This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar

  When the sun’s set, she takes the unraveled thread, snips it into lengths, and throws each length into the receding tide.

  Stars shine, and the moon. A dark shape slips along bright waves and dives. One by one, the seeker gathers the strands and ties them about her wrist so tight her fingers pale and stiffen. She makes a fist, tenses. Her skin splits beneath the cord and closes over it again.

  Red, who’s waited motionless on the shore since sundown, sees something like a seal against the waves of light, and wonders.

  * * *

  Dear Red Sky at Morning,

  Don’t shorten your letters.

  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. It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work, and there are better things of which to write.

  You say you were thirteen. You do not— You seem so young to me, still, however long ago that may seem like it was to you.

  My own folk are great gardeners. Our games are long and slow, and our maturation also. Garden seeds the past with us—your Commandant knows this already, whether or not it’s considered need-to-know for you—and we learn from and grow into its threads. We treat the past as trellis, coax our vineyard through and around, and harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, pours us back into the root system in loving libation, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

  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.

  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. And what 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. This is a necessary part of any ecosystem, but it unsettles others, this inability to be satisfied. It is difficult—it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way.

  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 am glad to know you love reading. Perhaps you should next write from a library—there’s so much I want to recommend.

  Best,

  Blue

  PS. Socrates! I wonder if we knew any of the same ones.

  PPS. I kept knotting your name at night, but this salutation seemed wiser—I’ve learned to take warning from delight.

  PPPS. Of course we’re still going to win.

  * * *

  Blue is in a high place at night.

  Wind blows. The air is cold, but she is not. Sharp rocks don’t hurt her feet. Her job is to guard a growing thing, millennia in the making, a seed planted in the banked embers of the planet’s heart that’s riddled its slate surface with something like vines, sap, blood. Just beneath the surface, just waiting.

  It will bloom soon.

  Blue has fed it from time to time, as required. She has always known its purpose: a lion in waiting, a planet-size trap to spring, seeds planted long before prohibitive treaties about downthread interference. Blue is to watch it hatch, accomplish its purpose, then destroy its root system and leave no trace to be found or used by the other side. Garden has learned with the slow patience of green things how to prune enemy agents from the timeline, releasing ladybirds to their aphids, dragonflies to their mosquito larvae.

  Blue is still thinking of larvae when she sees Red.

  Time stops.

  Blue carries nothing with her between strands except knowledge, purpose, tactics, and Red’s letters. Memory is tipped and decanted into Garden, life to life to life, always deepening, thickening, growing new roots and efficiencies—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. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers’ chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. 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.

  She looks at Red—thirteen, alone, vulnerable, so impossibly fragile and small—and a letter rises in her throat like bile.

  I wanted to be seen.

  She sees her and breaks like a wave.

  She does not run the scenarios. She does not think, did Garden send me here to test me, does Garden know, does Garden want me to watch her die? She thinks nothing as the roots tense and twitch, as the planet blooms a mouth, a face, a body, a vastness rearing silent as owl flight in the perfect dark, a hunger with eyes and teeth, bred for silent, waiting years to scent one specific set of nanoscopic implants, to hatch and devour one bright red element of its surroundings. It looks a little like a lion, truth be told—mane of pale blue cilia, maw worthy of cinematic roars, though it will never make a sound—but for the size, the number of legs, the wings.

  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.

  Blue eats the carcass, all but its teeth and venom sack. That she tears carefully open on the rocks, tips a few drops into the hole it grew out of. The roots will lap it up, wither, and die; her story will be that the creature had soured, attacked her instead of its quarry. Enemy action, no doubt, having discovered the root system, made changes to it somewhere upthread.

  An understandable but embarrassing mistake. Left Blue too injured to attempt her own correction, and at any rate there were the treaties—direct confrontation between agents so precariously downthread would be catastrophic for ambient Chaos levels.

  The words fall into place like rain. Blue licks her bloodied snout, her paws, her gouged shoulder. She needs to do one more thing.

  Slowly, keeping her wound out of sight, she walks where Red can see her. Keeping her distance, of course, and the words padded past in some dimness of mind. She does not look wounded; she is certain.

  She looks at Red and sees tears on her face.

  She stifles the urge to run—towards, or away. She carries her hunger like a compass rose (stars rose—they are a rose, right?), walks due south away from the north to which it points. Once she is out of sight, she tucks into a shallow cave and collapses, trembling, shifts her shape to human, finds her legs, her skin, the wound yawning larger and uglier than before, likely infected, needing care. She leans her back against the scalloped stone wall, closes her eyes, spreads her palms on the ground for extra support.

  She puts one hand on a letter.

  A letter to do Mrs. Leavitt proud: beautiful blue paper flecked with lav
ender buds and thistle petals, in a blue envelope with a red dollop of wax shutting it. 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.

  Much later, the seeker comes. She finds the gutted creature’s teeth. She plucks the two largest canines, fixes them into her mouth, and moves towards the cave.

  There is nothing for her to find there except blood.

  * * *

  Dear Blue,

  I—

  I don’t know what to say. Even perspicacious, almost prescient Mrs. Leavitt lacks a model. Birthdays, yes (it’s mine, by the way, to the extent I have one); funerals, fine; on the occasion of a marriage, naturally. But she somehow neglects to frame a form for when your enemy saves—

  Shit. I’m sorry. I can’t keep up the joke. And it’s wrong to call you enemy.

  Thank you.

  For saving me, obviously and for starters. I felt you climb down the braid. I am more sensitive to your footsteps, I think, than anyone alive. (And everyone is alive, somewhere in time. Even these digressions feel weak. I like them usually, my jokes. They feel like tacking in, not out, to the matter at hand. Less so now.) I followed you. I apologize for that, for trespassing on your privacy as you made yourself what you had to be to win.

