This Is How You Lose the Time War

e binary culled from Levantine manuscripts. The number of needles and berries on a branch form divinatory figures—conjunctio, puella—whose names can be easily parsed for a more elaborate alphabet. Dear Blue, I’ve thought about your proposal but need a demonstration of trust. It’s risky for me to communicate with you, so I’ve disguised the real letter as poison—consume it, and you’ll know when to meet me and where.

It doesn’t even sound like her. The thought of some grey-faced Agency hack hovering over Red’s shoulder as she writes fills her mouth with helpless fury. In dreams, sometimes, Blue sees herself straddling the goon, punching their face into pulp, except her hands keep slipping off, sliding away, and she can’t land a hit, and the goon laughs and laughs until a plant grows out of their mouth and says Blue’s name.

On her good days, she pricks her fingers experimentally on the thorns and thinks of spindles. On her bad days she takes trips seventy years downthread just to watch London burn.

Today is a very bad day.

A berry dropped. She nearly screamed—suppose it were a paragraph?—and picked it from the soil, held it between thumb and forefinger, placed it in her palm, made certain it hadn’t been pierced on a thorn, lost an ant’s sip of juice. It wasn’t yet time, she thought; a year is nothing, a year is no time at all to wait for a letter rescinding the letter, a letter contradicting the contradiction of this letter. The deadline for reply is written in the plant’s own mortality.

Truth be told, Blue is insulted. How obvious; how unsubtle. Red said not to read her next letter—and here it is, announcing itself as poison as a test of Blue’s interest, of Red’s success. If Blue eats it, she’ll die—but if Blue doesn’t, then Red’s side will know she’s been tipped off, will suspect Red, will destroy her instead.

Her heart should have been broken by better. Her betrayal should have had sharper teeth. All that—all that. And now this.

Still, she strokes its leaves. Still, she bends to sniff the stems: a blend of cinnamon and rot.

She was always going to eat it down to the root.

There are as many berries as they have exchanged letters. She eats each one slowly, her eyes closed, crushing some against her hard palate, others between her teeth, rolling their sweetness along her tongue. They have bitter, varied aftertastes, and the numbing properties of clove—frustrating when the thorns begin to tear into her cheeks and throat. She wants to feel everything.

She thinks of ortolan as she chews the plant’s fibres, considers draping her head in white cloth for closer communion. She wipes bright blood from her lips and laughs, softer and softer, swallowing every stroke of flavour.

She thinks, Loathsome in its own deliciousness.

She wipes tears from her face and feels them mix stickily with her blood. She thinks she feels, stirring in her, a counterclockwise twist against her being.

She rises, washes her face, washes her hands, and sits down to write a letter.

* * *

Stop.

Blue. I mean it.

I love you. But stop. Don’t read this. Each word is murder.

Dearest Blue, beloved Blue, wise fierce foolish Blue, don’t shrug this danger off as you’ve shrugged off death and time before. This is no slight sidling risk, no road-met random monster, no dragon, no woodland beast, no alien god to trick or out-war. Nothing so kind. These are words made to unmake you, and well wrought. You’ll have no second coming after this.

Put the letter down. We’ll have each other still, as memories and rivals. We’ll confront ourselves in the chase through time as it was when I first learned the shape of you. We can still dance, as enemies. Just stop now, and live and love and let be.

Stop, my love. Stop. Find a purgative, a hospital, a shaman-priest, one of your healing cocoons—there’s time. Barely.

Goddamn it, stop.

Each line I write, I must imagine you reading—and imagine what has made you read so far, ignoring my advice, as your body revolts and poison claims you. It twists in my guts. If you have read this far, I am not worth you. I am a coward. I let them use me. If you have read this far, I have been made a weapon, and they have plunged me into your heart.

I am so weak.

Give me up. Leave now. There’s still a chance—however slim. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Go.

Forever yours,

Red

And yet you’re still here. Aren’t you. Immune to my ruses, Indigo. I hoped you would leave and save yourself. But you remain. I think I would too. I hope I would be that brave, if you are. That we each would give up as much to read the other’s last few lines, written in water and forever.

I love you. If you’ve come this far, that’s all I can say. I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the depths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up—and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.