Skye Till pushed through the glass doors of Time Ltd just after eight, coffee still warm in her hand and pastry crumbs clinging to the sleeve of her cardigan. At twenty-eight, she looked more like a school librarian than someone who spent her days piecing together fractured minds—her long, thick brown hair pinned back with plastic grips, her oversized jumper hiding a slight frame with gentle curves beneath it, and her round, blue eyes constantly moving to take in every detail around her. She was careful by nature, the sort who checked electrical plugs twice before leaving for work and kept her tea tins arranged by date. The reception hall always felt too bright for what went on beneath it, all polished floors and quiet voices that never quite matched the work. Sam looked up from the desk as she approached, tall and broad, old field scars pale against his neck. His brown eyes crinkled the way they always did when he meant to wind her up.
“Morning, Counsellor. You’re almost on time. Miracles still happen, then.”
“Don’t start,” Skye said, though she almost smiled. “I brought you nothing. Suffer.”
He laughed under his breath and waved her through. She took the corridor to her office, the soundproof one with the soft chairs and the locked side door that only management used. No one ever explained the door properly. Skye had learned not to ask. She set her bag down, checked the kettle, then crossed to the filing cabinet for the morning’s reports. Squad notes. Return debriefs. The usual weight of other people’s fear.
She sat at her desk and pulled open the first case file. It belonged to an operative named Miller who had spent six months in Victorian London, trailing a temporal anomaly through the soot and narrow alleyways of Whitechapel. His debrief notes were messy, written in jagged, frantic handwriting that strayed off the lined paper. Keeps following me into the quiet, one line read. Not a man. Just the shadow of someone standing behind the curtain when the wind drops. Skye sighed, smoothing the paper down with her palm. She saw it every week: field stress, isolation, the quiet madness that set in when you spent too long surrounded by people who were dead a hundred years before you were born. Time travel broke something inside the human mind if you let it. It chipped away at the edges of who you were until you couldn't tell if your memories belonged to you or to the reports you had read before going under.
She took a sip of her tea, the steam rising between her face and the yellowed paper. Somewhere in the wall behind her desk, a pipe gave a long, metallic groaning sound. Skye froze, her mug halfway to her mouth. The building was old enough to have strange plumbing, but the sound didn't come from water. It was a rhythmic, scraping vibration, like iron sliding over stone. She set her cup down on the wooden blotter, her gaze drifting toward the locked side door. The brass handle stayed still, dull under the pale fluorescent strip lights overhead. Yet the scraping continued for three long seconds before fading into silence, leaving her office feeling strangely cold.
The door behind her opened without a knock.
“Sam?” She turned, expecting another joke. “If this is about the pastry—”
He stood too close. His eyes were wrong. Not brown anymore. Completely black, wet and deathless, as if someone had poured ink into them and left no white at all. Skye’s breath caught. She stepped back and hit the cabinet. He moved with her, hands closing around her upper arms hard enough to bruise. The smell of him changed—smoke first, then cold metal.
“Wait,” she managed. “Sam, stop—”
The black eyes held her. Something pressed behind her thoughts, heavy and patient. The room tilted. Her knees went. Darkness folded in from the edges until there was nothing left but the tick of a clock she could no longer see.
She came back sitting at her own desk.
The reports were finished. Neat stacks. Her handwriting, precise and even, filled three full forms she had no memory of starting. Her coffee had gone cold. The clock on the wall said two hours had passed. Skye stared at her hands. No marks. Only a faint ache in her arms where someone had held her.
She reached out with a trembling finger and touched the top sheet. The ink was completely dry, perfectly formed into her usual neat cursive, detailing psychological evaluations for two agents she hadn't even interviewed yet. The assessments were thorough, citing specific behavioral metrics and emotional stability scores that she couldn't possibly have known. On the margin of the third sheet, hidden beneath a crossed-out line about sleep patterns, a single phrase was written in her own hand, over and over until the paper was nearly torn through: The door is open. The door is open.
Her stomach lurched. She grabbed the edge of the desk, her breath coming in quick, shallow gasps as the silence of her office pressed in against her ears. The clock on the wall ticked with a heavy, deliberate thud. Ten after eleven. Two full hours wiped clean out of her life. She couldn't remember Sam's face after his eyes turned black. She couldn't remember him leaving. She couldn't remember taking out her fountain pen or pulling those forms from the cabinet drawer. Her fingers smelled faintly of copper and damp smoke, the same sharp scent that had filled her nose when Sam had held her against the metal filing cabinet.
