This Is How You Lose the Time War

Blue, still married, pursues a slow new critical mission to push her husband to have conversations in the future that will eventually benefit Garden. She ambles around and watches as an owl coughs up a pellet. She brings the pellet home and finds a note from Red, which details depths of her feelings for Blue and the bridges they’ve built between them. Red also asks Blue if she feels like she’s being followed. Some years later, a seeker zips through the area and gathers up the little bones from the pellet.

Red moves swiftly between timelines, from a futuristic starfleet to the Theater of Pompey. She asks another agent if they have ever experienced being followed, but the other agent blows off the conversation and urges Red to join her in Julius Caesar’s assassination. Red complies and later washes the blood from her hands in a faraway river. In the Ohio woods, another goose approaches her with a leather pouch looped around its neck. Blue has written on the pouch, asking if Red trusts her. Inside the bag, Red finds six red seeds numbered from one to six. She eats three staghorn sumac seeds, and each contains a letter. Blue confesses she wants to impress Red. She says she likes the reciprocity of their relationship and that being with Red makes her want to be more tender. She speculates on the idea of enemy agents and asks Red for more information regarding being followed. After savoring the third seed and letter, Red falls asleep under a tree. When she wakes up, she still has the other seeds but the pouch is gone and she hears footsteps. She chases after a shadow but loses it in the forest.

Blue studies her surroundings and braids grasses. A bird drops a damselfly into a long-empty nest, and Blue stands and spills all the grasses from her lap. She retrieves the damselfly and recognizes that it contains a letter from Red, so she consumes it. Red tells Blue that she misses her and explores how opposite their side’s approaches are: While Red moves swiftly through time, she only skims the surface. Blue lingers on behalf of the Garden and affects a single deep change, a new braid, with her efforts. Red thinks Blue’s absence is the deadliest thing of all. Red tells Blue that she can dream and divulges more about the shadow she feels following her. Before she writes more, Red wants to deal with the shadow and needs to keep moving. Later, the seeker comes and gathers up the grasses Blue dropped from her lap.

Red chases the shadow following her but the shadow always evades her traps. She eats another sumac seed while sitting by a stream. She feels alone and overwhelmed by her emotions, and a hand rests on her shoulder—the shadow she has been chasing—and she catches it by the wrist. They struggle, but the shadow gets away. Red is furious, her hunger for Blue overtaking her fear of whoever is following her. Since the first seed she ate was fake, she gives in and retrieves Blue’s seeds from behind her eye, eats all three and reads the letters: Blue wants to make Red hungry and satisfy her hunger. She’s happy Red has read the book she recommended. In her next letter, Blue writes that she hadn’t noticed all the red things in the world so intensely before. She shares an important memory of when she first felt alone. When she was a child, rooted in the Garden, she was very sick, so she was isolated to help her get stronger and keep her from infecting the others. She had been compromised by enemy action, even though no one had penetrated the Garden before. All she remembers is a kiss and eating something, almost like a fairy tale. The Garden saw Blue as a symbol of their strength in spite of enemy action and “deployed [her], made much of [her], praised and elevated [her], but always at something like arm’s length” (123). In her next letter, Blue tells Red that she imagines having placed the seed in Red’s mouth and admits that she trusts Red. She wants Red to write her long letters again. Red sleeps, and the seeker, injured and dirty from their earlier tussle, collects her tears and tastes them.