This is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

After a mission comes a grand and final silence. Her weapons and armor fold into her like roses at dusk. Once flaps of pseudoskin settle and heal and the programmable matter of her clothing knits back together, Red looks, again, something like a woman.

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

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

“Ontario sucks. As the prophets say.”

For one thing, there are so many Atlantises, always sinking, in so many strands: an island off Greece, a mid-Atlantic continent, an advanced pre-Minoan civilization on Crete, a spaceship floating north of Egypt, on and on. Most strands lack Atlantis altogether, know the place only through dreams and mad poets’ madder whispers.

I like to think this makes Atlantis make sense

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

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

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 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.

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

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