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The first place they stop to take a breath is after three hundred and twenty-two jumps, some together, some apart, pure flight to muddy their temporal scents amid the fibers of the threads of the braid. They shed, like flakes of paint, the patina of the Agency's downthread stronghold, the clinging non-odor of these sterile, statistical timelines.
Blue tumbles through time, more crazily than she ever has, dizzy; she has had to leave timelines quickly, of course, but always guided by the tendrils and root networks of Garden, like traveling along mycelial networks. Now she hurtles through vacuum, her momentum barely controllable, no time to pause and get her bearings, her only orientation the traces of Red's presence she clings to, so as not to lose her.
Blue's always found her before, of course, but that was inevitable, as easy as tracing back the ripples in a pond to where the stone broke the surface. If Red were to hide, truly hide, sink into a strand so neatly and absolutely that none of the thousand thousand futures branching off from that point quiver a yoctosecond, as she must, as they must now in order to survive, it would be a long, difficult fight to find her. Red is so very good at her job, after all. What was her job. Of course she'd try to make it easier for Blue, to hide in that margin between the skills of the second-best of Garden and Agency and Blue's own abilities, but that margin is not so wide that luck or coincidence might not betray them. Better not to lose her at all.
That's what this has all been for, after all. Not losing her.
The first place they stop for longer than it takes to deploy counter-tracking measures, the first place they allow themselves to relax, is a wisp of a strand so far downthread that it feels unstable under Blue's feet. Entropy pounds against her skull like a migraine.
Red looks worse; her wounds from interrogation have begun to heal, but the stress of flickering through spacetime like a flipbook has done her no favors. She sits down hard on the ground, extremis suit from radiation miners in Strand 112 drooping off her frame, and then she lies down. Blue crouches over her, concern, soothing, but Red clutches at her shin—claws at her—presses her forehead against Blue's superdense-silk-clad limb.
Feeling ferociously tender, Blue strokes her skull. Red hasn't bothered to grown any new hair, and the shape of her skull is so clear, the ports set in the bone empty. They'll have to find her some new weapons, whatever tech she needs to replace what the Agency took from her, to get her mods working again. She needs to be able to defend herself.
Red is clearly not thinking about any of this. With her teeth—still with an edge measured in nanometers—she tears at the fabric of Blue's extremis suit until her skin is bare, until she can press her nose and cheek flush against Blue's cells.
Blue—and she does think of herself as Blue now—is still wearing the face of the Agency's prison guard, with her carbon-composite hair buzzed short and her nails dense with artificial diamond. She curls over Red, her Red, Red who is her Red as surely as her own blood is her red, and finds all the bits of Red that are Garden, that are her, ingested and incorporated, and coaxes an increase in oxygen uptake, in ATP synthesis. She'll teach Red how to do that herself, eventually, but for now all the growths of Garden in her are unbudded, mere spores and seeds, tools that Red's hands have not grown used to. Red's breathing slows. They can't stay here for long, but there is, briefly, time. An hour, perhaps—the trick is knowing which planet's hour to use.
Red is whispering. Blue leans to hear, eagerly drinks in the sound of her voice. So rarely have they been in the same place at the same time in the same thread. A few battlefields—glimpses of each other, a hollered command. The ways they've infiltrated each other's making: Blue killing a creature in the dark, Red poisoning the part of her that lay gestating in Garden with a kiss, in many ways a truer version of herself than the little girl in a 1771 who got so very, very sick. But they didn't speak to each other then. Maybe Red spoke to her corpse; but Blue wouldn't know that.
Red isn't even really speaking to her now, not truly. If she's speaking to anyone, anything, it's the irradiated air. "My woad and indigo, my dayflower Deep Blue, my phthalocyanine, my Rayleigh-scattered light and love," she's saying, "so many names—poison dart frog partner in crime, YInMn yearning—people have killed for sources of Blue—me looking for sources of you—"
Blue wants to eat her. Blue wants to devour her. It's too much, too much, to feel Red gasping into her skin and to know that she can simply—reach out and crush Red against her, lick her cheek and taste her sweat, all of these things she has been so careful not to think about. All that time she longed for Red's presence and physicality, and it turns out that presence and physicality has stoked the fire in her higher, higher. She has never held Red in her arms before and could never have been prepared for it.
They need to eat and rest. They can't linger here. But Blue feels that she can do nothing but linger in the palpability of Red.
