms.

“It’s possible. Doesn’t always work.”

“What needs to be done for it to work?”

“For a start, you’ll need to take off the rest of your clothes.”

He rolled his eyes and started to fumble, one-handed, with the button and zipper of his fly.

“Don’t stare,” he murmured.

“I want to see.”

He leaned down and kissed me so that I couldn’t raise my head. The bed jounced under the movement of him kicking his trousers off.

I reached down, floundering a little because he still wouldn’t let me lift my head to look properly, and wrapped my hand around him. He groaned before he could clamp his mouth shut.

“Will you—”

“Yes—”

“There—”

“Is that—yes—?”

He started slowly, watching my face. It was if he was using a machine on me, and he was testing its efficacy by my reaction. That the machine was his body didn’t appear to move him. But I tilted my hips and started to match him, meet him. His expression tightened.

“Please—”

“This—like this—you want this—”

“Yes—”

“Did you—think about this—tell me—”

“Yes—I wanted to—watch you—give in—”

He bit me sharply on the shoulder and some other animal noise escaped me. He started to dig his thumbs into tender places while he moved in me. I bucked insistently into the pressure. A certain thrilling pain, which lived in my body like another body, woke and opened its long series of tributaries through my ribs. He put his lips to my ear:

“I used to—hear you—tossing and turning—at night—I couldn’t—sleep—your body—a wall away—”

“You wanted—to do—this—to me—”

“Yes—”

“Tell me—what you did—”

Into the wet heat between us, in jolts and gasps, he started to tell me about those nights, when God and the world felt far away and I felt so dangerously near, and neither prayer nor reciting the Articles of War nor squeezing his eyes shut stopped his mind from brimming with the thought of me, and he’d have to do to himself the only thing he could think of to help him sleep.

He said, softly, as if surprised by a sudden burst of rain, “Oh. God.”

Later I examined my body and saw a line of thin crescent moons where he’d dug his nails in, flushed the same color as my mouth.

Afterward, we lay on our sides, facing each other. The clumsy metallic bonking of the radiators announced the arrival of the central heating. It was very dark—the sun had dissolved, and I hadn’t yet turned on my lamp—but I thought his eyes were twinkling.

“Well,” he said, “that was interesting.”

“Ha!”

“Will you turn on the lamp, please?”

“Yes… there. Hello. So you’re very… talkative.”

His ears—now visible—turned red. “Yes, well,” he muttered. “You make terrible noises. Like an alley cat.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“It’s an amusing way to go deaf. Would you mind if I smoked?”

“Only if I can have one.”

“A fair trade. My cigarettes are in my pocket—”

I reached over the bed and fished his cigarettes and lighter out of his discarded trousers. He lit two and handed me one.

“Graham, can I ask you a question?”

“You may. I reserve the right to dodge it.”

“Do you—hmm. Trying to think of a way to put this subtly. When you said you didn’t have much experience with courting…”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t strike me as… inexperienced.”

He shrugged and settled back on the pillows, ashing into the mug on the bedside table. I rummaged around the scant supplies of my diplomacy.

“What did you usually do when you, er, if you got interested in a woman?”

“I would break into a cold sweat and put myself on the nearest ship.”

“Were you—I mean, was there anyone…?”

He continued to smoke reflectively. Then he said, “You understand that, in my era, a man would have to be a villain and a scoundrel to do—any of this—with a woman he wished to court.”

“Are you a villain and a scoundrel?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I am hurt that you have to ask.”

“Was there someone?”

“Not in a way that would have tarnished either of our reputations.”

“Ah. So. Right. Who?”

I puffed crossly on my cigarette. My heart had dropped two inches down my chest, or so it felt.

“It simply didn’t progress that far—”

“What was her name?” I said, louder than I would be able to bear when I remembered this conversation later.

He frowned at me. At length he said, “Sarah. Please don’t feel the need to offer me the names of any of your ghosts. I don’t want to know.”

He cautiously proffered the mug. I’d been drawing so hard on the cigarette that there was a precarious worm of ash hanging off it. I tapped, and it dropped into the thin scum of old tea still silting the bottom of the mug. These details were large and terrible to me. I said, “The two of you never—?”

“Little cat. Please.”

“You’re dodging this question very strenuously—”

“Because it’s making you upset. No, we did not. At most I may have kissed her hand, and even that would have been rather giddy and ill-advised.”

I hated hearing this. I said, “You strike me as someone who’s done a fair bit more than that.”

“What a threatening observation.”

“Well?”

“I suppose so. Not with—women I would have wished to court. My experience with women generally is limited.”

