I don’t know how it’s done between such as us, Red. But I can’t wait to find out together.
Love,
Blue
PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.
* * *
If Blue were less of a professional, she might sing as she slices the throat of her mark, tucked comfortably beneath Hôtel La Licorne’s brocade bedclothes and silk sheets she is almost sorry to spoil. The easiest work since her great achievement, and all in her favourite strands; Blue almost feels herself on vacation, she is so relaxed, so happy. Others work, now, to tend the new shoot, while she cuts fresh swathes in soft flesh.
She does not sing—but the bright bubbling of the earl’s blood beneath her hands makes her sigh, and ballads crowd her tongue. O, the earl was fair to see!
Blue has never laid plans, not really. Not her own, ever. Her job is to execute (she almost laughs, washing her hands, but doesn’t), to perform. She is familiar with cautionary poets’ exhortations across half a dozen strands, of mice, men, plans, canals, Panama—but she plans, now. She sits at the octagonal mirror in her own room—which she never left by the door, naturally, honestly the penny dreadful of her actions is another layer of amused enjoyment for her—and braids her dark hair in slow, careful configuration. She lays a circuitry of colour over the strands, raises a map out of them, and thinks of surfaces, of opposites that match, of the breathtaking reciprocity of a reflection. She curates, idly, scenarios in which to receive and deliver conversation, as one hand crosses another.
She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.
She takes the stairs to meet her alibi for a drink, smiling, already thinking ahead to the cognac she glimpsed earlier in the day, the reddest one, and how it will fill her mouth with sweet fire.
Garden looks out at her from the alibi’s eyes.
Blue does not miss a beat, but the smooth legato into which she folds the beat may as well be a stumble to Garden. Blue’s fingers curl around the gilt back of a chair as slowly as the corners of her lips curl into a smile. She pulls it out, sits down, while Garden pours her a glass of red wine to match her own.
“I hope you don’t mind my dropping in,” says Garden, mischievous green gaze flicking up at Blue, “but I so wanted to toast to our success in person. As it were.”
Blue chuckles and reaches her hand across the table to clasp Garden’s, warmly. “It’s good to see you. As it were.” Blue withdraws her hand, reaches for her glass, raises an eyebrow. “But you’re concerned about something.”
“The toast, first.” Garden raises her glass; Blue mirrors her. “To lasting success.” Their glasses clink; they sip. Blue closes her eyes as she licks colour from her lips, obliterates its name even as she coats her tongue with it, listens to the deep velvety green of Garden’s voice.
“You’re in danger,” says Garden, in soft, almost apologetic tones. “I want to put you to bed.”
Blue opens her eyes and affects a look of mild surprise. “That’s very flattering, but I expect a lady to buy me dinner first.”
Garden’s laugh is a rustle of leaves. She leans forward, and Blue feels herself falling into her eyes, tasting the ease they promise, the rest.
“My dear,” says Garden, “your accomplishment, while stellar, has a touch of, shall we say, ostentation to it. Relatively speaking. Where your siblings bloom and melt back into me, you . . .” Garden brushes a soft thumb along Blue’s cheek with a tenderness that draws a tremble from her jawline. “You root in the air, my epiphyte. It’s no hard thing to trace the new growth to you, singly. You have always,” says Garden, planting the words into Blue’s smile like strangler fig, “been too fond of signing your work.”
If Blue were less of a professional, she might have looked stunned. She might have chewed her lip. She might have walled up the inside of herself into a tomb and drowned it in a bog and set the bog on fire in her panic of what and when and how long.
Instead, she rakes through Garden’s words, look, tone, tills their depths, and turns over nothing but affectionate reproof of longstanding habit. She leans forward, takes Garden’s hands in hers again.
“If you embed me now,” she says, steadily, “we commit to losing the ground we’ve gained. More slowly, yes, but it will be a step sideways instead of forward. Keep me in, and we can press this advantage. You must feel it—the difference? We’re on the brink of something.”
“Brinks,” says Garden, with casual fondness, “are traditionally stepped back from.”
“They are also fine places over which to tip one’s enemies,” says Blue. “Traditionally.”
Garden chuckles, and Blue knows she’s won. “Very well. Once you’re done here, proceed upthread until you meet my sign, then twelve strands over. There’s a delicate opportunity there.” Garden draws her hands back slowly. “You are more precious than you know, my tumbleweed. Take care.”
Then Garden is gone, and Blue makes a dry remark about the strength of the wine as her alibi finds her focus again, laughs, and the evening dissolves into mirth.
When Blue checks out the next morning, the concierge looks confused. “My apologies, mademoiselle,” he says. “There has been a mistake with your bill—I will make up another—”
“May I,” says Blue, not trembling, not in knots, gloved hand sure as she reaches for it, already seeing the smudge in the ink for what it is, disguised as an unlikely decimal point. She reads it while the concierge looks on.
