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Ella-is-swell Happy anniversary, boo! 3 years today by my count [citation needed].
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Nuts_Meg You guuuuys! 
LuckyClover We should go to Cambridge next year, take a trip down memory lane.
Ella-is-swell By memory lane, do you mean sitting in the street while you refuse to look at me, LuckyClover?
LuckyClover Isn’t that how all of our dates end, Ella-is-swell?
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File note: Interactions on social media between CLOVE SUTCLIFFE and ELENORE WALKER from 22 July 2059. Included in the fictionalized biography Ella & Clove: A Love Story
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND, 2056
Ella sat down on the ground next to her. Clove turned her head away, not quite able to look at her.
“What are you doing here?” Clove asked. “How?”
“I’m a time traveller. Hey.”
“You’re a— I’m the time traveller. Not you!”
“What, you wanted me to stay in the past and let you leave me?” Ella laughed. “I’m not letting you get away that easily.” She shifted position, trying to get Clove to look at her, but Clove didn’t turn her head. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Ella, not quite yet. She felt too overwhelmed.
“I can’t believe you never worked it out,” Ella added. “It’s not like I blended into the eighteenth century.”
Ella had been a time traveller, this whole time. How had Clove not realized? How had Ella not told her?
“What year are you from?” Clove asked.
“The future,” she replied easily. “Your future.”
“What year?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you that. But you know one of my ancestors. Megan Walker?”
“Meg is your … your ancestor? What?”
“I think she’s my … great-great-great-grandmother? Something like that?”
Clove tried to stop herself from spluttering and failed. “You can’t— I can’t— What? I mean, what?!”
Someone walking past said, “Excuse me,” and Clove shuffled back against the wall, out of the way. She was still looking anywhere except at Ella.
“Sorry I never told you sooner. I didn’t want to interfere with what was supposed to happen.”
“What does that mean? Interfere?” Clove asked.
“Your first trip to the past was known to go a certain way, and—”
“My first trip? What do you mean? Do I go again?”
Ella was quiet. “That’s up to you.”
“I don’t understand,” Clove said. “How do you know anything about me? Why were you even there? Did you go to the past knowing I would be there?”
“You’re famous. I wanted to meet the real person, behind the textbooks.”
“TEXTBOOKS?”
“Yeah. Look, we should talk about this somewhere more private. People are staring at us.”
“But you just—”
“In a bit, OK?”
“Fine! Let’s go!” Clove stood up.
Ella stood up too. “Clove, look at me. The world isn’t going to end if you look at me.” Ella touched Clove’s cheek.
Clove felt her skin go flaming hot. She finally, finally turned to meet Ella’s gaze.
“Hey,” Ella said, a little breathlessly. Clove’s cheeks were hot, and every movement suddenly felt meaningful.
“Hey,” Clove repeated. Now that she was looking at Ella, she couldn’t look away. The make-up couldn’t hide her features, and it only brought out the colour of her eyes and her long eyelashes.
When Ella smiled, it lit up her entire face.
A lump rose in Clove’s throat. She couldn’t ever remember seeing anyone the way she was seeing Ella. She was a supernova, an explosion. She made everything else seem insignificant.
“This is why you were so good at lying,” Clove realized, suddenly annoyed. “You were lying about everything the whole time!”
Ella shrugged. Her eyes never left Clove’s lips. Clove had always thought her lips were too plump for her face, but now that Ella couldn’t look away from them, she didn’t mind them so much. “It’s my job.”
“Job?” Clove asked.
“Let’s go somewhere and talk. We have a lot to cover.”
Ella handed Clove a mug before sitting down opposite her in a quiet corner of the hospital cafe. It was so strange to see Ella in a modern environment, and under fluorescent bulbs rather than candlelight.
“OK.” Ella clapped her hands. “So, let’s start from the beginning. You’re famous.”
Clove made a noise that was the audible equivalent of question marks.
“You’re the first time traveller. Of course you’re famous. You established a whole new area of scientific study: History Control.”
Clove prodded her cream and chocolate sprinkles with her spoon. She had? “What is History Control?”
“It’s a way of adjusting history, of changing minor events to try and improve the quality of life for humans as much as possible. You’ve saved more lives than any other person in all of history.”
“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?”