This Is How You Lose the Time War

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.