Page 34 of Love and Other Paradoxes

“The one you can get to from your battlements.” Rob stopped next to a window and peered inside.

Joe shuddered. “By inching along a death-defyingly narrow ledge and shinning up a drainpipe?”

“Yeah. That one.” Rob pulled at the window. It swung open. “Yes! My accomplice came through.” He turned to Joe. “Give me a boost?”

He knelt, wincing as Rob stepped on his shoulder and climbed up through the window. He dropped with surprising agility and turned to help Joe through. “Might not be a great idea. You’re not much of a climber. Wouldn’t want you ending up smeared across Trumpington Street as a patch of Greeney-flavoured jam.”

His old fear, that his life would amount to nothing but a page-six story in theCourier. “It would be a really stupid way to die,” he agreed.

“Speaking of stupid ways to die...” Rob crouched over the bedside table.

Joe came closer to see what he was looking at: an old-fashioned perpetual calendar, with dials for the day, month, and year. Rob scrolled through the final set of numbers until they read 2150. He picked up a pad and paper from the victim’s bedside and wrote a note saying,You have died of old age.

“Wow,” said Joe. “Genius.”

Rob clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here before we get caught up in the time vortex.”

It turned out the time vortex was the least of Rob’s worries. Someone was waiting outside the window, armed with a banana. “Bang,” said the assassin lugubriously.

Rob looked disbelievingly at Joe. “I’m dead.”

“What is it with you and bananas?”

“The banana was incidental. My accomplice sold me out.” Rob glared at his killer, who was taking a picture for posterity. “I forgot rule one of the Game. Make yourself hard to find.”

Joe stared at his friend. “So you’re dead? It’s over?”

“Respectively, yes and no. There’s still the Lent Term Game, and the May Week Game. Two more chances to meet Darcy in thefield and triumph.” Rob lifted his chin. “I do not fear death,” he proclaimed, “for my future is glory.”

“Is that a quote from something?”

“Yes. Rob Trevelyan, 2005.” He pointed at Joe. “If you use it in a poem, I want royalties.”

Joe stared into space.I do not fear death, for my future is glory.There was something important here, unfurling in his mind like seaweed when the tide came in. Rob was dead.Joseph Greene lives with Diana Dartnell in London.

He had documentary proof that he would still be alive at sixty. He didn’t need to worry about falling and dying, because he couldn’t. Not for at least another forty years.

“Greeney?” Rob waved a hand in front of Joe’s face. “What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing much,” he said distantly. “I just realised I’m immortal.”

Twenty minutes later, he stood on the edge of the battlements, ready to jump.

A voice like Dr. Lewis’s rang in the back of his mind—the way to be destined to live to sixty was not to throw yourself off any buildings—but he dismissed it. The book proved that whatever he did between now and then couldn’t kill him.

Unless he was wrong.

He saw Esi in his mind’s eye, looking down tenderly at her mum’s picture. If she was right, there was no deterministic force, no hand of fate holding him back from plunging to his death. But if she was right, then his future was nothing but a possibility. He couldn’t believe that. He needed it to be a fixed reality, even if he had to stake his life on it.

He gathered himself, counted to three, and leapt.

An instant of terrifying plummet. He was falling, nothing between him and the old, cold stones of the court below. His feet hit the ledge, jarring his knees. He scrabbled at the wall, gripped for a crack between the stones, and held.

He clung, sweating, gasping, feeling invincibly alive. He shuffled crabwise along the narrow ledge, grabbed the drainpipe, and shinned up, a preternatural strength animating his limbs. Hauling himself over the lip of the roof, he got to his feet and emerged onto the secret terrace.

“Terrace” was pushing it. It was a flat niche between tiled roofs, with a view of the edge of King’s College Chapel crisscrossed by wires. The place felt like Cambridge folded in on itself, a portal to past and present and future all at once. It was perfect.

Shaking, he opened his phone and took a picture. He sent it to Diana with the message:

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