This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

  Red thinks of steganography, of hidden letters, of the rings of trees.

  I will try to compose myself—to order myself into something you can read.

  She remembers that last letter. A long game, she wrote, a subtle hand played well. Remembers between the rearing and the snap. Remembers pomegranate, and what pomegranates are for.

  They stick in the throat. They scatter to a hundred seeds. They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

  What is this, but a small mind’s deluded fantasy? What is this, but clutching straws against death and time?

  What is love, ever, but—

  Wish I could go back upthread, Blue wrote.

  Red thinks, There is a chance.

  A chance? Call it a trap, a temptation, suicide with a kind face. Any of those would be nearer the truth.

  All that supposing Blue even sent this message—that Red has not manufactured it, groping in despair for meaning in broken images the next braid’s twist will wash away. Art comes and goes in the war. The painting on the subway wall might be an accident. She might be making this up.

  But.

  There is a chance.

  Red’s poison was built to kill an agent of Garden—like Blue. It would have no purchase on someone of Red’s own faction. Someone with her codes, her antibodies, her resistance.

  Garden shelters its agents while they grow in embedded crèches ringed with traps. Blue almost died in her childhood crèche—cut off, warped. There is a hole in her mind as a result. And every hole is an opening.

  Red has no hope of nearing that crèche as she is. Garden admits only its own.

  Blue, as herself, cannot survive. Red, as herself, cannot reach her.

  But they have sprinkled bits of themselves through time. Ink and ingenuity, flakes of skin on paper, bits of pollen, blood, oil, down, a goose’s heart.

  Rocks laid for later avalanches. If you want to change a plant, start from its root.

  The plan she’s forming offers more ways to die than she can count, and to suffer on the way. If Commandant finds her, she’ll hurt long and slow and die babbling hallucinations. If Garden does, she’ll be shelled, filleted, and flayed, her mind curled against itself, her fingers snapped and braided. The other side has no more compassion than Red’s. She’ll have to follow a trail she and Blue rubbed out even as they left it, dodge her foes and former fellows, and then, at the last, walk into the enemy’s embrace. In her peak form, there would be no certainty of success.

  The decision forms like a jewel in her stomach.

  Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real.

  She reaches up to touch the dead man’s hand upon the wall.

  Then she climbs and goes seeking.

  Red’s no fool: She starts the whole desperate play with autosurgery. She pierces herself with a thin blade bought in thirteenth-century Toledo, breaks the obvious tracking systems. Commandant may yet trace her as she climbs and descends history’s braid, but that takes time, and Red moves fast.

  The first letter’s easy.

  They didn’t know they were being watched yet, of course. Only rough precautions taken. She emerges from the shadow of a broken gunship and stares into the sky of a world they wrecked and left. The letter is ash; she slits her finger, works blood into the ash to form dough as the world breaks. She applies jeweled lights and odd sounds. She wrinkles time.

  Thunder nears. The world cracks through the middle.

  The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire writing in a viny hand at the top.

  She reads it. She takes the beginning into herself. This is how we’ll win.

  Red finds water in an MRI machine in an abandoned hospital and drinks. In a temple abyss, Red gnaws fallen bones. In a grand computer’s heart, she peers through optic circuits. In a frozen waste, she slides a letter’s splinters into her skin. She takes them into herself, adapts. Finds all the missing shades of Blue.

  As the letters’ taunts change tone, she must be more inventive. A spider eating a dragonfly. A shadow drinking tears and coiled enzymes within.

  She watches herself weep in a dinosaur swamp, and though she knows this is a trap laid by the younger Red for her shadow follower, the tears still gouge and burn. She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I’m here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation. She wrestles herself in the shadows and feels the pain when she breaks her own hip.

  She travels the labyrinth of the past and rereads the letters. Recreates both herself and Blue, so young-seeming now, in her heart.

