The days Aickered between catastrophic rain and unseasonal heat, Aashing dark and bright as starkly as a chessboard. We played at domesticity, rearranging our strange new home around the belongings the Ministry had thought to seize from our old one.
The Ministry, meanwhile, locked down. The administrative team began the unwieldy, bug-polluted process of moving data and con1dential information onto another secure server. Internal comms were a mess. Emails bounced or sent with hysterical duplicates. The phones bluescreened. Even our key cards stopped functioning properly. Simellia got herself trapped in a mystery vestibule because her key card caused the lock to melt when she touched it to the pad, showering her with a terrifying rain of fat green sparks and setting oP the alarms.
I was in the building at the time, on my way to a meeting with Adela. The alarm was curiously nasal, like a complaint just at the edge of articulation. Someone from the ops and maintenance department staggered full-pelt past me and I followed in their wake. When we got to the fused door I could hear Simellia loudly reciting the hollow crown speech from Richard II on the other side, bashing rhythmically on the door with the iambs.
“We can hear you!” I called. “We’re getting you out.”
“‘We’ are, are we?” muttered the maintenance woman. Back-office ops loathed the bridges. I’d never understood why, but I was paid too much to care.
Simellia, once she emerged, was back in her uniform of chic, though she’d lost some weight and moved sepulchrally inside her deconstructed blazer. She’d also let her hair out into an Afro, which I’d never seen her do before. It suited her, though I wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to say this, and so I didn’t.
“You,” she said. “Me. Hello.”
“And baby makes three,” said the maintenance woman. She snorted when we ignored her and cantered oP. The Ministry suPered a maintenance emergency more or less every half hour during the lockdown; she’d be needed elsewhere.
“Technically Ivan made three,” I said, “but you know he’s in the process of being stood down.”
“What?”
“Adela thinks Cardingham’s development is better left in the hands of the 1eld agent program. We can make a solider out of him, but probably never a modern metrosexual.”
“And I heard Ralph is under house arrest?” said Simellia.
“Protective custody,” I corrected. “He’s ex-Defence, likely high on any anti- Ministry hit list.”
“Do you know where his safe house is?”
I shrugged. I knew where everyone’s safe houses were. Adela had made it known to me that Graham and I were considered, by the Ministry’s bellicose hierarchy, the senior bridge–expat team. We deserved more access, required more access, as Graham’s adjustment was so pivotal and promising. If it was unfair, it was also useful. Certainly Adela’s insistence that we were special in some way tallied with my experience of being in love.
“My key card has stopped working on Ministry property, and Adela has canceled our last three meetings,” said Simellia. “I’ve been trying to get Arthur’s benzodiazepine prescription reevaluated, and his own Wellness team is blocking me. Do you know why this is all happening? All we’ve been told is ‘emergency procedures’—”
“Someone tried to kill me,” I said. “The Brigadier.”
Watching what happened on Simellia’s face was like watching a paper cut 1ll with blood. I saw the shock of impact, the brief beat of perhaps nothing, the welling. She reached for me and, I think, would have embraced me, but her hand brushed the gun beneath my jacket. She pulled back.
“I can speak to Adela about Arthur, if you like,” I said, holding her gaze. “I’m going to see her now.”
“Thank you,” said Simellia, very coldly. “That would be kind. Look after yourself.”
One pleasant spring afternoon, I arranged to go with Arthur, Margaret, and Graham to a Turner exhibition. The expats played a game that they called ghost hunting. They would visit a place—a pub, a monument, a stately home—or a gallery or exhibition, to see if they could spot anything or anyone they recognized from their own era. In this instance, they expected Graham would see the most ghosts, as the exhibition was devoted to Turner’s marine paintings. In fact, I’d organized the jolly little trip—haunted by plainclothes agents and signed oP by Adela—partly because I wanted to test the limits of my special status, but also because I felt responsible for them. After the move to the safe houses, it became abundantly clear that Arthur and Margaret were not enjoying the same meaningful cultural integration as Graham, or even as Cardingham—by which I mean, the Ministry simply found them less interesting. Fewer and fewer meetings were devoted to their adjustment, their long-term goals. Only the “readability” experiments continued to run with any degree of consistency. Besides that, I knew Graham—who kept up a supervised and frequently curtailed program of visits—had told them something about what was happening behind our doors, in our beds—I didn’t know what—Graham was vague and evasive when I asked him—but he must have found a word for “lovers” that didn’t make him feel excessively Victorian and ashamed, and now I had no control whatsoever over how Margaret and Arthur might be receiving this knowledge about me. I had to 1x it.
