The story follows sixteen-year-old Odile, who seems destined for a job at the Conseil. Initially rejected, her application is reconsidered when she happens to see the parents of a classmate, who have travelled from the future to visit their son one last time. In fact, the valley where Odile lives is separated from a valley twenty years ahead to the east and a valley twenty years behind to the west. Twenty years later, Odile works on the eastern border, accompanying the people who can visit the other valleys, moving between the present and the future… and she begins to question the whole system. With the well-known uncertainty of time travel and its consequences, this novel has a number of questionable points around incoherent facts, but I just let myself be carried away by the story, which is quite touching.
“Ambition might be like a living organism, reliant on nurture to grow. With some encouragement, mine had protruded from the dirt, a tiny shoot crawling toward the light.”