A love written by fate

Act I: The Geometry of Coincidence

​Chapter 1: The Left-Handed Watch Maker

​The universe, as Julian Avery understood it, was not managed by a grand architect with a drafting table, but by an overworked clerk who occasionally dropped his paperwork.

​Julian was a restorer of chronometers. His shop, tucked into a sliver of brick between a dry cleaner and a defunct bakery in North London, smelled permanently of whale oil, benzine, and the sharp, metallic tang of brass filings. It was the year 1994, though Julian lived mostly in 1880. He liked the nineteenth century because its mistakes were large enough to see with a loupe.

​On a rainy Tuesday in November, Julian was working on a marine chronometer by Thomas Mercer that had survived three torpedo attacks in the North Atlantic only to be dropped down a flight of stairs by a grandson in Islington. The balance staff was bent—a microscopic curvature that required forty minutes of breath-holding with a pair of specialized tweezers.

​The bell above the door gave a thin, rusty tinkle.

​Julian did not look up immediately. In his trade, an abrupt movement could ruin three hours of filing. He finished setting the jewels, released his breath through his nose, and removed his eyeglass.

​"I was told," a voice said from the shadow of the coats near the door, "that you might be able to look at something that isn't supposed to exist."

​The woman who stepped into the light of his fluorescent tube was drenched. Her coat was a dark wool that had absorbed the rain until it looked like peat, and she was holding a small leather pouch with the ginger care one might give an unexploded mortar shell. She had hair the color of roasted chicory, pinned up with a plastic comb that had lost two teeth, and her fingers were stained with indigo ink.

​"Most things exist," Julian said, his voice dry from hours of silence. "Even the things people wish didn't."

​"This shouldn't," she repeated. She laid the leather pouch on his velvet counter. From it, she drew a silver pocket watch.

​Julian did not touch it at first. He leaned over it, his hands clasped behind his back like a museum visitor. It was an English lever watch, approximately fifty millimeters in diameter, with a silver-gilt dial. The case was worn down until the hallmarks were nearly smooth—only the small lion passant remained clear. But it wasn't the age that made him reach for his loupe; it was the second hand.

​The second hand was moving counter-clockwise.

​"It’s an optical illusion," Julian murmured, screwing the lens into his right eye socket. "A reversed train. Some watchmakers in the late nineteenth century made them for use in mirrors, or for barbershops so the clients could see the time behind them."

​"Look closer," she said.

​Julian turned the watch over. The back of the case was engraved with an unusually intricate labyrinth, its paths so narrow they looked like the grooves of a gramophone record. He found the indentation for the case knife and popped the back open.

​The movement inside was clean, almost impossibly so, but it was not an ordinary reversal. The balance wheel wasn't swinging from side to side; it was oscillating vertically, rising and falling on a tiny, hair-thin spring like a piston in an engine that hadn't been invented yet. More peculiar still were the wheels. They weren't brass or steel. They were made of a dark, dull metal that seemed to absorb the light from his lamp rather than reflect it.

​"Where did you get this?" Julian asked, his voice dropping an octave.

​"My grandmother died three weeks ago in Bristol," she said. "Her name was Clara Vance. I was clearing out her attic—she lived in one of those tall, damp terraces near the docks—and I found this inside a tin of loose tea. Along with this."

​She reached into her coat pocket and produced a small, square notebook bound in cracked black cloth. She laid it next to the watch.

​"I’m Maeve," she added, as if remembering her manners from a great distance. "Maeve Vance. I’m an archivist at the Maritime Museum."

​"Julian." He didn't shake her hand; he was already looking at the first page of the notebook.

​The handwriting was neat, sharp, and slanted violently to the left. The ink was faded to the color of dried bay leaves. The first line read:

​November 12th, 1944. The sky today is the color of a wet slate. He has not come through the gate at the quay, but the small wheel has begun to turn backward. I believe the distance between us is shrinking by three seconds every noon.

​Julian looked up at Maeve. Her eyes were gray—the specific, unappealing gray of the Thames on a low-sky day—but they were wide and fixed on his with an intensity that made him want to look back down at the gears.

​"Today is November 12th," Julian said.

​"I know," Maeve replied. "And thirty minutes ago, when I was sitting on the bus outside Euston station, the watch stopped going backward. It started ticking normally. For exactly sixty seconds. Then it went back to this."

