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.

You brought some depth to your side’s speed, some staying power, and I found myself working at capacity again. You invigorated your Shift’s war effort and, in so doing, invigorated me. Please find my gratitude all around you.

I have seen you laugh, I think—in the Ever Victorious Army’s ranks, as your dupes burned the Summer Palace and I rescued what I could of the Emperor’s marvelous clockwork devices. You marched scornful and fierce through the halls, hunting an agent you did not know was me.

(Yes, this is Earth—long before the ice age and the mammoth, long before academics many centuries downthread will think it possible for the planet to have spawned pilgrims, or labyrinths. Earth.)

I wonder, in that light, how much of your work has helped me, and the other way round—a question beyond my calculative capacity.

It feels harder to write than it should. It feels easier to write than it should, as well. I’m contradicting myself.

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

It steps out onto the cold, sharp ground. It sniffs the air, inclines its head in Red’s direction. Blue tears out its throat. Her teeth are very sharp. She has four rows of them. Her double-banked eyes see beautifully in the dark. Her six legs end in tearing points, rip the voiceless creature into hot, pulsing meat. It gets its own in—good for the story she’ll have to tell, she’ll later think, when she can recover thought, when she can act again from something besides pure, obliterating need—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.

Keep this. It’s yours. It won’t burn when you read the signature, it won’t decay faster than any letter one woman in your beloved Strand 6 C19 would write to another. The paper’s from Wuhan, Song dynasty, handmade: Leave it in a damp place and it will rot; mix it in water and you’ll have a pulp. Destroy it on your own, in your own way, if you want. I won’t mind. We all have our observers. And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting’s what you want.

So I change your shape in my thoughts. It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world, if you look.

There is a small hill from which I can watch the sun set over the Outaouais River; every evening I see a red sky bleed over blue water and think of us.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

think this is it. I need to keep strength enough to seal this. What would Mrs. Leavitt say otherwise? Or Bess, or Chatterton? Thank you, Red. It was a hell of a ride.

You remember I promised you infiltration from my very first letter—dared you to be infected by me. I couldn’t know, then—I couldn’t, and nor could you—how thoroughly you were already inside me, shielding me from the future.

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.