This Is How You Lose the Time War

The Agency is stationed near the main braid on the Russian front where the Nazis are developing ways of raising the dead. Red is summoned to the Commandant’s tent where she is torturing a soldier with blue eyes. Commandant shows Red a picture of Blue and asks if Red recognizes her. Red is honest and recalls the first time they met in battle. Commandant flips the paper over and shows all the time their threads have crossed. Commandant thinks Blue has purposefully been targeting Red and that Red is being groomed by Blue to defect and change sides. They believe Blue is waiting for Red to initiate contact with a message, so the Agency has a plan to counter Blue: They’ll use genetic steganography—the process of hiding worded messages in the world around them—to weave poison into a letter that will neutralize Blue. She is dismissed and told to go to a different thread to begin her new work to destroy Blue. Red leaves and moves 10 strands over. She feels sick at the thought of putting Blue in danger. A bee dances out a letter to her, and then stings her to deliver Blue’s postscript and dies. Blue tells Red she loves her too and confesses the lengths she’d go to just to write to Red. She doesn’t have all the answers, but she can’t wait for their future together. After Red has left this strand, a spider bundles up the bee’s body and consumes as much as it can. Once the spider is sated, the Seeker eats the spider.

Blue has never laid plans before, but now, with Red, she wants to. She completes her assigned task in a hotel room and meets the person who will serve as her alibi in a bar. Garden takes over the alibi’s body and toasts Blue’s success. The Garden suspects Blue is in danger and wants to pull her from the mission and re-embed her in Garden, though Garden is aware that Blue is a tumbleweed and prefers to be out on her own. Blue convinces Garden to let her continue her work. As Blue checks out of the hotel, the concierge apologizes for a mistake on her bill. Blue looks at it, and in a single decimal point Red has written her a letter: She tells Blue about the Agency’s plan to poison her and insists they have to let each other go. They can still live and see each other in battle if nothing else. Red reaffirms her love for Blue and apologizes for not being smarter. She doesn’t want Blue to read her next letter and warns her of the danger therein. She can’t stand the thought of Blue dying, and as painful as it is, wants to let her go rather than put her in any more danger. Outside the hotel, the groundskeeper is burning yard debris and Blue drops the crumpled bill onto the fire. As soon as Blue is gone, Seeker pulls the bill from the fire and eats it while it’s still alight.

Under the Agency’s gaze in a secret lab, Red embeds a letter to Blue in a plant with berries and the Agency then laces it with the poison engineered specifically for Blue. When they’re finished, Red layers in another letter beneath the poison to Blue. She writes a devastatingly beautiful letter she hopes Blue will never read. When their work is finished, the Agency blows up the lab, though Red saves a few people from the bomb despite being told not to. In the dust coming from the explosion, there’s a painfully short letter from Blue that just says, “As you wish” (157). Later, the shadow comes through the ashen area eating.

Blue wishes she could’ve been a scholar and studied the strands in which Romeo and Juliet ended up a comedy or tragedy. She watches a performance in the strand she’s in but leaves before she finds out the ending. She finds the poisonous plant and immediately notices how stiff and different Red’s voice sounds in the letter the Agency made her craft. Blue fights the urge to eat the plant for a long time, but one terrible day, she strokes its leaves and gives in to her desire to eat the berries, as she always knew she would. Blue feels the poison working as she reads Red’s letter disguised within the poison: Red begs her to stop many times and tells Blue she loves her. She signs off but keeps writing because she knows Blue is still reading. She admires Blue and longs for a world where they can be together and once again shares how much she loves Blue.