“Ah, yes,” she says, her voice warm and bright. “My friend and I enjoyed ourselves a little too well last night, but so fine a champagne would have been a step too far. You are correct.” She smiles. “We had nothing to celebrate.”
She crumples the smudged bill neatly before the concierge can ask for it back, pays the new bill, walks out, and imagines the housekeeper’s scream in one hour’s time in place of her own. A groundskeeper burns brush outside; Blue tosses the old bill into the blaze without breaking her stride.
Once she’s gone, Seeker plucks the smoldering bill from the flames and eats it piping hot.
* * *
Dear Blue—
I can’t
I
Fuck
In haste:
They know.
Not everything. Not yet.
But they know you. Your hammer blow, your trap, your triumph, your emergence—you hurt them bad, and they won’t let you have another shot. Not ever.
They know you’re close to me. Somehow they mapped us, our earliest beginnings, in spite of all our care. They don’t have the letters—I don’t think—just your interest, our nearness in time. They feel it through the strands, like spiders. They think you want to turn me. Did you, once? Was that why you reached for me at the first, whatever we’ve become since?
They think you’re waiting for me to contact you. To send you a letter. I can’t even laugh. They have machines to rewrite the code of cells, to turn proteins the wrong way round. They’ve never met you, they’ve never read you, but they know you well enough to break you—if you let them in. And they think if I send you a letter, you’ll
I can’t write it out. I can’t fucking
They’re so smart, and so dumb.
Your letter, the sting, the beauty of it. Those forevers you promise. Neptune. I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.
Listen to me—I am your echo.
I would rather break the world than lose you.
I see one solution. It’s—it should be—easy.
Let me go. And I’ll let you.
I will write their letter. Send it. Do not, under any circumstances, read what you next receive from me. When you do not die, they will see the gambit’s lost. Perhaps your interest in me was a feint. Perhaps I wasn’t yet ripe for you. Perhaps you spotted the trap before it sprang. Perhaps Commandant was wrong. She has been wrong before, and so have the machines.
J
ust—don’t read what I send you after this. Don’t answer.
And we go our separate ways.
I hate it. I never hated before, like I hate this. With all you are to me, and all you’ll always be, we can’t just go. We can’t just walk away.
But I will, if it leaves you living.
They will watch you, and me, closer than ever now. We can fight. We can chase each other down through time, like we did for centuries past before I knew your name. But no more letters. No more of this.
That I should die—fine. I signed on to this war to die.
I don’t know if I ever told you that before.
But that you should die. That you should suffer. That they should unmake you.
I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.
But never again like this.
I am so sorry. If I had been stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. If I had been worth you. If—
You would not want me to curse myself this way.
You’ll have to burn this. I hope you can keep it. I keep the memory. I imagine your hands on the paper. I imagine your fire.
I wish I could hold you.
I love you.
R
Red concocts an ending.
The work takes longer than she thought. She never labored so upon a letter. Day by day she sleeps in the white room and wakes to whiteness and showers alone. Then the experts arrive to help her brew the poison.
The experts rarely speak, and never with her. They wear decontamination suits with faceplates in the lab, while Red goes barefoot. They arrive in the morning and leave at night. Red stays. She peers behind the faceplates while the experts work, and whenever she can see them, they are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily. She does not think they always looked so calm. Commandant has hollowed them, hallowed them, for this purpose.
Red’s message must be subject to minimal interference and oversight, lest the poison reek of committee and warn their prey. That’s what Commandant has said. Red does not know whether she should believe.
She proceeds with care.
She never weeps. She does not curse the empty walls of her empty lab, even after the experts have gone home. She does not want to risk Commandant listening.
She sleeps and dreams of letters.
It will be a plant. She chose that form: a plant grown from seed, to give Blue every chance to turn away. She gives it thorns. She makes its berries evil red, its leaves dark and oily. Its every piece cries poison.
She waits for the experts to object, but they do not.
Nothing could be simpler than killing a Garden agent. They die like anyone else—and then their spores infect, their windblown dandelion tufts take seed, their deep roots put forth new shoots. To break them, that’s the trick: a brew to snap the chains of memory, tangle the germ line. It must be targeted with care. They have samples of Blue, bits of blood on slides, a strand of hair that might be hers. Before Red can devise a way to steal them, the experts drop them in the pot.
This is a letter of death. It will lack meaning to any but the intended recipient. Its killing words will lace through Red’s message, hidden, until the charm’s wound up. Steganography: hidden writing. Writing inside other writing.
She writes, on the first level, a simple enough note, the note Commandant expects her to write: an expression of interest; a temptation and a dare. Not unlike the letter Blue wrote her back then.
She thinks, Do not read this.
She remembers how it felt so long ago to taunt her, to rejoice in victory. Blueberry. Blue-da-ba-dee. Mood Indigo. She tries to channel that memory against all that’s happened since.
