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81 " You’ve always been the hunger at the heart of me, Red—my teeth, my claws, my poisoned apple. "
― Amal El-Mohtar , This Is How You Lose the Time War
82 " Hope may be a dream. But she will fight to make it real. "
83 " Even poetry, which breaks language into meaning--poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. What's supple, whipping, soft, and fresh grows hard, grows armor. "
84 " As she knots and thinks to herself, she decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike. A confession is also a dare is also a compulsion "
85 " Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you. I'll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp; I'll write you by shark's tooth and scallop shell; I'll write you by virus and the salt of a ninth wave flooding your lungs... "
86 " The short answer: no. The longer answer: I don’t think so? "
87 " Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? “And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing. "
88 " You have me watching birds, and though I don’t know their names like you know them, I have seen small bright singers puff before they trill. That’s how I feel. I sing myself out to you, and my talons clutch the branch, and I am wrung out until your next letter gives me breath, fills me to bursting. "
89 " But why? Red has done what she came to do, she thinks. But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her child does, or a smuggler she trades jackets with in some distant spaceport. And all this blood for nothing. "
90 " Words can wound – but they’re bridges too. (Like the bridges that are all that Genghis left behind.) Thought maybe a bridge can also be a wound? To paraphrase a prophet: Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside. "
91 " To be soft, for me, is so often pretense, and pretense does not come easily while writing to you. "
92 " I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the fact, in the palm of your hand, dying. "
93 " She is useless to the war effort like this. Might as well shovel snow. But she is a hero, and heroes can shovel snow if they like. "
94 " Red wrote too much too fast. Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth. "
95 " That's all I want now. A small place, a dog, green grass. To touch your hand. To run my fingers through your hair. "
96 " The future harvests us. "
97 " Gorgeous girlmonster, "
98 " There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave. "
99 " This is not even one of the weirder Atlantises. No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don’t exist, anyway.) "
100 " Your mission objective’s in another castle. "