When I woke up with a scar on the back of my hand, sloughing off the last dregs of a nightmare I could barely remember, I knew I had travelled back in time.

Relief was the first emotion to hit. The long wait was finally over.

Some people never got their brand. There were stories of people on their deathbeds still waiting, convinced they couldn’t die because the mark was still to come. Or folk in tears, realising they’d missed their one opportunity to go back and fix the wounds lingering long past the traumas that had breathed them to life.

And there was only ever one chance. The scar saw to that. Irrefutable evidence tied in with personalised instructions, all in one neat little package. Con artists had tried every trick in the book to bypass it: tattoos, laser surgery, even radical amputations. But no one fell for it - the paperwork was airtight. It had to be. Releasing time travel to the public was opening a can of worms ripe for every imaginable abuse. Once the authorities had realised closing it was impossible, the only remaining option was to limit the damage. That meant regulation.

I scratched at my head, trying to cling to what little scraps I could recall. A fast-paced life. A blur of different places, and a dark-haired man who flitted between them. A partner? It was like swimming for land through a beach of echoes, to realise only the very elite could possibly avoid being carried out to sea by the currents.

I did not number among them.

Memories had been the first things to go, it was said. Jumping back with one’s future mind intact was a recipe for disaster. Not for the traveller, but the society around them. Conscious time travellers were just too powerful, too dangerous and too well-armed with information. Apparently the first wave had been nightmarish: wave after wave of would-be autocrats using their foreknowledge to accumulate wealth, alter world politics, or both.

Some just wanted to bask in luxury. Others thought they could fix the world. Either way, the economy couldn’t handle them. Nor could society. The history books, in their descriptions of a present and future time that had never existed, spoke of a dark and twisted era where self-styled monarchs with names like Jess and Dan clashed in never-ending time wars. Where prisons were built to lock one’s rivals outside of time itself, where they could never be brought back because they never existed and could never exist.

They put a stop to that technology, of course. Killed off the knowledge before it could be created.

People were brought back all the time now. Although it was far more likely they’d stop existing.

The echoes in my head were hardly new, just… clearer. A result of them being my future self’s direct experience.

For years now I’d remembered the idea of a friend, elegant and brunette, sitting in classes with me disparaging the teachers. My only friend, even though she wasn’t real and I’d always had many. In one timeline, we would have laughed together and cried on each other’s shoulders. In reality, I joked around with the theatre team and spent my nights gaming with the crew.

I knew I only existed because my dad had gone back in time to win my mother’s heart. I’d heard him trying out the forgotten names of his previous children late at night where he thought no one could hear, down in the stairwell with his secret gin cellar. Hoping for a match that sparked something, even though they were children who were no longer real and never would be. Not until someone whose life intersected with his reversed the flow of time again and took away his scar, and the life-changing decision that came with it. Then it would be my turn to cease to be.

We were all ephemeral beings now, existing in layers of time lapping and flowing over each other like waves on a beach. Similar in appearance to our other selves, every iteration erasing all evidence of the previous one until it lived only in half-remembered dreams.

You could only travel back in time once. One chance, that was it. No backsies. No do-overs. If your message wasn’t clear enough, you had only yourself to blame. There were many reasons people sent themselves back in time, but they were almost always life-changing. I’d often wondered what mine would be. Love? Regret? Greed? Revenge?

But looking at the conspicuous scar raised on my hand in my own messy handwriting, I had my answer, and it was none of those. Instead, it said only: PROTECT YOURSELF.

And it was a bit late.

The first assassin had arrived when I was in primary school, an awkward teenager with instructions to kill. She’d turned herself in, unable to stomach her future self’s ruthlessness, and to my knowledge was still doing time for her victimless crime.

There had been more since then. Quite a few. Whoever had sent them was being smart about it, sending them back before my future self had left, and to a time before I’d received my own message. Before their timeline was inevitably erased. But by the time they turned up, my family had already moved cities under a new name, tipped off by that initial arrival.

You didn’t take chances with time travel.

For someone to hate me enough to spend their one return ticket on my demise – not to mention a lifetime in prison once the missive on their scars was discovered – my future self must have given them a compelling reason. To not just one person, but many.

