This Is How You Lose the Time War

One asks, “Should we throw it away?”

She shakes her head. It must be used. She does not say, Or else another might find it and read what I have read.

They drag the logs to camp. They split them, trim them, plane them, frame them into engines of war. Two weeks later, the planks lie shattered around the fallen walls of a city still burning, still weeping. Progress gallops on, and blood remains behind.

Vultures circle, but they’ve feasted here already.

The seeker crosses the barren land, the broken city. She gathers splinters from the engines’ wrecks, and as the sun sets, she slides those splinters one by one into her fingers.

Her mouth opens, but she makes no sound.

* * *

My perfect Red,

How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you’ll tell me once you’re finished with this strand.

The thought that you could have trapped me (stranded me, perhaps? Oh dear, sorry-not-sorry) is so delicious that I confess myself quite overcome. Do you always play things safe, then? Run the numbers so precisely that you can reject out of hand any scenario that has a projected success rate of less than 80 percent? It grieves me to think you’d make a boring poker player.

But then I imagine you’d cheat, and that’s a comfort.

(I’d never want you to let me win. The very idea!)

I wore goggles, but imagine, please, the widening of my eyes at your sweet interrogation in Strand 8827. Did my bosses send me there! Do I have bosses! A suggestion of corruption in my command chain! A charming concern for my well-being! Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal?

“And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.

It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means.

But enough philosophy. Let me tell you what you have told me, speaking plain: You could have killed me, but didn’t. You have acted without the knowledge or sanction of your Agency. Your vision of life in Garden is sufficiently full of silly stereotypes to read as a calculated attempt at provoking a stinging, unguarded response (hilarious, given how long it took me to grow these words), but spoken with such keen beauty as to suggest a confession of real, curious ignorance.

(We do have superb honey: best eaten in a thickness of comb, spread on warm bread with soft cheese, in a cool part of the day. Do your kind eat anymore? Is it all tubes and intravenous nutrition, metabolisms optimised for far-strand food? Do you sleep, Red, or dream?)

Let me also speak plain, before this tree runs out of years, before the fine fellows under your command make siege weapons of my words: What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here?

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

Best,

Blue

PS. I’m touched by the research effort expended on my behalf. Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide is a good one. Now that you’ve discovered postscripts, I look forward to what you could do with scented inks and seals!

PPS. There’s no trick here, no thwart. Give my best to this strand’s Genghis. We lay on our backs and watched clouds together when we were young.

* * *

Blue sees her chosen name reflected everywhere around her: moon-slicked floes, ocean thick with drift ice, liquid churned to glass. She munches a piece of dry biscuit on deck while the ship’s hands sleep, dusts the crumbs off her mitts, and watches them fall into the white-flecked pitch of the waters.

The schooner’s name is The Queen of Ferryland, carrying a full complement of hunters eager to stack scalps in the hold, hungry for what fur and flesh and fat will buy them in the off-season. Blue’s interest is partly in oil, but chiefly in the deployment of new steam technologies: There is a staggering of outcomes to achieve, a point off which to tip the industry, a rudder with which to steer these ships between the Scylla of one doom and the Charybdis of another, onto a course that leads to Garden.

Seven strands tangle on the collapse or survival of this fishery—insignificant to some eyes, everything to others. Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

Those days rarely happen while on a mission.

Who can speak of what Blue thinks on a mission, when missions are often whole lives, when the story spun for her to wield a hunter’s hook is years in the making? So many roles, dresses, parties, trousers, intimacies rolled into grasping a berth and bundling into shapeless clothes to keep Newfoundland’s winter at bay.

The horizon blinks, and morning yawns above it. Hunters spill over the schooner’s side, Blue among them: They sweep across the ice, tools in hand, laughing, singing, striking skulls and splitting skins.