They don't kiss then. It seems too little to express what Blue might've taken a leisurely three or four letters to express, to describe, to lay out in loving detail, perhaps in the throat of a gull, or the slow sedimentary layers of a canyon. Too many words, too little touch. So they make up for it now, just touch, don't really speak beyond Red's murmuring; they're more used to the written word anyway. Until Red, composed now, a little stronger once fortified by physical sustenance, stands, and takes Blue's hand, and they make their next jump as the light of this planet's moon winks out and the thread unravels, some battle fought upstream unmaking it, erasing their traces so thoroughly not even Red could Seek it out again.
— ⧗ —
It's a while before they can do more than just press together, reveling in each other's solidity. They'd like to sleep in the same bed, but one of them always ought to be on watch. They'd like to fuck, but the kind of safety Red—and Blue too, probably—would need to really lose herself is in short supply. They'd like to spend as much time learning each other's voices, which doesn't change much from disguise to disguise, as they have learning each other's words, each other's minds.
They do get to kiss though; Blue's strong, fierce hands in Red's new hair, grip as powerful as branches grown around her, as Garden's grasping leafy runners as it tried to pin her down after poisoning Blue with her cure. It's not any sort of milestone, just another way to hold each other close; it's nothing like consummation, nothing like what they truly want. But it's nice. To feel Blue's ephemeral strand-appropriate mask press against her own ephemeral strand-appropriate mask, flesh or metal or whatever else people are made of in that place and that moment, to catch at her breath, her living breath, that vehicle of her intoxicating, clever words.
Red isn't repining; they have time, they have all of time. They have so long to do it all.
Eventually there is Dublin, Strand 211, where they plan to spend a few years deadening their trail in a different way, burying themselves so deep in the weave a Garden or Agency asset could brush against them in the street and still not feel a disturbance. Too dangerous to stay here forever, but after a few longer jumps burying themselves deep below the rippling surface, they might stake out a home. A first home, a few decades. A dog, a tea set, notes on the refrigerator instead of grown in entrails.
Strand 211 is Garden, barely. Safer this way than to try and hide in a contested thread; there's not much here of interest to either Shift, this thread woven thoroughly but peripherally into Garden's braid. They choose 2039, a placid year. Residential Ballymount, hard up against the warehouses and office supply companies, a whizzing roundabout always audible from their front steps, but in the spring there are cherry blossoms thick on the pavement, and Blue sits on the steps outside their terrace house and reads, and Red sits two steps below her and leans against her, watching people.
The streetlamps hiss geoengineering sulfur compounds into the air, the first step in an ecological revolution pushing back against climate change that Garden seized upon and made its own long ago. They read the same versions of the same books and from this point of reference Red discovers that Blue is just as delightful to argue with about books as she'd imagined.
Living the slow way, it just becomes easier to… take everything else slow. There are still those gasping, greedy kisses, Blue's hands around Red's throat like cupping a fragile bird. Blue pulses with a slow, glorious heat, heartbeat more like a wave breaking on a shore than a muscle, like the heartbeat a tree might have, if trees had hearts. Against her, Red must feel fever-bright, always humming. Tucked against her as her skin sensors register dawn light slinking in through the windows, straddling her lap on the couch and not watching television, still dazzled with the reality that this is possible, that Blue is not dead or Garden but only Red's, there is too much to learn, to get used to, to really press the issue of sex.
The lust's always been there since the beginning; that's natural, adrenaline and other chemicals playing strange chords on the instrument of the body. But lust is other things, too. It's gripping Blue's hand so tight she leaves marks, first pale then red, red, red, it's sucking salt off her fingers when she's in the kitchen and the frypan is sizzling with aromatics. She wants to bite into Blue like a peach, juice dripping onto her chin; she'll get to the pit eventually. She has all the rest of it to taste first. It doesn't matter what order they find each other in. This, in their new linear life, has not changed.
It's not special at all, when it happens, except for it being Friday cusping on Saturday and spring bubbling into summer, and they've seen a show at the Abbey, something forgettable, and now Red is taking slow, dizzy sips of Blue's presence as they leave the riverside behind and turn down toward the main thoroughfare cutting through the heart of the city. The night's still throbbing with light even at this late hour, the historic stone edifices lit up with floodlights, drinkers and tourists still darting between the headlights of cars. Not the way most 2039 Manhattans are lit up at night, very cold and very blue from neon and safety lights running under scaffolding. Not the way most 2039 central Londons are lit up at night, everything huge and metropolitan and gleaming with adverts. The night feels exactly as small and contained as the world they are excavating, the two of them.
It's incredibly banal—about half of all the guidebook landmarks, the hop-on hop-off tour stops, are within a quarter kilometer of this spot. Red loves it. It's fun to pretend, to disappear into the crowd of people dating and drinking and having a night wander. This story she and Blue are telling about themselves seems so real at these moments, letters and threads and the agony of transformation so very far away.