Margaret, who understood how to sneak soft-drink cans and snacks into cinemas, was not impressed by the idea of the gallery trip. Consider how much she’d had to learn: negotiating supermarkets, brands and Aavors, the invention of the aluminum can, the basic untrustworthiness of the popcorn counter, the invention of 1lm.
“We’re hence to look at pictures of boats?” she asked, exasperated, in the car. “Ships, Sixty-1ve, ships,” said Graham. “The 1nest of the line.”
“Big boats,” Arthur supplied. Graham’s shoulders stiPened.
The exhibition was divided into several rooms, which charted Turner’s developing practice throughout his life. I stared listlessly at detailed and virtuosic paintings of “big boats” at sea, tilting horribly in the wind.
“Were you ever seasick?” I asked Graham.
“Not since I was a boy. A Gore stomach is a nigh unturnable one.” “I feel sick just looking at these.”
“You could not be a ship’s cat, poor little cat.”
It wasn’t until I walked later into Turner’s century—the 1830s, the 1840s— that I started to see what all the fuss was about. The forensic detail of the early paintings was gone. In their place, the sensory drama of the rain, the wind, and the waves was portrayed in sweeping, fuzzy strokes, more suggestion than depiction. I stood and gawped stupidly in front of The Fighting Temeraire, irradiated by its impossible orange sun. I felt a gentle hand on my jaw. Arthur was closing my mouth.
“You’ll catch Aies,” he said.
“Ha. It’s very impressive, isn’t it?”
“Very. Even Maggie has stopped complaining. Forty-seven is trans1xed—over there—”
I glanced over. Graham was staring hard at a canvas I’d recently pulled away from, The Slave Ship.
“Ah right. Let’s—let’s leave him to it.”
“He’s told me a little about his time sailing with the Preventative Squadron. Is that the correct terminology, ‘sailing with?’” Arthur added, embarrassed by the aPection he’d loaded his voice with.
“Beats me. ‘Floating around with’ is about my level of expertise. Here. Let’s sit down.”
Margaret was already sitting on the padded benches in the middle of the room. She gave us a wave.
“I caused the sounding of the bell,” she said. “You set an alarm oP?”
“Yes.”
“Well done!” said Arthur. “How long did it take?”
“I felt my ‘hereness’ readily! The guard was most vexed. I’faith, I would not steal these pictures. I am not so fond of boats.”
“Big boats,” I said.
Arthur laughed and settled between us.
I was shy of Arthur. Most friendship quartets don’t function in squares but in lines, and Arthur and I were the furthest away from each other. I liked him, and in any other circumstances it would have been impossible not to adore someone with as good a heart as he had. But he was in love with Graham. It was all over him like chicken pox. I felt myself going harridan and crooked when Graham looked longer than usual at Margaret, so I couldn’t imagine what it cost Arthur to be around me. Still, he was the most forgiving soul I ever met. I suspected he blamed himself: his gender, his era, his heart.
“Have you come to a decision on your 1lm schools, Sixty-1ve?” he was asking.
“Prague,” said Margaret promptly. “It is not so far. You may visit me.”
Margaret’s primary skills were of the household-running variety, chores she had barely engaged with since arriving in the future and which she had no intention of picking up again. She “had her letters,” as she put it, but she was still attending adult literacy classes. She’d 1xated on the notion of 1lm schools— that she lived in a world where she could be trained to create cinema, her favorite thing in the twenty-1rst century. The Ministry did have a budget for retraining the expats. But there was no way they would let Margaret out of London, let alone Britain. Perhaps Ralph had been wringing out some daydreams for her.
“Where will you be apprenticed, Sixteen?” asked Margaret.
“Do you have any sense of what, in this brave new world, you’d like to do?” I asked.
“Have a rest,” said Arthur.
“Ha. Yeah, wouldn’t we all. You could try something scandalously outré instead. Joining the circus? Professional go-go dancing? Accountancy?”
Arthur smiled. He was twisting the signet ring on his 1nger. Margaret reached out and took his 1dgeting hand.
“Speak it,” she said.
