The Last Beginning

by Lauren James

  “I have?” Clove said, aiming for nonchalant but ending up closer to uncertain.

  “You will. And I’m training to follow in your footsteps, to be a History Revisionist. I’m only in my first year of uni, though. I’ve still got loads to learn.” Ella scraped the cream off her drink and then licked it off the spoon.

  “So you, what, you choose a point in history and change it? I did that by accident and nearly destroyed the world. I was fading away! I nearly disappeared!”

  “It does have its risks. But if you do it right, you can improve everything.”

  “And you think I invented this?” Clove shook her head. “I’m never travelling in time again. It’s too dangerous.”

  “You will.” It was hugely annoying that Ella seemed to know stuff about Clove’s future that Clove didn’t. “And students in the future will study your life.”

  “That is insane.” As Clove drank her hot chocolate, she tried to wrap her head around the idea of being a role model for anyone. Let alone a role model for time travellers who helped revise history. It was impossible.

  Ella unzipped her rucksack, rummaged inside and then pulled out a battered textbook.

  File note: Cover of textbook The Comprehensive Guide to History Control by CLOVE SUTCLIFFE, first published in 2351

  It was written by Clove. In the future. Clove carefully looked away from it. That textbook could tell her everything about her life. She didn’t want to know. “You still use paper books?” she asked, casting around for something to say.

  “No, of course not. It’s a tablet. It just has a skin on it, to make it look like a book, so it blends into historical environments. See?” Ella turned a page, and suddenly the textbook was moving: a clip of film played on its pages.

  Clove examined the new technology, intrigued, and then realized she was getting distracted. She shouldn’t be looking at her future. She closed the cover. “You change history, then. Were you in 1745 to change something about the Jacobite Uprising?”

  Ella looked shy for the first time. “Er, no. I actually study the Romans.”

  Clove remembered Ella sitting in the attic bedroom and pouring over a Latin text. Clove realized with a jolt that Ella was telling the truth. Ella was a time traveller, and had been this whole time. If Clove had just paid more attention, she might have worked it out for herself. “That’s why you can speak Latin,” she said.

  “Yeah! Our current mission is to save the Library of Alexandria.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Didn’t it burn down?”

  “Yes, around two thousand years before your time. All the books, and all knowledge of their civilization, was lost for ever. If we could save it … humanity might develop its technology centuries earlier. It could save so many lives. Civilization would progress loads faster.”

  “That’s … powerful,” Clove said, stunned. Ella was literally a superhero.

  “It’s going to take a long time to do it. I probably won’t even get permission to go to the first century A.D. until after I graduate. It’s harder to travel that far back in time – it takes a lot more energy. For now, I’m stuck sifting for evidence in the eighteenth century, which is as far back as I can go until I qualify.” Ella sighed. “It’s all red tape.”

  “So that’s why you were in Carlisle,” Clove said, amazed. “Well, I’m glad you were. I would never have met you, if it wasn’t for your paperwork.”

  Ella ducked her head. “That wasn’t the only reason I was there. I wanted to meet you too.”

  Clove was thrown off guard by the nervous look in Ella’s eyes. Her reply caught in her throat. “Because I’m in your textbooks or whatever?”

  Ella fiddled with her spoon. “Uh. Yes?”

  “Why don’t you sound sure?” Clove asked, suspicious.

  “Well. Mainly it was because you’re hot.” She looked up at Clove from under her eyelashes, and smirked.

  Clove coughed. She was blushing again; she could feel it. “What’s time travel like for you in the future?” she asked quickly. “Is it still the most painful thing you could ever experience?”

  Ella held out her arm. Some sort of panel was embedded into the skin of her wrist. It glowed luminescent as it lit up with messages: a screensaver of stars spiralling across her lower arm. “This is my Skim. It picks up signals from an electrode in my brain, so it’s run directly via mind control.”

  “Powerful,” Clove said, awestruck. “Tell me everything. How does it charge? Where is the processor?”

