This Is How You Lose the Time War

The tent, suddenly, feels colder than outside. Observers. How long? What have they seen? She remembers her battle with the shadow. “I take it this is the operative who triggered the cascade.”

“And set it. Effective, and dangerous. As dangerous as you, in her own way.”

An opening. “I’ll raise her to the top of my target list.” And we will hunt and hunt in turn.

“Turn over the drawing,” Commandant says.

When Red took the paper, its back side was blank. Now it holds a multicolored snarl she is far more used to visualizing in three dimensions. She blurs her eyes, crosses them slightly, and topology emerges from the multicolor mess. A green thread, which she thinks should be blue, runs down the core of the braid—but it swerves here and there to intersect another, which is gray and should be red. How much ignorance can she fake and remain convincing? “I don’t understand.”

“So far as we can trace it, her paths upthread and down have formed this new braid’s core. But in these deviations, well—this gray line represents your own course.”

“We faced each other at Abrogast-882,” Red says. “Also, I think, in Samarkand.” What else would Commandant know? She sees through abstraction, tension, weight, through propositions and counterarguments. “Beijing.” How can Red explain away this topology that brings her, time and again, near Blue? She thinks and tries to look like she is not thinking.

“You mistake me,” Commandant replies. “We believe your paths have crossed because she has gone out of her way to cross them. Often subtly: upthread or down, alterations so small as to be almost undetectable.”

“What are you saying?” She knows what Commandant is saying, but she also knows what part she has to play.

“This operative has been grooming you. Her behavior suggests a fondness for grand gesture. You are being played. Subtly, perhaps so subtly you do not realize it yourself. Her masters want a weakness in our ranks.”

It could be true. It’s not, but it could be. She knows it’s not. She does. “I’m loyal.” This is not, as a rule, something loyal people say, but Commandant is too lost in thought to notice.

“We believe she wants to turn you. She’s seeding dissatisfaction. Little sense details you might not even notice. She is not trying to kill you: We have scanned you and found you clean.”

When was the scan? Who delivered it? What else did they find?

“She is waiting for you to make an overture: to ask her a question, to initiate contact. Something so subtle it could plausibly escape our observations. That message is our gate. Through that, we strike.”

Outside, a lone artillery piece fires for some reason. Red’s ears ring. The man in the chair moans. Commandant does not flinch. She does not know she’s supposed to. Red should not feign stupidity before this woman, but she needs the time an explanation will buy her. “What do you suggest?”

“Are you familiar,” Commandant asks, “with genetic steganography?”

This is one of those questions Red is not expected to answer.

“Our finest minds will help you craft the message. We will end her, and end the threat—without its linchpin, our adversary’s recent work will be easily unpicked. You are critical to the war effort, agent.” Commandant takes a sealed letter from the desk and offers it to her. She holds the letter too tight, since she’s unused to having hands. Red accepts. Bloodstains linger on the envelope, and the paper’s dimpled and creased with the strength of Commandant’s grip. “Suspend your ongoing operations. Transfer to the thread indicated here. Begin the work. Save the world.”

“Yes, sir.” Red salutes again.

Commandant returns the salute, then hefts the pliers again. The man on the chair is already screaming by the time Red leaves.

A comrade raises his hand, wants to talk to her. Red marches out to her duty. She makes it ten threads over, a continent away, several centuries up, before she collapses at the foot of an enormous rainbowed wall of water called Mosi-oa-Tunya and does not weep.

> She watches with her eyes open.

Some time later, a bee zips past her ear and dances before her, amid the spray. She reads the letter it writes on air and feels a sickness around the flame in her chest. They can make this work. They have to.

At the end, she holds out her hand. The bee settles on it and jabs its stinger into her palm.

Later, when Red is gone, a small, uncommonly adventurous spider seizes the corpse. Then, when the spider’s eaten its fill, Seeker eats the spider.

* * *

My Heart’s Own Blood,

I dance to you in a body built for sweetness, a body that tears itself apart in defense of what it loves. This letter will sting you when it’s done. Let it, and read a postscript in its death throes.

I dance—this will be a very boring letter—because this thing in me, this piping heat, this rising sun that hardly fits in the sky of me won’t stay put. To know you my equal in this, too—this beat of my blood’s drum, this feast that won’t diminish no matter how I ravage it—Red. Red, Red, Red, I want to write you poetry, and I am laughing, understand, as I teach this small body my joy, laughing at the joke of me and the relief, the relief of being supine on a stone slab with a knife above me and seeing your hand and eyes guiding it.

That surrender should be satiety. That it should have taken me this long to learn that.