Skye pushed herself back from the desk, her chair scraping loudly across the linoleum floor. She stumbled toward the small washbasin in the corner of her office, turning the brass tap until cold water splashed against the white porcelain. She washed her hands twice, scrubbing her palms until the skin went raw and pink, but the feeling of those hands on her upper arms remained—a heavy, unnatural weight that felt less like flesh and more like cold iron settling into her bones.
Agent Agei knocked once and entered before she could answer. He took in the scene the way field men did—quick, quiet, already sorting what mattered.
“Dr Till. You all right? You’ve been dark on the system.”
“Fine,” she said too fast. “I must have… lost track.”
He glanced at the completed files, then at her face. Concern flickered and settled into protocol. “Mr Thompson wants you. Now.”
Thompson’s office sat higher in the building, all glass and silence. He did not ask her to sit. He simply slid a thin folder across the desk.
“You volunteered this morning,” he said. “For 1905. Squad 21. They’re fraying. Long deployment. We need a counsellor on the ground under cover. You’ll travel as Lady Bell. Mr Z will play your husband, Lord Bell. The house is already arranged. Departure is tomorrow.”
Skye’s mouth went dry. “I didn’t—”
“You signed. Audio log confirms it. Agei witnessed the paperwork an hour ago.” Thompson’s tone left no room. “This is not a discussion. You leave at dawn. Pack light. Period kit will be issued downstairs. Do not discuss the assignment outside these walls.”
She nodded because there was nothing else to do. Admitting the missing hours would mean evaluation. Evaluation meant locked wards and questions she could not answer. She took the folder and left with her pulse hammering in her throat.
The corridor outside Thompson’s office felt longer and narrower than it had an hour ago. The green carpets swallowed the sound of her shoes, and every door she passed seemed shut against her, dark wood fitted with brass keyholes that stared like blank eyes. Skye clutched the thin folder to her chest, her knuckles white. As she reached the main staircase, she saw Sam sitting at the reception desk below, leaning back in his chair while he flipped through a newspaper. He looked entirely normal. The morning light caught his reddish hair, and he tapped a pencil against his knee to the rhythm of some song only he could hear.
Skye stopped at the top of the stairs, her heart thumping against her ribs. She watched him for a long moment, waiting for his eyes to flicker, for the dark stain to return, but he simply turned a page of his paper and took a sip from a paper cup. He was the same Sam who had joked about her pastry three hours ago. Had it been a hallucination? A sudden neurological snap brought on by stress and too many late nights spent reading the trauma of field agents? But the bruise on her upper arm throve with a dull, persistent heat, and the completed forms on her desk remained written in her own neat hand.
She walked down the steps, keeping her boots close to the wall so they wouldn't squeak. When she reached the lobby floor, Sam raised a hand in a lazy wave without looking up from his crosswords. “All good with the boss, Counsellor? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Skye paused, her throat so tight she could barely swallow. “Fine,” she managed to say, her voice sounding flat and distant to her own ears. “Just… a new assignment.”
Sam chuckled, clicking his tongue. “Lucky you. Better than sitting in a dark office all day listening to Miller cry about the Victorian shadows.” He finally looked at her, his light brown eyes bright and entirely clear. There was no trace of ink, no coldness, no smell of smoke. “Have a good trip, Skye. Bring us back something nice from the past.”
The train to Walsall felt longer than usual. Her flat smelled of cat food and the sweet, artificial sharpness of lavender spray, thin and futile against the deep, bitter hum of old smoke that clung permanently to the wallpaper. Snuggles wound around her ankles, complaining. Skye moved through the rooms on automatic, checking every plug socket twice the way she always did. Fire had taken her parents when she was nine, leaving behind charred floorboards, sirens in the night, and a dark room full of ashes where her childhood had ended. Smoke still made her hands shake. She unplugged the kettle, the lamp, the radio. Only then did she pull the small case from under the bed.
She packed spare underthings, a notebook, the cheap watch that never left her wrist. Nothing that would look wrong in another century. When the bag was zipped she crossed the hall and knocked on Janet’s door.