  “Well, I don’t know any of that stuff. I’m more of an arts student. But anyway, that’s my time machine.”

  Clove blinked at her. “What, that?” It was tiny. It couldn’t make a wormhole, could it? That little thing? Clove wondered when exactly in the future Ella was from, if technology had progressed that much.

  “Yeah! You have to travel with a certified historian until you’re twenty-one. I forged a permission slip to come on my own.” She looked extremely self-satisfied.

  This was so surreal.

  “So you broke the law, just to see me?”

  Ella nodded. “It was worth it.”

  Clove frowned doubtfully. “It seems like a crazy reason to travel back in time.” Ella had spent so much time and energy trying to find Clove. She’d even seen her in St Andrews the week before. “Why were you in the physics lecture?” It felt like ages ago. It couldn’t be, though, because it was when she’d been on work experience, which was chronologically only yesterday.

  Ella grinned. “I was in that lecture about an hour ago. I time-travelled to here straight after it. I went to the university after you left Carlisle, because I was trying to find you, but I arrived in 2056 a day or two early. You were crying, Clove. What happened?”

  “I was having a bad day,” Clove mumbled, remembering how terrible everything with Meg and her parents had been. “So why didn’t you talk to me then?”

  “It had to be in 1745.”

  “Why?” Clove asked. Based on Ella’s smug expression, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Because I’m in the textbooks. I know we met in 1745.”

  “You’re … you’re in your own textbooks?”

  “Well, the textbooks just refer to an Ella, but I was pretty sure it was me. When I got to 1745 and there was nobody else called Ella standing near by ready to fish you out of a river, I was certain it was me.”

  “I knew I hadn’t imagined someone rescuing me!” Clove said. She’d thought it had been a hallucination from lack of oxygen. But it had happened. “That was really you? You saved my life?”

  Ella slurped her drink. “Be grateful I actually do the assigned reading for school.”

  Clove was affronted. “What happened to ‘I wanted to meet you because you’re hot’?”

  Ella laughed in delight. “Oh, you’re definitely still hot.”

  Clove bit her lip, trying to hide a smile. Then she frowned down at the table. “So you went to 1745 and saved my life because you read in a textbook that you were going to?” Clove rubbed her temples. “Surely there’s a paradox in that.”

  Ella shrugged, one-shouldered. “I suppose the first time I met you − which was presumably in a timeline before I read the textbooks − I was only there to find information about the Library of Alexandria. I would have met you totally by accident. After that first time, I always knew I was going before I went there, because I got the idea from the textbooks. The current hypothesis for when things like this happen is that time is lots of little loops, repeating themselves until there’s an equilibrium – but that’s still hypothetical.”

  Clove exhaled loudly. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”

  “You won’t believe how hard it was to not tell you everything! Watching you talk to your father for the first time! I was bursting at the seams.”

  “Well,” Clove said, sulkily, “I wish you had told me all this earlier. That was a giant mess. I should never have spoken to Matthew. It nearly destroyed the universe.�
�

  “That point in time is locked. I couldn’t interfere in your conversations with Matthew. It’s illegal for time travellers to make unrecorded contact with you. Your life is too important to risk changing unless you initiate it. You’re a set point in history. There are some things which are just too major to risk changing – it would create a completely different timeline, one that might be unrecognizable.”

  “Like the motorbike universe,” Clove said, thinking of how different everything had been there.

  “The what?”

  “Never mind. So why was what I did in 1745 so important?”

  “Your work spawned the entire theory of History Control. Everyone in my class – every historian in the world − would kill to be in 1745 to witness you in action. There were probably time travellers hiding in every bush for miles around trying to eavesdrop. The cook, Mrs Samson, is originally from the twenty-second century, or someplace ancient.”

  Clove blinked. Was everyone she’d met in 1745 secretly a time traveller? She thought about the way nobody had ever seemed to question her odd slang or faux pas. Suddenly everything was starting to make a lot more sense – especially given the rule that said they couldn’t reveal themselves. Clove had already messed up history quite enough. Imagine if Katherine or Matthew had known the whole house was full of time travellers!