Arthur sighed. Then he said, “I think the suPragettes did bally well. I can see there are famous career opportunities for a bright and ambitious young lady. But I can’t help noticing that the exchange has not been all equal. I rarely see chaps taking care of old folks or scrubbing the Aoors. People still look at a man ferrying a child without a wife alongside with something like suspicion. Or pity.”
“You want to work with children?” I said, alarmed. We didn’t have material on how to deal with the expats if they got broody, and I wasn’t much good at it with normal people either. Arthur gave me a despairing look.
“You see? You’re surprised. Maybe disappointed.”
“No, that’s not what—Arthur, of course that’s possible—”
“Is it? I’ve read all sorts on the liberation of the queers—do you say it like that, ‘the queers’?—anyway, and the working woman and the feminist revolution and so on and so forth. But… you know, I’m not Forty-seven, I stay awake through everything I watch, and I can see what your era likes. You use the same patterns as we did, as Gray’s people did and Maggie’s too. You just expect women to do more of it, that’s all.”
“But you’re not a woman, Arthur,” I said.
He threw me an amused look—not in one-upmanship, but playfully, for me to catch—and said, “But I’m not the blueprint for the perfect man either.”
“You are the print of a perfect egg,” said Margaret. “Thank you, Sixty-1ve.”
“I love you very well, egg.”
“Love you too. That’s a 1ne example of what I mean, by the way! I am supposed to hatch into something—very useful and ePective—to make all of this palaver with bringing me over here worth its salt. Even back home—excuse me— back in my era, there was always a sense that money and ePort had gone into mixing my preparation, and I’d jolly well better bake and set in the right mold and not go oP my onion in any way. The reward is, well, all the 1ner things— children, a family, some peace of mind—but the cost is matching the recipe. And I am a little oP my onion, you know.”
“So you—want children?” I asked, audibly Aoundering.
Arthur tossed me another look, but this one was opaque. I’d feel terrible shame about that, in the weeks and months and years afterward. I couldn’t 1nd
the right words to answer him, couldn’t even imagine—high-achieving poster child of an immigrant preserved by the benevolent British state that I was—what the answer might be, but I was saved by Graham’s arrival at the bench. Arthur turned his face up to him.
“Hallo, Gray. Have you 1nished looking at the big boats?” “Ships. I am done with this room, yes.”
“Did you see any nice boats?” asked Arthur pleasantly. “Ships,” Graham said, and stalked oP.
We got up and adjusted our clothes. We were all wearing sheepish, excitable expressions, like children caught drawing on walls. We followed Graham into the next room and crowded around him, clucking annoyingly.
“This sail has the aspect of a cloud! ’Tis wondrous fair. Did you ever mistake an enemy sail for mere weather, Forty-seven?”
“I like this guy’s cool little bandanna. Did you ever wear a cool little bandanna? Something… groovy?”
“This one is rather good. With the burst of light. As if the big boat is coming to collect passengers to Heaven. God’s own dear little ferry.”
“You are all tedious people,” he said calmly. “I should have you Aogged for insubordination.”
“Did you ever order Aoggings?” I asked. He ignored me to read the painting’s legend. Quite suddenly, he straightened up, eyes blank, and moved oP without speaking.
“Oh,” said Arthur, distressed. “Do you think we went too far?” I read the legend:
Hurrah! for the whaler Erebus! Another fish! (1846) Turner seems to have borrowed the name of this whaling ship from HMS Erebus, which with her companion vessel, the Terror, had sailed for the Arctic the previous year. In one of the greatest disasters in polar exploration, neither ship nor any of their company returned.
“Ah,” I said.
He brushed oP all attempts to comfort or question him, of course. He arranged the conversation so that his momentary lapse of face was obscured. It was a trick of his, as expertly wielded as his perfect cogency with his “hereness” and “thereness.” He would build sentences around the rooms where burnt and broken things squatted, and I would never be able to see the damage for the bars. Cars took us back to our separate safe houses. Margaret and Arthur wilted as they retreated into the vehicles. Their days of free wandering were over. The twenty-1rst century was a thing that was happening outside their windows. Of course I felt sorry for them. They’d been at the mercy of the Ministry since they arrived. Every in-breath and shed tear was monitored. But the Ministry had
saved their lives. It had some small say in how those lives continued.
