A future that is already broken. A paradox that must be solved. A love that can never be erased.

When Cal meets a soldier of the French Revolution, he knows his lover is destined to die.  But what is the point of being a time traveller if you can’t make a few small tweaks to the course of history?  A little paradox here, an alteration there – nothing Cal can’t fix, to save the man he loves.

When Fadimatu walks into a museum in 2018, she stumbles upon her own mummified corpse, setting her on the path to a betrayal that has already killed her, and a murder that has not yet come to pass.

And when a sudden rupture in the fabric of history rips through the lives these travellers have built, breaking both past and future, they must reckon with death foretold, love forsaken, and a secret that will shatter time itself.

Exclusively read the first section of As We Fall Through Time below:

The time traveller met Olivier at Madame Pelassier’s soirée. The year was 1789, and an icy winter was about to crack the boiling enthusiasm of the summer fires, a cold lance across the hot thrill of revolution. Olivier wore his uniform, all starched white and gleaming gold, and said: “But what does it even mean, an oath to the king?”

The time traveller wore a dark blue waistcoat and knee- length cream breeches. Today he was male, for ease of pursuing his goals; tomorrow she might be female again, taking a break from the company of the philosophers who knew the answers to everything, as only a certain kind of frock- coated gentleman can. His clot- coloured hair was hidden beneath an only slightly anachronistic wig; brown eyes laughed from an autumnal face that in the realms of art would have been sculpted by an apprentice on their first day on the job. His ears were a bit too large, sockets a bit too deep, nose too wide, cheeks a little too sallow, resulting in an oversized gauntness that the charitable called “characterful” and a fashion designer in 2008 had dubbed “so ugly as to be enthralling, my dear”.

He was shorter than most people in the room, and striking in certain absences – absent the usual pox marks, limps from a poorly set bone, loose goitres and so on that were the background, chronic, low- level hum of most of human history. Absent too was the usual smell of sweat, powder and the pungent oils used to try and mask these medical odours. Instead, if one had deigned to stick one’s snout into an offending armpit, one might have caught the faintest
whiff of papaya- scented bubble bath.

The time traveller’s name was Cal, and when he spoke French, it was with an accent that he pretended was Swiss – no one minded the Swiss. He smiled and bobbed and said “oh how interesting” and drank the surprisingly good wine on offer – and in this manner drifted into Olivier’s orbit just in time to hear the young soldier proclaim: “If a king is appointed by God, then are we not swearing our allegiance to the divine? Should our politicians all be priests?”

The room tittered – it was an age for tittering. Questions were being asked that a few years ago would have resulted in punishment far stricter than the indignation of an elder gentleman as he exclaimed: “One land, one crown – this is how wars are won!”

Beneath his powdered wig, Olivier’s closely cropped hair was a fluff of ash brown. His eyes, owl- like in a face of low hills and soft valleys, were two green- grey baubles caught in an expression of perpetual wonder that his lived experience did not merit. He spent the vast majority of his days trying to source salted pork and fresh hay for the garrison, and tried to mask the scent of manure with a withering pomander of dried orange he kept in a pocket. He was twenty- seven years old, and had disappointed his father – the owner of a wallpaper factory near Nantes – by joining the army with a dashing cry of: “But is one’s duty to one’s country not greater even than the duty owed to the father?”

Duty had been the watchword when Olivier was growing up. Of course his father had meant duty to the family and unquestioning devotion to the mysteries of wallpaper – but as with so many parental good intentions, things had gotten out of hand.

“What use a king when his ears are poisoned by courtiers and Austrian wives?” chimed a lady in fern green and powder pink who liked to cause trouble, if only to remind people that she was here, in this room, still alive.

“Kings are but men,” another agreed.

“Men are but men – what is your point?”

“If the National Assembly called on you to arrest your king, would you do it?”

“One could argue that the National Assembly already has . . .”

“Peasants! Sans- culottes! Street- rabble.”

“Darling, there are more of them than there are of us . . .”

And as the men and women of this new age bickered beneath the drooping candlelight of the crystal- glittering room, the time traveller listened, smiled politely and said hardly anything at all. This is the common condition of most time travellers during events of massive political upheaval. They stand on the sideline while people – honest, good people who do not know the hurricane is about to blow – are buffeted by a history that, to the traveller, has already ended. The storm passes and these gossipers are merely footnotes in a book; just another breeze, the traveller seems to say. Just another cloud passing across the sky.

Olivier, however, did not care for quiet onlookers. It was an age of new men and grand conventions, and thus, seeing Cal quiet in the corner of his eye, he turned and blurted: “What do you think?”

Cal rolled the stem of his glass in his hand, considered the reflected candlelight dancing across the ceiling, gazed down at the floor, then met the soldier’s eye and said: “In my experience, the more men talk of big ideas and grand, divine designs, the more likely they are to fire grapeshot into their peers for getting in the way.”

