This Is How You Lose the Time War

Sun hammers the streets of Rome. A man with a lean face and a sharp nose and a laurel crown walks, attended, past the Theater of Pompey. Others intercept him, summon him inside. A crowd’s waiting there, in the shadows: the senators, their servants, and others.

“Have you,” Red asks one of the others, “ever felt you’re being followed? That Commandant is spying on you?”

One senator offers Caesar a petition.

“Followed?” says the man with the broken nose to her left. “By the enemy, sometimes. By the Agency? If Commandant wanted to spy on us, she could read our minds.”

Caesar waves off the petition, but the senators cluster close.

“Someone’s dogged my tracks,” Red says. “But they’re gone as soon as I think to catch them.”

“Enemy agent,” says the woman to her right.

“These are jaunts of my own, research trips, not counterplay. How would an enemy agent know where I was going?”

One senator draws a knife. He tries to stab Caesar in the back, but Caesar catches his hand.

“If it is Commandant,” says the man with the broken nose, “why worry?”

She frowns. “I would like to know if my loyalty is being tested.”

The man whose hand has been caught shouts for help in Greek. Knives slither from senators’ sheathes.

“That would defeat the purpose of the test,” observes the woman. “Come on. We’ll miss the fun.” She has a wide grin and a long blade.

Caesar shouts some words, but they’re lost in the din as the killers descend. Red shrugs and sighs and joins them. Their war holds few enough chances to cut loose, and she can’t be seen to pass them up. Blood sticks to her hands. She washes them later, in another river, far away.

Leaves are turning in the Ohio woods when the geese land. One departs from the flock to approach. Red ponders the fate of the last goose to bring her a letter and feels a moment’s guilt.

Twine loops the goose’s neck, and from the twine hangs a pouch of thin leather.

Her hands tremble as she opens the pouch. Six seeds lie inside, tiny crimson teardrops with tinier numbers scratched into their surface, one through six. On the leather, in an ink too blue for this continent or strand, handwriting she knows well, though she’s only seen it once, traces Do you trust me?

She sits in the woods, alone.

She does.

Red trusts her so far down in the bone she has to ponder a long while to realize what distrust might imply—what these seeds might be, what they might do to her if she’s wrong.

She eats the first three seeds one by one. She should be sitting beneath a baobab tree, but she slumps under a buckeye instead, surrounded by spiked shells.

As each letter unfolds inside her mind, she frames it in the palace of her memory. She webs words to cobalt and lapis, she weds them to the robes of Mary in San Marco frescoes, to paint on porcelain, to the color inside a glacier crack. She will not let her go.

The third seed, with its third letter, drops Red into a swoon.

She wakes at a rustle of buckeye shells to find the last three seeds still clutched in her fist, but the leather bag missing. She hears footsteps in the wood and pursues them: A shadow darts before her, always out of reach, and then it’s gone, and she falls panting to her knees in the empty wood.

* * *

Dear Price Greater Than Rubies,

I have been needle-felting for my lover’s sister’s children: an owlet for one, a fawn for the other. Curious to use so delicate a tool for such savage work—you take a needle so fine you wouldn’t feel it in your flesh, then stab it through a mess of roving over and over until the fibres settle into shape.

I feel you, the needle of you, dancing up and downthread with breathtaking abandon. I feel your hand in places I’ve touched. You move so fast, so furious, and in your wake the braid thickens, admits fewer and fewer strands, while Garden scowls thunderclaps and bids me deepen my work.

I like to think of all the ways I could have stopped you, were I so inclined.

Sometimes I am inclined. Sometimes I sit here stationary, and know you so swift and sure, and think, I must prove myself her equal again—and the sharp, electric ache to stop you just to see you admire me is a kind of needle too.