Who had I been? Who was I going to be?

What I’d really been hoping for from my brand was answers. Instead, I had a perfectly logical, perfectly sensible edict of self-preservation which hadn’t been relevant since that first assassin had touched down in the middle of her high school netball court.

But maybe there was still a chance. If my future self had come back to save her own life, perhaps there was still another assassin to come. The very first assassin from the old timeline. Or at least the first I’d known about. If they weren’t arriving now, then they would be soon. It wouldn’t be here in my ocean-tinted bedroom with its nautical murals, but wherever I would have been in the initial timeline.

I skipped school that morning, leaving without telling my parents what I was doing. I didn’t actually think the chances of running into an assassin were that high, not when guided by the whims of fate. Besides, if I was wrong – and with the ambiguities of time travel, it was never possible to know anything for certain - and my future self was right about needing to protect myself, the worst thing I could do would be in the first place a would-be assassin expected to find me.

My family would have stopped me. For the obvious reason, of course, but also for the principle of the thing.

“Don’t get caught up in time travel,” Mum would say over dinner, her pristine hands untouched by scars despite already being well into middle age. “Nothing good can come from it.”

To which my dad, whose future self had sacrificed an entire family for the sake of love, would bite his lip and squeeze my hand, but not disagree.

Mum loved to talk about the follies of time travel, and not just because of Dad. It was her job, after all. She worked in a quiet building filled with highly-trained technicians who rarely touched the machines they were meant to be operating. As she explained it, the technicalities of temporal paradox meant that most people who turned up to an appointment would turn out to be rejected. Usually because they already had a scar. Though occasionally because they were rude to the staff. Mum smiled when she talked about those ones. She said it put some excitement into a soul-destroying career people only performed because the alternative was a return to the days of the Monarchs.

It was the scars. Once you had one, you knew you’d be turned away. So most people didn’t even try.

“What about the people who don’t have their scars yet?” I’d asked over a mouthful of asparagus on toast. “Couldn’t I just walk in and go back?”

“Don’t you dare,” Mum had said.

“I don’t really want to,” I’d mumbled in response.

Mum had grinned at me then. “I rest my case. The people who want to travel have already done so, in the future. For the others, it isn’t their thing. Knowing you’re effectively committing yourself and an entire universe to destruction with your decision can be a deterrent to some people, heaven knows why.”

“But people can still do it, right? If I wanted to walk in today -”

“- I wouldn’t let you.”

“But if someone did, you’d have to let them. It’s their right as a citizen.”

“Then we send them back. But there are fewer every year. There’s a –” she had paused, fork halfway to her lips, “- there’s a theory. Don’t tell anyone I said this. It’s just dumb office speculation. But some people think we’re close to the end.”

Dad had put down his tonic water and stared at my mother. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The end of time travel. When everyone who’s ever going to do it has already done it, and we can finally put it behind us.”

My head had filled with echoes as I had a feeling I’d heard this conversation, or one very much like it, before. Whether it had gone in the same direction, I couldn’t remember enough to say.

There was a pause at the dinner table. “I don’t think it works like that,” said Dad, after a moment. He rubbed at his

scar with the fingers of his opposite hand.

“As I said, dumb speculation. We don’t have the answers. No one has the answers. And I think we all know there will never be any answers.”

There was another, longer, pause.

“I’d travel,” I’d told her around the same mouthful of asparagus. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“To avoid being murdered by assassins,” my dad had answered. The crunch of his teeth on his slice of toast had signalled the end of the conversation.

It was hard to argue with assassins.

There were guidebooks on how to interpret leftover timeline residue. It was a skill anyone could learn given enough patience. There had been courses in school rolled in with meditation to help people accept the impermanence of all things. I hadn’t taken it especially seriously – who cared about discarded realities? – but some of it had stuck.

