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141 " Your fellows have their intrigues and their passions, and now and again a clever play, but there’s none so intricate, so careful, so assured. You’ve whetted me like a stone. "
― Amal El-Mohtar , This Is How You Lose the Time War
142 " It is difficult - it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask Do I have you still, when they end a letter with Yours, mean it in any substantive way. "
143 " So in this letter I am yours. "
144 " She remembers that last letter. A long game, she wrote, a subtle hand played well. Remembers between the rearing and the snap. Remembers pomegranate, and what pomegranates are for. They stick in the throat. They scatter to a hundred seeds. They bring daughters of earth back down to the land of death—but death does not claim them. "
145 " My viny-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia. We both know it’s nothing so simple, any more than a letter’s reply is its opposite. But which egg preceded what platypus? The ends don’t always resemble our means. "
146 " Hunger, Red - to sate a hunger or to stroke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth - is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that's what I have instead of friends. "
147 " I want to tell you something about myself. Something true, or nothing at all. "
148 " The needle sinks and spirals through its grooves. I spurt anachronisms as I wind down. It's good to feel this in common with the universe, somehow. I never died but once - that once I told you of - and it was quite a different thing. Strange how being erased can bring one in line with a greater narrative.I loved you. That was true. With what's left of me I can't help but love you still. This is how you win, Red: a long game, a subtle hand played well. You played me like a symphony, and I hope you won't mind my feeling a little proud of you for such a magnificent betrayal. "
149 " She kills again and again, frequently, but not always, to save. "
150 " She seeds the Strand 9 Amazon Basin with defanged versions of European superbugs ten centuries before first contact, and when conquistadors arrive, they face locals by the millions, strong, thriving communities that won’t perish by mere contact with the world across the waves. "
151 " And this letter is a knife at my neck, if cutting's what you want "
152 " Will you respond, establishing complicity, continuing our self-destructive paper trail, just to get in the last word? Will you cut off, leaving my note to spin its fractal math inside you? I wonder which I’d rather. "
153 " Closing a letter—a physical object without even a ghost in the cloud, all that data on one frail piece of paper—with an even more malleable substance, bearing, of all things, an ideographic signature! Informing any handler of the message’s sender, her role, perhaps even her purpose! Madness—from an operational-security perspective. But, "
154 " She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack, "
155 " hate it. I never hated before, like I hate this. With all you are to me, and all you’ll always be, we can’t just go. We can’t just walk away. But I will, if it leaves you living. "
156 " I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you. "
157 " When I was a girl, I loved reading. An archaic pastime, I know; the index and download are faster, more efficient, offering superior retention and acquisition of knowledge. "
158 " Poetry ossifies, in time, the way trees do. "
159 " - as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeting void tails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away. "
160 " Her limbs inform her that they ache where they clutch this ancient trunk above an unfathomable drop. "