  She clutches the text like a spar against a flood—Red in tooth and claw, the Mongol hordes, curses of Atlantis, a hunger so sharp and bright it might split you open, break a new thing out. Rose-hip tea. Promises of books. That I might have taught you this. Tending each to each.

  The breadcrumbs she finds as she seeks them! Blodeuwedd. You’d need to practically wear their skin. How long had she planned this? How long did you know, my mood indigo?

  Or did she know at all? The links are small, deniable. The breadcrumbs could be only crumbs. Red devours them anyway. She has decided; there’s no room left for doubt.

  Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something.

  Commandant’s agents smell her, chase her. They trap her in a sinking pirate ship in Coxinga’s fleet, and she breaks them quickly, surgically, and peels their camouflage shields away and wears them.

  A letter is more than text. She reads Blue into her: tears, breath, skin—most of these traces were scrubbed away, but a few remain. She builds a model of Blue’s mind from the words she left; she molds her body to the letters’ measure. Almost.

  And at last, Red stands on the cliff at the end of the world and holds out her hand, and her heart breaks to see herself weeping in the world before. She wishes she could take herself into her arms, crush her in a fierce embrace.

  The broken Red presses Blue’s last letter into her hand, jumps off the cliff, and does not die.

  The letter remains—the seal, the wax with a drop of blood inside.

  On a bare island far upthread, she places the seal upon her tongue, chews, swallows, and collapses.

  She shades herself with Blue, from blood, tears, skin, ink, words. She thrashes with the pain of growth inside her: new organs bloom from autosynthesized stem cells to shoulder old bits of her away. Green vines twine her heart and seize it, and she vomits and sweats until the vines’ rhythm matches hers. A second skin grows within her skin, popping, blistering. She claws herself off upon the rocks like a snake and lies transformed. And more: A different mind plays around the edges of her own.

  She feels herself alien. She has spent thousands of years killing bodies like the one she wears. Sea spray breaks the barren sunrise to rainbows.

  Her transformation has not gone unnoticed.

  Threads of time sing with the light, swift footfalls of Red’s sister-soldiers: The Agency has smelled her treason, their hero turned. She is meat, now, for their teeth.

  If they’re already that angry, wait until they get a load of her next trick.

  She dives from this thread, plummets down the space between the braids. Time feels different now—she remains herself, but also an echo of her love, a by-blow, a not-quite. The hounds bay behind, Red’s sisters, her rivals fiercest and fast, but one by one they realize where she’s bound and break off pursuit. The last, too strong and dumb for her own good, remains, nearer, nearer, her hand almost clutching Red’s ankle. But the green wall looms ahead, the great border where futures turn from Ours to Theirs.

  Red strikes that wall, and it reads the Blue in her, bubbles, at first resists, and she thinks, That’s it, chance failed, we’re done. But then it gapes, and she tumbles through, and it closes fast behind. Her pursuer shatters.

  Red falls, flies, down threads she’s never dared touch, into Garden.

  She enters as a letter,
sealed in Blue.

  She finds herself, at first, in orbit.

  Space here is sick. Thick. Slick. She drowns in cloying honey-heavy light. Her passage through vacuum feels like sliding over meat. The cold touches her new skin but does not burn; her lungs lack air, but she does not need to breathe. Far away and too, too near shines a sun that is an eye with a great hourglass pupil like a goat’s, sweeping space for weaknesses to improve, exploit. All the stars are eyes here, always seeking. Red’s prophets rail against an indifferent universe; here, in Garden’s domain, all the vast worlds care.

  The planet she circles has outlived its usefulness, she knows—the new organs tell her. Thick fluid space opens. Green taproots descend from its gaps, wrap the globe, and, with a gentle pruner’s strength, crumble it to dirt, drawing life from the fragments until only ash remains. The nutrients are needed elsewhere.

  The eye that is a sun sweeps past her, and Red burns with the fury of its glance.

  She has made a terrible mistake. She is a fool, and she will die far from home. How could she think she knew this place from letters, from the memories of a friend? How could she have been so certain; how could she believe she’d become enough of Blue to survive here? Not knowing this, did she really know Blue at all?

