The redheads

I'm Adidas. I chose it. He didn't argue; you don't argue with a redhead about a name, he said, and I hummed.

I'll go fast. I've got thirty years and I've used nineteen.

The accident first. Not the big one. Later there's a big one, the Dragon King, the mice and the dogs and the door left open, and that one isn't mine to hum; I'm only a bar of it. This one's mine. I was in the room.

The princess had an accident. Or the Duke of Mercy. The titles over there change with the light and the snake never bothered to learn them. What came out of it I'll say the way it was said to me, since nobody has found a better way: a redhead of a thousand, in that year, turned into an expensive horse with a very high number of very large and very strong teeth.

Let's be honest. That is what happened. I saw it in a flash and did what I do, which is nothing.

It was ours. The five say so and I say so. Through that one small fuck-up, the lords withdrew. We'd had their trust for a battle and a pact and not much longer. And the five kept at it anyway, the whole time, to save themselves, for the children's sake, on conditions that were high, very high, I saw the numbers and hummed; and grief be thanked, after a great deal of rebuilding, they found a cosy place in the end.

It's hard to let go. It's harder when the world's so beautiful you can't move. I watched him stand in that place, the blind one, snake round his neck, and go still, and I saw it: not sadness. A body that had decided it had seen enough and would like to stay exactly here, thank you, forever.

"I understand the stone now," he said.

"What stone?"

"I didn't then," he said, which isn't an answer, and the snake looked at me until I stopped asking.

···

About us. The redheads.

Not all of us are the horse. I should say so. Some of us come close to him, nearly, in what we can do. Chanel number two, three and four. And me.

I smell. It's appalling; I know; the snake leaves the room, and it has lived on a man's neck for a thousand years, so that's a judgement. I don't mind. I see things in a flash. Faster than anyone he's met, he says, and he's met everyone. What I can't do is act. The flash goes off in my head and dies there, like a match in a jar.

So he gave me a tool.

Something to put the flash into, so it wouldn't just go off in my head and die there. He said he knew it was in safe hands, and I want that on the record, because there's a version of what came next going round, on a channel I won't name, in which I'm the trigger. I'm not. He was there. Ask him.

And bear this in mind for the next part: time-travel stories are always more complicated than they look, especially when nobody involved actually knows the technology. Nobody did. Hum.

···

We weren't always red. That's the thing nobody tells you. And we live short. Thirty years. Inside that thirty, over the generations, we built a system that works like music: it tells our own story, again and again, to itself, in the same order, with the same rests. By our own teaching that's how we became immortal. Not by living long. By being a piece of a story that's still going, and handing the piece on, and being, each of us, not a person at all but a bar of the tune.

No personality of our own. He said that to me once, carefully, the way you tell someone there's something on their face.

I agreed and hummed.

Then Gucci saw us. Our Gucci, we called her then; she was on our side of the room, gold hair, kind to everyone individually. She looked at a people with no self and a perfect memory, thirty years each, endlessly replaceable, and I saw the flash go off behind her eyes, and what she'd seen was a machine for printing money.

And in the name of help, for the first time in his era, she began research again.

···

He did his own exploring in those years. To solve the riddle of the truth, he called it; I'd call it what he calls it now: what is actually going on. I went with him. I could see the answer before he'd finished the question, and it made no difference, and he liked that.

A million years of short lives leaves a life of dead time behind it. It's one thing to use magic; it's another to understand it. And we had a thing, the sharing-gan, we called it, an eye, a way of seeing, and it gave him the chance to see the truth about the visible universe. Only it was like a journey back in time. What you saw through it had already happened. Old light. Old truth.

"It's a flash," I said. "It's my flash, only slow."

"Then put them together," he said.

Sharing-gans in circuits. You get more: blueprints. Plans of how the thing had been built. And the mass of it took a while to understand and to fix, because, maybe on account of the short lives, the constellations weren't quite accurate, even though each one was perfect. Perfect and slightly wrong.

"That's the redheads in a sentence," he said, and I hummed, because it is.

Unfortunately removing a thing like that isn't simple, and putting it right without setting something off is worse. To avoid the feedback we built shelters, and tested at a safe distance, and he set everything, and we came back. And the world still hadn't understood how serious it was. He could hear it in the rafters.

"We move fast," he said.

And what came to us, marching up the road with something in her hand, was little Sakura.