While she waited for the latch to turn, Skye looked down the dimly lit hallway of her apartment building. The yellow wallpaper was peeling near the ceiling, showing patches of damp plaster beneath. It was a quiet building, inhabited mostly by pensioners who kept to themselves and spent their afternoons listening to daytime television. Everything here was mundane, broken, and slow. Yet standing on the welcome mat, Skye felt an overwhelming sensation that the walls were thinner than they used to be—as if the safe, predictable world she had built for herself was merely a thin layer of paint laid over something dark and endless.
Janet opened it wrapped in her usual cardigan, silver hair neat, smile ready. “Skye, love. Everything all right?”
“I need a favour. Work trip. Can you feed Snuggles? Fish only. She’ll pretend to starve otherwise.”
“Of course. Come in a minute.”
Skye stepped inside. Janet’s hand closed around her wrist without warning. The old woman’s eyes flooded black the same way Sam’s had. Her grip was iron.
“You will not be returning,” Janet said, and the voice was not hers. It came from somewhere deeper, scraped and cold. “You are the entity’s now. You have been marked.”
Skye yanked free. Janet blinked. The black drained away. She looked briefly confused, then merely kind again.
“Sorry, dear. Did I drift? I’ll look after the cat. Don’t you worry.”
Janet smiled, her hands resting naturally in the pockets of her knitted cardigan, entirely unaware of the words that had just spilled from her mouth. She reached out and patted Skye’s arm with a soft, paper-thin hand that trembled slightly with age. “You make sure you wrap up warm, love. The weather’s turning cold out there.”
Skye backed into the corridor, heart slamming, and locked her own door with shaking fingers. She ran a bath because she needed the noise of water and the steam to hide in. When she stripped and stepped into the tub the pain came sharp under her left ribs. She looked down.
Something metallic sat beneath the skin. A tiny gold scroll, no longer than her thumb, ridged and wrong. She pressed it. It did not move like a scab. It felt rooted. She found nail scissors on the shelf and, before sense could stop her, cut the skin just enough to pinch the thing free. Blood welled. The scroll lay in her palm, warm, inscribed with words so fine she had to tilt it toward the light.
As I bleed through the ages, I am ready.
She read them aloud without meaning to. The gold flared once, soft and sickly, then dimmed. Skye wrapped it in tissue, shoved it deep into the side pocket of her bag, and sat in the cooling water until her teeth chattered. Reporting it would mean confinement. She already knew what Time Ltd did with anomalies they could not classify. She left the scroll where it was.
Sleep came in fragments. When she closed her eyes, the dark did not stay empty. It turned thick and hot, smelling of scorched lath and wet cinders. In the nightmare, she was small enough that the skirting boards reached her elbows. A voice she knew—her father's—was shouting somewhere beyond a closed door, low and panicked in a way he had never been during the day.
She ran her small hands along the wallpaper, feeling the heat blooming through the plaster like a living thing. The hallway was filled with a strange, heavy grey fog that didn't rise to the ceiling but crawled along the floorboards, wrapping around her bare ankles like cold water. She tried to call out for her mother, but when she opened her mouth, no sound came out—only a thin stream of soot that tasted of salt and old iron.
“We said no,” he was saying, his fists rattling against a heavy wooden frame. “We told you, not her. Not through our line.”
A second sound answered him, not a voice at all, but a wet, heavy scrape inside the chimney, as if something vast and cold were trying to squeeze down through the narrow brickwork. Flame burst through the gap beneath the bedroom door, silent and pale blue at the edges. Her mother had grabbed her hands then, her palm wet with sweat, her face hidden in shadow. Hold your breath, Skye. Don’t open your mouth to it. Don’t let it in. Then the floor gave way, and Skye fell through heat and black smoke, waking with a gasp that burned her dry throat.
At first light Agei was at her door with a black car. They drove in silence back to headquarters. He led her past the public lifts to a service door she had never noticed, then down a hidden shaft where the air grew noticeably colder. The elevator shuddered to a halt, and Skye stepped out into the glare of bare white tube lights that buzzed overhead. Raw, unpainted concrete stretched down the corridor, the damp chill of it sinking straight through the soles of her shoes as she walked. Two women waited at the far end in neat maid uniforms that belonged to another century entirely.