So now, in bed, my new scar red and puckered above the bones, I closed my eyes and let my mind wade through the crowd of departing echoes where it could grasp the final vestiges of some other life. Now, when it was clearer than it had ever been and would ever be again, in the dregs of the only time travel chance I’d ever have. This singular moment was a person’s best chance, the guides had advised. Advice written by the world’s finest scientific minds. Yet somehow without citations, since no one could be sure where the source material had come from.

I had no idea what I was doing but the dream seemed to know something I didn’t. I caught glimpses of another school in another city, and it was enough. More so because it sparked a recognition of something real, a place from my childhood before the first assassin. Before the removalists and police interviews par for the course with someone making an attempt on your life.

A place I might have grown up in, in another timeline. Did grow up in, for a little while. It felt right.

I found a bus that would take me there, using up most of my savings for the privilege of spending the night folded up in a cramped vinyl seat surrounded by snoring adults in beanies. I couldn’t sleep, but it seemed to help with the echoes. Helped them fade slower and linger longer.

Until at last I found myself standing in front of a schoolyard playground accompanied by a very real pang of nostalgia. I remembered this place. For real. Over there I’d pushed a girl over for putting ice down my skirt. On the underside of that slide, I’d scratched my initials into the plastic with a sharp stick.

And standing in front of the swings, the ones I’d sprained my ankle jumping off of, was the assassin.

I didn’t recognise her, but it had to be her. Part of it was the otherworldly expression you sometimes saw on people who had just had their brush with time. I’d seen it not so long ago in the mirror. And part of it was the situational dissonance. Why else would she be waiting for me? School was in; the other students cooped up in their classrooms. But there she was, a tiny child perhaps six years old, wearing a very adult expression.

Unusual for a time traveller, but not unheard of. Scars had been known to appear on babies. The impression of insight radiating from her stance, however, was another matter.

“Hello, Danika. You made it this time. You don’t always.”

I examined the child-who-was-not-a-child; a small, unfamiliar girl with a serious haircut and equally serious expression. Still in her school uniform, a white and blue-checked dress paired with polished shoes and a long, blue tie. Some form of recognition stirred in the back of my mind, enough to tell me some other version of me had met her, before drifting away on the ephemeral tide.

“You’re the assassin,” I stated bluntly, examining her body for a concealed weapon. Empty. Tiny as she was, there weren’t a whole lot of places she could hide something.

She must have been desperate, her adult self, to ruin her own life from such a young age. If it would even happen. And it probably wouldn’t. Desperation led to poorly thought-out decision-making even in the world of time travel. I felt my shoulders droop; in weariness if not quite relaxation.

Physically, I could overpower her with one hand. Mentally – I was a teenager talking to a six-year-old.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said gently, as the girl approached me and sat beside me on the playground bench. “The person who sent you that message is a bad person. And you’re not a bad person.”

“What message?” asked the girl. She kicked her legs over the side of the bench.

“The scar on your hand,” I pointed out. “The one from the –”

I broke off in surprise. I’d just assumed. But the evidence was in front of my eyes: the girl had no scar. After a moment’s hesitation, I reached out and lifted her arm, pulling her sleeve up to expose more of the forearm. I turned it over, front to back. Nothing.

“I’m sorry,” I said, heart suddenly racing. “I thought you were –”

“I’m exactly who you think I am,” said the child, interrupting me. She looked up at me with a serene expression. “I don’t need a scar to tell me what to do. I’m the reigning world memory champion, six years undefeated. Or I was, before all this went down.”

“You mean you will be,” I corrected her, raising a hand to rub at my temples. Trying to remember something I knew I never would.

She shook her head. “I won’t. It’s regulated out of existence in most futures these days. Too risky. Besides, why go into sports when I could be a genuine princess?” This last part was accompanied by a proud puffing out of the chest and dramatic squaring back of the shoulders.

I blinked at her, uncomprehending. “You’re… one of them? A Monarch?”

She giggled, pulling her knees up to sit under her chin, for a moment indistinguishable from the innocent schoolgirl my eyes wanted me to believe she was. “No,” she said. “And yes. And I never really ruled so much as tried to prevent people yeeting us straight into the hell furnace. But here we are.”

