Through time II ; Flames of time

The morning before Leo shows up *Lily* The alarm drags me out of a dream I can’t hold onto. Something about fire, and a voice I almost recognise. I swipe the screen to silence it and lie still for a moment, staring at the hairline c***k that runs diagonally across the ceiling. The c***k has been there since I moved in. I check it every morning, the way other people check the weather. Still the same shape. Still heading towards the light fitting. Heathcliff is already on the pillow beside me, a great mound of orange fur with one amber eye half open. He kneads the duvet with a paw the size of a biscuit, and the motion tugs the fabric in a slow, insistent rhythm. “All right,“ I tell him. “I’m up.” The flat is cold in the way basement flats always are before the heating kicks in. I pull on my dressing gown and pad through to the kitchen area, where the combi boiler is making its usual morning complaint. Heathcliff follows, tail high, and stations himself beside his empty bowl with the quiet dignity of a creditor who has been patient long enough. I scoop food into the bowls. A tired looking Darcy shows up. They eat. The familiar sound of crunching fills the silence, and I let it. While the kettle heats, I prop my tablet against the fruit bowl and open the news app. The lead story is about the Big Ben restoration project. I skim it without much interest until a phrase catches me mid scroll: the newly discovered ambient-energy converter, believed to predate modern electrical systems by at least a century, will be integrated into the clock tower’s mechanism during the current renovation. I set the tablet down. Pick it up again. Read the sentence twice more. Big Ben does not have an ambient-energy converter. It has a clock. It has a bell. It has stone and iron and Victorian engineering. I have stood beneath it at least a dozen times. I have watched the hands move against the sky. There is no futuristic power source tucked inside the mechanism, and there never was. The kettle clicks off. I don’t move. Heathcliff finishes his breakfast and begins washing his face with the unhurried thoroughness of a creature who has never once doubted the stability of the universe. I watch him for a moment, then force myself to stand and make the tea. It’s a mistake, I decide. A hoax. Some journalist got sloppy, or the restoration team fed the press a line about a minor technical upgrade and the copy desk ran with it. That’s all. I pour boiling water over the teabag and watch it darken. Perfectly explainable. Except that it isn’t the first thing. Yesterday it was a headline about the London Underground trialling a pneumatic tube system on the Northern Line. The day before, a radio segment about the city council debating whether to restore gas lighting to the Embankment, and the presenter spoke as though this were a perfectly ordinary policy question rather than a piece of Victoriana that belonged in a museum. I had switched the radio off halfway through and sat in the sudden quiet of the flat, my hands wrapped around a mug that had gone lukewarm without my noticing. I stir milk into the tea now and carry it to the small table by the window. The window looks out onto a strip of pavement and the lower half of the building opposite. A woman walks past with a pram. A delivery van idles at the kerb. Everything ordinary. Everything as it should be. I open social media. The trending topic is a meme I don’t understand at first. A photograph of a woman in full Victorian dress, bustle and high collar and hair pinned up beneath a small hat, standing in what is unmistakably a modern Tube carriage. She holds a smartphone in one gloved hand. The caption reads: When you’re an influencer but make it 1888. The comments are what undo me. Thousands of them. Laughing, tagging friends, adding their own variations. No one asking why a Victorian woman has a smartphone. No one pointing out that the photograph cannot exist. The joke is that she’s an influencer. The joke is not that the timeline has come unstitched. I scroll until my tea goes cold. Then I scroll some more. There are other posts. A photograph of a horse drawn cab fitted with what looks like a GPS unit bolted to the driver’s seat. A video of a street performer in Covent Garden playing a theremin, and the crowd is dressed in a mix of modern coats and frock coats, and no one seems to notice the frock coats. A news clip about the Royal Mail introducing a new fleet of steam powered delivery vans, and the minister for transport is standing beside one, beaming, his hand on the brass boiler casing. I close the app. I close my eyes. I count to ten. When I open them again, Darcy has jumped onto the table and is sniffing the rim of my mug. I lift him down, and he protests with a low, throaty sound, then settles on the rug and begins grooming his tail. The rug needs hoovering. I notice this, and the noticing steadies me. The rug needs hoovering. The milk in the fridge is about to turn. I have a shift at the hospital in two hours. These are real things. These are things I can touch and verify and act upon. The other things, the wrong things, I file away in the same mental drawer where I keep the dream about the fire and the voice I almost recognise. A drawer I do not open unless I have to. I shower. I dress in my nursing uniform. I pack my bag. Each action is deliberate, a small ritual of normalcy. The flat is warm now, the heating having finally done its work, and the light through the window has shifted from grey to a thin, watery gold. Morning in London. Morning in 2026. I check my phone one last time before I leave. The text message is there, waiting. Unknown number. No name. Just four words. It’s happening. I’m coming. I read it three times. The words don’t change. The number doesn’t resolve into anything I recognise. I tell myself it’s a wrong number, a spam message, a prank. But my hand is gripping the phone too tightly, and I have to make a conscious effort to loosen my fingers. I set the phone on the counter and stare at it. Heathcliff winds around my ankles, and I bend to scratch behind his ears, and the motion is automatic, a comfort I reach for without thinking. The kettle has gone quiet. The boiler has stopped its cycling. In the silence, the message sits on the screen like a stone dropped into still water. I delete it. Then I delete it from the deleted folder. Then I put on my coat and pick up my bag and walk out of the flat, locking the door behind me with a key that fits the lock exactly as it always has. The pavement outside is damp from an earlier rain. A bus grinds past. A man in a high visibility vest is unstacking crates outside the corner shop. Everything is normal. Everything is exactly as it should be. I walk towards the Tube station, and I do not look back.