  These are the thoughts that seek to betray her: cracks for roots to exploit.

  She thinks of Blue and does not break.

  The eye moves on, and so does Red, without betraying her relief.

  She walks Garden’s many worlds. Space itself is hostile to her here. Moss breathes fumes of sleep; spores drift, seeking traitors’ lungs where they can nest. Constellations hang phosphorescent in the sky, and vines tangle between galaxies, great trunk lines bridging stellar gulfs. Life burgeons and blooms even in fusion fires at the heart of stars. She is lost.

  She seeks Blue. She climbs through a mangrove growing from a mercury sea, and spiders the size of hands fall on her and tickle the back of her arms, her neck, feather light. They question her in silk, and she answers each challenge with memories of Blue. Blue braiding grasses. Blue taking tea. Blue, hair shorn, come to steal from God. Blue with club raised, Blue with razor, Blue birthing futures.

  The spiders mark her with their fangs, which is a dangerous way to give directions. But though the knowledge burns through her veins, the woman Red’s become does not die.

  She climbs upthread. She works slowly, steps light.

  We’re grown, I think you know, Blue wrote. We burrow into the braidedness of time. We are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals.

  Red finds the place. The spiders’ wisdom leads her to a green hollow of vines and moths, where flowers whiter than white bloom, at their hearts only dots of red. She descends into fairyland.

  It seems like one of Blue’s beloved paintings, but Red can sense the dangers here. The roses waft scents of sleep: Come rest among us so our thorns can climb through your ears to the softness within. A blanket of massive gray-wing moths falls from the willow boughs to flutter around her, settle on her, taste her lips with their proboscides. Wings sharper than razors slide rough against her tendons. Grass grows to cushion her steps, but she feels its coiled strength. Is she Blue enough? If this place suspected what she was, she would die at once: carved by mothwing, choked by grass, food for the roses.

  But she belongs here. This place belongs to the newness, the Blueness, inside her. So long as she does not fear. So long as she does not waver and gives the grove no reason to suspect.

  A mothwing presses, just, between her eyelashes, and she does not scream or vomit or cut her eyeball open.

  This is Blue’s place. She will not give it the satisfaction of killing her.

  Pollen thickens the air with wisdom. To walk is to swim, and so she swims, upthread along the taproot that is this grove, into a past Garden has warded round with walls and thorns to guard the fertile dirt where her most perfect agents grow.

  Seeds planted, roots combing through time.

  Red swims to the grove’s vegetal heart, surrounded by wet, green apparatus through which Garden rears and feeds its tools, its weapons. Yet look another way, with human eyes, and she stands on a hillside near a farm in autumn.

  There, the princess lies.

  The princess is a creature of thorn and edge and flame. She is a grand weapon unfinished, heartrending and beautiful. Ranks of teeth shine in her mouth.

  Look another way, and she is a girl asleep on a hill in light.

  When I was very small, Blue wrote, I got sick.

  When she’s grown, she will be fit for a war. But she is not Blue yet.

  Red nears. The princess’s eyes open, golden, gleaming—and dark, deep, human, both at once, a trap inside a trap. Gorgeous girlmonster, she blinks, stretches between dream and waking.

  Red bends to her bed and kisses her.

  Her teeth cut Red’s lip. Her tongue darts out to claim Red’s fallen blood.

  Red carved the poison into her memory down those long days in the lab, as she warped berries into paragraphs: a hungry poison, to turn Blue’s defenses against her, to make Garden cut her off, to eat her from within.

  The blood she gives Blue to drink holds a foretaste of that poison—and Red’s antivenom, her resistance. A small virus that, if this works, will taint juvenile Blue the most delicate shade of Red.

  I was compromised by enemy action.

  Take this of me, Red thinks. Carry it in yourself, a root fed by what would kill it. Carry hunger all your days. Let it guard you, guide you, save you.

  So that when the world and Garden and I all think you’re dead, some part of you will wake. Live. Remember.

