This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

Red likes to feel. It is a fetish.

winning tastes sweet, but sweeter still to triumph and tease.

It amuses Blue to no end that, in disabling their temple, in mounting this attack, she has, herself, performed an act of devotion to their god.

“Further,” Blue adds, stepping lightly towards the box, making to lift it into the heavy bag next to it, “Ontario sucks. As the prophets say.”

She gathers splinters from the engines’ wrecks, and as the sun sets, she slides those splinters one by one into her fingers. Her mouth opens, but she makes no sound.

It grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player. But then I imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

“And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

The ends don’t always resemble our means.

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

When the seeker comes hard and fast on her trail, all that’s left is a smear of dark red on blue snow.

Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

As the prophet says: Everybody’s building them big ships and boats.

And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self . . . is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away.

but Red’s letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers’ tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She

So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone.

Red rarely sleeps, but when she does, she lies still, eyes closed in the dark, and lets herself see lapis, taste iris petals and ice, hear a blue jay’s shriek. She collects blues and keeps them.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.

Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.

every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us.

Thank you for your letter, more than I can say. It found me in a moment of hunger.

Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

Red trusts her so far down in the bone she has to ponder a long while to realize what distrust might imply—what these seeds might be, what they might do to her if she’s wrong.

To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you.

(I taste the letters still. They linger. They undermine all other flavors, pipe them full of you.)

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.

I cannot endanger us, endanger you, any further. But I am the songbird running out of air, and I must breathe.

But I like exhaustion, call it a kink or what you will, and in my work upthread it’s often convenient to impersonate humanity.

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

I want to say, now, before you can beat me to it—Red, when I think of this seed in your mouth I imagine having placed it there myself, my fingers on your lips.

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me.

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.

Bravery won’t save them.

Red wraps herself more tightly in her coat. Not to guard her flesh—she is barely cold, even in this death freeze—but to guard the small blue flame inside her.

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.

If you have read this far, I have been made a weapon, and they have plunged me into your heart.

Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.

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

The seal breaks as easy as a spine.

She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.

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.

Even an immortal can only ride the Circle line so long.

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

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

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.

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.

But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.