I was almost at the filter and my throat hurt. “And with men?” I said, more because I felt like being annoying than because I had noted his wary syntax.

To my surprise, he went quiet again, and regarded the end of his cigarette. Eventually he said, “Well. One is a long time at sea.”

“What does that mean?”

“Enough,” he said, suddenly sharp. He flicked his stub into the mug and pinched mine, damp with the sweat of my fingers, out of my hands. I could see in the momentum of his movements that he was one twitch away from getting out of bed, leaving the room, pretending none of this happened—but then he jolted toward me, took me by the shoulders and pulled my head onto his chest.

“Put your arms around me,” he instructed.

He held me firmly. My nose was squashed against him, tickled by the black curls over his sternum. He smelled, attractively, of sweat. I folded the arm not crushed between us over his back.

“I’m not trying to keep secrets from you,” he said quietly. “It’s simply that—these matters—I have tried to separate from the rest of my life. Had I ever married, I imagine I would have kept up the fiction of a perfectly chaste life, if only not to humiliate my wife. You will learn nothing special or important about me from asking me questions that can only hurt you.”

“In this era, I think we’d call that ‘dishonest.’?”

“In my era, it might have been considered a kindness.”

I ran my fingertips over the white, curved place between his shoulder blades. I could just feel, below the skin, the toothy fragment of the microchip the Ministry had implanted in him when he first arrived, which had enabled them to monitor his movements with the closeness he’d found so inexplicable.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I said. I kissed him.

Axioms have us sealing all sorts of things with kisses. Vows. Envelopes. Fates. But parents don’t always tell their children what the slurs and curses mean, for their protection. I thought it would be better, for now, that I didn’t mention the microchip. To tell you the truth I tried not to think about it at all.

The next morning, when I woke up, I was alone in the bed. I lay there feeling bereft and sorry for myself until I heard a gentle knock at the door.

“Are you awake?”

“Oh. Hi. Yes.”

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

He brought the tea up and put it on the bedside table, rather than approach the bed and hand it to me. I wriggled upright. I was naked under the bedsheets. He didn’t move to touch me, but he didn’t leave the room or look away either.

“Adela’s sending a car from the Ministry. I need to get dressed…”

“If you would prefer not to travel alone, I can come with you.”

“I’m all right, thanks. She and I need to talk.”

He nodded. He looked awkward. I was moved to wonder whether he had ever actually had a “morning after,” or whether he was improvising action and reaction, caught between his era’s expectations and mine. If you are surprised that, so soon after a secret agent tried to kill me, I was wondering whether the man with whom I’d had sex liked liked me, remember that being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma. I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.

I was not such a fool as to imagine the Vice Secretary for Expatriation had become my handler because she liked me. Adela had a plan that had something to do with Graham. Her brusque mentorship, its delineation uncanny but forcibly indicated, suggested that she wanted a workplace proxy, a daughter-in-case-file. It looked like she wanted me to be Graham’s handler, and for Graham to be—what?

I arrived at the Ministry sweaty and vibeless. It was another dank toothache of a day, barely qualifying in its chromatic dullness for “gray.”

Adela was sitting at her desk, hands stacked. She was so neatly posed that I found myself wondering what meme she was referencing. She didn’t look at me, but through me. Instead of her usual abrasion, she spoke with cool diffidence. She acted like I was an ex she hadn’t seen in a very long time, one engaged to a much younger woman.

“Ma’am. The Brigadier. Did he murder Quentin?”

“Inquiries are ongoing.”

“Why,” I said, “does the Brigadier want Commander Gore?”

“He wants to go home.”

“Eh?”

The time-door, explained Adela, supported a limited number of what the Brigadier called “free travelers.” That was why the Ministry lost two of the seven original expats—there wasn’t enough capacity for them to be moved through time, it was like they’d tried to breathe through oxygen masks after other people had depleted the tank. But it was possible to make a space in the door—refill the tank, as it were—by taking a free traveler “out of time,” viz, killing them.

“How does the Ministry know that?” I asked.

“That information was extracted by the intelligence agents.”

“Torture.”

“You know we don’t use that word.”

“That means there are other ‘free travelers’ from the future around,” I said. “If you found one to torture.”

Adela gave me a ghastly grin. “Oh yes,” she said. “Not just the Brigadier and Salese, I mean. They already know about the door’s operational capacities. It was made in their era. Those two were never equipped for a long stay in the twenty-first century, incidentally. I believe they were part of a blitz assassination campaign.”

I tore a filet from my thumb with my teeth.