​Julian looked down at the watch. The second hand was dragging its tiny silver spade across the dial, from twelve to eleven, from eleven to ten.

​"That's mechanically impossible," he said. "Unless the mainspring has been reverse-coiled and the pallet jewels are shaped like..." He stopped. He felt a strange, cold prickle at the base of his neck, the sensation one gets when they realize they have been standing on a ledge they thought was a pavement. "Show me the next page."

​Chapter 2: The Archive of the Unwritten

​The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is a place where history is kept under heavy glass and regulated humidity. It is an institution dedicated to the belief that the past is a solid object that can be scrubbed, cataloged, and prevented from rotting.

​Maeve Vance did not work in the grand galleries with the oil paintings of Horatio Nelson or the gilded barges of state. Her office was in the basement of the west wing, down a corridor that smelled of old vinegar and cardboard. Her specific task was the conservation of "Unattributed Logs"—the diaries, journals, and scrapbooks kept by merchant seamen, cooks, and passengers that didn't have the official standing of Royal Navy records.

​On Friday morning, three days after her visit to Julian’s shop, Maeve sat at her desk with three different magnifying glasses and the black notebook.

​Julian had refused to keep the watch. “If I keep it here,” he had said, his long, ink-stained fingers twitching toward his tea mug, “I’ll take it apart. And if I take it apart, I have a feeling I won't be able to put the world back together the way it was before.”

​Instead, he had given her a small vial of synthetic oil and a single instruction: “Don’t wind it. Whatever you do, don't turn the crown forward.”

​Maeve opened the notebook to the third page. The entries weren't chronological in the way she was used to. They were dated by year, but the years skipped like a stone across a pond.

​August 4th, 1914. The bells in the town are ringing for the war. Everyone is running toward the recruiting office, but I went to the old well behind the maltings. The iron handle was hot. I dropped a halfpenny down, but I didn't hear it hit the water. I think he was at the bottom, holding it.

​June 18th, 1815. A man came through the village on a horse that was lathered to the ears, shouting that the Frenchman was beaten at Waterloo. I was setting the bread to rise. The dough felt heavy, like lead. My hand shook and I spilled the salt in the shape of a crescent moon. He told me once that the crescent moon was the sign for a closed valve.

​Maeve leaned back, her chair creaking in the small room. The names didn't match. The handwriting was identical throughout—the same sharp, left-handed slant, the same ink—but the names signed at the bottom of the sections changed. Clara Vance in 1944. Margaret Vance in 1914. Christian Vance in 1815.

​"An family myth," her supervisor, a man named Henderson whose skin looked like lard, had said when she showed him a photocopy of the first page. "People used to copy out old family stories to make their lineages look more ancient. Look at the paper, Vance. Is it nineteenth-century rag or modern wood pulp?"

​Maeve had looked. The paper was the problem. It wasn't rag, and it wasn't modern pulp. When she held it up to the fiber-optic light, she couldn't see any grain at all. It looked like a single, continuous sheet of something organic but completely uniform, like the inner lining of an eggshell.

​Her telephone rang. It was the internal line from the security desk at the main entrance.

​"Maeve? There’s a chap down here for you. Says his name is Avery. He’s got an enormous wooden box and he’s refusing to let us put it through the X-ray."

​Maeve found Julian standing in the stone vestibule, looking thoroughly miserable. He was wearing a grease-spotted trench coat that looked as though it had been inherited from a larger uncle, and he was cradling a mahogany case about the size of a typewriter.

​"I found something," Julian said without greeting her. "In the Mercer logs from the Admiralty. I didn't want to call. The phones sound... thin today."

​"Thin?"

​"Like there's too much air in the wires," he said, turning his head as if listening for a distant whistle. "Come on. Show me where you work. I don't like the light up here. It’s too flat."

​In the basement, Julian set the mahogany box on her desk, displacing three folders of nineteenth-century bills of lading. He opened the brass hooks.

​Inside was an instrument that looked like a brass spider caught in a web of copper wire. It had three different dials, none of them marked with numbers, but rather with concentric circles that resembled the growth rings of a tree.

​"This is a vibration galvanometer," Julian said. "It was made by William Du Bois Duddell in 1898 to measure alternating currents. It’s very sensitive to frequencies. I brought it because of the watch."

​"The watch is in my drawer," Maeve said.

​"Take it out."