Then, down a side street, a bar stacked to either side, dark but with the pale fire of the street still falling onto the cobbles hard beneath her shoes, Blue presses her against a wall and Red falls out of the story and back into herself.
Blue's placid smile, her hungry eyes. Meticulous fingers stroking down the line of Red's throat, those fingers who, until the end, had out-puppeted her. Blue kisses her and, frenzied, Red bites at her lips.
Red still doesn't know the name that had come with Blue's first seeding, before cuttings of her had been cultivated, transplanted through time. She likes it—she's always been more of a hunter, Blue more of an architect. She likes the idea there are more facets of Blue to catch in her teeth and tear open. She says the name Blue has slipped on for this thread and time, and then, softer, more secretive, the name she hoarded and obsessed over for so long. "Blue," she says. "Blue," she breathes.
"Let me have you," Blue whispers, and Red says, yes, yes, yes.
First, Blue kisses her. It's nice to have this messy physicality, given what they're about to do. Blue kisses her with the presumption of possession, the cold of the exterior wall behind Red digging into her synthetic skin, new-grown over the wounds the Agency inflicted. It sends mild pain-notifications shooting up her neuronal network and for once she doesn't acknowledge and dismiss them.
Blue draws back, her full lips bruised, her breath a touch unsettled, and says, "Show me your bud."
"What?" Red says.
— ⧗ —
Of course Blue knows sex. Seeded in the eighteenth century as she was, Blue has still always thought of real sex the way Garden does, so different from the simple touching and pressing of nerve bundles and skin. Garden is a connoisseur of all the ways in which alive-things can grow together, recombine, be each other on a level that runs below and beneath the visceral.
The most physical way she can describe it is graftage, trees growing into each other, bud to bud, root to root. It's like pollination, and penetration, and like… well, like gardening, taking the richness of another being, as brimming with abundance as a fistful of soil, in your hands and letting it stain you. It's like breaking one's self down to enzymes and substrates and reforming into a new living thing, one that has now known their partner or partners fully, a creature of Theseus, no woman stepping into the same river twice—no river ever being entered or left by the same woman. It's like sharing the same cup of tea, using her Garden-given senses to tease out the flavors in the trace of saliva left on the rim. And it's like none of those things.
Garden has always had a point about words, and Blue doesn't have them now to describe it, sex, as it is in the Shift of Garden. She'd imagined a reddening, a ruddying, of herself, and however they manage sex, it probably won't be that, so she mourns that fantasy and kisses it goodbye. However Red wants it, she'll grow to meet her. It's what she does.
— ⧗ —
Of course Red knows sex. The organ and various other processes that regulate libido, in all its manifestations, do not neuter the humans of her Shift so much as it frees them to pursue sexual pleasure in other, purer ways. It's the same with the network that throbbed in her constantly until she left it, made herself, in her capacity for solitude, the kind of person who was an Agent even before the Agency found her; all that closeness, all those minds joined to each other, makes true intimacy sweeter and stronger.
When not on a mission, she'd preferred to feel her hunger and desire, turning down the regulating hormones that disconnected her from the needs of the human form that still, even deep downthread, was necessary to generate the spark of mind that would become a human. When she turned it back on after a while, it was an unpleasant sort of need, an itch which she endured because sating it touched, briefly, that ever-hunger within her.
But real sex wasn't about hunger; it was about absolute pleasure, about knowing someone else down to the base code of them. Ported into another person's bio-electrical network, where the metal melded into neurons. Feeling someone else's back, warm, press against hers, as they leaned against each other so the cable could thread the port at the base of her skull to theirs.
Most people never bothered with sex at all, even this kind of glorious sharing that was half mind. But Red, in her physical wanderings, and then later as an Agent, had tasted it many times with others of the embodied and found it delightful. The perfect balance between the material and the immaterial; just like her.
When she'd pictured fucking/being fucked by Blue (the deficiency of this language! to have two words that only touched on part of the whole, to lack a word that encompassed both), she hadn't really thought about the ports, the cables. She'd only pictured white-hot pleasure, and knowing, while they were connected, every synapse fired in Blue's body, the waveforms of her thoughts as they rose and fell. For a moment, knowing truly the wholeness of Blue in the way she'd longed for since the very, very beginning.
It's all right—they'll figure it out. What's a little death to the great grand one, and they've already conquered that. Whatever they end up doing, Red will devour it; every scrap. The hunger that is Blue might never be sated; but then, it was never going to be anyway. Red already knows that not even sex would fulfill her. That there would always be more Blue to long for.