“The Brigadier used my fingerprints to access and disable the CCTV system at Parry Yard,” I said. “That’s why there’s no CCTV footage of Quentin’s assassination.”

Her one eye clicked into focus like a camera.

“That is a serious breach,” she said slowly. “One that I had not anticipated. I’ll deal with it. I’ve signed you up for a firearms refresher course. As a preventative measure. You ought to be able to bring your score up quickly. After all, you still have your depth perception.”

This was a macabre joke, and even Adela seemed to sense that. She lifted her hand self-consciously to her eye patch. I stared at her slender hand, its narrow ropes of vein. Her hand looked older than her face—around a decade older, in fact. She noticed me noticing.

“Botox,” she said dryly. “My jawline’s been shaved. Nose job, that’s a few years old now. Had my tear troughs and my cheeks done. This isn’t my natural eye shape either. Brows are microbladed.”

“Oh,” I said. “I always assumed it was reconstructive rather than cosmetic. Not that it’s any of my business. Everyone should get to do what they want with their face.”

Whatever the test was, I failed it. Adela’s face misted with disappointment.

“I’ll handle the CCTV breach,” she said. “Until I have personally lowered the security status, all bridge–expat teams are confined to their safe houses. Journeys to and from the Ministry must be taken in Ministry-issue vehicles, accompanied by an armed guard. Any communication or movement between safe houses needs sign-off from both halves of Control.”

She gave me an almost maternal look and added, “Though, as your handler, all of your requests need be signed off only by me. Don’t worry about the Secretary.”

A Ministry car took me back to my new, horrid home. I heard Graham call, “What are your orders?” before I’d even taken off my coat. I scrubbed at my face, pushed to fidget by his rare urgency.

“None. Sit tight. We’re confined to the house, except for Ministry business.”

“Surely not. You are in danger!”

“Yeah. I’m taking a firearms refresher course. They know, Graham. They’ve known all along. They were trying to keep an eye on him.”

I flopped onto the sofa. He came to sit beside me, leaving a careful and charged channel of two feet between us.

“I am reluctant to ask you my next question,” he said, “since it seems so comparatively trivial. But.”

I waited. He sighed.

“Well. Some time ago, I asked Maggie about ‘dating.’?” (He said this in the same disdainful way he once said “housemate.”)

“You asked the lesbian from the seventeenth century about modern-day dating.”

“Yes. I am aware of the irony of the situation.”

“Wow. What did she say?”

“Well, she laughed at me for a while. But. My understanding of ‘dating,’?” he said, “is that it is like trying on clothes for fit, except that the clothes are people.”

“That’s a pretty brutal way of putting it, but I suppose so.”

“What happens if the fit is wrong?”

“Well. People break up. They stop seeing each other. And start over with someone else.”

“And if the fit is right?”

“Depends on what the people involved want, I guess.”

“At what point is that discussed?”

“There’s… not really a set timeframe. You just feel your way along. Even as I say that I can see how deeply messed up modern dating must sound. But it’s supposed to grant more of a sense of freedom and personal choice. No one has to commit to anything they don’t want.”

He ran his hands through his hair. The curls flattened and sprang back. I was overwhelmed with the desire to touch him. So it was a shock, the psychic equivalent of biting down on bone, when he said, very quietly, “I want to touch you.”

“Jesus,” I said, and surged across the sofa.

In addition to the firearms refresher course, Adela also insisted that I sign up for unarmed combat classes, basic cipher, and an international relations refresher for my “region of expertise” that all field agents were required to attend every four months unless in the field. Graham and Cardingham, too, were granted special movement rights and dedicated transport to continue their field training at the Ministry. Arthur and Margaret did not enjoy the same level of freedom. I was relieved. My work with Adela meant that I soon had access to their safe houses’ whereabouts—but I wanted them both stowed away safely until I had the mental wherewithal to work out next moves. In a game of chess, I reasoned, one does not rush the board with all the pawns and burn down the rooks. This analogy tells you everything you need to know about the level of depersonalized detachment I enjoyed after my attempted assassination.

I attended training sessions at the shooting range with Adela. There was an unofficial scoreboard tacked to a wall. It was updated weekly, and I couldn’t fail to notice that “G. Gore” was always in the top four, clambering over and under the scores of two field agents and one of the quartermasters. It was inevitable that Adela and I were going to bump into the center of our project at the range. Sure enough, one porridge-mild Wednesday, there was Graham and Thomas Cardingham.

“Poxy maumet weapons,” Cardingham was saying (loudly—he was wearing ear mufflers). “Better to break a man with my yard than slay him with this scurvy arm.”

