This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.