This Is How You Lose the Time War

She reads it. She takes the beginning into herself. This is how we’ll win.

Red finds water in an MRI machine in an abandoned hospital and drinks. In a temple abyss, Red gnaws fallen bones. In a grand computer’s heart, she peers through optic circuits. In a frozen waste, she slides a letter’s splinters into her skin. She takes them into herself, adapts. Finds all the missing shades of Blue.

As the letters’ taunts change tone, she must be more inventive. A spider eating a dragonfly. A shadow drinking tears and coiled enzymes within.

She watches herself weep in a dinosaur swamp, and though she knows this is a trap laid by the younger Red for her shadow follower, the tears still gouge and burn. She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I’m here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they’ll mistake embrace for strangulation. She wrestles herself in the shadows and feels the pain when she breaks her own hip.

She travels the labyrinth of the past and rereads the letters. Recreates both herself and Blue, so young-seeming now, in her heart.

She clutches the text like a spar against a flood—Red in tooth and claw, the Mongol hordes, curses of Atlantis, a hunger so sharp and bright it might split you open, break a new thing out. Rose-hip tea. Promises of books. That I might have taught you this. Tending each to each.

The breadcrumbs she finds as she seeks them! Blodeuwedd. You’d need to practically wear their skin. How long had she planned this? How long did you know, my mood indigo?

Or did she know at all? The links are small, deniable. The breadcrumbs could be only crumbs. Red devours them anyway. She has decided; there’s no room left for doubt.

Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something.

Commandant’s agents smell her, chase her. They trap her in a sinking pirate ship in Coxinga’s fleet, and she breaks them quickly, surgically, and peels their camouflage shields away and wears them.

A letter is more than text. She reads Blue into her: tears, breath, skin—most of these traces were scrubbed away, but a few remain. She builds a model of Blue’s mind from the words she left; she molds her body to the letters’ measure. Almost.

And at last, Red stands on the cliff at the end of the world and holds out her hand, and her heart breaks to see herself weeping in the world before. She wishes she could take herself into her arms, crush her in a fierce embrace.

The broken Red presses Blue’s last letter into her hand, jumps off the cliff, and does not die.

The letter remains—the seal, the wax with a drop of blood inside.

On a bare island far upthread, she places the seal upon her tongue, chews, swallows, and collapses.

She shades herself with Blue, from blood, tears, skin, ink, words. She thrashes with the pain of growth inside her: new organs bloom from autosynthesized stem cells to shoulder old bits of her away. Green vines twine her heart and seize it, and she vomits and sweats until the vines’ rhythm matches hers. A second skin grows within her skin, popping, blistering. She claws herself off upon the rocks like a snake and lies transformed. And more: A different mind plays around the edges of her own.

She feels herself alien. She has spent thousands of years killing bodies like the one she wears. Sea spray breaks the barren sunrise to rainbows.

Her transformation has not gone unnoticed.

Threads of time sing with the light, swift footfalls of Red’s sister-soldiers: The Agency has smelled her treason, their hero turned. She is meat, now, for their teeth.

If they’re already that angry, wait until they get a load of her next trick.

She dives from this thread, plummets down the space between the braids. Time feels different now—she remains herself, but also an echo of her love, a by-blow, a not-quite. The hounds bay behind, Red’s sisters, her rivals fiercest and fast, but one by one they realize where she’s bound and break off pursuit. The last, too strong and dumb for her own good, remains, nearer, nearer, her hand almost clutching Red’s ankle. But the green wall looms ahead, the great border where futures turn from Ours to Theirs.

Red strikes that wall, and it reads the Blue in her, bubbles, at first resists, and she thinks, That’s it, chance failed, we’re done. But then it gapes, and she tumbles through, and it closes fast behind. Her pursuer shatters.

Red falls, flies, down threads she’s never dared touch, into Garden.

She enters as a letter,

sealed in Blue.

She finds herself, at first, in orbit.

Space here is sick. Thick. Slick. She drowns in cloying honey-heavy light. Her passage through vacuum feels like sliding over meat. The cold touches her new skin but does not burn; her lungs lack air, but she does not need to breathe. Far away and too, too near shines a sun that is an eye with a great hourglass pupil like a goat’s, sweeping space for weaknesses to improve, exploit. All the stars are eyes here, always seeking. Red’s prophets rail against an indifferent universe; here, in Garden’s domain, all the vast worlds care.

The planet she circles has outlived its usefulness, she knows—the new organs tell her. Thick fluid space opens. Green taproots descend from its gaps, wrap the globe, and, with a gentle pruner’s strength, crumble it to dirt, drawing life from the fragments until only ash remains. The nutrients are needed elsewhere.

The eye that is a sun sweeps past her, and Red burns with the fury of its glance.

She has made a terrible mistake. She is a fool, and she will die far from home. How could she think she knew this place from letters, from the memories of a friend? How could she have been so certain; how could she believe she’d become enough of Blue to survive here? Not knowing this, did she really know Blue at all?