This Is How You Lose the Time War

Blue, the other protagonist, boils a glass jar in an MRI machine in an empty modern hospital. She has already failed her mission, which was to infect a doctor with a new strain of bacteria to move the Garden toward or away from biological war, depending on the Agency’s response. However, Red has stopped her and left her a jar in the hospital, like Blue’s note on the battlefield, that says “READ BY BUBBLING” (11). The water’s heat transforms into numbers, data Blue can read and then destroy. Red’s note, like Blue’s, is playful, though Red is more rigid and formal in tone. She approaches the letter like a checklist because it has been so long since she has written a letter. She explains her motivations to spare the doctor to braid Strands 6 and 9 to preserve her side’s future. She teases Blue a bit and compliments her skill before moving on to recall a moment she saw Blue on a battlefield in the Summer Palace while pursuing Red, who was trying to save the Emperor’s clockwork devices. Red states their shared business: Their exchange of letters across sides would upset their leaders, but now they’re both in it, infecting each other’s thoughts. Red challenges Blue about whether she’ll continue their correspondence or cut it off before musing how fun it is to write to her. Once Blue has gone, the seeker enters the hospital and drinks the water in the jar.

Red navigates a labyrinth full of pilgrims shuffling to pay homage to fallen gods, though she notes the lore of the labyrinth varies by culture. Red’s mission is to enter a cavern, collect bones, hang them so they will create a song that will draw a hermit to build a hermitage and later allow a woman to find shelter with her child. She gathers bones and hangs some of them, but she fails her mission because she doesn’t finish it in time and throws the rest of the bones down into the cavern. The wind blows across the bones she did hang and makes a song that turns into a letter for Red from Blue about how she thwarted Red’s plan and what became of the pilgrim Red sought to draw there: He fell in love instead. Blue tells Red that she is watching while Red does her work, and she wonders if Red will be embarrassed by the thought. However, Blue then says she’s just joking because she is long gone and wants to hear from Red again. Red cuts down the bones she hung before leaving, but the seeker is down in the cavern and catches the bones before they reach the ground.

Blue enters a sacred pavilion. Her form is biomechanical in nature with exposed circuitry, short hair, chrome lips and eyes, and typewriter keys on her fingertips to pay homage to the god Hack. She releases a virus that incapacitates the other pilgrims and enters the labyrinth to make her way to the center. When she arrives, there is a box with a screen that attempts to tell her its formal god name, but Blue cuts it off, calls it Siri, and tells it she wants to hear the riddles. Each time Siri asks her a question, Blue recites a line of poetry—first lines from “The Jabberwocky,” then some Keats and some Byron. Siri powers down, and Blue starts to put it in a large bag, but Siri’s screen flashes then scrolls a letter from Red. Red asks Blue questions about her mission and tells her she is reading Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide to Etiquette and Correspondence because she isn’t versed in writing letters, a process she takes quite seriously. Blue sheds all the metallic bits she wore to appear as a pilgrim as she re-enters the strand of time, and it disintegrates and falls to the ground. The seeker appears and gathers up every bit of the dust.

Red helps Genghis Khan’s army gather trees in the bitter cold forest alongside the horde. She has worked with the horde for 10 years at this point and proven herself a valuable asset, and they respect her. She circles the trees and finds a letter in the lumber, written in the rings of a tree “in an alphabet no one present knows but Red” (33). She memorizes the message from Blue, and then tells the men that the lumber must be used when they ask her if she has seen a bad omen and if it should be destroyed. Blue’s letter is once again teasing and flirtatious. Blue answers Red’s questions but asks some of her own about whether Red eats, what she wants, and what she’s doing here. Blue also sends her best wishes to Genghis Khan, who she used to watch clouds with when she was younger. Blue is excited that Red is reading Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide on writing letters. The lumber with the letter is used to make war machines that lie broken at the end of the battle. Red is long gone, but the seeker comes and gathers up all the splinters left of the lumber and soundlessly inserts them all into her fingers.