— ⧗ —
How, in twenty-six letters, in which they had bared more of themselves than many—most—people had to bare over a lifetime, had they never talked about this?
They get rice balls and duck spring rolls from a deeply underrated Thai fusion restaurant that will go under in two years and which Blue is already missing and half-sit, half-lean on the embankment wall, the River Liffey rippling at their backs. A small part of Blue turns over the dilemma while the rest of her talks it over with Red; neither of them are precious about sex, and from Shift to Shift birth, reproduction, food, all of the other essential human drives, had been different. It amuses her that apparently neither of them had given a thought to the pleasure-and-intimacy of it all, that they had thought, because their love and longings were the same, their lust would be, too.
"It appears, my dear carmine, that we are at an impasse. Again." Blue laughs at the thought. A thousand battlefields, a trap of letters that could never be reported, mutually assured correspondence. Here they are again. Red leans against her and Blue can feel her eyelashes flutter against her bare shoulder. Halter tops are in again in 2039, Strand 211.
Red licks grease off her fingers and says, easily, "I'm not sure how that would work. If you gave me the numbers I could attempt to approximate the hormone levels and molecular changes…"
"Numbers," Blue says, charmed.
"Probably not," Red agrees.
"I don't have an erogenous port."
Red's kissed the back of her neck enough to know this, too. She nods.
"We could—as the prophets say—do it like they do today," Blue suggests. Catalyze the right enzymes to generate vaginal lubrication. Clitorises and nipples. Et cetera.
She's had that kind of sex before, the mutely physical kind, and it was… fine. It felt good, like stretching or scratching, and sometimes there was a deeper togetherness, with someone loved, if not beloved. Genghis, once. Her husband, once, in that long peace of Strand 198. Others.
"We probably will, some time." And it would be lovely—anything, any closeness with Red would be. "For now—" Red looks at her and her eyes are hungry. "Let's start there. And see how far we can go."
— ⧗ —
Not that night; that night they stay out until dawn, speaking quietly arm in arm, trying to tease out the other things they might've forgotten to say, until the streets are truly deserted. When Red unlocks their front door—an era-appropriate RFID key, followed by some security measures from far, far further downstream—the first trickles of color are just beginning to tint the cloud-inflected sky. They fall into bed and sleep sleep which they do not need, but which is lovelier for that. Presence and warmth and bodies tucked together.
Later, Blue goes to her knees on the rug Red braided herself with techniques she learned in Tawantinsuyu and drags her deceptively strong fingers down the inside of Red's thigh and says, "Let's try this again."
Yes, yes, yes—Blue is meticulous, tugging each sock off and kissing at the exposed ankle, and Red wants to tear at her clothes. Blue's seen her naked, in all ways, but the impatience never gets any easier to bear. Blue knows, of course. The torment is purposeful, as calculated as that first letter, and as capricious. Blue unbuttons the side clasp on Red's jeans and stops, leans forward to kiss her. Every inch she tugs them down, she bites, very gently, so light Red's sensors struggle to pick up the sensation, even turned up high enough that her clothes feel like pain, at the newly exposed skin.
Red curses in the words of the prophets of a thousand Earths, scattered across ten thousand strands. You'll kill me, I hate you, I love you. Blue's laugh is as low and inviting as a mourning dove's. Then she licks at Red through the damp fabric of her underwear and Red jerks, shocked with pleasure, her receptors still turned up from Blue's ghosting bites, totally unprepared for a brazen swipe of Blue's tongue.
Blue knew exactly what she was doing here, too. Red's thighs tremble around her head, her fucking jeans still tangled around her ankles, as Blue buries her face into the crease of Red's thigh and inhales.
What's she sensing, with those Garden-given chemoreceptors of hers, what does Red taste like to Blue on a molecular level?
Red snarls and moves. Bedrooms and battlefields—there isn't much difference in a aikido throw in either. Blue doesn't make a sound, her eyes go wide and surprised as Red flips her onto the bed, but aside from a soft puff of breath shocked out of her she relaxes back into the softness. 21st centuries always have horrible mattress materials, but she lounges on it like it's silk.
Red braces herself over Blue, sucking marks onto the tender parts of her neck and down between her breasts, through the material of her shirt, just hard enough to bring the blood to the surface. They stay, and Blue must be tamping down the thing in her that wants to heal, repair, pluripotentiate. Red growls approval. But she's gentle when she undresses Blue—she likes her fine fabrics, and Red is possessive enough to want the only marks on Blue to be hers, directly, teeth and fingers, not the sloppy marks of clothes tugged at too sharply.