At home, Graham, his jaw set and his eyes dull, pushed me against the door. “Do you remember,” I said, “that this is more or less how we 1rst kissed?” “Don’t ask me about the things that I remember,” he muttered.
I put my hands through his hair and he put his face in my neck. “Please,” he murmured.
When he was inside me and his breath was dewing my throat, I wondered what was going through his mind. I kissed him until my lips hurt, and I tried to hear his thoughts. What was it like, to be the only one who came back? The only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with? The last one still able to die?
The crumble and leak of our new lodgings were as uncomfortable as wearing ill- 1tted clothing. I became acutely aware of the vulnerability of my body, as if it were a rented house with locks I hadn’t had the chance to change. The 1eld agent program included a course in unarmed combat and, at Adela’s insistence, I signed up to see if it would make me feel any better. After I’d attended six sessions, Adela appeared one day, in expensive athleisure.
“Spar with me,” she said. “I’d like to see what you’ve learned.” “Mainly that it’s almost always better to run away.”
“That’s a start,” said Adela, then kicked my feet out from under me. I hit the mat with an embarrassing grunt-woof.
“You didn’t say we’d started!”
“Attackers generally don’t,” said Adela placidly. I rolled out of the way just before her heel came down on my stomach and scrambled upright.
“No, if it’s the Brigadier, he’ll just shoot me with—He’s got this weapon that makes blue light and—”
“You’ve escaped once. There, why did you strike so slowly? Now I have your wrist.”
I wrenched free and skittered backward. “What does that mean, I’ve escaped ‘once?’” I panted. “Is he coming back? Do you have information on that? Where is he? Ow! Jesus!”
“I was merely remarking upon it. You are more capable than you realize. How is Commander Gore?” Adela asked, easily blocking two weak punches. “I understand the quartermasters 1led permission to train him on long-range weapons. You are telegraphing your punches.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not going to,” she said, and landed a meaty blow into my shoulder. “Ow!”
“Block.”
“Ow! I’m trying! Yeah, he’s at the Ministry almost as much as I am. Not just for training either. For historical context too, I think. Aah! Like. No one explains the Cold War better than the archivists. Fuck! Ow! Also a while ago I dropped some big history on him with no context and he’s working his way backward through declassi1ed missions.”
“Blitzkrieg and 9/11.”
“Ha. Ouch! The trenches and Auschwitz, actually.” Adela froze, the edge of her hand arrested mid-strike. “What?”
“I said the word ‘Auschwitz’ out of context and he spent all night looking up the Holocaust.”
“You didn’t tell him about the attack on the Twin Towers?” asked Adela. She seemed genuinely confused. Her hand hovered in midair. I hesitated, then
decided this must mean the sparring was over, and relaxed.
“No. God, can you imagine? He’d already spent 1839 blowing up the sultanate at Aden. I’m not sure how much I’d trust him to keep the whole war on terror thing in, like, non-racist proportion.”
“Yes,” said Adela, in a Aaking voice. “If he’d come to the news abruptly, he would have converted to the Ministry on the spot.”
She met my eye and added, “I imagine.” Slowly the look went rancid.
“I had my guard down. It would have been sensible to attack then,” she said, and punched me in the face.
Beating the shit out of me put Adela in a good mood for several days. I wrangled permission from her to take Graham for a monitored bike ride to Greenwich, to see the Franklin expedition memorial. “We can’t expect him to adjust without closure,” I’d said. “And it might improve his grip on his ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness.’ I know he’s already scoring highly on voluntary readability, but there’s no harm in reinforcing it.” She’d looked at me as you might a cat that, with unusual perspicacity, has brought home a ten-pound note instead of a dead mouse.
The day I’d chosen was, in fact, fair. The light was even and soft, like carefully sifted Aour. Deranged by the heat shift, unseasonal roses were bursting and shedding luminously in front gardens and public squares. A cool breeze ran alongside us as we cycled; it resembled nothing so much as a handshake. As with every time I experienced clement weather, I was overcome with the sense that my troubles and pains had been put on hold, and would resume after an interval break in which I could, spiritually speaking, use the bathroom and get a drink and generally 1x myself.
Under the March sunlight, the buildings of the Old Royal Naval College looked scrubbed and canvas-clean. He stared out over the long green lawns, frowning.
“It’s a monument to itself.”
