This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

Two great empires broke themselves here, each a reef to the other’s hull.

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.

Each player has their signature. She recognizes patterns of audacity and risk.

If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses’ mouths would grow berries.

She searches shadows for her hunter, her prey. She hears infrasonic, ultrasound. She thirsts for contact, for a new, more worthy battle, but she is alone with the corpses and the splinters and the letter her enemy left.

Red’s mouth twists: a sneer, a mask, a hunter’s grin.

In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated,

She combs or snarls the strands of time’s braid with the finesse or brutality required of her, and leaves.

so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.

How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored?

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

The horizon blinks, and morning yawns above it.

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

I prefer read-receipts, all things considered—the instant handshake of slow telepathy through our wires. But this is a fascinating technology, in its limits.

Eating’s gross, isn’t it? In the abstract, I mean. When you’re used to hyperspace recharging stations, to sunlight and cosmic rays, when most of the beauty you’ve known lies in a great machine’s heart, it’s hard to see the appeal of using bones that poke from spit-coated gums to mash things that grew in dirt into a paste that will fit down the wet tube connecting your mouth to the sack of acid under your heart.

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?

London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.

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

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me. But while I’ve been enmeshed in this wholeness—they are not the whole of me.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

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.

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

It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look. You’re different colors of flame: Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.

She climbs upthread and down; she braids and unbraids history’s hair.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.

To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. I feel your hand in places I’ve touched. You move so fast, so furious, and in your wake the braid thickens, admits fewer and fewer strands, while Garden scowls thunderclaps and bids me deepen my work.

I like you to know, with my words in your mouth, the places and ways in which I think of you. It feels good to be reciprocal; eat this part of me while I drive reeds into the depth of you, spill out something sweet.

You’ve whetted me like a stone. 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. How I love to have no armor here.

So long as I bear these last three seeds in a hollow behind my eye, you are a blade against my back. I love the danger of it.

we are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals.

feels like teetering on the brink of something that will unmake me.

And we’ll run again, the two of us, upthread and down, firefighter and fire starter, two predators only sated by each other’s words.

I send you this letter on a falling star. Reentry will score and test it but will not melt it away. I write in fire across the sky, a plummet to match your rise.

Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations.

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.

Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs; I’ll—

I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.

they are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.

Her heart should have been broken by better. Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth.

I know your solitude and poise, the clenched fist of you, the blade:

You’re a whip uncoiling in my veins, and I write between the rearing and the snap.

Red kills time. She strides through the veils of the past, a woman robed in fire, hands wet with enemy blood. Her fingernail razor blades slide through the meat of your back; she stalks you as a shadow down long lonely halls, footsteps metronome measured, inescapable. She visits dark-angel mercies on the curled metal wrecks of Mombasa and Cleveland.

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.

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.

Her skin is raw. There are hollows beneath it where her weapons used to be.

It was, I confess to you here, a smug thought: that I died by my own hand, and was raised by yours.

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.

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?

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.