“You are a very bad loser, Thomas,” Graham said. I was amazed he hadn’t told Cardingham off. Perhaps that was just how men talked to each other when women weren’t listening.

“Marry, sir, with a musket in my hand thou wouldst find me a sweet foe indeed.”

“You’re going to fall off the scoreboard. Oh, except you aren’t on it this week. Or last week, I seem to recall.”

“Aye, my hand’s not oft on such small pieces. Perchance thou art more familiar with the size. I ought to ask your bridge.”

At this, Graham colored. He said, coldly, “Mind how you tread, Lieutenant.”

Cardingham subsided and scowled with boyish embarrassment.

“Hello,” I said, because I wanted to see what would happen. The men turned around.

“We are graced,” said Cardingham with vicious irony, and bowed. “Thou wast but lately on our tongues. With my full respect to the good commander, thou art often on his tongue.”

“I hope he has good things to say,” I murmured, eyeing Graham. But Graham appeared not to have heard me. He was staring, bemused, at Adela. I glanced at her and was baffled to see a sudden softness on her face. Though, knowing Adela, maybe her silicone fillers were melting.

“This is Adela,” I said. “Er. My handler. Adela, of course you know Commander Gore… and probably Lieutenant Cardingham…”

“Yes,” said Adela hoarsely. “I am aware of them.”

“It’s an honor to be worthy of the attention,” said Graham politely. “Will you be joining us?”

“No,” said Adela. Her voice was thick. Pallor strained through her cheeks. “Regrettably, I must be going… but I expect your score to improve by twenty….”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, for want of anything else to say. Adela nodded, her stare landing between the three of us. Then she muttered something approximating a “good day” and stalked out.

“She is very blond,” murmured Graham. He seemed confused, as if he’d just been handed an egg and told to hatch it.

“Bottle blonde. I think she’s naturally a very dark brunette, which accounts for the scruffly texture of her hair.”

“The women of this era have a certain constant cast,” said Cardingham. “Perhaps it is the ‘chemicals’ i’th’water. I have heard the ruling powers do filter in such poisons as emasculate men and pacify the weak. Perhaps they clone the womenfolk.”

“Aren’t you both training for entry on the field agent program? You’re part of the ruling power now, Lieutenant,” I said sweetly.

I glanced at Graham and was surprised and put out when he didn’t say anything.

But for the most part, Graham and I were locked in together. The state of emergency that sealed our doors also had the effect of truncating our thoughts and plaiting us together with an intensity I’d never before experienced. All we had was each other and the rooms we had each other in.

At the end of February, arriving with the abruptness of a man walking late into a packed theater, there was an afternoon of vivid light and heat. It was as if a wet towel had been taken off the bowl of the sky. I stood on the roof between the air vents and turned my face upward.

“Yes,” I said, in a mad person’s monotone. “Ahaha. Yes.”

“Does summer start in February now?” he asked, standing beside me.

“No. We get these unseasonal hot days. Except they happen so often they’re pretty much seasonal. Do you remember about global warming?”

“A fever of the earth.”

“Mm.”

“You look very pleased about this.”

“Terrible, isn’t it?” I murmured. “No, I’m not happy about the climate crisis. But I hate the winter so much.”

“You look livelier,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Shall we go back inside?” he suggested, in the vague way he spoke when he was about to put his hands under my top.

There were some things about sleeping with a Victorian naval officer that didn’t surprise me, and there were others that astonished me. He kept trying to touch the edge of license, but my parameters were so much more capacious than his. I didn’t have the same sense of shame of it, but I don’t think I ever had the same sense of holiness either.

Some things could have been him, or they could have been the era in him. He wouldn’t go to bed with me if we were at all stoned or drunk (I went teetotal). He wouldn’t strike me, even when I pleaded for it, even though I knew he wanted to—for various reasons I’m good at assessing this—and he worked off his desire to lay forceful hands on me in interesting ways—weird games with bowls of milk and thumb pressure in my hollows. He didn’t seem to want his body involved in sex at all. He always undressed me first and undressed himself afterward. He wouldn’t let me go down on him for weeks after we started sleeping together, and even then I had to do it with the lights out, snuffling about like a randy anteater. “You shouldn’t,” he whispered, both hands on the back of my head.

He enjoyed kissing more than any person I’d ever kissed—not as a precursor to other acts, but as an act in itself. He kissed me until my mouth burned. He locked my wrists in his grip so that I couldn’t take my hands for a walk below his waist, and kissed me until I was thrumming with need. I got to know his mouth very well. I was on warm terms with his shoulders, his neck, his chest, his arms, his shapely calves, his (very ticklish) feet. But he was shy about everything else, and guarded as a stray cat.