​She did. The moment the silver watch touched the wooden desk, the needle on Julian’s brass spider gave a violent jerk to the left. It didn't vibrate; it pinned itself against the side of the casing with a soft click.

​"Look at the second hand," Julian whispered.

​The spade hand had stopped its backward march. It was trembling on the number eight, pulsing back and forth by a fraction of a millimeter, like a heart that couldn't decide whether to beat or stop.

​"It knows we’re looking at it," Maeve said, and the thought made her fingers go cold.

​"No," Julian said, his eyes fixed on the needle. "It doesn't care about us. It knows where we are. Look at the notebook, Maeve. Look at the entry for 1944. What was the date?"

​"November 12th."

​"And what did she say about the distance?"

​Maeve opened the book. "'I believe the distance between us is shrinking by three seconds every noon.'"

​Julian pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was covered in his tiny, crabbed calculations, done with a sharp pencil. "I’ve been running the rates. If the distance decreases by three seconds every day, then from November 12th, 1944, to today... do you know where the zero point is?"

​Maeve looked from the watch to Julian’s face. His skin was pale, almost gray under the basement light, but his eyes were bright with a terrifying kind of certainty.

​"The zero point is next Tuesday," he said. "At three minutes past four in the afternoon. Exactly eighty-two years since the first entry was written."

​"And what happens at the zero point?"

​Julian closed the lid of the mahogany box with a sharp snap. "The watch stops going backward. Or everything else does."

​Act II: The Great Disruption

​Chapter 3: The Convergence of Low Tide

​They spent the weekend in Julian’s shop, surrounded by the ticking of seventy-four clocks. It was like living inside the ribcage of a massive, wooden animal.

​Julian had disassembled the casing of the silver watch—not the movement itself, which he still refused to touch, but the outer silver sleeve. Underneath the silver-gilt dial, stamped directly into the baseplate, was a name that hadn't appeared in the notebook: Avery & Sons, Horologists, London.

​"My family didn't have a shop in London in the nineteenth century," Julian said, his fingers turning a small brass screw over and over on his oilcloth. "We were smiths in Yorkshire until my grandfather came down after the General Strike. We didn't make watches. We shod horses."

​"Maybe it’s a different Avery," Maeve said. She was sitting on his packing crate, her knees pulled up to her chin, reading the notebook by the light of a paraffin heater.

​"The trademark is the same," Julian said. He pointed with his tweezers to a microscopic engraving of an owl with an hour-glass in its beak. "That’s my grandfather's mark. He used it on his letterhead in forty-five. He said he saw it in a dream during the Blitz."

​The room grew very quiet, save for the syncopated clack-clack of a grandfather clock from York that was twenty minutes slow.

​"Listen to this," Maeve said, leaning forward. "This is from 1867. 'The man from the forge came today. He has the same scar on his thumb that I have on my knuckle, the three-cornered one from the gooseberry bush. He did not know my name, but when he took the tea from my hand, our fingers stayed together for a second, like we were stuck by frost. He says the tide at the pool is running backward too.'"

​She looked up at Julian. He was holding his left hand over his mouth. He slowly lowered it, exposing his thumb. Near the joint was a pale, triangular scar, the skin white and puckered like a tiny sail.

​"I got that when I was seven," he said. "In my grandmother’s garden in Leeds."

​"The gooseberry bush by the outhouse?" Maeve asked, her voice barely a breath.

​Julian didn't answer. He stood up, went to the window, and pulled aside the green canvas blind. Outside, the rain had stopped, but the fog had come up off the river, thick and yellow with the smell of coal smoke and old salt. It wasn't the clean, gray fog of the nineties; it was heavy, greasy, and filled with the shapes of horses that weren't there.

​"Julian," Maeve said from the desk.

​"Don't look," he said.

​"Julian, look at the floor."

​Around the base of the counter, where the floorboards were worn thin by fifty years of customers' boots, a thin line of river silt was rising between the cracks. It was wet, black mud, smelling of rotten reeds and old iron. It didn't spread; it rose in neat, straight ridges, following the grain of the pine boards like the lines on a map.

​He went back to the counter and picked up the watch. The second hand was no longer trembling. It was moving forward now, but with an erratic, limping gait—two seconds fast, one second slow, like an engine running out of fuel.

​"It’s not that we’re going back," Julian said, his eyes fixed on the gear train through his loupe. "It’s that the two ends of the string are being pulled through the same buttonhole. We’re being dragged toward each other."

