This Is How You Lose the Time War

But that you should die. That you should suffer. That they should unmake you.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

But never again like this.

I am so sorry. If I had been stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. If I had been worth you. If—

You would not want me to curse myself this way.

You’ll have to burn this. I hope you can keep it. I keep the memory. I imagine your hands on the paper. I imagine your fire.

I wish I could hold you.

I love you.

R

Red concocts an ending.

The work takes longer than she thought. She never labored so upon a letter. Day by day she sleeps in the white room and wakes to whiteness and showers alone. Then the experts arrive to help her brew the poison.

The experts rarely speak, and never with her. They wear decontamination suits with faceplates in the lab, while Red goes barefoot. They arrive in the morning and leave at night. Red stays. She peers behind the faceplates while the experts work, and whenever she can see them, they are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily. She does not think they always looked so calm. Commandant has hollowed them, hallowed them, for this purpose.

Red’s message must be subject to minimal interference and oversight, lest the poison reek of committee and warn their prey. That’s what Commandant has said. Red does not know whether she should believe.

She proceeds with care.

She never weeps. She does not curse the empty walls of her empty lab, even after the experts have gone home. She does not want to risk Commandant listening.

She sleeps and dreams of letters.

It will be a plant. She chose that form: a plant grown from seed, to give Blue every chance to turn away. She gives it thorns. She makes its berries evil red, its leaves dark and oily. Its every piece cries poison.

She waits for the experts to object, but they do not.

Nothing could be simpler than killing a Garden agent. They die like anyone else—and then their spores infect, their windblown dandelion tufts take seed, their deep roots put forth new shoots. To break them, that’s the trick: a brew to snap the chains of memory, tangle the germ line. It must be targeted with care. They have samples of Blue, bits of blood on slides, a strand of hair that might be hers. Before Red can devise a way to steal them, the experts drop them in the pot.

This is a letter of death. It will lack meaning to any but the intended recipient. Its killing words will lace through Red’s message, hidden, until the charm’s wound up. Steganography: hidden writing. Writing inside other writing.

She writes, on the first level, a simple enough note, the note Commandant expects her to write: an expression of interest; a temptation and a dare. Not unlike the letter Blue wrote her back then.

She thinks, Do not read this.

She remembers how it felt so long ago to taunt her, to rejoice in victory. Blueberry. Blue-da-ba-dee. Mood Indigo. She tries to channel that memory against all that’s happened since.

She can’t.

She thinks, Some time traveler I am.

Blue won’t fall for this. She will listen. She received the letter. She will understand. She must. The only future they have is one apart and together. They lived for so long without knowing one another, warring through time. They were separate, they did not speak, but each shaped the other, even as they were shaped in turn.

So just go back to that. Why not?

It will hurt. They’ve hurt before, to save each other’s lives.

But there is another path. One she cannot bear to chart, and yet she must, because while Blue is subtle, she is also bold, and this may be the last chance Red will have.

So when the experts have left, she hides another message in the message they have hidden inside hers. She frames new meaning in the poison lines and hides it so the techs won’t notice, so even Commandant won’t see. She hopes.