I became demented about his body in nonsexual contexts. If his shirt lifted and his trousers dragged when he was trying to reach a high shelf, revealing a crescent moon of hip bone, my heart would beat so hard I could basically chew it. The mole on his throat had me writing poetry. Watching him fumble for his cigarettes in his pockets was an incredible experience. By contrast, he liked watching me shower, and I just let him. He’d smoke while he watched, and I’d come out of the bathroom with my wet hair stinking.

I could tell when he was coming, because he liked to talk to me when he was inside me, but he wouldn’t make much more noise than a muffled groan when he climaxed, and so the volume would decrease the closer he got. He asked questions—how it felt, what I wanted, how I wanted it—for the sheer pleasure of listening to me respond.

And afterward, brief demi-hours of peace. Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses. Smiling at me, as if to say, Well, aren’t you glad we both survived that? Watching the sun go down over my shoulder, stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. His pretty dimples, because he was smiling so much, because I think he always felt that we were as divided by passion as propriety, and he was at his happiest when we were quiet and calm.

All this unfolded in what I now know to call our last weeks. Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.

March came in, mellow and pastel. The air felt washed. The scrubbed newness of the spring gave the rooftops and the street furniture a friendly polish. I was angry, every day, terrified of death at the hands of a burst of blue light, and I was also nursing fragile joy. It was disorientating. Sometimes I sat up in bed and stared down at Graham, in his coal-hot, silent sleep in the early hours of the morning, and I wanted to lick him all over. I wanted to put him in a locket by my heart. I wanted to get promoted fast enough that I’d always have enough firepower to protect him. And to be senior enough to stop him leaving, but I didn’t like to think about that too much.

One evening, he made an impressive yao hon and then tried to eat his with a knife and fork.

“Listen. This is delicious, but I can’t praise you if you’re going to jab at your wraps with cutlery.”

“What on earth are you doing with that innocent lettuce leaf?”

“What I’m supposed to do. Put down the fork, for goodness’ sake. It’s like watching the Spanish Inquisition with the thumbscrews.”

“Your way seems very messy. Look. There goes your prawn. Goodbye, prawn.”

“Yeah, well, it’s also the right way. Which one of us is ‘not entirely an Englishwoman’ here, eh?”

“Which one of us can cook?” he countered.

Afterward, I made a start on the washing up, but he cleared his throat and said, “I thought we might go out. On the bikes. Take a flask of hot toddy with us.”

“We’re not allowed to do that sort of thing anymore.”

He took my hand, sudsy as it was, kissed a bubble on my knuckle, and said, “Sometimes you wake me in the middle of the night because you are grinding your teeth so vigorously. I’d rather we break a rule than you break your poor molars. Come on. Let’s ‘let off some steam.’?”

I smiled. Graham was an Age of Sail officer who had just witnessed the overture to steam-powered ships. Of all the idioms he absolutely fucking loathed, “let off some steam” was right at the top. In using it, I suspected he was trying to charm me. In fact his next words were, “Besides, there’s something special I want to show you.”

I love to feel special. Of course I was interested enough to break a rule.

I hadn’t used my bike since we’d arrived at the new safe house, and I was electrified by the sense of freedom it gave me: movement, in my chosen direction, from the happy effort of my body. After a half hour of cycling down the bike superhighway, the city receded, and the streets darkened. Soon we were having to pick our way along barely lit residential roads where the houses were squat and sleeping. Then we came to dark blue lanes grasped by the trees, the ground underfoot rustic with pebbles. My bike light bounced off his back.

“Where are we going?” I called to him.

“We’ll come to a large field. Very soon.”

When we reached the field, it was a line of darkness scrawled on the deeper darkness. We stumped our bikes over the wet, breathless earth.

“There,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Stars.”

I blinked at him, and then I looked up. It was true. Away from the grubby muslin of London’s light pollution, in the fresh March night, the sky was full of stars. I turned back to him. As I adjusted to the dark, I could see he was staring upward.

“I can’t manage it exactly without a sextant,” he said. “But I wanted to be able to orient myself.”

“So that, in the event of London flooding when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?”

“So that I will know where I was when I met you.”

I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.

“Come here,” he said softly, and pulled me into his arms.

I pressed my face against his neck. My body sparked, and I couldn’t move it, except to lean into him. I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I’d committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I thought I might not be allowed it. He combed his fingers through my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.