​"Who?" Maeve asked. "Who is on the other side?"

​"The people who wrote the book," Julian said. "The people who made the watch. You. Me. The versions of us that didn't stay in their own centuries."

​He looked at her then, and for the first time, Maeve noticed that his eyes weren't just brown—they had small, golden flakes around the pupil, the exact color of the brass shim stock he used to balance the wheels. She felt a sudden, illogical wave of familiarity, not the warmth of an old friendship, but the sharp, cold recognition of an old injury. She knew the way his shoulder dipped when he walked; she knew the specific way he cleared his throat before he spoke about something that frightened him.

​"We have to go to the river," she said.

​"The river is where it ends," Julian agreed. "The zero point is always where the water turns."

​Chapter 4: The Anatomy of a Century

​On Monday night, London began to lose its edges.

​Maeve tried to go home to her flat in New Cross, but the bus stopped at Bricklayers Arms because the road ahead had ceased to be tarmac. The driver, a large man with a mustache that belonged to a different decade, stood on the pavement staring at a stretch of cobbles that seemed to have risen from beneath the asphalt like teeth through gums.

​"Can't go down there," he told the passengers. "The horses won't take it."

​"What horses?" Maeve asked, stepping off the platform.

​The driver didn't answer. He was looking at his own hands. His digital watch was gone; in its place was a heavy white metal turnip watch with a steel chain that led to his waistcoat pocket—a waistcoat that hadn't been there when he took the shift at Peckham.

​Maeve walked. The air was thick with the sound of things falling apart—not with a crash, but with the soft, tearing sound of wet paper. A billboard for a movie starring Tom Cruise was peeling away, and underneath it, painted directly onto the brick, was an advertisement for Gatti’s Hungerford Palace of Varieties from 1892.

​She reached Julian’s shop at midnight. The streetlamps were flickering with a strange, violet light that smelled of ozone.

​Julian was sitting on the floor in the center of the room. He had cleared away the tables and the clocks. In the middle of the bare boards lay the silver watch, the black notebook, and a circle of copper wire six feet in diameter that he had nailed to the floor.

​"The electricity is gone," he said as she let herself in. "The grid went about ten o'clock. But the clocks are still going."

​It was true. Even the ones that hadn't been wound in months, the old skeletal movements hanging on the walls, were ticking. Their pendulums were swinging with a frantic, uniform speed, like a thousand metronomes set to the same furious march.

​"The notebook is filling up," Maeve said, dropping to her knees beside him.

​The pages were turning by themselves, lifted by a draft that didn't exist in the closed room. New ink was rising through the paper, dark and fresh, the words forming themselves from the bottom of the page upward.

​November 16th, 1944. The bombs have stopped falling on London, but the silence is worse. I can hear his hammer through the wall. He is three doors down, but when I look out the window, there is only the old elderberry tree and the crater where the bakery used to be. I am leaving the watch on the sill. If he finds it, tell him I waited until the tide went out.

​"That's my grandmother's entry," Maeve whispered. "But she didn't write it in forty-four. Look at the date at the bottom."

​The ink was still wet, but below the signature Clara, another hand had written: November 16th, 1994.

​"It’s happening now," Julian said. He reached out and took her hand. His palm was dry and hot, and where their skin met, Maeve felt a sharp, electric thrum, like holding the terminals of a small battery. "The time isn't passing us by anymore, Maeve. We’re passing through it."

​"Where are we going?"

​"Nowhere," Julian said, his eyes fixed on the silver watch. "We're staying exactly here. But 'here' is about to get very crowded."

​Chapter 5: The Glass Threshold

​At three o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, the rain returned, but it didn't fall from the sky. It rose from the gutters, tiny droplets of water lifting into the air and hovering like a cloud of silver midges.

​Julian and Maeve stood on the stone steps of the Greenwich Pier. The Thames was a flat, greasy mirror, its surface so still that the reflections of the cranes on the opposite bank looked more solid than the cranes themselves.

​The silver watch was in Julian’s left hand. The second hand was five seconds away from twelve.

​"When it hits," Julian said, his voice dropping to a whisper against the silence of the city, "don't let go of my arm. If you let go, you’ll end up in 1840 or 2040, and I won't have the tools to find you."

​"How do you know there’s a 'you' to find me?" Maeve asked.

