CHAPTER 1: #1
University of Nottingham
Campus, England, 2039
Kate poured
glycerol into a beaker, measuring out what she would need for the afternoon’s
experiment. She wasn’t really in the mood for labs today, but it was only her
second session of Biology practicals since university started and she couldn’t
miss it. It didn’t help that she was the only person without a lab partner, so
she had to do double the work of the other first-years. Not that she minded the
extra work particularly.
She’d just
enjoy having someone to gossip with, which − judging by the crowd gathered by
the ice machine − was all the other students did.
She was
opening up her labbook on her tablet when a voice from behind her said her
name.
“Kate
Finchley?” a harried-looking supervisor asked.
“Yep,” she
said, dropping her pen and turning around.
At the same
time, she stuck her hand into her pocket, fingers catching on a locket she’d
stuffed in there last week when it had annoyed her while she was working in a
fume cupboard.
The
supervisor gestured to a boy who was standing behind her. “Here’s your new lab
partner; just transferred from Chemistry. You can get him settled, can’t you?”
Then the
supervisor disappeared in a cloud of stress and steamed-up goggles to deal with
another fresher, who had just managed to drop a beaker of something foul on the
floor and then stand in it.
Kate stared
at the boy. “Hi,” she said dubiously. She fished out the locket and put it back
on.
He stared
back at her, his expression indecipherable. Then he nodded hello. He was
wearing a tweed waistcoat, of all things, over a ratty band T-shirt. His light
brown hair hung over his eyes in a retro fringe that seemed to be based on
something from the late noughties.
She was
delighted to note that despite his doubtful fashion choices he was exactly her
type.
“Welcome to
my lair. Make yourself at home.” She gestured to the lab, which was filling
with the gentle scent of rotting manure. Nearby a cluster of the Ice-Machine
Gossipers, labcoat sleeves over their noses, were gathered around the spillage,
offering advice to the flustered supervisor.
Kate turned
back to the boy, who’d dropped his labcoat onto the bench like he’d just been
waiting for her permission.
He’d
apparently been using it as a kind of satchel, as he pulled out an assortment
of stationery, notebooks and what looked like his lunch (in a biology lab; did
he have no survival instincts at all?) from its depths. As he finally wrestled
his way into his sparkling new labcoat and then rescued an apple from where it
had bounced across the floor, she found her gaze lingering on the way his hair
curled over the back of his collar.
Having
picked up the apple, he turned around and actually blushed when he noticed her
watching him − a vivid pink staining cheekbones that she was frankly jealous
of. Bone structure like that was wasted on a chemist. Kate pulled off her
goggles to distract from the fact that she’d been caught watching him. She
fought for a moment to pull them from their determined grip in her tangled red
hair.
He had blushed?
She wasn’t sure what to do with that, actually. Was it a good thing, a guy
blushing when you looked at him? He might as well have a name tag saying, “Hi,
I’m a shy, socially awkward scientist. Please don’t look me directly in the eye
or I might faint.”
Kate was
just imagining him introducing himself as “a socially awkward scientist”, his
Scottish lilt skipping quickly over the words, when he cleared his throat and
spoke.
“I didn’t
actually download a copy of the labbook. What experiment are we doing today?”
That was a
bit odd. He sounded exactly as she had imagined him: the same soft Scottish
brogue. She frowned.
Why had she
assumed he would be Scottish?
“Cleaning up
horse muck, by the look of it,” she joked, glancing over at the students still
gathered around the spillage.
He dimpled a
smile at her, and relaxed a little.
“What’s your
name?” he asked, looking her up and down. His eyes lingered on her labcoat
collar, which was decorated with badges and beads, but he didn’t mention it.
She didn’t think he had any right to judge – there was half a ham sandwich
poking out of his pocket.
“Kate,” she
said brightly, trying to convey a more normal aura.
His eyebrows
rose at her answer in what looked like surprise. She wasn’t sure why her name
would be surprising.
“Matt,” he
replied. “Matt Galloway.”
“Hi, Matt,
nice to meet you. Welcome to Biology, etc., etc. I know you from somewhere.
Have we met before?”
Or instead
of being normal she could just act like his own personal stalker. That worked
too.
“We haven’t
met before. I would have remembered.” He blushed and then stammered, “I mean, I
haven’t even been to this country before. I moved here for university.”
She eyed him
speculatively. He must be particularly intelligent to have got permission to
study abroad. Since Scotland had gained independence from England after the
last world war, almost twenty years ago, it had been practically impossible to
get permits to study internationally.
Hmmm. He
didn’t seem like he was lying. Where did she know him from?
She should
probably get back to work and give him a week or so to settle in before she
began to torment him further by actually chatting to him, or doing something
equally terrifying like nodding to him in the corridor. It was obvious he was
completely overwhelmed by her raw sexuality − or that was what she was telling
herself, anyway, and no one could prove otherwise. But she couldn’t look away.
There was something … familiar about him.
He made no
attempt to continue talking, just looked at her, nonplussed. Kate was afraid to
continue any line of conversation in case he actually died from the blood
rushing to his face, but the silence was awkward, so she eventually said, “Why
are you transferring over to biology, anyway?”
“There
weren’t as many explosions as I was hoping for in chemistry.” It sounded like a
prepared response; he’d probably been asked that question a lot recently.
“Well there
aren’t nearly half as many giant octopuses as you’d want in biology either,
sorry.”
He grinned.
“Shame. How’s the physics department here?”
She could
sense him eyeing her, and she tried not to feel self-conscious. Her grandmother
had once described her as a perfect Pre-Raphaelite beauty, which she took to
mean that her figure was a little too soft around the edges to conform to
twenty-first-century perceptions of beauty, and her hair was a vivid shock of
red. Sometimes people at school had teased her for being ginger, but she’d
always loved her hair too much for it to bother her.
Either way,
she was secure in her body image a lot of the time, but it didn’t stop her
feeling self-conscious, especially when there was a cute boy looking at her
like she was the most interesting thing he’d seen all day.
“I’d give
the physics lot six out of ten. There aren’t enough brunets,” she said.
There’d been
a disappointing mixers event in freshers’ week.
He grinned
and Kate smiled back, then she said, “I hear their MRI research rivals
Cambridge’s, though.”
“I’ll look
into that, then. If the octopi don’t work out.”
“I’m sure
they will. No sea monsters today, though. We’re testing fertiliser effects on
the development rates of bacteria cultures.”
“Sounds a
lot easier than chemistry labs. I had to bring an acid to boil. On my first
day.”
“Ouch. Well,
I’ll look after you today.” She handed him a pair of latex gloves. Their hands
touched, just slightly.
> First contact established in time-landscape 2039
Kate
shuddered, closing her eyes for a moment. She felt a little strange.
The Next Together
by Lauren James
Publisher: Walker
Release Date: September 3rd, 2015
Blurb:
How many times can you lose the person you love?
Katherine and Matthew are destined to be born again and again, century after century. Each time, their presence changes history for the better, and each time, they fall hopelessly in love, only to be tragically separated.
Spanning the Crimean War, the Siege of Carlisle and the near-future of 2019 and 2039 they find themselves sacrificing their lives to save the world. But why do they keep coming back? What else must they achieve before they can be left to live and love in peace?
Maybe the next together will be different...
A powerful and epic debut novel for teenagers about time-travel, fate and the timelessness of first love. The Next Together is told through a mixture of regular prose, diary entries, letters, "original" historical documents, news reports and internet articles.