She still feels unsteady sometimes, with the once-loss of Blue. That Seeking, that desperate attempt to seed Blue with unpoison, it made her ragged and desperate in ways she has still not shed, with all the reality of Blue to glut herself on. Blue understands, always; she runs her fingers through this form's thick, dark hair and Red shudders under her touch.
Since discarding the guise of the Agency guard, Blue's epigenetic processes have darkened her skin, made her taller, more leonine in build. Her body now is freckled, cedarwood-brown, stretch marks darker where they ripple over her skin like wood grain. Her springy curls splay over the pillow; this guise's hair is red. Her eyes are still blue. Red explores her with her mouth and her fingers, tries to memorize her as she did her letters, but there's too much data to compress so neatly. She kisses her belly-button (cute! she wonders if Garden operatives come with them, given that they're born enmeshed in a time; Agents have one surgically created later, to blend in with most eras). She kisses her hipbone. She kisses her clit, and eagerly presses her tongue to Blue's cunt-lips and feels her getting wetter and wetter.
Then she tries something new. Lowers her cortisol. Ups her LH and her luteal progesterone. Above her, Blue gasps; a positive sign.
All this is just physical. This next bit she has to concentrate on.
Red's been thinking, about the Seeking, about making herself just enough Garden that it wouldn't spit her out immediately. She's noticed, since escaping, that parts of her are—different. It was hard to tell in the Agency's prison, so many parts of her dampened, all her mods removed or repressed. Stronger now, nearly healed, it's impossible to deny.
Red finds the part of her that is nearly-Garden and reaches.
It doesn't go. Quite as expected. And not at all like Blue described, budding into each other, the places blooming between them connecting their veins with thin filaments of xylem and phloem. Instead, the places where she's touching Blue, lips and fingers and expanses of skin, spark with familiar electrical activity. Neurons firing, she thinks. But no—it's a different kind of movement. Slower, slower. Same mechanism, different medium. Action potentials moving through root networks instead of nervous systems. Blue gasps. Blue screams. Red's vision blurs.
She can see her hand, dark against the lighter brown of Blue's skin, and she can see electrical potentials move between them, and they overlap each other in a dizzying way that makes her shake. Blue grabs her wrist and laces their fingers together, and–
She doesn't know how it works. It's not really supposed to be possible, this kind of mind-to-mind transfer, not without the proper hardware threaded in from birth, and indeed it's not like any other sex Red has had with anyone from her Shift. It's a little like—all the parts of Blue she's supposed to be able to access, in sex, are pulsing through the points of contact between them. Slow, bottlenecked by the speed of the electrical impulses themselves.
Instead of being dropped into Blue's mind and left to drown, instead it's more like—she's standing on a shore, and the ocean froth is lapping at her toes. Not drowning, not even really in the water. But experiencing it nonetheless.
It's not really mind-reading—you can get emotional states, sometimes, if you're very compatible, but it's more about the architecture of a person that runs deeper than surface thoughts. But for a moment, Red catches a glimpse of Blue's mood.
It's pleasure, shocking, wondering pleasure. And it's smugness, too. A hint of you didn't think you were the only one experimenting, did you?
Blue, cold as a matrix of ice, warm as the heart of a flame. Her Blue, her pain, her greatest joy. Red loses herself in the tide.
— ⧗ —
When the endorphins drain away enough that Blue can think again, she rolls over to her side and sees Red, dazed and fucked-out and glorious, staring at the ceiling. She's sweaty and short of breath and the most beautiful thing Blue has ever seen. Blue reaches over and gently places her fingers on the inside of Red's elbow, a neutral place that runs no risk of overstimulating her.
A little while later, Red stirs, blinks heavily, and rolls her head toward Blue. Blue traces the curve of one heavy eyebrow lovingly. "Huh," Red says.
"Yes," Blue agrees.
There are all kind of things to say. All kinds of things they need to figure out now, what it means, that Blue has enough of Red's nano-antibodies to use them this way, that Red's grown into something that can branch and root.
But Blue allows herself a night to think, tired and content and utterly sated, utterly full, for the first time in her life, of how utterly they have made themselves perfect for each other. This new kind of being they have invented between them.
"I love you," Red says. It's not the first time she's said it; not even the first time she's said it aloud, and not on a page. Every time it feels as momentous; every time as great of a gift.
"My Red," Blue sighs, and closes her eyes, and slips into a dream. She's not sure if Red dreams it, too. They won't talk about it in the morning, not out of shame or secrecy, but simply because it seems unnecessary. She dreams of a place that is neither the cold leaping distances of space nor the floral glut of a garden; it is summer, it is safe, and Red is there. And she is no longer hungry.