This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.