Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  “Hi, Scott,” I said.

  He gave me a curt nod before walking to the car.

  Uhh, maybe I wouldn’t get any info out of him. I climbed into the passenger seat.

  “So,” I said. Now that I thought about it, the most I had ever heard Scott speak was when he was taking care of Andy after the incident. Maybe his Talent was being silent so Leslie could do all the talking. “How long have you worked at the mansion?”

  “I stayed as a teen. Now I come only to help during the summer.”

  Two sentences together. That had to be some kind of record.

  “Oh, that makes sense. What do you do for the rest of the year?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Classified as in you work for the government or you do some kind of Talent work or you just don’t want to tell me classified?”

  “Yes.”

  I couldn’t help it—I laughed.

  The corner of his mouth twitched once before his face returned to its usual stoic mask.

  “How would I learn more about Talents?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, this world of Aolians is pretty insane, and our text book is just basic. It seems like most people have someone to show them the ropes, but I never knew my dad. It would be nice to know some Aolian history. I tried searching online, but I can’t find anything.”

  “Aolians have software that searches the Internet for any Talent-incited anomalies and then it destroys the information. We don’t post our own histories because the web is too difficult to control.”

  “So where else is there?”

  “You could try the whole Aolian library we have at the mansion.”

  “What?” I said. “There’s a library?”

  Scott’s lip twitched again. “You really need to get out more.”

  It was late when we returned to the mansion, and I was exhausted from my insane day, so I went straight to bed.

  In the morning, I found the mythical library. The entrance was right next to Leslie’s octagonal office. I should have recognized this room was different with just a glance. Instead of the usual brass knob with skeleton keyhole underneath, this handle was made of beautiful solid blue glass with tiny air bubbles beneath its surface. A shimmering image of the sun was carved into the hardwood door, no doubt to show knowledge to be as illuminating as the sun or something.

  The glass was cold beneath my fingers as I pushed open the door, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. I stepped into the room.

  The space was huge, with twenty-foot ceilings that arched into a slightly domed roof. The wall straight in front of me was made entirely of windows. The other three walls were covered with books with a thin balcony halfway up. It even had those awesome ladders that slide around a track so each book was accessible.

  “Hey, Aya.”

  “Wowbodabo,” I yelled, flinging my hands up in front of my face like a ninja.

  Andy snorted. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be in here.”

  “It’s the perfect place to hide because there’s never anyone here but me.” He returned a book to the shelf and picked up the volume next to it.

  “So, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  Andy cocked one eyebrow. “You mean because I’m strong I should also be a bumbling idiot? Me Andy. You Aya. Me know how to count to ten.”

  I laughed. “I’m guessing you get that stereotype a lot.”

  “You can’t even imagine. Does everyone assume because you’re an artist you want to move to Italy to paint where the great Renaissance masters painted?”

  “Yes . . . but to be fair though, I really do want to move to Italy to paint where the great Renaissance masters painted.”

  “Don’t tell people that, keep them guessing at least.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I took a few more steps into the library. It was magnificent in its grandeur, but it would take forever to find what I was looking for. “You hang out here a lot?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure if it is a cool hiding spot because it has books, or if it is an awesome place with books that also happens to be a hiding spot.”

  “Best of both worlds. How do you find anything?”

  “If you can believe it, they actually have everything cataloged on that computer.” Three sleek computers on top of separate wooden desks sat in the corner. “The one on the right is the catalog, but it doesn’t connect to the Internet.”

  “Really? Who has a private library that’s big enough to use a catalog?”

  “It’s a big library, and I think Aolians come from all over to use it, since we are so hush, hush about information.”

  “Cool, thanks.”

  The catalog computer didn’t even seem to have an operating system. It just had a search menu on a home screen.

  What was it that I really wanted to know? I typed in Van Gogh. There were some books listed about him, but it said they were no longer in circulation. The only other books just mentioned him as being a Colorist. I needed to know more. I needed a history of Aolians or something like that. They should at least have something brief about him.

