This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

You imagined the fire glinting off my teeth; knowing your fine attention to detail, I thought I’d put a little devil in it.

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

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

She’s kept her gloves clean, for the most part, but now she stains them red as a name.

When the seeker comes hard and fast on her trail, all that’s left is a smear of dark red on blue snow. On hands and knees, she licks and sucks and chews until all the colour’s gone.

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. 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.

If we’re to be at war, we might as well entertain one another. Why else did you taunt me at the start?

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?

When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know;

(Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.)

Blue is still thinking of larvae when she sees Red. Time stops.

She looks at Red—thirteen, alone, vulnerable, so impossibly fragile and small—and a letter rises in her throat like bile.

And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

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

If I could touch you, put my finger to your temple and sink you into me the way Garden does—perhaps then. But I would never.

All this to say, I’m not being followed; if you are, I’ll send out what feelers I can to see if it’s my people.

I miss you in the field. I miss defeat. I miss the chase, the fury. I miss victories well earned.

I want to sharpen your hungers fully as much as I long to satisfy them, one letter-seed at a time.

I love you, Blue.

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.

I would rather break the world than lose you.

I loved you. That was true. With what’s left of me I can’t help but love you still.