This Is How You Lose the Time War
Page 12
“Garden doesn’t deserve us. Neither does the Agency.” By us she means herself and Blue, wherever she may be, if in fact she is. She means all of them, all the ghosts on all the threads dying in this sick old war. Even this guard. Red gives her this truth, at the last. Maybe it will save her life.
The guard throws her into the cell anyway.
Red hits the floor and skids. She lies still and does not look up. Something rustles behind her. The cell door shuts. All over soon. She did what she could. The guard walks away, boot thud echoing heavy, measured, slow.
When Red looks up, a small rectangle of white paper lies upon the floor.
She scrambles toward the envelope, claws it to her.
Her name. Handwriting she knows.
She remembers the guard’s grip on her arm. Remembers that voice. Was it familiar?
She rips the envelope open with her thumb and reads, and by the second line, her cheeks hurt from the fierceness of her smile.
* * *
My dear Hyper Extremely Red Object—
I didn’t know what you would do.
I want to explain myself—this self you’ve saved, this self you’ve infected, this self that was Möbius twisted with yours from its earliest beginning.
I planted your letter. I watched it grow. I tended it and thought of feeding it my blood, rearing a mouth in it through which to speak to you. You said not to read it. The thought of your naïveté charmed me in the same breath as the thought of betrayal burned me. It had to be one or the other: How could you think that your failure to kill me would result in anything less than your own death? How could you not see this for the test it was? How, unless you trusted in your conquest sufficiently to know I would take myself off the board for you, prompted by a clumsy show of your pain?
Either way, there was only one choice. To protect you—whatever your intentions—I had to submit to you.
It wasn’t hard. Truth be told, Red—not reading your letter was harder.
When you said you wouldn’t write again, when you said—that is the only letter of yours I’ve wanted to obliterate from myself. If I’m honest, that’s part of why I took the bait. To be unmade, that last written over—to be destroyed by you was easier, truly, than living with what you proposed.
But I’m greedy, Red. I wanted the last word as well as the first.
I hope you did not take my reply too hard. I knew you might not be the first to read it. I want you to know—I died thinking that if anyone could keep me alive, it would be you. It was, I confess to you here, a smug thought: that I died by my own hand, and was raised by yours.
You remember I promised you infiltration from my very first letter—dared you to be infected by me. I couldn’t know, then—I couldn’t, and nor could you—how thoroughly you were already inside me, shielding me from the future. You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red—my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.
There’s still a war out there, of course. But this is a strategy untested. What would Genghis say if we built a bridge together, Red? Suppose we reached across the burn of threads and tangles, cut through the braid’s knots—suppose that we defected, not to each other’s sides, but to each other? We’re the best there is at what we do. Shall we do something we’ve never done? Shall we prick and twist and play the braid until it yields us a place downthread, bend the fork of our Shifts into a double helix around our base pair?
Shall we build a bridge between our Shifts and hold it—a space in which to be neighbours, to keep dogs, share tea?
It’ll be a long, slow game. They’ll hunt us fiercer than they ever hunted each other—but somehow I don’t think you’ll mind.
I’ve bought you five minutes to bust out. Instructions on overleaf, though I doubt you’ll need them.
I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends.
But maybe this is how we win, Red.
You and me.
This is how we win.
Acknowledgments
M: It’s customary to start pieces like these with a riff on the subject of how “this book would not exist without . . . ,” but I suspect this particular book would have found a way to shoulder into being in spite of adversity. Nonetheless! So many people prepared the way and shaped the final volume.
A: So many people! And while it might be in keeping with the enterprise to thank G. Lalo for producing the truly gorgeous paper that enticed two writers with more ink on their hands than time (SORRY) into a lengthy correspondence—such acknowledgments are, perhaps, beyond the scope of even this project. On to friends and family!
M: Much of our Time War was composed in the gazebo of an anonymous benefactor, which is a phrase I have always wanted to type. All thanks and glory to that individual. I’d say they know who they are, but they may not. Perhaps it was . . . YOU?
A: Shh, we’ve already said too much! But genuinely, thank you, A. B.—so many of the birds and bees around that gazebo made it into this story, and we’re so grateful for the lease of them.
M: My wife, Stephanie Neely, is a constant font of strength, spirit, joy, and good humor, without which art falls silent, and she’s brought me back to life on more than one occasion. She is that without which none. Love you, Steph!
A: My husband, Stu West, spent the early years of our relationship loudly proclaiming his hatred for (a) novellas and (b) cowritten works, so I can hardly begin to say how happy and grateful I am that he set those prejudices aside to love this unreservedly. His warm enthusiasm and unceasing support are a balm and a hearth. Shukran habibi!
M: Like any book, this one had many shepherds. Amal’s parents, Leila Ghobril and Oussama El-Mohtar, generously tolerated our occupying the living room table with exclamation-point-laden notes and singing Steven Universe songs; Kelly and Laura McCullough provided vital welcome, hospitality, and throwing axes.
A: Deep, heartfelt thanks to DongWon Song and Navah Wolfe, agent and editor (respectively) both most extraordinary, for taking such a truly strange literary creature and helping us shape and refine it for you. It would not be what it is without them. Praise them with great praise! Warm thanks, too, to Felicity Maxwell, for her generous expertise on Bess of Hardwick.
M: It takes a village to raise a book from a vulnerable manuscript into a strong and beautiful object. Our awed and sincere thanks to our managing editor, Jeannie Ng, who kept our wiggly time-travel project on schedule; to our copy-editor Deanna Hoak, for a combination of eagle-eyed precision and kind forbearance; to our production manager, Elizabeth Blake-Linn, who in many invisible ways has made this book more enjoyable to hold and read; to Greg Stadnyk, who designed a jacket neither of us could have predicted but which both of us love; and to our publicist Darcy Cohan, for all her tireless work on our behalf.
A: Finally, dear reader, we dedicated this one to you, and we meant it. Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.
Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.
About the Authors
Photo © Navah Wolfe
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning author, academic, and critic. Her short story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” won a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Aurora, and Eugie Awards in the same year. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and is the science fiction and fantasy columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Her fiction has appeared on Tor.com and in magazines such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, and the Rubin Museum of Art’s Spiral, as well as in anthologies such as The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories and The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. She is pursuing a PhD at Carleton University and teaches creative writing at the University of Ottawa. Visit her at amalelmohtar.com.
Max Gladstone is the author of the Hugo-nominated Craft Sequence and critically acclaimed works of interactive fiction. He regularly consults as an interactivity specialist and has given talks at Google and Pixar on generating novel approaches to political, economic, and social problems through defamiliarization and research. He has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and sung in Carnegie Hall. You can visit him at maxgladstone.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Jacket photographs copyright © 2019 by iStock/PrinPrince (ultramarine flycatcher) and iStock/Saddako (northern cardinal)
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Jacket design by Greg Stadnyk; interior design by Hilary Zarycky
Jacket photographs copyright © 2019 by iStock
The text for this book was set in New Caledonia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: El-Mohtar, Amal, author. | Gladstone, Max, author.
Title: This is how you lose the time war / Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Saga Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017464 | ISBN 9781534431003 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534431010 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Time travel—Fiction. | GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.E424 T48 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017464