One Hundred Years

My name is Tirana. I was born in 2105.

That sentence has cost me a great deal, and I have stopped needing anyone to believe it.

Here is what you need to know about my family. We travel through time — and only ever in one direction. The amulet my father kept in his study obeys three rules that have never once bent:

• It only goes backward.
• It only arrives where our own blood is standing.
• It does not let us change a thing.

I was nineteen. I was not supposed to touch it.

I arrived in Egypt in 2024 — a year I had only ever read about, in a country that was mine and not mine at all.

A woman found me. She did not scream, or call anyone, or ask a single one of the questions you would ask. She looked at the amulet in my hand. Then she looked at my face for a long time. Then she took me home.

Her name is Yasmine. She is my great-great-grandmother, and she designs jewellery.

I did the arithmetic sitting on her kitchen floor. The amulet will not carry me forward. My family is one hundred years away, in the wrong direction. I will be dead long before I am born.

There is no way home.

So I stopped trying to travel, and started trying to be found.

Understand the problem. A letter burns. A monument falls, or gets renamed by whoever comes next. There was nothing I could leave behind that would still be standing in a hundred years.

But I grew up in a family of time travellers, and there is one thing we know better than anyone alive: you can date every ancestor you have by what she was buried wearing.

Gold does not rot. Stones do not fade. A ring outlives the hand, the house, the language and the country. Jewellery is the oldest working technology humans have for sending a message forward through time, and it is the only one that has never failed us.

So Yasmine and I built one.

We put my name on it. We put the date on it — 2024, the year I arrived. And we made it good enough that a woman would keep it, and give it to her daughter, and her daughter would give it on.

If this house is still standing in one hundred years, then in 2124 my mother will hear a name that is also her daughter’s name, beside a date that is also the year her daughter vanished.

She will know exactly what it means. And she will come for me.

The amulet still works. It simply does not work in the direction I need.

Which means I can still go back — and only ever to where my own blood is standing. I do not choose the year. I do not choose the woman. I arrive beside her, wherever she is and whatever is happening to her, and I am not permitted to change a single thing.

I can only listen.

Every one of them did something extraordinary. Almost none of them are in a history book.

Ostura. Legend. In Arabic it means two things at once — a story too large to be true, and a woman who became one.

Ostura is how I bring them back. One woman at a time — her story, her colours, her name on the box.