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These are the thoughts that seek to betray her: cracks for roots to exploit.
She thinks of Blue and does not break.
The eye moves on, and so does Red, without betraying her relief.
She walks Garden’s many worlds. Space itself is hostile to her here. Moss breathes fumes of sleep; spores drift, seeking traitors’ lungs where they can nest. Constellations hang phosphorescent in the sky, and vines tangle between galaxies, great trunk lines bridging stellar gulfs. Life burgeons and blooms even in fusion fires at the heart of stars. She is lost.
She seeks Blue. She climbs through a mangrove growing from a mercury sea, and spiders the size of hands fall on her and tickle the back of her arms, her neck, feather light. They question her in silk, and she answers each challenge with memories of Blue. Blue braiding grasses. Blue taking tea. Blue, hair shorn, come to steal from God. Blue with club raised, Blue with razor, Blue birthing futures.
The spiders mark her with their fangs, which is a dangerous way to give directions. But though the knowledge burns through her veins, the woman Red’s become does not die.
She climbs upthread. She works slowly, steps light.
We’re grown, I think you know, Blue wrote. We burrow into the braidedness of time. We are the hedge, entirely, rosebuds with thorns for petals.
Red finds the place. The spiders’ wisdom leads her to a green hollow of vines and moths, where flowers whiter than white bloom, at their hearts only dots of red. She descends into fairyland.
It seems like one of Blue’s beloved paintings, but Red can sense the dangers here. The roses waft scents of sleep: Come rest among us so our thorns can climb through your ears to the softness within. A blanket of massive gray-wing moths falls from the willow boughs to flutter around her, settle on her, taste her lips with their proboscides. Wings sharper than razors slide rough against her tendons. Grass grows to cushion her steps, but she feels its coiled strength. Is she Blue enough? If this place suspected what she was, she would die at once: carved by mothwing, choked by grass, food for the roses.
But she belongs here. This place belongs to the newness, the Blueness, inside her. So long as she does not fear. So long as she does not waver and gives the grove no reason to suspect.
A mothwing presses, just, between her eyelashes, and she does not scream or vomit or cut her eyeball open.
This is Blue’s place. She will not give it the satisfaction of killing her.
Pollen thickens the air with wisdom. To walk is to swim, and so she swims, upthread along the taproot that is this grove, into a past Garden has warded round with walls and thorns to guard the fertile dirt where her most perfect agents grow.
Seeds planted, roots combing through time.
Red swims to the grove’s vegetal heart, surrounded by wet, green apparatus through which Garden rears and feeds its tools, its weapons. Yet look another way, with human eyes, and she stands on a hillside near a farm in autumn.
There, the princess lies.
The princess is a creature of thorn and edge and flame. She is a grand weapon unfinished, heartrending and beautiful. Ranks of teeth shine in her mouth.
Look another way, and she is a girl asleep on a hill in light.
When I was very small, Blue wrote, I got sick.
When she’s grown, she will be fit for a war. But she is not Blue yet.
Red nears. The princess’s eyes open, golden, gleaming—and dark, deep, human, both at once, a trap inside a trap. Gorgeous girlmonster, she blinks, stretches between dream and waking.
Red bends to her bed and kisses her.
Her teeth cut Red’s lip. Her tongue darts out to claim Red’s fallen blood.
Red carved the poison into her memory down those long days in the lab, as she warped berries into paragraphs: a hungry poison, to turn Blue’s defenses against her, to make Garden cut her off, to eat her from within.
The blood she gives Blue to drink holds a foretaste of that poison—and Red’s antivenom, her resistance. A small virus that, if this works, will taint juvenile Blue the most delicate shade of Red.
I was compromised by enemy action.
Take this of me, Red thinks. Carry it in yourself, a root fed by what would kill it. Carry hunger all your days. Let it guard you, guide you, save you.
So that when the world and Garden and I all think you’re dead, some part of you will wake. Live. Remember.
If this works.