Scoff, scoff, said some, scoff and tush!

But Olivier just stared at the time traveller as if seeing straight through his puffy white sleeves, his silken cravat and aura of polite respectability, right down to his rather anachronistic breathable cotton underpants. Cal smiled, held his gaze, and for a little while audible conversation continued about them while an inaudible dialogue passed between the two men, until someone on Olivier’s right said something that was too fantastically pig-headed for the young man to let pass.

In the street outside, in the brittle- boned darkness of the Paris night, Olivier says his farewells at the same time Cal does, and it is an accident, but not an unhappy one. “Where are you headed?” he asks the traveller, and Cal briefly struggles to reply.

“Well, I was going to that patch of wall over there, which will still be standing in 2018 and thus presents an adequate loci of temporal travel. Then I was going to either walk through a decade with decent street lighting or get the Métro to my perfectly pleasant four-star hotel just off rue de Bretagne” – did not our time traveller say?

Instead: “Le Marais,” he blurted, in the face of Olivier’s polite stare. “I am staying with a friend.”

“Ah – my rooms are not so far from there. Do you have a lantern?”

Cal does not. Cal had not planned on sticking around in 1789 long enough to need one. Olivier tuts at him – actually tuts like the little officer he is, rising fast through rapidly thinning ranks – then holds up his freshly burning light and says, “Well then, I will accompany you.”

Olivier, for all that he is a lieutenant, does not have much in the way of disposable income, and rather unfashionably walked to Madame Pelassier’s. His father would have been mortified, but Olivier is unafraid of censure, vagabonds and those who have been so emboldened by the word “revolution” as to think that it extends to “do what you want, to whom you want, whenever the shadows are deep enough”. In other words, he is recklessly confident with a
sword, despite having barely ever used it.

Cal, he thinks, does not look confident with a sword, although he would be surprised – both by Cal’s proficiency, acquired from a Dutch master who’d served in the armies of both France and Austria and was very pragmatic about the art of cutting hands, and by the pepper spray he carried in his pocket, another anachronism for a traveller far from home.

Cal hesitates, face half cast in the light of Olivier’s lantern.

He should say no, utter a polite “Ah, but I have forgotten my hat!” or some other feeble excuse. Manners are not always a concern to a time traveller, who knows – oh how they know – that today’s conversationalist will be, is already, has already died, their name written in some dusty archive to be perused a few centuries from now. Then again, Cal has travelled enough to have come to realise that there is a real beauty in the here and now, a wonder to be found
in those who live it, for whom then is now and now is everything, and though sometimes he forgets, tonight he looks at Olivier . . .

. . . and he remembers.

And for a moment he looks at Olivier, and Olivier looks at him, and Cal thinks there is . . .

. . . something.

A little more than courtesy in the corner of the soldier’s eye.

They walk through the night, at a pace that is absolutely perfect for a mugging, chatting as if they were out for a springsome frolic in the fields south of Saint- Marcel. Which is not to say that Olivier’s eyes do not flicker to the shadows, nor his hand rest upon the hilt of his blade. He is a soldier, and a soldier’s duty is to protect others, even – if
not especially – when they appear to be a naive Swiss, far from home.

And what is home? Olivier asks.

Ah, mountains, Cal lies, snow in winter brighter than any summer’s sun, lakes bluer than the sky, skiing . . .

Skiing?

Cal swallows as if he could gulp the guilty word back down his throat. Yes, people have been strapping big bits of wood to their feet to bimble across snow for millennia – but the name, the idea, is not going to start entering the popular imagination of Europe for a few decades yet . . .

“A kind of game we play, like winter skating on a frozen lake, only with snow.”

“I see,” says Olivier, and doesn’t really.

The last time Cal was actually in Switzerland was 1928, but that was decades ago (in centuries yet to come) and he briefly regrets that he was so blasé about his visit to this era that he didn’t bother to pop over to Geneva to do the bare minimum of research. Getting a little sloppy, Cal. Getting a little too casual about dropping into an age of fire.

“And what brings you to Paris?” Olivier asks, and he is genuinely curious in a way that in just a few years will be a trap of a question muttered by angry men with tricolour sashes and grey, hungry lips.

“I am a dealer in antiquities. Ancient artefacts – Roman coins and blades, unusual paintings, the lost jewels of Charlemagne, that kind of thing.”

The word “archaeologist” has absolutely not entered the local lexicon yet, but everyone understands a yearning for the past, for fantastical glory days when kings were strong, bold, wise and possessed of spectacularly bushy beards.

“I came to Paris,” Cal adds, a little less enthusiastically, “looking for something very unusual – an item really quite remarkable and also utterly banal. I had hoped Madame Pelassier would have some information regarding it, but I fear I have got my timings wrong.”