  If this works.

  The gaze of the girl who would be Blue fixes on her, soft with dreams, trusting. She tastes what she is offered, knows the pain in it, and swallows.

  Hunger rushes crimson through the girl’s veins and out her roots into the glen; it pulses and snaps in flower petals; it sears the wings of moths. The grove burns. Red flees. Burning moths dart for her, carve furrows in her legs and arms and gut, but they cauterize the wounds they carve as they strike. One clips off Red’s little finger. Grass catches her leg, ungloves skin from a section of her right calf, but the grass, too, shrivels with hunger, and Red lurches out, bleeding, and gropes upthread toward the home she has betrayed, toward safety that is no longer safe.

  But she does not know where else to go.

  The slick heavy weight of space is still no longer. Anger tenses the skin of worlds. Eyes that are stars seek a traitor.

  Garden chases her.

  • • •

  Red is swift, clever, mighty, and in pain. Free of the grove, subtlety no longer needed, she deploys her armor, her weapons, and makes it a running fight. Suffice to say, this does not go well. The stars that are eyes pin her between possibilities. She wrestles giant taproots in the void. Tearing herself free, she loses armor, bones, fingers, teeth. She calls upon her last secret engines of war, burns the taproots, blinds the eyes—stars collapse and explode at once, and Red falls through a gap in worlds as into a mouth.

  She tumbles between threads, in silence and null time, to crash at last, broken, bleeding, barely conscious, in a desert beside two vast and trunkless legs of stone.

  She looks up, stares, and, broken-throated, laughs.

  And then Commandant’s legions fall upon her like the night.

  A cell is all Red’s world.

  They take her from it sometimes to ask her questions. Commandant has so many, all variations on the basic: why, and when, and how, and what. They think they know who.

  The first time Commandant asked those questions, Red grinned and told her to ask nicely. Then they hurt her.

  The second time Commandant asked questions, Red told her, once more, to ask nicely. They hurt her again.

  Sometimes they offer pain. Sometimes they offer steak and freedom, a word which means something to them presumably.

  But when she’s not in use, the world’s this cell, th
is box: gray walls meeting overhead; a flat, gray floor; rounded corners. A bed. A toilet. When she wakes, she finds food on a tray. When they come for her, a door opens at a random point on the curved wall. Her skin is raw. There are hollows beneath it where her weapons used to be.

  She suspects they built this prison especially for her. They drag her past other cells, all empty. Perhaps they want her to think she’s alone.

  The guard comes for her one morning. She has decided to believe whenever she sleeps is night, whenever she wakes is morning. Absent sun, who’s to care? They drag her down another empty hall. Commandant waits. No pliers this time. Commandant looks as tired as Red feels. She’s learned exhaustion in their many sessions together, as Red has learned fear.

  “Tell us,” she says. “This is the last time I ask. Tomorrow, we’ll take you apart and sift the pieces for what we want to know.”

  Red raises an eyebrow.

  “Please,” Commandant says, dry as steel.

  Red says nothing.

  She does not think about pomegranates. She does not dare hope. All they ever had was a chance. And even if it worked, even if she woke, who’s to say she’d come for you?

  You betrayed her.

  Red does not think.

  The guard drags her back down the long empty hall and pauses at the open door.

  Red, ready to be tossed once more into her small gray world, looks back. The guard watches her with still and weighing eyes and a mouth twisted to a cruel, clever line.

  “Why are you doing this?” Gruff, low. They aren’t supposed to talk to prisoners.

  Red’s always been one for small talk. And—tomorrow’s the end. “Some things matter more than winning.”

  The guard considers. Red knows the type: idealistic but unskilled, hoping to rise through the ranks on dependability. Yet her defection loosened this one’s lips.

  Blue would have been impressed.

  “You broke into Garden, and out again, and you won’t tell us how. So you’re not on our side. Why not join them when you had the chance? Sell us out?” So earnest. Red was that way once.