This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

I want flowers from Cephalus and diamonds from Neptune, and I want to scorch the thousand earths between us to see what blooms from the ash, so we can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible only to each other. I want to meet you in every place I have loved.

“My dear,” says Garden, “your accomplishment, while stellar, has a touch of, shall we say, ostentation to it. Relatively speaking. Where your siblings bloom and melt back into me, you . . .” Garden brushes a soft thumb along Blue’s cheek with a tenderness that draws a tremble from her jawline. “You root in the air, my epiphyte. It’s no hard thing to trace the new growth to you, singly. You have always,” says Garden, planting the words into Blue’s smile like strangler fig, “been too fond of signing your work.”

If Blue were less of a professional, she might have looked stunned. She might have chewed her lip. She might have walled up the inside of herself into a tomb and drowned it in a bog and set the bog on fire in her panic of what and when and how long.

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 will write their letter. Send it. Do not, under any circumstances, read what you next receive from me. When you do not die, they will see the gambit’s lost. Perhaps your interest in me was a feint. Perhaps I wasn’t yet ripe for you. Perhaps you spotted the trap before it sprang. Perhaps Commandant was wrong. She has been wrong before, and so have the machines. Just—don’t read what I send you after this. Don’t answer. And we go our separate ways. I hate it. I never hated before, like I hate this. With all you are to me, and all you’ll always be, we can’t just go. We can’t just walk away. But I will, if it leaves you living.

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.

I would have fought you forever. I would have wrestled you through time. I would have turned you, and been turned. I would do anything. I have done so much, and would have done as much again, and more. And yet here I am, a fool, writing you one last time, and here you are, a fool, reading me. We’re one, at least, in folly.

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

She might be asleep, wrapped in sunlight, but she is not. Blood has congealed already. Red wanted the poison to be painless, but Garden’s people—Blue’s—hold to life, and breaking that hold takes savagery. Blue fought to— Red can’t bear to think the word “die” at first, but that’s hypocrisy. This is her fault. The least she can do is own it. Start again: Blue fought to die composed.

Red falls to her knees by the bed. She runs her hand through Blue’s hair and grips it between her fingers, and it does not feel the way she imagined, and that is the last sick joke.

Red screams at the sky. She calls Beings in which she does not believe to account. She wants there to be a God, so she can curse Her.

I loved you. That was true. With what’s left of me I can’t help but love you still. This is how you win, Red: a long game, a subtle hand played well. You played me like a symphony, and I hope you won’t mind my feeling a little proud of you for such a magnificent betrayal.

But I’m greedy, Red. I wanted the last word as well as the first.

It’ll be a long, slow game. They’ll hunt us fiercer than they ever hunted each other—but somehow I don’t think you’ll mind. I’ve bought you five minutes to bust out. Instructions on overleaf, though I doubt you’ll need them. I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.