This Is How You Lose the Time War

Red is at the foot of a volcano as Atlanteans frantically try to board their ships from the sinking Atlantis. Red tries to protect the people to give them time to get away, even though she hates Atlantis and all its versions. The volcano erupts, and she’s distracted by the lava, which forms words. She turns off the cameras in her eyes to read the letter, even though this distraction costs her the village below. Blue writes that she also hates Atlantis despite all the work that must be done to make the city seem magical. Blue wants to know about Red’s hunger, if she feels it. Blue thinks she has more hunger than friends and requests Red write to her from London next time. The work Red has done was enough to save the most important people, though the village is destroyed. The seeker comes and gathers up the fine hairs of molten volcanic glass that form near the flow of lava.

Blue is in a London that “other Londons dream [of]: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar” (55). In the Mayfair teahouse, she sits in the corner booth and eagerly awaits her tea on the fine china. When Blue gets her tea, it’s not in a matching set. The server apologizes that the matching cup was cracked and didn’t want to make Blue wait any longer. When Blue stirs the tea, she notices a downthread substance and stirs the tea more and drinks it as letters swirl into meaning. It’s a letter from Red who is pleasantly surprised they agree on Atlantis and wonders how much their efforts may have helped each other along the way despite being on opposite sides of the time war. Red explains she doesn’t feel traditional hunger, but the way Blue described it, that “hollowness,” feels familiar to her (61). Red tells Blue an intimate story of when she was 13 and sought to be alone as an experiment and found herself moved to tears as she felt loneliness. She mentions that she saw a large wolf-like creature with six legs walk past her in that moment. Red wonders if Blue has ever been lonely and hopes to see her next time in a more public setting. In postscripts, Red worries about whether her letters are too long, and then she reveals the meaning of the name she used for Blue at the beginning of her letter—0000FF. It’s a shade of blue porcelain, but she can’t remember the name of it, so she uses the hex code instead. She taunts Blue that her side will still win. After she’s done with her tea, Blue crushes the cup beneath her boot and grinds it to powder. Once she leaves, the seeker sweeps up the powder of china and then inhales it through a rolled-up bill.

Red works alongside Quechua sailors and fisherman knotting reeds. She knows that this strand could go many directions and wonders if the empire will rise or fall, if the Tawantinsuyu will survive and thrive. She knows the Agency is not happy and knows she could be killed for not being good enough. She tries to work faster but makes a mistake. She gets up and walks along the beach. An old man asks for her opinion on the sails, and at last she feels the language in the knots of a cord: It’s another letter from Blue. Blue tells Red not to shorten her letters and explains that friendship and falling in love are part of her duties, but there are better things to write about than that. She’s interested in the memory Red shared from when she was 13. Blue shares some of her background in the Garden and how they see life there, how they are a part of the whole of nature, but the whole of nature isn’t all of her. Blue confirms she also feels the hunger that Red experiences, the hunger to be a separate and whole self. She likes that Red likes reading and taunts Red in a postscript that her side will win. Red watches what looks like a seal bobbing in the sea and wonders what it is: It is the seeker gathering the strands of the letter that Red has cut into lengths and thrown into the water.

Blue, in the form of a wolf-like creature, guards a “growing thing, millennia in the making” (74), but across the way she sees Red as a 13-year-old, and time stops. Blue is overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings when she sees Red. When the “growing thing” hatches, Blue is unable to let the monstrous creature attack Red and tears out its throat with her teeth instead, though the creature also wounds Blue in the process. She eats its carcass and concocts a plan to cover up her betrayal of the Garden. Red is crying, and Blue wants to run toward her, but she doesn’t. Instead, she finds a cave and returns to a human form, realizing that her wounds are worse than she thought. In the cave she finds a letter from Red written on blue stationary in an envelope sealed with red wax—the kind of proper letter Mrs. Leavitt would approve of. In the letter, Red confesses how close they are and the hunger their letters create. Red pledges herself to Blue, not to the Garden or her mission but just to her. She hopes to write from a library next time. Later, the seeker removes the teeth from the creature Blue killed and puts them in her own mouth before going to the cave to gather up the blood Blue left behind.