She reached into a dress pocket and I flinched, but all she brought out was a chocolate bar, the ‘fun-sized’ variety they made for small children in an ill-fated attempt to put a stopper on juvenile obesity. “Mmm,” she said, smacking her lips in a decidedly childlike fashion. “So good.”

“So…” I began.

“Jessica.”

“…Jessica. What does this have to do with me? What am I going to do? Why have you come to kill me?”

“I’m not going to kill you, silly-billy. This is a courtesy visit. You always have so many questions.”

I decided to ignore the implications of that comment for the moment, lest it distract me from my main purpose. “Then why me? Why the other assassins?”

“Because, Danika, in some very distant timeline, a tinkerer was poking around in their backyard shed and fluked their way into the chemical compound for time travel. Turns out a lot of people didn’t like that very much.”

“But what does –”

“Huh,” she said, shrugging her tiny shoulders in a way that lifted most of her upper frame. “I guess that means you don’t have a shed in this timeline.”

“Wait,” I said, holding up an outward-facing palm. “Are you saying I’m going to invent time travel?”

That giggle again. “I wish.”

Muscles I hadn’t realised were tense started to unwind. “I didn’t think so.”

The origins of time travel were shrouded in secrecy. I’d assumed it was information only the world governments had access to, and perhaps only a select few at that. It was generally accepted that it had to have been sometime within a hundred years of the revealing of the first known time-traveller twenty years ago, given its limitation to human lifespan. Except that nobody was sure how many times the history books had been rewritten, and what had been covered up or simply forgotten.

And I wasn’t a tinkerer. I didn’t think I’d ever picked up so much as a toy hammer in the crib. It had all been toy boats and soft plushies for me.

“Wanna know a secret, Danika? Nobody invents time travel. Not anymore. You started it, sure. Then the so-called dark times came and the first thing they did was try to stop you.” She rolled her eyes. “Give me those days anytime. I’ll take even the worst dictatorship over chronic instability.” At this point she paused and looked hungrily in the direction of my handbag. “Can I have some lollies?”

“Um, I only have chewing gum,” I offered, digging around in my bag and holding some out.

Jessica only turned up her small nose. I put the gum away.

“So did they stop me?” I asked, trying to get the conversation back on track.

“Oh yes. Kill you off, bring you back, kill you off again – whole faction wars were fought over you. Which is so stupid, because it wasn’t as though you were ever going to replicate the original conditions once the slightest detail changed. I mean, look at you. You’re harmless. Do you even know what a flux capacitor is?”

“Er –“

“Meanwhile, those with the knowledge continued to spread it, intentionally or not. Couldn’t stop it. Now it’s everywhere, like it’s always existed. Because it has always existed. Adults took the knowledge back in time as kids and passed it to their parents, who are passing it back to their parents even as we speak. That you and I still exist at all right now is nothing short of a miracle, because the moment our lineage changes, that’s it. We’re sitting on the brittle twig end of a rapidly-expanding tree diagram where the lifespans of any civilisations younger than sapience itself will be measured in mere seconds. This is the last patch of calm before the oncoming storm, and the wind’s already picking up. We’re in the bloody end days, Danika, and it’s all your fault.”

I pushed myself back on the metal bench away from the small child, rocking back on my haunches. I heard the words coming from her mouth, understood them even, but couldn’t quite process the implications.

“But,” I protested weakly, “I didn’t do anything.”

The small child sighed, and wiped a somewhat sticky-looking hand over her forehead where she’d gone red in the face. She sniffed, and it was the kind of snuffle that sounded like someone was trying very hard to hide the fact they’d been recently crying. “Of course you didn’t. I’m the only one who remembers anything anymore. Not the governments, not the researchers, not the chrono clinics. Just me. How many assassination attempts have you had this time? Ten? Fifteen?”

“You’re the fourth,” I answered honestly. “And they all flubbed.”

“Well, it used to be thousands. They’ll stop once they all forget. We’re diverging so rapidly it won’t be long. Even I can’t keep it together anymore, and I devote every waking moment to the litany. I’ve had so many lifetimes -” She broke off, wiping another small fist across her eyes. “So there’s no point in killing you. You’ve already murdered yourself, along with the entirety of human civilisation. It’s only a matter of time.”