​"Because we’ve done this before," he said, looking at her with a sudden, terrible clarity. "The notebook isn't a history. It's a repair manual. Every time the gear wears out, we have to come back to the forge to get it reset."

​The second hand reached eleven.

​The world went perfectly dark. Not the darkness of night, but the total absence of light that occurs when an eye is closed. There was no sound—no river, no wind, no ticking.

​Then came the click.

​It was the sound of a giant iron bolt sliding into a groove.

​A blinding flash of yellow light struck the center of the river. When Maeve’s eyes adjusted, the Thames was gone. In its place was a vast, cobbled plain that stretched as far as the eye could see, illuminated by hundreds of small, flickering fires.

​Around them, the plain was filled with people. They weren't ghosts; they were solid, breathing, and terrified. A man in a leather apron with a face blackened by coal dust was standing three feet away, holding a heavy iron ladle that was still glowing red at the rim. Next to him was a girl in a white linen dress from the 1920s, her hair cut into a sharp bob, holding a portable typewriter that was typing by itself.

​"Julian," Maeve said, her fingers digging into his coat.

​"Look down," he said.

​At their feet, the cobbles were laid out in the shape of an immense gear. The lines of mortar between the stones were glowing with the same dull, dark metal that Julian had seen inside the watch movement. And in the center of the gear, where the axle should be, stood a small, circular iron structure that looked like an old wellhead.

​A man was sitting on the edge of the well. He was old—his hair was white and long, his skin like old parchment—but he had Julian’s eyes and the same triangular scar on his left thumb.

​"You're late," the old man said, his voice like stones rolling in a bucket.

​"The balance staff was bent," Julian said, stepping forward but keeping Maeve beside him.

​"It’s always the balance staff," the old man muttered. He reached out his hand. "Give it here."

​Julian laid the silver watch in the old man's palm. The old man didn't look at the dial. He took a small, silver-handled hammer from his belt and struck the watch once, square in the center of the crystal.

​The glass didn't shatter. It dissolved into a drop of clear liquid that ran down his fingers and fell into the well.

​"The loop is closed," the old man said, looking up at Maeve. "For another eighty-two years. Go back to your papers, girl. And you, boy, use the whale oil. The synthetic stuff clogs the pivots after forty years."

​"Wait," Maeve said, stepping toward the well. "Who are you? Who were we?"

​The old man smiled, and his teeth were gone, but his eyes were bright with the same terrible knowledge that had been growing in Julian's shop.

​"We’re the ones who didn't want to lose each other," he said. "So we built a clock that wouldn't let us."

​He waved his hand, and the smell of whale oil and wet wool rushed back into Maeve’s nose.

​Act III: The Mechanics of After

​Chapter 6: The Normal Seconds

​When Maeve opened her eyes, she was sitting on the packing crate in Julian’s shop. The fluorescent tube overhead was humming its usual, irritating B-flat. Outside, a red double-decker bus was honking its horn at a delivery van.

​The mud on the floorboards was gone. The copper wire was gone.

​Julian was standing at his bench, his eyeglass in his eye, his tweezers steady. On the oilcloth before him lay the silver watch. The crystal was whole, without a scratch, and the second hand was moving from twelve to one, from one to two, with the steady, boring rhythm of every other clock in London.

​Maeve stood up, her joints stiff. She walked to the counter and looked down at the black notebook.

​The pages were old again, dry and yellowed. She turned to the last page. The wet ink she had seen an hour ago was now a faded, grayish-brown. It read:

​November 12th, 1994. The clockmaker has fixed the staff. The world is very loud today, and the air smells of petrol, but he has promised to buy a bun for tea. We have eighty-two years before the tide turns again. I think that will be long enough to finish the inventory.

​Julian took the eyeglass from his eye and looked at her. He looked older, or perhaps just tired in the way men look when they have finished a long piece of work that no one else will ever see.

​"Do you want that bun?" he asked.

​Maeve looked at the watch, then at his hand—the thumb with its small, three-cornered sail.

​"Only if it’s from the bakery next door," she said.

​"The bakery closed in seventy-eight," Julian said, his mouth twitching into the briefest hint of a smile.

​"Then we'll have to wait for it to reopen," Maeve said, and she reached across the velvet counter to take his hand. This time, there was no spark—just the warm, solid weight of a person who belonged in the same year as she did.