“Yes. But a very beautiful one.”
“How curious that I have survived to watch my obsolescence grow old enough to be celebrated as legendary.”
He walked slowly up the path, looking around as if he’d never seen a building in the wild before.
“Little cat,” he said, and I obediently trotted to his side. There were at least two other people in sight distance, which meant we were in public, which meant he wasn’t going to kiss me or embrace me, but he reached out and quickly squeezed my hand. For him, this was a scandalous display of aPection.
We walked side by side to the chapel, at a chaste and proper distance, and up the steps.
“Oh,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Somehow I did not think it would be—right there.”
The chapel’s memorial to the Franklin expedition, under which the body tenuously identi1ed as assistant surgeon Harry Goodsir was buried, was in an alcove near the entrance. I was embarrassed by the sight of a half-rolled poster display for a recently closed exhibition and a small herd of black queue barriers which had been left nearby. The moment should have been grand, heartrending, important. I felt sure there should be mournful organ music. Instead the memorial looked forgotten.
He stood and stared for a long time at the engraved muster roll of officers. “They promoted Edward, then,” he said softly. “Good.”
“All the mates got their commission too.”
“Oh, as it ever was. One often had to wait for someone to die in order to ascend the ranks. It’s just unusual for the person dying to be oneself.”
I smiled unsurely. He was very pale. A trick of the shadow had swallowed the green in his eyes. They were an opaque, Aat brown, like a spring tree that had failed to regrow.
“And—Dr. Goodsir is—?” “Yes,” I murmured.
“He was in 1ne, bombastic form the last time I saw him. He came out to the magnetic observatory and went into rhapsodies about the lichen. He told me
moss is a sign that God has a sense of humor, and fungi that he has a sense of awe. He was very eccentric. You would have liked him.”
“Yeah. I’ve read his letters home. He seemed like a funny man.”
“I forget that we are objects of study to you. That you can read our private correspondence.”
“Sorry.”
“No, don’t be. At least they are remembered and cared for still.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this. I touched my 1ngers to his palm.
He made a soft, gear-adjusting noise in his throat and said, “Would you mind if I had some time alone here?”
“Of course not. Uh. Should I wait—”
“You may wish to 1nd something to occupy yourself.” “Ah. Yes. I’ll go to the museum.”
I regretted saying that, because part of the museum had relics dug up from the collapse of his expedition, but he was already in a diPerent place in his mind. He didn’t look at me, but he reached out and brushed my cheek, as he might have absentmindedly petted an animal. “Thank you,” he said.
In the end it was an hour before he sent me a carefully composed text, arranging to meet me near the entrance to the Greenwich foot tunnel. We got lunch at a food stall, and I could see him trying to work out the recipe for the Nutella-covered pisang goreng. I joked that we’d have to buy a 1re blanket and he accused me of having little faith, then asked why I’d never let him have Nutella before. I said that I tried not to let myself have it otherwise I ceased to partake of the other food groups.
He said, “On the subject of which.” “Yes?”
“Cannibalism.” “Uh.”
“I knew those men.” “Yes.”
“And they wouldn’t have done that.”
He looked at me, as if debating how much I would weigh if I were hundreds of beans and poured in a bottle.
“Would they?” he added.
“I’m sorry. If you know about that then you know how we know. The Inuit had no reason to lie. And, well. We found the remains, eventually. The British, I mean, and the Canadians and so on. The bones had knife marks. There’s this thing called pot polishing—”
He held up his wooden fork, and I broke oP. His lips were pale. So was the rest of his face, but it was the lips that startled me. Finally he said, “Do you believe the natives were telling the truth?”
“Graham. It’s what happened. There’s archaeological evidence.” “But then you believe that it could have been true of me.”
“It would have been true of anyone. They were starving.” “And the Esquimaux didn’t help.”
“We say ‘Inuit.’ They crossed paths here and there. I know there’s at least one record of a successful joint caribou hunt after the ships were abandoned. But. I mean. You must remember what King William Island looked like. There’s just not enough game to support that many men.”
He gave me a strange, blurry look, like he was burying something in the back of his skull. “Do you know the names of the last men?” he asked.
“No. About thirty men made it to the 1nal camp at Starvation Cove. But we don’t know who. Some people think the very last survivors were Captain Crozier and Dr. McDonald, based on Inuit testimony, but really we have no idea.”
