This Is How You Lose the Time War
Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I’ll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I’ll write you by shark’s tooth and scallop shell; I’ll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs; I’ll—
stop, here, I’ll stop. This is probably not how this is done. I want flowers from Cephalus and diamonds from Neptune, and I want to scorch the thousand earths between us to see what blooms from the ash, so we can discover it hand in hand, content in context, intelligible only to each other. I want to meet you in every place I have loved.
I don’t know how it’s done between such as us, Red. But I can’t wait to find out together.
Love,
Blue
PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.
* * *
If Blue were less of a professional, she might sing as she slices the throat of her mark, tucked comfortably beneath Hôtel La Licorne’s brocade bedclothes and silk sheets she is almost sorry to spoil. The easiest work since her great achievement, and all in her favourite strands; Blue almost feels herself on vacation, she is so relaxed, so happy. Others work, now, to tend the new shoot, while she cuts fresh swathes in soft flesh.
She does not sing—but the bright bubbling of the earl’s blood beneath her hands makes her sigh, and ballads crowd her tongue. O, the earl was fair to see!
Blue has never laid plans, not really. Not her own, ever. Her job is to execute (she almost laughs, washing her hands, but doesn’t), to perform. She is familiar with cautionary poets’ exhortations across half a dozen strands, of mice, men, plans, canals, Panama—but she plans, now. She sits at the octagonal mirror in her own room—which she never left by the door, naturally, honestly the penny dreadful of her actions is another layer of amused enjoyment for her—and braids her dark hair in slow, careful configuration. She lays a circuitry of colour over the strands, raises a map out of them, and thinks of surfaces, of opposites that match, of the breathtaking reciprocity of a reflection. She curates, idly, scenarios in which to receive and deliver conversation, as one hand crosses another.
She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.
She takes the stairs to meet her alibi for a drink, smiling, already thinking ahead to the cognac she glimpsed earlier in the day, the reddest one, and how it will fill her mouth with sweet fire.
Garden looks out at her from the alibi’s eyes.
Blue does not miss a beat, but the smooth legato into which she folds the beat may as well be a stumble to Garden. Blue’s fingers curl around the gilt back of a chair as slowly as the corners of her lips curl into a smile. She pulls it out, sits down, while Garden pours her a glass of red wine to match her own.
“I hope you don’t mind my dropping in,” says Garden, mischievous green gaze flicking up at Blue, “but I so wanted to toast to our success in person. As it were.”
Blue chuckles and reaches her hand across the table to clasp Garden’s, warmly. “It’s good to see you. As it were.” Blue withdraws her hand, reaches for her glass, raises an eyebrow. “But you’re concerned about something.”
“The toast, first.” Garden raises her glass; Blue mirrors her. “To lasting success.” Their glasses clink; they sip. Blue closes her eyes as she licks colour from her lips, obliterates its name even as she coats her tongue with it, listens to the deep velvety green of Garden’s voice.
“You’re in danger,” says Garden, in soft, almost apologetic tones. “I want to put you to bed.”
Blue opens her eyes and affects a look of mild surprise. “That’s very flattering, but I expect a lady to buy me dinner first.”
Garden’s laugh is a rustle of leaves. She leans forward, and Blue feels herself falling into her eyes, tasting the ease they promise, the rest.
“My dear,” says Garden, “your accomplishment, while stellar, has a touch of, shall we say, ostentation to it. Relatively speaking. Where your siblings bloom and melt back into me, you . . .” Garden brushes a soft thumb along Blue’s cheek with a tenderness that draws a tremble from her jawline. “You root in the air, my epiphyte. It’s no hard thing to trace the new growth to you, singly. You have always,” says Garden, planting the words into Blue’s smile like strangler fig, “been too fond of signing your work.”
If Blue were less of a professional, she might have looked stunned. She might have chewed her lip. She might have walled up the inside of herself into a tomb and drowned it in a bog and set the bog on fire in her panic of what and when and how long.
Instead, she rakes through Garden’s words, look, tone, tills their depths, and turns over nothing but affectionate reproof of longstanding habit. She leans forward, takes Garden’s hands in hers again.
“If you embed me now,” she says, steadily, “we commit to losing the ground we’ve gained. More slowly, yes, but it will be a step sideways instead of forward. Keep me in, and we can press this advantage. You must feel it—the difference? We’re on the brink of something.”
“Brinks,” says Garden, with casual fondness, “are traditionally stepped back from.”
“They are also fine places over which to tip one’s enemies,” says Blue. “Traditionally.”
Garden chuckles, and Blue knows she’s won. “Very well. Once you’re done here, proceed upthread until you meet my sign, then twelve strands over. There’s a delicate opportunity there.” Garden draws her hands back slowly. “You are more precious than you know, my tumbleweed. Take care.”
Then Garden is gone, and Blue makes a dry remark about the strength of the wine as her alibi finds her focus again, laughs, and the evening dissolves into mirth.
When Blue checks out the next morning, the concierge looks confused. “My apologies, mademoiselle,” he says. “There has been a mistake with your bill—I will make up another—”
“May I,” says Blue, not trembling, not in knots, gloved hand sure as she reaches for it, already seeing the smudge in the ink for what it is, disguised as an unlikely decimal point. She reads it while the concierge looks on.