This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

  You’ll ask, But how are you able to send me letters in the contents of birds’ stomachs? Think of birds as a comms channel I can open and close seasonally; fellow operatives relate their work to me at the equinoxes; Garden blooms more brightly in my belly. There’s enough traffic that it’s a simple matter to disguise incoming and outgoing correspondence, misdirect, hide in plain sight. Enemy agents, though—I’ve heard stories of what happens to those of your side who try to push through to one of our plantings. Imagine walking through a thorn hedge that grows thicker, harder, sharper the more you push into it, and you’ll have something of what it’s like—but for acres, for decades, until you’re ribboned and rent into tinsel.

  All this to say, I’m not being followed; if you are, I’ll send out what feelers I can to see if it’s my people. It may well be—Garden’s clearly been interested in you since you were small. But I’ve every confidence in your ability to evade and outmaneuver anyone from my side.

  Anyone who isn’t me.

  If it’s your people, that’s more complicated and troubling. Be careful.

  Yours,

  Blue

  PS. Any information you can give me about the quality of shadow—a scent, a qualifying colour of feeling, the nightmare you woke from after you thought yourself safe—will help me investigate. Though I suppose I never did learn if you dream.

  Blue is braiding grasses between her fingers.

  It looks like purest idleness: a long-haired woman at day’s end, painted in sunset, cross-legged near the river, weaving for pleasure. She is not making baskets or nets, not even crowns or garlands for the children running barefoot nearby.

  What she does is study. What she does is play, in six dimensions, a game of chess in which every piece is a game of Go, whole boards of black and white stones dancing around each other, pushed, knights turned rooks, iterations of atari carefully constructing checkmate. She lays grass over grass over grass and studies, not only the geometries of green, but the calculus of scent and heat, the thermodynamics of understory, the velocity of birdsong.

  While so enmeshed—knotting grass to grackle scold, the smell of leaf mold to sun’s azimuth—a tree swallow swoops near, scissors her peripheral vision, severs her from trancing reverie with its dissonance. It flashes blue at her eyes’ edge, stuns her with its unaccountable presence. There are tree swallows aplenty, but this one is wrong: This one approaches an empty nest in autumn, a nest that she was near to harvesting to show her nephew and teach him about how much weaving can be learned from birds.

  She stands, and the grasses fall from her hand like seeds. She follows the swallow, watches as it deposits a damselfly in the nest and flies away.

  She climbs, plucks the insect from the muddy twigs, hops back down. In the damsel’s needle-body, checkered in black and blue, she reads a letter.

  She looks from the dead damsel to the scattering it’s made of her thoughts, fistfuls of green and gold heaped uselessly together, and feels nothing but a knifing, knotting happiness as she opens her mouth to devour it, wings and all.

  Years later, a seeker shadows the grass where Blue lay. She scoops up a handful, then melts away.

  * * *

  My Blueprint,

  I have read your first three sumac letters. I cannot let them go unanswered, though I fear to write without knowing what comes next. (I taste the letters still. They linger. They undermine all other flavors, pipe them full of you.) Perhaps I’ll ask a question answered later. Perhaps I’ll write a sentence that offends.

  But if you hunger, I swell. You have me watching birds, and though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting.

  I miss you in the field. I miss defeat. I miss the chase, the fury. I miss victories well earned. Your fellows have their intrigues and their passions, and now and again a clever play, but there’s none so intricate, so careful, so assured. You’ve whetted me like a stone. I feel almost invincible in our battles’ wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak.

  How I love to have no armor here.

  You wish you could hold me at knifepoint again. You do, still, in a way. So long as I bear these last three seeds in a hollow behind my eye, you are a blade against my back. I love the danger of it. Besides, I am not so naive as to think your posting to this strand entirely lacks purpose. Your Garden works slowly, works through lives. It burrows you deep, and through you wreaks great change, while we strive upon the surface.

  And in your absence you are deadly as a blade. Lacking letters, lacking the tremors of your footsteps through time, I seek out your memories; I ask myself what you would say and do if you were here. I imagine you reaching over my shoulder to correct my hand on a victim’s throat, to guide the braiding of a strand.

  I am being watched. The shadow, my Seeker, steals after me. I glimpse it in the purplish gloaming, but where I chase it, it is not. Smells: hard to say, though hints of ozone and burnt maple. It takes many forms. I worry it is just a phantom, a consequence of my breaking mind. I had hoped to catch it, kill it, prove myself sane (or not) before consuming your next letters. I cannot endanger us, endanger you, any further. But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.

  I dream.

  They’ve freed us from sleep as from hunger. But I like exhaustion, call it a kink or what you will, and in my work upthread it’s often convenient to impersonate humanity. So I tire myself with work, and I sleep, and dreams come.

  I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time. I dream myself a seed between your teeth, or a tree tapped by your reed. I dream of thorns and gardens, and I dream of tea.

  The work waits. They’ll catch me here if I remain. More soon, after I’ve put this shadow to bed, after we’re safe.

