The Ministry of Time

An unnamed narrator interviews for a secret internal posting and is recruited by Adela, Vice Secretary of Expatriation, into a British government program that has developed time travel. The Ministry extracts people from history who were “supposed to be dead,” hoping to avoid paradox, and assigns each survivor a full-time “bridge” to house them, monitor them, and keep the project secret. In the final briefing, the bridges learn that extraction is medically dangerous and that two of the original expats have already died.

The narrator is assigned Commander Graham Gore, a Royal Navy officer extracted from 1847 after suffering pneumonia, frostbite, scurvy, and injury. She brings him to a Ministry-provided house in London and begins the delicate work of explaining electricity, plumbing, transport, and basic social norms. Gore is sharp and guarded, compulsively touching objects with damaged hands, and quickly becomes restless under the Ministry’s confinement rules. The first destabilizing blow lands when the narrator tells him the Franklin expedition was lost and everyone he knew died by 1850; Gore reacts with shock and numb suspicion that the extraction itself might have caused the catastrophe.

From the start, Gore’s past bleeds through. In Arctic flashbacks aboard the icebound Erebus, officers confront rotten tinned rations, dwindling game, and the terrifying possibility the ice will never release them. Gore experiences “debility” (scurvy) as both bodily collapse and mental unravelling, remembers earlier expeditions and injuries, and clings to hunting as the one act that still gives him purpose. On a solitary hunt, he fires at what he thinks is a seal and realizes too late he has shot an Inuit man; aboard ship he orders offerings and restraint to prevent escalation, but later the dead man’s widow silently demands to look at him, sealing Gore’s guilt into something physical and lasting. At Cape Felix, while men freeze and starve and Inuit trading partners vanish, Gore sees an impossible blue doorway split the horizon—an image that will later echo the Ministry’s technology.

In the present, the Ministry’s control tightens. Gore repeatedly forgets the Franklin expedition’s fate, forcing the narrator and her handler Quentin to treat his memory like a risk factor and schedule scans. Bridge meetings reveal Adela’s priorities: the project is about feasibility, not comfort, and expats cannot be sent “back” without consequences. The narrator grows close to other bridge–expat pairs, especially Simellia and her traumatized World War I expat, Captain Arthur Reginald-Smyth, and she begins to see how surveillance reduces everyone to categories—racial, behavioral, bureaucratic. Gore bonds with the group, but his 1847 assumptions repeatedly collide with modern language and racism, forcing painful conversations the narrator cannot fully control.

The Ministry expands monitoring through empathy tests for expats and polygraph-like “honesty” exams for bridges. Adela probes the narrator’s feelings for Gore, framing intimacy as both threat and data. Meanwhile, irregularities surface: Anne Spencer, an expat from 1793, becomes “unreadable” to scanners and effectively invisible to modern technology, prompting a working group to conduct “stress tests” on expats’ “hereness/thereness.” Gore himself triggers security alarms when airport scanners fail to register him during a trip to Scotland, suggesting some expats may be able to evade detection.

Quentin resurfaces after going silent, warning the narrator that Gore’s sketch of a strange projecting device is not a joke but a future weapon, and that the time-travel project is really a weapons program. Soon after, Adela reveals Quentin has defected after contacting a supposed brigadier who is actually a foreign intelligence asset; Quentin and the “brigadier” disappear underground. When a mutated common cold devastates Margaret Kemble (an expat from 1665), illness spreads through the household, and Gore becomes dangerously feverish. Terrified of being reclaimed by the Ministry, he begs the narrator to hide it. With Arthur and Margaret’s help, the narrator nurses him privately, cementing a loyalty that runs directly against her job.

The narrator then discovers Gore practicing a field-agent exam, implying the Ministry is training him—an increasingly “unreadable” expat—as an operative. After a neighborhood flood, he appears with powerful, unissued gear, suggesting covert access to resources. The narrator’s attachment deepens into near-romance, but trust is brittle: the Ministry is clearly shaping Gore into an asset, and the narrator cannot tell whether she is helping him survive or helping the state weaponize him.

