This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

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.

On a span of blasted ground, she finds the letter. It does not belong.

Perhaps if she reads this letter, she will be recorded, exposed, blackmailed for use as a double agent. The enemy is insidious.

A seeker emerges from that shadow, bearing other shadows with her. Wordless, the seeker regards the aftermath. She does not weep, that anyone can see.

She wrinkles time. The world cracks through the middle. The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire ink in a viny hand at the top. This letter was meant to be read once, then destroyed. In the moments before the world comes apart, she reads it again.

I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards, unable to keep the letters on a page; instead you must absorb them, admit them into your memory. In order to recall them you must seek my presence in your thoughts, tangled among them like sunlight in water. In order to report my words to your superiors you must admit yourself already infiltrated, another casualty of this most unfortunate day. This is how we’ll win.

She is unaccustomed to being thwarted. Something about it tickles, even as she meditates on how to phase-shift failure into opportunity.

Even we who fight wars through time forget the value of a word in the right moment, a rattle in the right car engine, a nail in the right horseshoe… It’s so easy to crush a planet that you may overlook the value of a whisper to a snowbank.

Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche.

Trees fall in the forest and make sounds.

My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia.

What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here? 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.

There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there?

I enjoy eating these days. More of us do than care to admit it publicly. I revel in it, as one only revels in pursuits one does not need.

You asked me to tell truths. I have. What do I want? Understanding. Exchange. Victory. A game—hiding and discovery.

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.

They have lived their lives as sacrifices to—who again? Red has lost track. She feels bad about that. They lived their lives as sacrifices.

Small touches, ideas so fundamental they seem useless. Nobody here knows their worth, yet. But if they do not perish on this island, someone might realize their use a few centuries earlier and change everything. So Red tries to give them time.

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?

Humans need marks to strive for—but imperfect systems decay. So we build them ideals. Change agents climb upthread, find helpful strands, preserve what matters, and let what doesn’t fall to dust: mulch for the more perfect future’s seed.

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.

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

She feels observed. Might Commandant be watching her? And if so, for what? She has been so careful. She does not even think the sky’s name, often.

You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come.

The thought of your disembodied network repulses me, but I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest.

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.

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.

I do not know what roads lead forward. But your letter hungers for reply.

Garden dislikes words. Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt.

I ramble, it seems, when writing to the darkness by hand. How embarrassing. I’m quite certain I’ve never rambled a day in my life before this. Another thing to give you: this first, for me.

Words can wound—but they’re bridges, too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Though maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside.

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.

The triumph feels stale and swift. She used to love such fire. Now it only reminds her of who’s not there. She climbs upthread, taking solace in the past.

They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.

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 to think of all the ways I could have stopped you, were I so inclined.

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.