My eyes seemed to be stinging for some reason. I didn’t know much about comforting children, and certainly not ones who were time-travelling killer geniuses. But I felt I should try.

“My dad cries sometimes under the stairs,” I confessed to the bizarre combination of traits in front of me which somehow comprised a person. “When he does, my mum brings him a pile of blankets and gives him a hug while they both drink spiced gin.” I paused. “I’m not allowed to drink the gin. What I’m trying to say is, I may not be an inventor, or even particularly smart. But if you want –”

I never got to complete the sentence, because the small body flinging itself at my chest had knocked the wind out of me.

“I like this version of you.” The world’s most powerful time traveller; six-time reigning world memory champion; once war-waging Monarch – and frightened six-year-old child called Jessica – sniffled into my arms. “Don’t ch –”

---

The sharp blare of the end-of-class alarm snapped me out of my daydreams. Below me, adulterating my desk with its presence, sat a page full of maths exercises not even a quarter finished. Head fuzzy and full of fresh echoes, I barely remembered completing any at all.

I knew this feeling. Everyone knew this feeling.

“Let’s go, sleepyhead.” My best and only friend, Monique, nudged me as I blinked at my table of formulas. For a moment part of me felt surprised to see her, but only for a moment. Her hand with its responsible but unexciting scar, STUDY PHYSICS, came down onto my desk and rolled up the sheaf of papers, tapping the edges on the table to bring each sheet into consolidated alignment. “Time for this later. Now we enact our plans to throttle the vending machine and become sole distributors of the hot chocolate supply. Total domination has never been closer.”

For some reason, I felt like I’d been significantly closer just seconds ago.

“Something’s changed in the timeline,” I muttered. “I’ve got echoes.”

Monique tilted her head. “Really? I didn’t notice anything.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. In it fluttered a note of concern. “Are you sure you don’t have some kind of special sensitivity? This seems to happen to you a lot more than anyone else.”

I glanced around the classroom, where students were leaving with grins and raised voices. No one else seemed to be affected. “Does the name Jessica mean anything to you?”

The concern lifted from her face. “Of course, duh. You only talk about her all the time for saving your life from the insane axe murderer last year.”

Oh. Right. I’d had a mental blank there for a moment. Odd, because my close brush with death hadn’t exactly been a forgettable moment. I remembered the wannabe killer, a mild-mannered househusband-turned-rogue, spurred on by his new scar’s instructions to kill.

He’d climbed into my bedroom at night and tried to paint the leaves of its forest murals arterial red. And would have succeeded, except that a tiny girl had followed him up the ladder, silent as a cat, and punctured his neck with a dart gun, putting him to sleep until the police could arrive.

I still remembered the whites of her eyes peering through my window and the deep scar composed across the back of her hand in neat red welts. NO MORE, it had said.

“Last time, Danika,” she’d said, as I’d blinked at her in the dark.

“I… what?” I remembered saying blearily, staring through blurred vision at the unconscious body on the carpet.

“You’re welcome,” said the tiny girl. “The name’s Jessica, by the way. But you won’t meet me again. Goodbye.”

And then she was gone, vanished into the night.

“I still think something’s changed,” I told Monique in the present day, checking my wrist in case a scar had appeared there. But the skin was as pristine as ever, my future self still silent. One day, my time would come. I pursed my lips, trying to hold onto what little scraps I could recall. But they faded away, dreams to dust, leaving only an ominous sense of nightmarish foreboding in their place.

STUDY PHYSICS covered my hand as Monique placed her palm atop mine. “It’s okay,” she said, giving it a squeeze. “You’re here. Sometimes you’re gone. I think. And I think I miss you when you are.”

“Sometimes you’re gone,” I echoed, meeting her eyes. “I think.”

Whatever I was trying to hold onto slipped my grasp and melted away into the aether, gone for good. I didn’t bother trying to chase it.

“Then that’s all we can hope for,” she declared. “Make the most of it while it lasts. Hot chocolate?”

“Hot chocolate,” I agreed. “While it la –”

*