The air down here tasted different from the rest of the facility—stale, thick with the heavy scent of coal smoke, starch, and damp wool. There were no windows, no clocks, and no sound except the low, continuous hum of machinery working deep within the surrounding rock. Agei stopped three paces back, his arms folded behind his back, his face completely blank as he handed her over to the two women. He didn't say goodbye or offer a word of luck. In the cold light of the sub-basement, he looked less like a colleague and more like a guard delivering a prisoner to the gallows.
“Lady Bell,” the older one said, as if the name already fit. “Arms up.”
They stripped her with practised efficiency and began the layering. Chemise. Drawers. The corset came next. The younger maid braced a knee against Skye’s back and pulled the laces until breath became a careful negotiation. Skye’s ribs protested. The older maid watched her posture the way a drill sergeant watches a recruit.
“Stand straight. A wife of standing does not slouch. She does not gasp. She learns which silences are safest.”
She smoothed down the stiff fabric of the underskirt with quick, heavy strokes that made the stiffened cotton rustle like dry leaves. “Lord Bell is a man of precise habits,” the older woman continued, her voice flat and rhythmic, without any heat or kindness. “He does not like to be kept waiting for his tea. He does not tolerate a wife who twitches her fingers or looks out of the window when spoken to. You will speak when addressed, Lady Bell, and not a moment before.”
Skye tried to draw a full breath to protest, but the bone stays of the corset dug sharply into her breastbone, locking her chest into a rigid, unnatural arch. “I know how to conduct myself,” she managed to squeeze out between her teeth.
The older maid gave a cold, thin smile that didn't reach her eyes. “Knowing and doing are very different things when the house begins to watch you, madam.”
Deep red silk followed, heavy and perfect. Gloves. A necklace that sat cold against her throat. Small ruby pins fixed her long, thick brown hair in place.
“Lady Bell,” the older one said, as if the name already fit. “Arms up.”
They stripped her with practised efficiency and began the layering. Chemise. Drawers. The corset came next. The younger maid braced a knee against Skye’s back and pulled the laces until breath became a careful negotiation. Skye’s ribs protested. The older maid watched her posture the way a drill sergeant watches a recruit.
“Stand straight. A wife of standing does not slouch. She does not gasp. She learns which silences are safest.”
Deep red silk followed, heavy and perfect. Gloves. A necklace that sat cold against her throat. Small ruby pins fixed her long, thick brown hair in place. When they finished, Skye barely recognised the woman in the glass. She looked owned already.
Agei returned with a small tin of pills. “For the nausea. Two now. One on arrival if needed.”
They walked her to the chamber. It was a tall glass cylinder veined with copper and soft blue light. Straps waited at wrists, waist, ankles. Skye stepped inside because the alternative was refusing, and refusing had already been taken from her sometime in those missing two hours. The maids fastened the buckles. The older one leaned close.
“Do not fight the drop. Fighting makes it worse.”
The door sealed. Air pressure changed. The pills sat bitter on Skye’s tongue. Blue light climbed the glass. Somewhere far above, Time Ltd continued its ordinary morning. Down here the chamber hummed, then roared, then tore the present away like paper.
The light grew blinding, pressing hard against her closed eyelids until her whole body felt weightless and wrong, suspended in a cold, rushing silence that stretched on and on. Then the floor vanished entirely, and she felt the century give way beneath her feet.
The drop was not a fall so much as a violent, tearing displacement. It felt as though her skin remained in the glass cylinder while her bones were yanked backwards through miles of dark water. Pressure slammed against her ear drums, accompanied by a sound like a thousand dry pages being torn from a book all at once. For a second that felt longer than an hour, Skye was nowhere. She had no hands, no lungs, no name—only the cold, heavy shape of the gold scroll embedded in her memory, glowing like a brand inside her head.
Then air smashed back into her chest, sour and thick with woodfire and old oil. Her boots struck polished oak with a dull, heavy thud that rattled through her knees. The smell of lavender and cold iron rushed into her throat. Skye reeled, her hands reaching out blindly to catch herself before she fell. Her fingers brushed against the smooth, cold curve of a mahogany bedpost. The rushing sound faded, replaced by the slow, heavy ticking of a tall grandfather clock standing somewhere in the shadows of an unfamiliar room.
