This Is How You Lose the Time War

Steganography is hidden writing. You hide a message in a crossword puzzle, a novel, a work of art, in the dapple of a dawn river. Even your hidden message can hide other messages deeper, as here. Eat one of the berries Red has made, and you would find a simple message, and inside that message, the poison. And inside the poison, farther down, legible only as in death, she hides another letter. A true letter.

To think of this letter being read sickens her, but she writes it anyway, because whatever happens next, this is the end.

Because it is the end, she cannot resist the urge to make this deadly thing beautiful.

The seed has its luster. Growing, she lends it fragrance. Blossoming, she grants it color, depth. Berrying, she gives it shine and taste. Even its thorns are wicked art. She signs her death with love.

She must, even now, give Blue something worthy of her.

Blue will not read it. She will spot the trap.

All will be well.

And they will go back to how they were before.

Nothing need change, though everything has.

They can make this work.

When it is done, she sleeps, restless.

The next day they close the lab. It’s due to be destroyed: a bomb, a footnote of history. Red watches the explosion. She was ordered to save no one. She saved a few anyway, what deaths history could spare.

In the blooming dust she reads a letter.

She walks away.

Later, a shadow moves among the ashes, eating.

* * *

Dear Red,

As you wish.

B

* * *

Blue stands among the groundlings, watching players strut and fret their hour upon the stage.

She’s an apothecary’s apprentice in this life, a study in dark and bright: black hair cropped short beneath a flat felt cap, black doublet over white shirt and hose. She has carried out Garden’s delicate opportunity—one womb quickened, another slowed—and lingers, now, on the margins, watching the first performance of a new play.

If Blue were a scholar—and she has played one enough times to know she would have loved to be—she would catalogue, across all strands, a comprehensive study of the worlds in which Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy, and in which a comedy. It delights her, whenever visiting a new strand, to take in a performance not knowing how it will end.

She is not delighted now. She watches the performance with all the tense fervor of awaiting prophecy.

She leaves before the end.

She returns to the shop. A plant—a curious cross, her master said, between hemlock and yew—sits potted near a window. Dark, oily leaves; viciously elegant thorns; berries red as the half-moons she digs into her palms every time she looks at them.

The letter is beautifully composed. She is not.

This, more than anything, infuriates her.

She has grown it, dutifully, from a seed—oddly marked, misshapen, glinting blue in a paper packet of pale browns. She has watched for a year—while she coaxed life into one belly and banished it from another—its mocking growth into a promise never kept, a sheet of music never played.

The plant is written in an obvious geomantic script, a kind of crud