This Is How You Lose the Time War

Remembering our last encounter, I thought it best to ensure you’d twist no other groundlings to your purpose, hence the bomb threat. Crude, but effective.

I appreciate your subtlety. Not every battle’s grand, not every weapon fierce. 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.

Address the reader—done. Discuss shared business—done, almost.

I imagine you laughing at this letter, in disbelief. 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.

So I imagine fire glinting off your teeth. You think you’ve wormed inside me—planted seeds or spores in my brain—whatever vegetal metaphor suits your fancy. But here I’ve repaid your letter with my own. Now we have a correspondence. Which, if your superiors discover it, will start a chain of questions I anticipate you’ll find uncomfortable. Who’s infecting whom? We know from our hoarse Trojans, in my time. Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut off, leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you?

I wonder which I’d rather.

Finally: conclude.

This was fun.

My regards to the vast and trunkless legs of stone,

Re

d

* * *

Red puzzles through a labyrinth of bones.

Other pilgrims wander here, in saffron robes or homespun brown. Sandals shuffle over rocks, and high winds whistle around cave corners. Ask the pilgrims how the labyrinth came to be, and they offer answers varied as their sins. Giants made it, this one claims, before the gods slew the giants, then abandoned Earth to its fate at mortal hands. (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.) The first snake built the labyrinth, says another, screwing down through rock to hide from the judgment of the sun. Erosion made it, says a third, and the grand dumb motion of tectonic plates, forces too big for we cockroaches to conceive, too slow for mayfly us to observe.

They pass among the dead, under chandeliers of shoulder blades, rose windows outlined by rib cages. Metacarpals outline looping flowers.

Red asks the other pilgrims nothing. She has her mission. She takes care. She should meet no opposition as she makes a small twist this far upthread. At the labyrinth’s heart there is a cavern, and soon into that cavern will come a gust of wind, and if that wind whistles over the right fluted bones, one pilgrim will hear the cry as an omen that will drive him to renounce all worldly goods and retreat to build a hermitage on a distant mountain slope, so that hermitage will exist in two hundred years to shelter a woman fleeing with child in a storm, and so it goes. Start a stone rolling, so in three centuries you’ll have an avalanche. Little flash to such an assignment, less challenge, so long as she stays on script. Not even a taunt to disturb her path.

Did her adversary—did Blue—ever read her letter? Red liked writing it—winning tastes sweet, but sweeter still to triumph and tease. To dare reprisal. Every op since, she’s watched her back, moved with double caution, waiting for payback, or for Commandant to find her small breach of discipline and bring the scourge. Red has her excuses ready: Since her disobedience she’s been a better agent, more meticulous.

But no reply has come.

Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps her enemy does not care, after all.

The pilgrims follow guides down the path of wisdom. Red departs and wanders narrow, twisting passages in the dark.

Darkness does not bother her. Her eyes do not work like normal eyes. She scents the air, and olfactory analytics flash into her brain, offering a trail. At a particular niche, she draws from her satchel a small tube that sheds red light on the skeletons arrayed within. The first time she does this, she finds nothing. The second, her light glints off a pulsing stripe on this femur, that jaw.

Satisfied, she adds femur and jaw to her bag, then banishes the light and wanders deeper down.

Imagine her in utter night, invisible. Imagine the footsteps, one by one, that never tire, never slip on cave dust or gravel. Imagine the precision with which her head swivels on her thick neck, swinging a measured arc from side to side. Hear (you can, just) gyroscopes whir in her gut, lenses click beneath the camouflage jelly of those pure black eyes.

She moves as fast as possible, within operating parameters.

More red lights. More bones join the others in the sack. She does not need to check her watch. A timer ticks down in the corner of her vision.

When she thinks she’s found the bones she needs, she descends.

Far below the path of wisdom, the masters of this dark place ran out of corpses. The niches remain, waiting—perhaps for Red.

Even the niches stop, eventually.

Soon after that, guards set upon her: eyeless giants grown by the sharp-toothed mistresses of this place. The giants’ nails are yellow, thick, and cracked, and their breath smells better than one might expect.

Red breaks them quickly and quietly. She has no time for the less violent approach.