Forever Twenty-One

Chapter Originals

Selena Hart is twenty, in her second year at St Cuthbert's College in the cathedral town of Alderwick, and holding on by her fingernails. The Founders' Award pays for all of it — fees, room, the lot — and it comes with one obligation: a summer spent cataloguing the college archive, in a basement, alone, going through boxes nobody has opened since the war. In the fourth box she finds a photograph of the 1901 rowing eight. Third from the left is a boy of about twenty-one with a particular way of not quite looking at the camera. He is in the 1938 photograph too. He is in a group shot from 1974. And he was sitting four seats along from her in a seminar on Thursday morning, and his name is Cassian Sinclair, and he has never been at this college longer than three years in his life — because three years is the point at which people start to notice that you have not aged, and Cassian Sinclair has been coming back to Alderwick for a hundred and forty years for one reason. Every forty years or so, a girl dies on the same stretch of river. The last one was in 1985. He has gaps in his memory going back a century and he has never been able to account for a single one of them. And Selena, who is very good at archives, is about to find out three things in the wrong order: what he is, what the Founders' Award actually selects for, and why every single girl who has ever held it is dead.