At a formal ceremony marking Gore’s move into supervised field training, Quentin reappears disguised to defeat recognition software and presses a document-holder into the narrator’s hand—then is shot dead in front of her. In the aftermath, Gore shepherds the narrator out, refusing the role of rescuer, but later comforts her as she unravels. Quentin’s documents reveal the Ministry’s true origin story: police once found mutilated teenagers and a glowing blue doorway in a shuttered youth center; the machine beyond the door was seized and collapsed, and the Ministry’s time travel came from confiscation and cover-up. A handwritten note shows Quentin objected to disposing of the minors’ bodies and was marked for surveillance.

Security intensifies. Anne Spencer is shot dead during an escape attempt, and Adela orders it framed as suicide. The narrator, increasingly paranoid and depressed, investigates CCTV logs and discovers she has been framed for the courtyard blackout that enabled Quentin’s assassination—her fingerprints were used to disable surveillance. Leaving a karaoke night, the narrator and Gore are attacked by the Brigadier and Salese, now revealed as armed operatives with future technology; Salese scans Gore as a “free traveler,” and the Brigadier fires a blue-impact weapon. They escape on Gore’s motorbike, and in the adrenaline aftermath the narrator kisses him. Gore panics and withdraws, terrified of what it means to want her in an era where everything about them is observed and used.

Adela relocates all teams into safe houses and arms the narrator, explaining that the time-door supports only a limited number of “free travelers”—and that making space can mean taking one “out of time,” i.e., killing them. Under confinement, the narrator and Gore finally consummate their relationship, negotiating consent, shame, and need while Adela escalates the narrator’s training. Gore’s trauma resurges during a supervised museum trip when he sees the Franklin expedition referenced as inevitable disaster; later, at the Franklin memorial in Greenwich, he confronts the permanence of his exile and forces a conversation about cannibalism among the doomed survivors, seeking reassurance about what hunger might have made him.

The fragile refuge shatters when safe houses are violently breached. Ralph is murdered; Arthur is found dead, apparently poisoned; Margaret survives by hiding. Gore leads the narrator through flooded dockside tunnels and demands a final truth: the expats have implanted tracking microchips. Furious at the narrator’s silence, he nevertheless orders the chips cut out and disposed of, severing the Ministry’s most intimate control.

Adela summons the narrator, but the meeting becomes a showdown: the Brigadier and Salese hold Adela at gunpoint. Adela reveals she is the narrator’s future self and that this is a repeat attempt in which she has tried to change outcomes. She kills Salese by stabbing through a protective field, and the narrator fights the Brigadier but discovers the blue weapon is out of charge. Adela gives the narrator passcodes to wipe the project, admitting that she and the narrator killed Quentin because they believed he was the mole. Before any reconciliation, Gore and Thomas Cardingham confront them from cover; a shot nearly hits the fleeing narrator, and she realizes it likely was not Gore, because he would not have missed.

The narrator returns to the Ministry and is intercepted by Simellia, who confesses she is the mole. Simellia says she was persuaded by the Brigadier’s projections of a racist, climate-ruined future and helped leak information in the hope of preventing it. The narrator fights free, reaches the time-door room, and—determined to stop the Brigadier from taking Gore—empties her gun into the core machine. The time-door malfunctions catastrophically, annihilating the Brigadier into a hovering, boxed “galaxy” remnant and killing Adela in the chaos. Simellia escapes in the confusion.

At home, Gore confronts the narrator at gunpoint. Believing she has served the Ministry’s agenda, and told “everything” by Adela before her death, he forces the narrator to delete all remaining project traces using Adela’s passcodes. He then flees with Margaret “Maggie” Kemble, warning the narrator not to help the Ministry find them. The Ministry arrests the narrator, then pays her off as “redundant,” forbids her from returning near the building, and confirms its ruthlessness: expats were treated as trainable assets, while others were culled as redundant. Cardingham is detained and cooperating; Gore and Kemble are missing.

Grief-stricken, the narrator moves back in with her parents, reads Arthur’s notebook and poetry, and tries to rebuild a smaller life. Months later, a parcel arrives containing Gore’s returned copy of Rogue Male and a photograph suggesting Gore and Maggie are alive near Sitka spruce in Alaska. A marked passage carries a handwritten note—“Of course I loved you”—and the narrator decides to use her payout to travel and search, choosing a new timeline shaped by hope, responsibility, and the refusal to let the Ministry’s story be the only ending.