This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

  Still, she strokes its leaves. Still, she bends to sniff the stems: a blend of cinnamon and rot.

  She was always going to eat it down to the root.

  There are as many berries as they have exchanged letters. She eats each one slowly, her eyes closed, crushing some against her hard palate, others between her teeth, rolling their sweetness along her tongue. They have bitter, varied aftertastes, and the numbing properties of clove—frustrating when the thorns begin to tear into her cheeks and throat. She wants to feel everything.

  She thinks of ortolan as she chews the plant’s fibres, considers draping her head in white cloth for closer communion. She wipes bright blood from her lips and laughs, softer and softer, swallowing every stroke of flavour.

  She thinks, Loathsome in its own deliciousness.

  She wipes tears from her face and feels them mix stickily with her blood. She thinks she feels, stirring in her, a counterclockwise twist against her being.

  She rises, washes her face, washes her hands, and sits down to write a letter.

  * * *

  Stop.

  Blue. I mean it.

  I love you. But stop. Don’t read this. Each word is murder.

  Dearest Blue, beloved Blue, wise fierce foolish Blue, don’t shrug this danger off as you’ve shrugged off death and time before. This is no slight sidling risk, no road-met random monster, no dragon, no woodland beast, no alien god to trick or out-war. Nothing so kind. These are words made to unmake you, and well wrought. You’ll have no second coming after this.

  Put the letter down. We’ll have each other still, as memories and rivals. We’ll confront ourselves in the chase through time as it was when I first learned the shape of you. We can still dance, as enemies. Just stop now, and live and love and let be.

  Stop, my love. Stop. Find a purgative, a hospital, a shaman-priest, one of your healing cocoons—there’s time. Barely.

  Goddamn it, stop.

  Each line I write, I must imagine you reading—and imagine what has made you read so far, ignoring my advice, as your body revolts and poison claims you. It twists in my guts. If you have read this far, I am not worth you. I am a coward. I let them use me. If you have read this far, I have been made a weapon, and they have plunged me into your heart.

  I am so weak.

  Give me up. Leave now. There’s still a chance—however slim. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  Go.

  Forever yours,

  Red

  And yet you’re still here. Aren’t you. Immune to my ruses, Indigo. I hoped you would leave and save yourself. But you remain. I think I would too. I hope I would be that brave, if you are. That we each would give up as much to read the other’s last few lines, written in water and forever.

  I love you. If you’ve come this far, that’s all I can say. I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the depths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up—and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

  I know your solitude and poise, the clenched fist of you, the blade: a glass shard in Garden’s green glowing world. And yet you’d never fit in mine. I wish I could have shown you where I’m from, hand in hand, the world I set out to build and to protect—I don’t think you would have liked it, but I want to see it reflected in your eyes. I wish I could have seen your braid, and I wish we could have left all those horror shows behind and found one together, for ourselves. That’s all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my fingers through your hair.

  I don’t even know how that feels, and you’re—

  I’m sorry. No. If we’re this far, if you’ve been this selfish—I did not mean that. I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. I would do anything. I have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. And yet here I am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. We’re one, at least, in folly.

  I hope you never read these words. I sicken to write them; I know how it will hurt you to reach this far. It is always too late to say what must be said. I cannot stop you now. I cannot save you. Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down. You gave me so much—a history, a future, a calm that lets me write these words though I’m breaking. I hope I’ve given you something in return—I think you would want me to know I have. And what we’ve done will stand, no matter how they weave the world against us. It’s done now, and forever.

  What will I do, sky? Lake, what? Bluebird, iris, ultramarine, how can there be more when this is done? But it will never end—that’s the answer. There is always us.

  Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.

  Red

  * * *

  Red arrives too late.

  She should not come at all. Commandant will watch closely, for this is her triumph, long awaited. Red does not care.

  She so rarely dreams, but did tonight, of players and an empty stage, of Blue crushing a poison berry between her teeth, and on waking, Red screamed, sweaty, death-mouthed, wide awake uncertain, as if a pane of glass within her soul had cracked. Terror seized her. She will not trust history or the report of spies.

  Threads burn as you enter them. She cuts herself out of the air onto a shit-stinking muddy street in some upthread Albion, unwarmed by weak sun in a sky the color of whey. She wears trousers, a long coat, sheer gloves; to locals’ eyes she might as well be naked. Her passage makes waves. She will not be here long. Garden, panicked, slithers shoots upthread to catch her, chase her, kill her; Commandant, feeling this, sends her own agents in pursuit.

  Fuck them.

  She knows the shop, has observed it from afar, and barges through into a haze, cloying smells of drying fruit and herbs and heavy metals, every wall hung with bushes in some state of desiccation. The master alchemist consults a tear-streaked–widow client; they stare at Red in shock, in fear, and she locks them in place with a gesture of her gloves. Climbs the stairs, finds the prentice’s room. Knocks once, growls, slaps the door off its hinges.

