This Is How You Lose the Time War

They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them.

A: Finally, dear reader, we dedicated this one to you, and we meant it. Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.

When you said you wouldn’t write again, when you said—that is the only letter of yours I’ve wanted to obliterate from myself. If I’m honest, that’s part of why I took the bait. To be unmade, that last written over—to be destroyed by you was easier, truly, than living with what you proposed.

You remember I promised you infiltration from my very first letter—dared you to be infected by me. I couldn’t know, then—I couldn’t, and nor could you—how thoroughly you were already inside me, shielding me from the future. You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red—my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I made you and you made me.

Shall we build a bridge between our Shifts and hold it—a space in which to be neighbours, to keep dogs, share tea?

It’ll be a long, slow game. They’ll hunt us fiercer than they ever hunted each other—but somehow I don’t think you’ll mind.

I’ve bought you five minutes to bust out. Instructions on overleaf, though I doubt you’ll need them.

I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends.

But maybe this is how we win, Red.

You and me.

This is how we win.

Red, ready to be tossed once more into her small gray world, looks back. The guard watches her with still and weighing eyes and a mouth twisted to a cruel, clever line.

“Why are you doing this?” Gruff, low. They aren’t supposed to talk to prisoners.

Red’s always been one for small talk. And—tomorrow’s the end. “Some things matter more than winning.”

The guard considers. Red knows the type: idealistic but unskilled, hoping to rise through the ranks on dependability. Yet her defection loosened this one’s lips.

Blue would have been impressed.

“You broke into Garden, and out again, and you won’t tell us how. So you’re not on our side. Why not join them when you had the chance? Sell us out?” So earnest. Red was that way once.

“Garden doesn’t deserve us. Neither does the Agency.” By us she means herself and Blue, wherever she may be, if in fact she is. She means all of them, all the ghosts on all the threads dying in this sick old war. Even this guard. Red gives her this truth, at the last. Maybe it will save her life.

When Red looks up, a small rectangle of white paper lies upon the floor.

She scrambles toward the envelope, claws it to her.

Her name. Handwriting she knows.

She remembers the guard’s grip on her arm. Remembers that voice. Was it familiar?

She climbs upthread. She works slowly, steps light.

We’re grown, I think you know, Blue wrote. We burrow into the braidedness of time. We are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals.

The blood she gives Blue to drink holds a foretaste of that poison—and Red’s antivenom, her resistance. A small virus that, if this works, will taint juvenile Blue the most delicate shade of Red.

I was compromised by enemy action.

Take this of me, Red thinks. Carry it in yourself, a root fed by what would kill it. Carry hunger all your days. Let it guard you, guide you, save you.

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.