Relief crept through his face. I wondered who he had imagined, starving and blank-eyed, picking calf muscle from their teeth.
The next morning, when I woke up, he was in my bed.
We’d taken to sleeping together most nights. He slept as if a plug had been pulled on his brain. He looked sweetly boyish when he was asleep, and it made me afraid. I adored him, and it was robbing me of a layer of skin.
But he was rarely still in bed in the mornings, as he rose some two hours before I did. When I saw him there, lying still on his back and staring at the
ceiling, I felt a shiver of wrongness.
“I’m never going back, am I?” he said. His voice was low and conversational, as if we were picking up a chat we’d been having 1ve minutes beforehand.
I wriggled closer and settled my hand on his chest. “No. You can’t.”
“I don’t think I really believed it. But it’s true. They’re all dead. Everyone I ever knew is dead. Everything I had in my life is gone.”
I rubbed my thumb on his chest.
“Be present and calm,” the Wellness team had advised. “Focus on action. Accept confusion; do not demand explanation.”
He stared at me, vague and empty, the way an animal looks at a book.
“There is no one left in the world who has known me for longer than a few months. I am a stranger in a strange land.”
“I know you.” “Do you?”
“I’m trying. I’d like to know you better.”
Something softened in his face, enough that I caught a glimpse of the ocean of sadness he had dammed and kept damming, every night, every day.
“Come here,” he said.
People sometimes asked me if I’d ever been “back” to Cambodia. I told them I’d “visited.”
On one such visit, with my parents and my sister, my mother arranged a trip to the seaside resort town of Kep. There, women manning market stalls cooked mud1sh and baby squid over charcoal and cheerfully Aeeced us—my mother’s Penh accent as poor a passport as her family’s Western faces—and we ate 1sh and rice with prahok and bitter melon on a raised wooden picnic platform. A wandering drinks vendor with sak yant tattoos told my mother that nice Khmer girls didn’t drink, and my father had to buy the beers and sneak them to her, holding up a fan each time she took a sip, an operation they managed with increasing hilarity.
When we were fed and had made a memory of it, she took us farther up the coast. Eventually we found what she was looking for in an abandoned, weed- choked plot smelling outrageously of animal behaviors. She pulled up something red from the Aoor.
“Look.”
It was part of an intricately carved Aoor tile, bearing the rubbed remains of a mandala pattern. We started to look, amazed, around our feet.
“It was my family’s holiday home,” said my mother. “Your grandmother chose the tiles.”
When something changes you constitutionally, you say: “The earth moved.” But the earth stays the same. It’s your relationship with the ground that shifts.
The time-travel project was the 1rst time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like Aoods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life.
I knew Graham felt adrift on treacherous waters. He desired me—that much was obvious now—but either he wished that he didn’t, or he wished we could have done it his way. He was in an uncertain relationship with everything in our era, but he knew how to make love to me, and he knew it was what I wanted. If I’d let him have his choice, he would never have touched me, but would have courted me chastely in that little house until the Ministry made him enough of a man that he could create an honest woman out of what he had to work with.
I suppose I mean to say that I’d betrayed him, because he’d been told I was his anchor, and instead I insisted he become mine. Betrayed him in other ways too, of course, by keeping secrets from him and reporting on him. But that was all in the original job description.
He sat with his back against the headboard and held me in his lap, rutting unhurriedly into me. My mouth and breasts stung pleasurably where he had kissed me and rasped me with the shadow of stubble on his chin. He rolled one
of my nipples like a rosary bead between his knuckles, and clasped my hips in one arm, pinning me in place.
“Let me—”
“Be good and take it slowly.”
Twice I’d wrenched myself oP him and tried to provoke him into rough movement with my mouth and my hands. Our bodies were slick with sweat, and when I moved away from him to do this, the cold air in the bedroom lapped at me with a peculiar frigid eroticism. When I came back to him, he licked my mouth clean.
“Let me—”
“No,” he said, and bit me lightly on the throat.
On my bedside table, my work phone started ringing. “Oh—”
“Ignore it.” “It’s—uh—it’s—work—”
“So far as I understand it, I am your work. Thus, you are working. Do you like it—when I am very deep—like this—?”