  “If my past is … ‘locked’, then why were you allowed to get involved?” Clove asked. “You interfered with everything I did, constantly! You never stop interfering!”

  Ella smirked. “Yeah, but I don’t count. I’m special.”

  “Why? Why are you special?”

  “I’m the love of your life.”

  “The” − Clove could feel her eyes bulging − “the—”

  “The love of your life. Historically speaking.”

  “I…” Clove had no idea what to say. What was the correct response, when someone told you that they were your soulmate? She should probably ask Matthew. If anyone knew, he would.

  “I know,” Ella said, when Clove still hadn’t managed to speak thirty seconds later. “It took me a while to get used to it too.”

  “I…” Clove sighed. “This is really weird.” She traced shapes on the table.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  Clove dropped her head on the table and knocked it against the wood a few times. “I’m not sure yet.”

  Ella rested a hand on the top of Clove’s head.

  Clove stilled. “I can’t decide whether this makes you a stalker or just very determined.”

  “Probably both.” She could hear Ella’s smile in her voice.

  “So what happens next?” Clove said, sitting up.

  “Well, haven’t you got a parent from the eighteenth century who needs to get back to his one true love?” Ella gestured to the Skim on her wrist. “Need a lift?”

  CHAPTER 33

  Clove Sutcliffe has given frequent interviews about her time in Carlisle since that first experimental History Control mission, and one constant appears in them all: she would not have been able to achieve half so much during her time in 1745 if it were not for a fellow time traveller referred to only as Ella.

  Elenore Walker Comment: Homework due next Fri: 1k words on C.S in 1745

  Ella had more experience of surviving unnoticed in historical periods, and her guidance to Clove, an amateur trying to find her feet in the as-yet-unexplored field of History Control, would have been invaluable. Not only that, but Ella saved Clove’s life upon her arrival in 1745, when she landed in a river and nearly drowned.

  Elenore Walker Comment: Is it creepy that I can’t stop imagining this Ella being me?

  The identity of Ella, whom Clove has more than once described as “the love of her life”, has never been revealed. Both travellers value their privacy, so little further information is known. However, it has been hypothesized that Ella must originate from some point in the six centuries after Clove Sutcliffe’s birth, as after the year 2678 time travel became much more highly regulated and no unlogged journey to pre-internet eras would have been possible.

  Elenore Walker Comment: The dates fit and everything. Huh.

  File note: Extract from An Unauthorized Biography of Clove Sutcliffe, annotated by ELENORE WALKER on her Skim during a history lesson

  CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND, 2056

  “The maid?” Matthew said later that day, as he stared with wide eyes between Ella and Clove. “She’s not my daughter too, is she?”

  “No, I’m Clove’s girlfriend,” Ella said, before Clove could reply.

  Clove whipped round to stare at Ella, who straightened her shoulders and stared right back. Clove grimaced but said nothing. There were more important things to deal with than Ella right now. Also Clove didn’t want to start trying to explain the word girlfriend to Matthew or give him an abridged political history of homosexuality. Not when they were about to perform a highly illegal patient break-out. She had to hurry this process along, before a nurse came.

  “She’s going to get you out of here,” Clove said, finally.

  “Are we going to find Katherine?” Matthew asked, immediately starting to get out of bed.

  “Wait! Let me take out your IV first,” Ella said, wincing. “It’s very admirable how much pain you are willing to go through for love, but some of it isn’t necessary.”

  Matthew suffered the indignity of Ella helping him remove the medical equipment, which started beeping until Ella pressed the screen and shut it down.

  Clove found Matthew’s old clothes under the bed, neatly laundered, and he got dressed. Apart from a scar across his chest and a lack of colour in his cheeks, he was almost better. She could send him on his way with a dose of penicillin, and he should be fine. Hopefully.