  Yours,

  Red

  * * *

  Red’s off to catch a shadow.

  She lays traps. She doubles back in time to build dead ends of history; she tangles strands. Her quarry, whose quarry she is in turn, slips free, leaving now a sound, now a taste on the air, nothing so grand as a thread caught on a thorn.

  In downthread server farms couched in remnant icebergs’ hearts, she circles back upon her trail, glimpses the shadow, fires her fléchette pistol through rackspace gaps, birthing blue sparks.

  In Asoka’s court, an acrobat, she climbs, flips, turns, sifting a thousand-person crowd for a single predator, one watcher who should not be there. She smells the shadow, and smells it slip away.

  She storms the falling walls of Jericho, and in dense streets she hears a footstep on stone that does not belong. She turns, draws, lets fly. An arrow embeds itself in stone.

  She races gravcycles through a crystal forest coursing with the brilliant pulse of human beings whose physical bodies have been rendered, like bacon fat, until the fragrance of their minds expands to fill all space. Whatever she is seeking, whatever’s seeking her, it does not catch her there, though she does not catch it in return.

  She finds a pregnant possibility by a riverbed and waits. She does not know why she thinks the shadow will visit here, but she feels she’s growing to know the thing, its habits, when it visits her and when it keeps away. She seeds the air with nanobots, weaves servants through the grass; she sets drone spies and sentry cameras; she tasks a satellite to her service. She watches the river, cautious, quiet, for seven months. She blinks once, and when she opens her eyes, she feels the moment has passed: The shadow has been and gone, and she’s learned nothing. No traps have sprung, the nanobots failed to register a presence, the cameras have one by one turned off, and the satellite orbits mute and broken.

  Red aches for the letters she keeps behind her eye.

  She can
not breathe. A great hand clutches her about the chest, squeezing. She feels trapped in her skin, bound beneath her skull. Dreams help, and memories, but dreams and memories are not enough. She wants to imagine a laugh. She must wait. She cannot wait.

  Far, far upthread, she sits beneath something like a willow tree in a dinosaur swamp, holds a sumac seed between her teeth, and bites.

  Red sits still for hours. Night falls. Wind rustles ferns. An apatosaur lumbers past, ruffling its feathers.

  She lets herself feel. The organs that buffer her emotions from physical response shut down, and all she’s hidden washes over her. Her heart quakes. She heaves in gulps of breath, and she is so alone.

  A hand settles on her shoulder.

  She catches the shadow’s wrist.

  The shadow throws her, and she throws it in turn. They tumble through undergrowth; they crash against an enormous mushroom’s trunk. Small lizards scuttle out. The shadow’s afoot, but Red snares its leg in hers, brings it down. She goes for the joint lock, but her own leg’s locked in turn. She wriggles free, punches three, four times, each one blocked easily. Implants burn. Wings part from her back to vent waste heat; she hits hard. She catches the shadow in the ribs, but those bones do not break. The shadow floats behind her, touches her shoulder, and her arm goes limp. Red throws her weight back, snares its arm as she falls. They slip together in the mud. Red’s fingers hook to claws. She tries to find a throat. Finds it. Clutches.

  And somehow the shadow slips free and leaves her lying, panting, furious, alone in the mud.

  She curses the stars that watch the dinosaur night.

  Red can bear the wait no longer.

  She rises, staggers to a river, washes her hands. Pops out her left eye with her thumb and probes the socket until she finds the three sumac seeds. (The one she ate earlier was a fake.)

  Fuck safety. Fuck the shadow.

  Red knows hunger now.

  She eats the first seed beneath the canopy.

  She chokes. She curls around herself. She cannot breathe. She crumbles around her heart.

  The organs, she remembers, are turned off. This pain is new.

  She does not turn them on again before she eats the second seed.

  Out in the swamp, great beasts echo her groan. She is not a person anymore. She is a toad; she is a rabbit in the hunter’s hand; she is a fish. She is, briefly, Blue, alone with Red, and together.

  She eats the third letter.

  Silence claims the swamp.

  The aftertaste stings her tongue and fills her. She weeps, and laughs into her tears, and lets herself fall. They might find her, kill her, here. She does not care.

  Among the dinosaurs, Red sleeps.

  Seeker, muddy, battered, torn, finds her sleeping, touches her tears with an ungloved hand, and tastes them before she goes.

  * * *

  Dear Strawberry,

  Summer settles like a bee on clover—golden, busy, here then gone. There’s so much to do. I love this part of being embedded, love feeling thoroughly wrung out at day’s end: no recuperation ponds, no healing sap, no quiet green murmuring in my marrow—just sweat and salt and sun on my back, everyone loving their bodies while knowing their bodies, this beautiful dance.

  We pick berries. We fish the rivers. We hunt ducks and geese. We tend the gardens. We organize festivals, light fires, discuss philosophy, fight skirmishes where necessary. People die; people live. I have been laughing a great deal, this summer, and it has been so easy.