The phone rang out. A few seconds of silence, then it started again. “Oh—Godsake—I should—”
He sighed, then lifted me up and dropped me onto my back. I hooked an ankle around his hips. Soon he didn’t even need that urging. The bed thudded ferociously against the wall. I came, one foot scrabbling at his calf, to the sound of the headboard thumping and the phone ringing. It was very stressful. He climaxed soon after, gasping in my ear. I stroked his back, touching the bump of the microchip.
All the tension streamed oP him, and he Aopped onto me. “Hhhuk. Heavy!”
“I think I put my back out trying to hold your hips at the right angle,” he said peacefully. “For which you are welcome, by the way.”
“GerroP. Phone.”
“Hmm. I’ll stay here until I can feel my spine again.” I waggled about, trying to dislodge him.
“You’re going to get it all over your thighs,” he observed. “And then you will be so annoyed.”
“What happened to the blushing virgin I married?”
“Well, we did not marry. You took me out of wedlock. Now I’m ruined.”
This worked, however. He rolled oP me and pulled the bedsheets around his hips.
“You weren’t a virgin either,” I said cheerfully. He ignored me.
The phone lit up with a text message. It was from Adela.
Come to the Ministry immediately.
9
May 1859. Captain Leopold McClintock’s search expedition has endured eight grueling months trapped in the ice near Bellot Strait. Frostbite, scurvy, and the long, unforgiving Arctic winter have taken a heavy toll on his crew. But now, with the return of the sun, sledging is once again possible.
Lieutenant Hobson sets out south along King William Land. Some Inuit have told him that, nine years ago, they saw a group of about thirty starving, ragged white men—the last survivors, they believed, of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s two ships, *Erebus* and *Terror*, have not been seen since July 1845. None of the officers and sailors who accompanied him have been found.
The Inuit hinted at other horrors too. Dismembered bodies at makeshift campsites. Boots boiled in pots, still filled with human flesh. Knife marks on tibias, finger bones sucked clean of marrow. A final camp on the mainland where they found a corpse with watch chains threaded through slits in his earlobes—perhaps for safekeeping, or perhaps clinging to the hope of returning to a place where the watch might still have value. Hobson stirs his rations and wonders what his own biceps might taste like.
At the location known to Europeans as Cape Felix, he finds the remnants of a camp. Tents are still pitched, filled with bearskins and canvas sleeping bags. He finds two sextants, wire cartridges, snow goggles, and brass screws. He concludes that this wasn’t a camp of last resort, but a scientific observatory, likely set up during the milder summer months. The only oddity is the haste with which it was abandoned, leaving behind valuable Royal Navy property.
As Hobson sledges further south, he discovers a cairn of piled stones. Inside, he finds the only piece of communication from the Franklin expedition that will ever be recovered: a note on Admiralty notepaper, written over twice.
The first message, in strong, confident handwriting, reads:
—
*H.M.S. ships “Erebus” and “Terror” wintered in the ice in lat. 70° 05′ N., long. 98° 23′ W. Having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island, in lat. 74° 43′ 28″ N., long. 91° 39′ 15″ W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77°, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well.*
*Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the ships on Monday 24th May, 1847.*
*(Signed) G. M. GORE, Lieut.*
*(Signed) CHAS. F. DES VOEUX, Mate.*
—
The second, wavering in the margins, reads:
—
*25th April 1848 H.M. ships “Terror” and “Erebus” were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37′ 42″ N., long. 98° 41′ W. This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831—4 miles to the northward—where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May June 1847. Sir James Ross’s pillar has not, however, been found, and the paper has been transferred to this position, which is that in which Sir J. Ross’s pillar was erected—Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.*
*(Signed) JAMES FITZJAMES, Captain H.M.S. Erebus.*
*(Signed) F.R.M. CROZIER, Captain & Senior Officer.*
*And start on tomorrow, 26th, for Back’s Fish River.*
—
The note revealed two crucial details.
First, the expedition had abandoned their ships in April 1848, after two consecutive summers so cold that the sea remained frozen. Twenty-four men had already died, including the renowned Franklin. Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, captains of *Terror* and *Erebus* respectively, led the surviving crew on an overland march of eight hundred miles. None, as far as Hobson could tell, survived the ordeal.
Second, Lieutenant Graham Gore—who had been promoted to Commander in the field—was dead before the march began. History had swallowed him, closing over him as the sea does over an ill-fated sailor.
