This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

To you. PS. Yes, you.

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. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing.

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.

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? 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? Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

But the hunger you describe—that blade jutting from the skin, the weathering as of a hillside often struck by storm, the hollowness—it sounds beautiful and familiar.

Fortunately, geniuses understand that young men are often fools.

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

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.

She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter—hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip. Vermillion Lie. Scarlet Tanager. Parthian Thread. My Red, Red Rose.

and she bleeds in her wolf shape but makes no sound, nothing to distract Red from the absence of epiphany, the hollowing that left a space for another, the moment when she became Blue’s.

There is no seal, no stamp—only red, red as the blood dripping from her shoulder. She stares at it. Then she laughs, hollow and bare, and she sobs, and she clutches the letter against her heart and does not open it for a long time. But she does. She reads it. Fever builds, sweat beads on her brow, but she reads it and reads it again and again and again.

I see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. (My wolf, with the six legs and double-banked eyes.)

So in this letter I am yours. Not Garden’s, not your mission’s, but yours, alone. I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review your words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still, I suspect you will appreciate the token.

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.

Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too—I think you might like sumac.

to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.

You were right, back when—I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you. Thank you for your letter, more than I can say. It found me in a moment of hunger.

Perhaps someday they’ll assign us side by side, in some small village far upthread, deep cover, each watching each, and we can make tea together, trade books, report home sanitized accounts of each other’s doings. I think I’d still write letters, even then.

You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain, Yours, Red

Sometimes I am inclined. Sometimes I sit here stationary, and know you so swift and sure, and think, I must prove myself her equal again—and the sharp, electric ache to stop you just to see you admire me is a kind of needle too.

Though I suppose I never did learn if you dream.

I dream of you. I keep more of you inside my mind, my physical, personal, squishy mind, than I keep of any other world or time. I dream myself a seed between your teeth, or a tree tapped by your reed. I dream of thorns and gardens, and I dream of tea.

I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I? When did it happen? Or has it always happened? Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations. There was, I am sure, a time I did not know you. Or did I dream that me, as I’ve so often dreamed of you? Have we always fulfilled one another in the chase? I remember hunting you through Samarkand, thrilling to think I might touch the loosening strands of your hair. 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. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.

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. Love, Red

I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

PS. 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.

Your letter, the sting, the beauty of it. Those forevers you promise. Neptune. I want to meet you in every place I ever loved. Listen to me—I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you. I see one solution. It’s—it should be—easy. Let me go. And I’ll let you.

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.

You’ll have to burn this. I hope you can keep it. I keep the memory. I imagine your hands on the paper. I imagine your fire. I wish I could hold you. I love you. R

Steganography is hidden writing. You hide a message in a crossword puzzle, a novel, a work of art, in the dapple of a dawn river. Even your hidden message can hide other messages deeper, as here. Eat one of the berries Red has made, and you would find a simple message, and inside that message, the poison. And inside the poison, farther down, legible only as in death, she hides another letter. A true letter.

I love you. If you’ve come this far, that’s all I can say. I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the depths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up—and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

What will I do, sky? Lake, what? Bluebird, iris, ultramarine, how can there be more when this is done? But it will never end—that’s the answer. There is always us. Dearest, deepest Blue— At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.

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

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.