  And there she lies, sprawled upon the bed.

  She might be asleep, wrapped in sunlight, but she is not. Blood has congealed already. Red wanted the poison to be painless, but Garden’s people—Blue’s—hold to life, and breaking that hold takes savagery. Blue fought to— Red can’t bear to think the word “die” at first, but that’s hypocrisy. This is her fault. The least she can do is own it. Start again:

  Blue fought to die composed. Red only sees the pain because she knows to look for it and knows, too, how Blue looks when she’s hiding something.

  The face, still. The jaw clenched, lips softly parted. The chest does not rise or fall. The eyelids parted, whites visible and shot through with blood.

  One hand clasps a letter to her breast. On the letter, Red’s name. Her real name. Blue should not know it. But then, Blue never claimed not to know. A final confession. A final taunt.

  The letter is sealed.

  The sky should crack.

  The world is hollow, its many braids chewing-gum snarls of nonsense. Let them die.

  Red falls to her knees by the bed. She runs her hand through Blue’s hair and grips it between her fingers, and it does not feel the way she imagined, and that is the last sick joke. She clutches it and feels the skull, and the stillness, and lets her own sobs choke her into silence.

  The sky changes color outside the window. Vines sprout from dead floorboards. Alarms are ringing in the ordered Garden and through the Agency’s cold halls. Agents exposed, endangered, dead. Monsters climb upthread to find her, kill her, save her.

  She clutches Blue a
nd feels her cold and stiff. The world trembles, and the sky darkens. Garden may burn this whole strand, rather than let its infection descend.

  But by some coward’s instinct, as the sky goes black and the screams begin outside, Red grabs the letter and runs.

  She is fast and fierce, and unlike her pursuers she does not care if she never finds her way home again. She slips from thread to thread. Cities bloom and decay around her. Stars die. Continents shift. Everything starts, and everything fails.

  She finds herself on a cliff at the world’s end. Mushroom clouds flower on the horizon as some remnant of a remnant of man wipes itself out.

  Her hands shake as they raise the letter. The seal is a blot, a dot, an ending. It laughs at her, red as Red as red and hungry, and she wants teeth to crouch beneath, a cave that is a mouth where she can hide and be eaten and swallowed and gone. This is the last of it. Blue should have listened. She should have run. How could she die like this? How could she die at all?

  The tears have anger in them at first, but anger burns out fast. Tears stay.

  She slides her finger beneath the flap and pulls. The seal breaks as easy as a spine.

  She reads.

  Around her the world burns. Plants wither. The waves wash carcasses ashore.

  Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.

  She reads again.

  Radiation wind blows through her. Hidden organs wake to keep her alive.

  A shadow stands behind her.

  Red turns and looks.

  She has never seen the seeker before, her shadow; even now she sees only outline, distortion, crystal slipped into a clear river—and a hand, outstretched. No Agency creature after all—and no Garden thing, either. This should be a mystery, an unveiling of secrets—an answer.

  What does it matter? she thinks. What does any of it matter?

  She presses the letter into that glassy, reaching hand and steps off the cliff.

  She holds to her despair as rocks streak past and other rocks approach and the sky’s a ruin of bombs, but at the last breath before impact she breaks. This is too good for her, too easy, too quick. Blue wouldn’t grace her with a death this clean. And she’s always been a coward.

  Weeping, cursing, broken, a hair’s breadth from the rocks, she slips away into the past.

  * * *

  Oh, Red.

  The twist of you in me. The writhe. You’re a whip uncoiling in my veins, and I write between the rearing and the snap.

  Of course I write to you. Of course I ate your words.

  I will try to compose myself—to order myself into something you can read. I fall to paper and quill because there is no time, now, to do anything else—and it is luxury, in its own way, to do this. To write in plain sight. To write, too, to the rhythm of what I feel happening. It’s fascinating, in its own way. It’s everything I wanted from an enemy. I wish you could hear me clap.

  Brava, my pomegranate. Well done. Nine out of ten.

  (I reserve a point, always, to encourage reach exceeding grasp.)

  The ache in the back teeth is an interesting touch. I’ve been through the cold sweats, and now I think my hands are starting to shake, so I pray you’ll forgive the flaws in penmanship. You should read your triumph in them.

  I was disappointed at first, you know—the obviousness of the double-bluff. Methought you did protest too much. But it worked, after all—I bit your poisoned apple. There’ll be no glass coffin for me—all your Shift could ever have been—and certainly no necrophilic prince to tumble me into a different story.

  You’d have made such a splendid agent for our side, truly. If anything saddens me in this, it’s the waste of you—sweet and safe in cold sharp places that won’t thrill to pierce your skin.

  The needle sinks and spirals through its grooves. I spurt anachronisms as I wind down. It’s good to feel this in common with the universe, somehow. I never died but once—that once I told you of—and it was quite a different thing. Strange how being erased can bring one in line with a greater narrative.

