This Is How You Lose the Time War

So, why? A taunt? I will write myself into the world, so you will see me throughout all braids and mourn?

And yet. Red did not recognize the reference to this painting—and neither would Commandant. For Commandant, art is a curiosity, a detour on the journey to pure math.

Red thinks of steganography, of hidden letters, of the rings of trees.

I will try to compose myself—to order myself into something you can read.

She remembers that last letter. A long game, she wrote, a subtle hand played well. Remembers between the rearing and the snap. Remembers pomegranate, and what pomegranates are for.

They stick in the throat. They scatter to a hundred seeds. They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

What is this, but a small mind’s deluded fantasy? What is this, but clutching straws against death and time?

What is love, ever, but—

Wish I could go back upthread, Blue wrote.

Red thinks, There is a chance.

A chance? Call it a trap, a temptation, suicide with a kind face. Any of those would be nearer the truth.

All that supposing Blue even sent this message—that Red has not manufactured it, groping in despair for meaning in broken images the next braid’s twist will wash away. Art comes and goes in the war. The painting on the subway wall might be an accident. She might be making this up.

But.

There is a chance.

Red’s poison was built to kill an agent of Garden—like Blue. It would have no purchase on someone of Red’s own faction. Someone with her codes, her antibodies, her resistance.

Garden shelters its agents while they grow in embedded crèches ringed with traps. Blue almost died in her childhood crèche—cut off, warped. There is a hole in her mind as a result. And every hole is an opening.

Red has no hope of nearing that crèche as she is. Garden admits only its own.

Blue, as herself, cannot survive. Red, as herself, cannot reach her.

But they have sprinkled bits of themselves through time. Ink and ingenuity, flakes of skin on paper, bits of pollen, blood, oil, down, a goose’s heart.

Rocks laid for later avalanches. If you want to change a plant, start from its root.

The plan she’s forming offers more ways to die than she can count, and to suffer on the way. If Commandant finds her, she’ll hurt long and slow and die babbling hallucinations. If Garden does, she’ll be shelled, filleted, and flayed, her mind curled against itself, her fingers snapped and braided. The other side has no more compassion than Red’s. She’ll have to follow a trail she and Blue rubbed out even as they left it, dodge her foes and former fellows, and then, at the last, walk into the enemy’s embrace. In her peak form, there would be no certainty of success.

The decision forms like a jewel in her stomach.

Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real.

She reaches up to touch the dead man’s hand upon the wall.

Then she climbs and goes seeking.

Red’s no fool: She starts the whole desperate play with autosurgery. She pierces herself with a thin blade bought in thirteenth-century Toledo, breaks the obvious tracking systems. Commandant may yet trace her as she climbs and descends history’s braid, but that takes time, and Red moves fast.

The first letter’s easy.

They didn’t know they were being watched yet, of course. Only rough precautions taken. She emerges from the shadow of a broken gunship and stares into the sky of a world they wrecked and left. The letter is ash; she slits her finger, works blood into the ash to form dough as the world breaks. She applies jeweled lights and odd sounds. She wrinkles time.

Thunder nears. The world cracks through the middle.

The ash becomes a piece of paper, with sapphire writing in a viny hand at the top.