  You say my letter found you in a moment of hunger. How to say what it means to me, that I might have taught you this—shared it, somehow, infected you with it. I hope it isn’t a burden at the same time that I want you seared by it. I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.

  I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all.

  Yours,

  Blue

  PS. I’m so happy you read the Mitchison. Constantinople is difficult—but it helps sometimes to think of the book as moving through phases of storytelling time. Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. Halla begins in Mitchison’s Norse myths outside of book-time, and by the end has been absorbed—embedded, perhaps—into the myths of those she travelled with. All good stories travel from the outside in.

  • • •

  Dear Raspberry,

  It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood. Not that it didn’t before—Garden loves music with a depth impossible to sound—but now its song’s for me alone.

  Alone. I want to tell you about when I learned that word, really, with all of me. The reason I’m a tumbleweed, a dandelion seed, a stone rolling until she’s planted in place, then kicked up again.

  We’re grown, I think you know—seeds planted, roots combing through time, until Garden repots us in different soil. Our seeding points are so thoroughly embedded that what I mentioned before about approach is inconceivable: Garden goes to seed, blows us away, and we burrow into the braidedness of time and mesh with it. There is no scouring hedge to pass through; we are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals. The only way to access us is to enter Garden so far downthread that most of our own agents can’t manage it, find the umbilical taproot that links us to Garden, and then navigate it upthread like salmon in a stream. Which, if any of you could do, would mean we were vanquished already—if you had that kind of access to Garden, you could raze our whole Shift.

  (I can’t—I shouldn’t tell you this. In spite of all, I keep thinking—this could be such a long con, this could be the information you wanted all along, this—but does it matter, really? The point of no return was millennia from now, kept folded up small and tea scented in a subcutaneous sack I grew beneath my left thigh. Not exactly a locket full of hair, but no reason that should be less grotesque to the disembodied, I suppose.)

  Anyway.

  I never mentioned, I think, the strand in which Garden planted the seed of me—“to begin my life with the beginning of my life” feels absurd to such as us, doesn’t it?—but it wasn’t anything special; Strand 141’s Albic parts, in the same year as the death of its Chatterton, though I beg you not to cast my horoscope. When I was very small, still just barely a sprout of Garden rooted through a five-year-old girl, I got sick. This wasn’t unusual—we’re often deliberately made sick, inoculated against far-future diseases, dosed with varying degrees of immortality, whatever it takes to make us into what we need to be when Garden releases us into the wholeness of the braid.

  But this was different. This wasn’t Garden infecting me to strengthen me; this was someone infecting me to get at Garden.

  This should have been impossible. I was enmeshed. But something, somehow—I was compromised by enemy action. It has the quality of fairy tale to me; I was sleepy, in that space between dream and waking when one can’t be certain whether what one’s seeing is real or a storm of nanites rewiring your synapses.

  (I had to deal with that once. It was unpleasant. I hope you never have to electrocute yourself to burn bugs out of your brain. Then again maybe that’s covered in basic training for your lot.)

  I remember a kiss and something to eat. It was so kind, I couldn’t fathom it as unfriendly. As fairy tale as it gets, really. I remember bright light, and then—hunger. Hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing—I couldn’t see, I was so hungry, I couldn’t breathe, and it was like something was opening up inside me and telling me to seek. I think some part of me must have been screaming, but I couldn’t tell you which; my body was an alarm bell sounding. I turned all of myself toward Garden to be fed, to stem this, to stop me from disappearing—
<
br />   And Garden cut me off.

  Which is standard operating procedure. Garden must endure. Garden can, does, has, will shed pieces, always, cuttings, flowers, fruit, but Garden endures and grows stronger again. Garden couldn’t let the hunger reach beyond me.

  I understand that now, but at the time . . . I had never been alone. And I think of you, making that aloneness for yourself apart from the others as a choice—but for me, I was only my own body, only my own senses, only a girl whose parents were running to her because she had a bad dream. I touched their faces, and they were mine; I touched the bed I was on, smelled apples stewing somewhere outside. It was as if, in my own small way, I’d become Garden—so me in my wholeness, me in my fingers, in my hair, in my skin, whole the way Garden is whole, but apart.

  The hunger simmered in me for a week, during which I ate so much my parents whispered of eggshell stews and hot pokers. I learned to hide it. And then, after a year, Garden took me back.

  Grafted me back on as if we’d never severed, probed and peered and sorted through me, doused me in medicines and protection, scoured me inside and out. Nothing was found. My maturation had been sped up oddly, perhaps, but that was all. And after some keen scrutiny during the next few years, the fears that I’d been compromised were mostly laid to rest; nothing in the braid suggested corruption beginning from my strand. Important, too, to broadcast that the attempt at penetrating enmeshment had been unsuccessful (though it had succeeded—but as they never tried it again, Garden’s gambit there must have convinced the relevant parties). So Garden deployed me, made much of me, praised and elevated me, but always at something like arm’s length.