  I could not have beaten the beast alone. You’re more ferocious than I am.

  Do you look around in turn as you read these lines, seeking me? I’m gone, dear Blue, upthread, and you should be as well. We’re neither of us safe here, and the longer you remain the less safe we become. You know the drill: Tremors spread from a traveler’s foot, and though no other spider has grown so attuned to your tread as I have, the others aren’t deaf. I’ll have to see your eyes some other time. I leave you a letter, sealed in wax, a trace of perfume.

  Scent, for me, is a medium. I rarely use it for ornamental purpose. I hope I’ve selected a fragrance to your taste. I asked the busboy in London Next for a sample of your tea a few letters back, brought it to a parfumerie in Phnom Penh (Strand 7922 C33 if you happen to like the smell; I’ll enclose the address below), worked back and forth for a few years on the proper mix.

  Anyway. 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.

  It’s so hard to move, here, and reply to your last letter. I feel—I can’t say precisely what. I’m shaken. You know the edges of old maps that promise monsters and mermaids? Here there be dragons?

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

  I’ve read your last missive and reread it—in memory, as you warned me I would so long ago, preparing myself for a fall. I see you as a wave, as a bird, as a wolf. (My wolf, with the six legs and double-banked eyes.) I try not to think of you the same way twice. Thinking builds patterns in the brain, and those patterns can be read by one sufficiently determined, and Commandant, sometimes, is sufficiently determined—I think you’d like her. So I change your shape in my thoughts. 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.

  I suspect you see me plain by now—imagine me shifting, uncomfortable, exposed. My way was always the straightforward push, in one direction, without hesitation or restraint. I only worried you might view these long letters as the sign of a simple or a desperate mind. I worried—maybe you’ll laugh—that you responded on sufferance.

  So: Let me be clear.

  I like writing you. I like reading you. When I finish your letters, I spend frantic hours in secret composing my replies, pondering ways to send them. I can trigger any combination of chemical ups and downs with a carefully worded phrase; a factory within me will smelt any drug I seek. But there’s a rush in reading and sending against which no drug compares.

  Speaking of exposed! If you have some grand plan, if the death your masters envisioned for my younger self was too quick and you’d rather see me disassembled for my parts, all you need do now is drop this letter where some other agent of my faction might find it. I could live with that. (Well, not for long, and painfully, but you take my meaning.)

  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.

  I’ll try for a library next time. I hope you understand my need for a change of plans.

  Yours,

  Red

  * * *

  Red runs the table, to stop herself from thinking.

  In Strand 622 C19 Beijing, she, uncomfortable in her sheathing of silk (but channeling Blue), starts a debate about canal construction that feeds into a debate about public morality that spurs a principled, incorruptible bureaucrat named Lin to accept an Imperial dare. If Lin clears drug-smuggling foreigners from Guangzhou, he will have funding for his infrastructure project. When Lin reaches Guangzhou and tries to break the drug trade, a war begins, and Red slips away.

  In fourteenth-century Axum, Islamicized and strong in Strand 3329, Red, in shadows, stabs a man who’s about to stab another man who’s wandering home buzzed on espresso, sugar, and math. The man Red stabs dies. The mathematician wakes up the next day and invents a form of thought that, in another strand, much later, will be called hyperbolic geometry. Red’s already gone.

  In ninth century al-Andalus she serves the right tea, at the right time. In the diamond city of Zanj she strangles a man with a silken cord. She seeds the Strand 9 Amazon Basin with defanged versions of European superbugs ten centuries before first contact, and when conquistadors arrive, they face locals by the millions, strong, thriving communities that won’t perish by mere contact with the world across the waves. She kills again and again, frequently, but not always, to save.

  And she watches over her shoulder.

  A shadow follows her. She has no proof, but she knows, as bones know their breaking stress.

  Commandant must suspect. A drop in her efficiencies would point to compromise. So Red throws herself into her tasks: works riskier assignments than Commandant would ever require, succeeds beautifully, brutally. Time and again, empty, she wins.

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

  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.

  When she is sure no one is watching, she rereads the letters she’s carved into herself.

  All this running and murder merely passes time. She waits and waits. For the guillotine: She’s been trapped, the one for whom she waits has fed Commandant the letter she left behind, and Commandant’s just playing her out now, squeezing Red for work until the Chaos Oracle indicates she has marginally more value crushed.

  My dear Cochineal—

  Or: Blue (she lets herself think that name once in a two-mooned month) read her letter and recoiled. Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it
was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth.

  She dreams of a morpho butterfly with wings spread large as a world.

  She strangles, screws, builds. She works.

  She watches birds.

  There are so damn many birds. She never heeded them before; knowledge of them (whose call is that, which is male and which female, what’s the name of the duck with the emerald head) is all stored on the index, but when has she needed it? She planned to get to it one day; she plans to get to everything one day.

  But now she learns the names from books. She pulls some from the index to save time and because books are heavy, but she does not leave the knowledge in the cloud. She repeats the names to herself; she carves patterns into her eyes.

  She burns three astronauts in their cockpit on a launchpad. Every cause needs sacrifices. The stench of seared pork and sour rubber catches in her lungs, and she flees upthread, lets no one see her weep. Collapses on the bank of the Ohio River, bends double, vomits in a bush, crawls away, and cries out the rubber and the screams. She strips. She wades into the water until it covers her head. A flock of Canada geese dawn north and paint the sky green-black with the creaks of their wings.

  She stops the air bubbling from her mouth.

  The geese settle on the river. Their legs churn the water. They stay half an hour, only to lift off in a thunderclap of feathers.

  She emerges.

  One goose waits on the shore, for her.

  She kneels.