  Ella was fiddling with her Skim. Clove had never seen someone control a computer with mind control. It made Ella look a little cross-eyed.

  “We’re going to Katherine?” Matthew asked, with impressive single-mindedness.

  Ella took Matthew’s hand, and Clove’s in the other. “Kind of,” Ella replied.

  Before Clove could question what that meant, a familiar sucking sensation spread through Clove’s hand, and she was tugged into a vacuum.

  File note: Diagram of the “Skim”, as enclosed in the original patent application

  * * *

  When the spinning stopped, Clove was so dizzy she couldn’t work out which way was up. “Didn’t we need a suit?” she asked, gasping for breath. She spat out one of Ella’s curls and blinked away the phosphenes. “For the radiation?”

  Ella shook her head, apparently unaffected by the wormhole. “Built into the Skim.”

  They were standing in the rain on the side of a road. The white van driving past definitely wasn’t an eighteenth-century carriage.

  “This isn’t 1745! Where are we?” Clove asked, confused. “I thought we were taking Matthew home?” Perhaps Ella had used a wormhole to break them out of the hospital and would create another one to take them to 1745. It seemed an awful waste, though. Wormholes gave Clove a really bad headache.

  “I had a better idea,” Ella replied, as Clove realized she was still holding her hand and let go abruptly. “We’ll take Matthew home later. Right now we’re in 2040, on the Scottish border. In about thirty seconds, there should be…”

  Ella broke off as a bus swerved out of the traffic and pulled to a stop in front of them. The door slid open with a squeak. Ella climbed on board, gesturing for Clove and Matthew to follow her. She paid the driver and then headed straight for the back row of seats.

  Clove stared after her in furious shock. She couldn’t believe that Ella was taking them somewhere without even explaining what was happening or asking Clove how she felt about it. It was beginning to seem like Ella enjoyed making Clove feel lost and off-balance.

  “Ella, what’s going on? What are you doing?” she hissed, dropping into an empty seat opposite her. Matthew sat beside Clove. The bus was almost empty, but Ella had chosen to sit dow
n next to the only other passenger − an old lady with a shawl wrapped around her head. She had her head down, and her arms were wrapped around a large rucksack. She didn’t look up at her new companions.

  Ella stared meaningfully at the old woman.

  “What?” Clove hissed, and then she realized.

  That wasn’t an old lady at all.

  It was Katherine Finchley.

  Clove gaped. If they were in 2040, and that was Katherine Finchley … then this must be her actual mother: the Kate who had given birth to Clove in Scotland, before leaving her with Tom so that she could break Matt out of an English prison. If they were on a bus, on the Scottish border, then Kate must be going to the prison right now.

  Kate had given birth to Clove only days before. This was her mother.

  “Excuse me,” Clove said, leaning forwards, buzzing with excitement.

  Kate’s whole posture stiffened. She must be terrified of anyone discovering her identity. She was considered a terrorist in England: the number-one most-wanted criminal.

  “Excuse me,” Clove repeated, and this time Kate looked up. Her gaze flickered warily from Clove to Ella, and then to Matthew, where it stopped.

  “Matt?!” Kate asked, her voice hoarse.

  Matthew, who had been staring with fascination out of the window at the countryside speeding by, spun around to stare at Kate. “Katherine?!” he spluttered. He stood up and then abruptly sat back down to grab Kate’s hands. “How did you get here? What happened to you?”

  “Me?” she said. “What happened to you? How did you get out of prison?”

  “Hi,” Clove said, interrupting them both. They turned identical, amazed expressions on her. “Sorry to interrupt, but I can explain. This isn’t your Matt, Kate. Matthew, this isn’t Katherine. Not the version you know, anyway.”

  Kate seemed to understand instantly. “When are you from?”

  “1745,” Clove replied for him.

  As Kate threw herself at Matthew and pulled him into a hug, her rucksack fell to the floor. “Matthew,” she said. “The coachman. I remember you.”