She can’t.
She thinks, Some time traveler I am.
Blue won’t fall for this. She will listen. She received the letter. She will understand. She must. The only future they have is one apart and together. They lived for so long without knowing one another, warring through time. They were separate, they did not speak, but each shaped the other, even as they were shaped in turn.
So just go back to that. Why not?
It will hurt. They’ve hurt before, to save each other’s lives.
But there is another path. One she cannot bear to chart, and yet she must, because while Blue is subtle, she is also bold, and this may be the last chance Red will have.
So when the experts have left, she hides another message in the message they have hidden inside hers. She frames new meaning in the poison lines and hides it so the techs won’t notice, so even Commandant won’t see. She hopes.
Steganography is hidden writing. You hide a message in a crossword puzzle, a novel, a work of art, in the dapple of a dawn river. Even your hidden message can hide other messages deeper, as here. Eat one of the berries Red has made, and you would find a simple message, and inside that message, the poison. And inside the poison, farther down, legible only as in death, she hides another letter. A true letter.
To think of this letter being read sickens her, but she writes it anyway, because whatever happens next, this is the end.
Because it is the end, she cannot resist the urge to make this deadly thing beautiful.
The seed has its luster. Growing, she lends it fragrance. Blossoming, she grants it color, depth. Berrying, she gives it shine and taste. Even its thorns are wicked art. She signs her death with love.
She must, even now, give Blue something worthy of her.
Blue will not read it. She will spot the trap.
All will be well.
And they will go back to how they were before.
Nothing need change, though everything has.
They can make this work.
When it is done, she sleeps, restless.
The next day they close the lab. It’s due to be destroyed: a bomb, a footnote of history. Red watches the explosion. She was ordered to save no one. She saved a few anyway, what deaths history could spare.
In the blooming dust she reads a letter.
She walks away.
Later, a shadow moves among the ashes, eating.
* * *
Dear Red,
As you wish.
B
* * *
Blue stands among the groundlings, watching players strut and fret their hour upon the stage.
She’s an apothecary’s apprentice in this life, a study in dark and bright: black hair cropped short beneath a flat felt cap, black doublet over white shirt and hose. She has carried out Garden’s delicate opportunity—one womb quickened, another slowed—and lingers, now, on the margins, watching the first performance of a new play.
If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be—she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.
She is not delighted now. She watches the performance with all the tense fervor of awaiting prophecy.
She leaves before the end.
She returns to the shop. A plant—a curious cross, her master said, between hemlock and yew—sits potted near a window. Dark, oily leaves; viciously elegant thorns; berries red as the half-moons she digs into her palms every time she looks at them.
The letter is beautifully composed. She is not.
This, more than anything, infuriates her.
She has grown it, dutifully, from a seed—oddly marked, misshapen, glinting blue in a paper packet of pale browns. She has watched for a year—while she coaxed life into one belly and banished it from another—its mocking growth into a promise never kept, a sheet of music never played.
The plant is written in an obvious geomantic script, a kind of crud
e binary culled from Levantine manuscripts. The number of needles and berries on a branch form divinatory figures—conjunctio, puella—whose names can be easily parsed for a more elaborate alphabet. Dear Blue, I’ve thought about your proposal but need a demonstration of trust. It’s risky for me to communicate with you, so I’ve disguised the real letter as poison—consume it, and you’ll know when to meet me and where.
It doesn’t even sound like her. The thought of some grey-faced Agency hack hovering over Red’s shoulder as she writes fills her mouth with helpless fury. In dreams, sometimes, Blue sees herself straddling the goon, punching their face into pulp, except her hands keep slipping off, sliding away, and she can’t land a hit, and the goon laughs and laughs until a plant grows out of their mouth and says Blue’s name.
On her good days, she pricks her fingers experimentally on the thorns and thinks of spindles. On her bad days she takes trips seventy years downthread just to watch London burn.
Today is a very bad day.
A berry dropped. She nearly screamed—suppose it were a paragraph?—and picked it from the soil, held it between thumb and forefinger, placed it in her palm, made certain it hadn’t been pierced on a thorn, lost an ant’s sip of juice. It wasn’t yet time, she thought; a year is nothing, a year is no time at all to wait for a letter rescinding the letter, a letter contradicting the contradiction of this letter. The deadline for reply is written in the plant’s own mortality.
Truth be told, Blue is insulted. How obvious; how unsubtle. Red said not to read her next letter—and here it is, announcing itself as poison as a test of Blue’s interest, of Red’s success. If Blue eats it, she’ll die—but if Blue doesn’t, then Red’s side will know she’s been tipped off, will suspect Red, will destroy her instead.
Her heart should have been broken by better. Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth. All that—all that. And now this.
This Is How You Lose the Time War Page 9