“Ah, yes,” she says, her voice warm and bright. “My friend and I enjoyed ourselves a little too well last night, but so fine a champagne would have been a step too far. You are correct.” She smiles. “We had nothing to celebrate.”
She crumples the smudged bill neatly before the concierge can ask for it back, pays the new bill, walks out, and imagines the housekeeper’s scream in one hour’s time in place of her own. A groundskeeper burns brush outside; Blue tosses the old bill into the blaze without breaking her stride.
Once she’s gone, Seeker plucks the smoldering bill from the flames and eats it piping hot.
* * *
Dear Blue—
I can’t
I
Fuck
In haste:
They know.
Not everything. Not yet.
But they know you. Your hammer blow, your trap, your triumph, your emergence—you hurt them bad, and they won’t let you have another shot. Not ever.
They know you’re close to me. Somehow they mapped us, our earliest beginnings, in spite of all our care. They don’t have the letters—I don’t think—just your interest, our nearness in time. They feel it through the strands, like spiders. They think you want to turn me. Did you, once? Was that why you reached for me at the first, whatever we’ve become since?
They think you’re waiting for me to contact you. To send you a letter. I can’t even laugh. They have machines to rewrite the code of cells, to turn proteins the wrong way round. They’ve never met you, they’ve never read you, but they know you well enough to break you—if you let them in. And they think if I send you a letter, you’ll
I can’t write it out. I can’t fucking
They’re so smart, and so dumb.
Your letter, the sting, the beauty of it. Those forevers you promise. Neptune. I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.
Listen to me—I am your echo.
I would rather break the world than lose you.
I see one solution. It’s—it should be—easy.
Let me go. And I’ll let you.
I will write their letter. Send it. Do not, under any circumstances, read what you next receive from me. When you do not die, they will see the gambit’s lost. Perhaps your interest in me was a feint. Perhaps I wasn’t yet ripe for you. Perhaps you spotted the trap before it sprang. Perhaps Commandant was wrong. She has been wrong before, and so have the machines.
J
ust—don’t read what I send you after this. Don’t answer.
And we go our separate ways.
I hate it. I never hated before, like I hate this. With all you are to me, and all you’ll always be, we can’t just go. We can’t just walk away.
But I will, if it leaves you living.
They will watch you, and me, closer than ever now. We can fight. We can chase each other down through time, like we did for centuries past before I knew your name. But no more letters. No more of this.
That I should die—fine. I signed on to this war to die.
I don’t know if I ever told you that before.