This Is How You Lose the Time War
Take care my yew berry, my wild cherry, my foxglove.
Yours,
Blue
* * *
Red kills time.
She strides through the veils of the past, a woman robed in fire, hands wet with enemy blood. Her fingernail razor blades slide through the meat of your back; she stalks you as a shadow down long lonely halls, footsteps metronome measured, inescapable. She visits dark-angel mercies on the curled metal wrecks of Mombasa and Cleveland.
Commandant chided her for exposing herself back in the apothecary’s shop, but Red claimed she had to see, to know for sure the threat was done. Did Commandant believe her? Perhaps not. Perhaps survival is its own form of torture.
She has lost all the subtlety Blue ever teased her for lacking, her old competitive patience for a good officer’s work. She abandons her tools, retreats to the grossest physical foundations. Winning this battle, losing that, strangling that old evil man in a bathtub in his skyscraper penthouse, feels empty because it is: In the war they wage through time, what lasting advantage comes from murdering ghosts, who, with a slight shift of threads, will return to life or live different lives that never bring them to the executioner’s blade? Repetitive task, murder. Kill them and kill them again, like weeds, all the little monsters.
No death sticks but the one that matters.
She is useless to the war effort like this. Might as well shovel snow. But she is a hero, and heroes can shovel snow if they like.
Garden sends weapons against her, stinking green, howling sideways down strange angles from alien braids into the ghost land she walks, fit partners to kill or die.
She visits Europe, because Blue liked it here.
She thinks that name in her head now. What risk?
She sees London built and burning, upthread and down; she sits atop Saint Paul’s and drinks tea and watches madmen drop bombs while other madmen skitter over lead rooftops to put the fires out. She chucks spears in revolts against the Romans. She sets a great fire in a plague year. In another thread, she puts that fire out. She lets a mob tear her. She walks cholera-stricken streets while Blake scribbles apocalypses upstairs. The Tube still runs, in some threads, long after the city falls to robots or riot or is merely abandoned, all that beloved history a cast-off shell for beings who stride godlike skyward, and she rides it, rusting, empty, in circles, smelling a rot she cannot place. Coward, the rails call her—small use fighting now. Coward to continue, and coward to seek an end.
Even an immortal can only ride the Circle line so long. She wanders dripping tunnels, paced by swarms of scuttling sentient rats—they stink and hiss, their tails slither over brick, and she wishes they would fight her. They are not so foolish, or else they’re cruel. She collapses to her knees, and the rat tide closes over her, whiskers sharp against her cheeks; tails curl around her ears, and when the tide passes she is crying again, and though she never had a mother, she thinks she knows what a mot
her’s touch would feel like.
She remembers sun. She remembers sky.
Red cannot stay below forever. She does not know why she chooses the station she does, but she leaves the tracks and climbs.
She will see the city one last time, and then.
Even composed, certain, she cannot frame the then.
She stops, her hand on the bannister, overcome by—not those old French stairway spirits, but the other ones that whisper in your ear as you climb to a familiar room, that if you knock, if the door is opened, your world will change.
After a long time, she realizes she has been staring at a mural. A copy of an old painting, made to advertise a museum long since burned to ash. It survives here, in a subway like a bunker.
A boy dies on a bed, by a window.
One hand claws his still breast, the other trails on the floor. He is beautiful, and he wears blue trousers.
Red staggers back against the wall.
The window half-open. The slumped coat beside the bed. The open box. Hips turned half up. Every detail of pose is right, save only the absence of letter and the fact that the boy upon the bed in the mural does not look like Blue at all. For one thing, his hair is red.
Terror seizes Red beneath the earth. She thinks, This must be a trap. She feels herself seen by a mind far subtler and vast. But, if it’s a trap, why is she still alive? What game is this, sapphire? What slow victory, o heart of ice?
The dead boy remains.
The undoing of latter-century forgers. Chatterton, that Marvellous Boy.
And she realizes: Blue would not kill her. She knows this. She has always known.