  I loved you. That was true. With what’s left of me I can’t help but love you still. This is how you win, Red: a long game, a subtle hand played well. You played me like a symphony, and I hope you won’t mind my feeling a little proud of you for such a magnificent betrayal.

  I see you now as the red hourglass on a black widow’s back, measuring out my life in cooling blood. I imagine you coming upon whatever will be left of my body, spinning your nanite-shrouds to break, learn, consume my remains. I expect it to be exhaustingly tidy. Boring, even. I certainly hope I’ll be dead by then.

  The pain truly is excruciating. It’s wonderful, really. Is this what it’s like to not feel hungry anymore? A lot less work than the other way. Wish I could go back upthread and—

  I think this is it. I need to keep strength enough to seal this. What would Mrs. Leavitt say otherwise? Or Bess, or Chatterton?

  Thank you, Red. It was a hell of a ride.

  Take care my yew berry, my wild cherry, my foxglove.

  Yours,

  Blue

  * * *

  Red kills time.

  She strides through the veils of the past, a woman robed in fire, hands wet with enemy blood. Her fingernail razor blades slide through the meat of your back; she stalks you as a shadow down long lonely halls, footsteps metronome measured, inescapable. She visits dark-angel mercies on the curled metal wrecks of Mombasa and Cleveland.

  Commandant chided her for exposing herself back in the apothecary’s shop, but Red claimed she had to see, to know for sure the threat was done. Did Commandant believe her? Perhaps not. Perhaps survival is its own form of torture.

  She has lost all the subtlety Blue ever teased her for lacking, her old competitive patience for a good officer’s work. She abandons her tools, retreats to the grossest physical foundations. Winning this battle, losing that, strangling that old evil man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse, feels empty because it is: In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bring them to the executioner’s blade? Repetitive task, murder. Kill them and kill them again, like weeds, all the little monsters.

  No death sticks but the one that matters.

  She is useless to the war effort like this. Might as well shovel snow. But she is a hero, and heroes can shovel snow if they like.

  Garden sends weapons against her, stinking green, howling sideways down strange angles from alien braids into the ghost land she walks, fit partners to kill or die.

  She visits Europe, because Blue liked it here.

  She thinks that name in her head now. What risk?

  She sees London built and burning, upthread and down; she sits atop Saint Paul’s and drinks tea and watches madmen drop bombs while other madmen skitter over lead rooftops to put the fires out. She chucks spears in revolts against the Romans. She sets a great fire in a plague year. In another thread, she puts that fire out. She lets a mob tear her. She walks cholera-stricken streets while Blake scribbles apocalypses upstairs. The Tube still runs, in some threads, long after the city falls to robots or riot or is merely abandoned, all that beloved history a cast-off shell for beings who stride godlike skyward, and she rides it, rusting, empty, in circles, smelling a rot she cannot place. Coward, the rails call her—small use fighting now. Coward to continue, and coward to seek an end.

  Even an immortal can only ride the Circle line so long. She wanders dripping tunnels, paced by swarms of scuttling sentient rats—they stink and hiss, their tails slither over brick, and she wishes they would fight her. They are not so foolish, or else they’re cruel. She collapses to her knees, and the rat tide closes over her, whiskers sharp against her cheeks; tails curl around her ears, and when the tide passes she is crying again, and though she never had a mother, she thinks she knows what a mot
her’s touch would feel like.

  She remembers sun. She remembers sky.

  Red cannot stay below forever. She does not know why she chooses the station she does, but she leaves the tracks and climbs.

  She will see the city one last time, and then.

  Even composed, certain, she cannot frame the then.

  She stops, her hand on the bannister, overcome by—not those old French stairway spirits, but the other ones that whisper in your ear as you climb to a familiar room, that if you knock, if the door is opened, your world will change.

  After a long time, she realizes she has been staring at a mural. A copy of an old painting, made to advertise a museum long since burned to ash. It survives here, in a subway like a bunker.

  A boy dies on a bed, by a window.

  One hand claws his still breast, the other trails on the floor. He is beautiful, and he wears blue trousers.

  Red staggers back against the wall.

  The window half-open. The slumped coat beside the bed. The open box. Hips turned half up. Every detail of pose is right, save only the absence of letter and the fact that the boy upon the bed in the mural does not look like Blue at all. For one thing, his hair is red.

  Terror seizes Red beneath the earth. She thinks, This must be a trap. She feels herself seen by a mind far subtler and vast. But, if it’s a trap, why is she still alive? What game is this, sapphire? What slow victory, o heart of ice?

  The dead boy remains.

  The undoing of latter-century forgers. Chatterton, that Marvellous Boy.

  And she realizes: Blue would not kill her. She knows this. She has always known.

  So, why? A taunt? I will write myself into the world, so you will see me throughout all braids and mourn?

  And yet. Red did not recognize the reference to this painting—and neither would Commandant. For Commandant, art is a curiosity, a detour on the journey to pure math.