1994, Norwich

Adam’s hand throbbed. The tall girl with the surprisingly strong grip hadn’t in fact broken his finger, just stretched the tendons in his hand. Not broken, but still incredibly painful. Under normal circumstances it would have been painful enough for him to take himself to the campus walk-in surgery for a splint or icepack and some serious painkillers, but he was distracted enough that the throbbing in his finger was, for the moment, ignorable.

It can’t be. That’s what his mind was muttering to itself. It just can’t be.

‘What we’ve got to do is get back home to 2001.’ That’s what the girl with the glasses had said while he’d stood in the bathroom, holding his breath and listening to them. ‘Then I’ll send a warning message into the future, to 2056.’

He’d nearly laughed out loud at that. If he had, it would have been the shrill humourless laugh of someone losing their mind. Because this – the stuff they were saying – it was plain crazy, right? Because … because 2001 was seven years from now. 2001 was the future.

Mission Control to Adam, his mind chastised him, are you about to tell yourself that they’re time travellers? Is that it? Have you really gone that insane?

He nodded and chuckled to himself. ‘Yes … that’s it. Maybe I’ve gone completely mad.’ He was halfway to accepting that was what was wrong with him. His two visitors, his throbbing finger, all of it, were just elements of a paranoid delusion. After all, he’d been hiding out in this room for nearly a week, living like a hermit. Beginning to see things.

He decided that the sensible little voice in his head was most probably right, that this was a sign it was time to go see a campus councillor. And maybe, just maybe, he or she could explain to him in a perfectly rational way how come he’d found a message, written in modern English, in a document nearly a thousand years old; how come he was imagining visitations from time-travel girls from the future.

He laughed at how crazy it all sounded.

He was just about ready to admit he’d gone completely insane and help when he noticed a twist of paper on his bed where the girl – Maddy, that’s the name; that’s what your hallucinated visitor called herself, wasn’t it? – had placed her jacket. He reached over tentatively to pick it up, hoping it was just one more example of his mind playing tricks on him and it would vanish in a puff of delusion before he even managed to touch it.

Only it didn’t.

‘Errr … Adam to Mission Control … it’s, uhh … it’s …’ he muttered, turning the twist of coloured paper over in his hand. ‘This is real? Right? I’m not hallucinating this, am I?’

Mission Control had nothing useful to add at this point in time.

He looked closely at the paper in his hand. It was a ticket stub. An entry ticket to what appeared to be a nightclub or a bar or something. The address was West 51st Street, New York. What’s more, it had a date and an admission time stamped faintly like ticker-tape along the bottom.

20:21 – 09-09-2001.

All of a sudden he felt light-headed: dizzy and queasy, excited and terrified all at the same time. He looked again at the faintly printed time and date: 9 September 2001, seven years from now, the girl who’d just left his room was going to go to this New York nightclub.

It was one thing too many for him. He lost balance and flopped face forward on to his mattress.

Outside he heard the clump of boots on the stairs and a moment later a heavy fist on his door. ‘Hey, Adam! Who were those girls?’ Lance’s voice sounded far away; it sounded utterly inconsequential.

‘Suit yourself … you stay in there, you little freak. But tell your weird freak friends not to come round so late next time, right?’

Adam heard none of that. He was already busy mapping out the next seven years of his life.