  I typed that in. The first listing was a twelve-volume set called the Comprehensive History of Aolians. Uh, that seemed a little more than I needed. I scrolled down, reading over the many titles until one caught my eye: Significant Points in Aolian History. This one only had three volumes, so I retrieved all of them and took them to a table nearby.

  Even though someone had narrowed it down, the amount of information was overwhelming. It was like trying to read the entire world’s history, which I guess it was. Only this happened to be the Aolian version. So many Aolians were listed, and many of the names I recognized: King Arthur, Constantine, Marilyn Monroe, Thomas Edison, and Madame Curie.

  Soon Andy found whatever it was he was looking for and came to sit at my table. I tried to sneak a glance at what he was reading, but I couldn’t see the title. There were some black-and-white diagrams printed on the pages. My curiosity got the better of me.

  “What’cha reading?” I craned my neck to see.

  He held the cover.

  “Woodworking Techniques of the Amish?” I said.

  “It’s pretty cool. You seem surprised.”

  “I just assumed everything in this library would be about Aolians. That just seems so ordinary.”

  “Aolian powers are usually hidden behind the ordinary, but in this case it’s just a regular old woodworking book.”

  “Hmm.” I continued flipping through the book in front of me. “That makes sense.” I needed something completely ordinary, too. I went back over to the computer and typed in French/ English dictionary and I retrieved it from the shelf. If the message I found today was in French, I should be able to start at the beginning by looking up the letters in order in the dictionary to see if they made a word. With my notebook in hand I looked up the first series of letters.

  I started with the T section of the dictionary until I formed the word trouver—translated meant find.

  I kept going, and my system worked pretty well. It didn’t take long to break the letters into words and translate them to English. Find prism where the knight and good meet Theo in the candlelit winter, Paris.

  I was expecting an address or something. Prism? A prism was clear glass that broke up light into the colors of the rainbow. Why would I need to find that? Where the knight and good meet? What did that mean? Candlelit winter. It wasn’t much of a clue.

  Van Gogh had left a message for the next Colorist. He’d left that clue for me. But what was Prism? Did it actually mean a prism or something else? Why was Van Gogh leaving clues at all? I studied the picture I’d taken of the page at the MoMA. I knew from my books that most of his writings were in the form of letters Van Gogh had written to his brother Theo. When the two lived together, the information we know about him was slim, because he didn’t need to write letters. I stared at the p
icture for a long time, wishing I had the real page in front of me to study. Who had he written these words to? But wait, this page was too small to have been a letter. But what was that on the very edge?

  This wasn’t a normal sheet of paper.

  It looked as though it had been ripped from a book.

  A book. Was there a book out there written by Van Gogh? Danny had said scholars thought it was the color that drove him mad, if this page was any indication, perhaps he’d written an entire journal about his struggle with color, not the stuff he’d written to Theo. Maybe Theo didn’t even know he was an Aolian. Maybe this book was about being a Colorist. Was the book called Prism, or was that something else entirely? Connections snapped together in my mind. The logical part of me knew it was too far of a stretch, but I ignored that part. A book called Prism, written by Van Gogh, that would help me be a Colorist.

  My brain couldn’t absorb all the possibilities.

  22

  I am having an extraordinary spell of feverish activity these days.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  No one seemed to know anything about being a Colorist, but Van Gogh did. If I could recover the rest of this book, I could know what he knew.

  I examined one of the more modern volumes, found Van Gogh’s name in the index, and flipped open to the page.

  What the . . . ?

  The pages about Van Gogh were gone.

  I double-checked the page numbers. The whole span where information about Van Gogh should have been was cut out of the book. Inside was a straight sliver of paper where the pages had been attached to the binding.

  Why would anyone take pages?

  The twelve-volume set was on a lower bookshelf and I selected the book that listed Van Gogh in the index. I opened to it.

  Same thing. The pages had been cut out of the book.

  I slammed it shut and wedged it back in its spot on the shelf.

  The fact that the pages were missing said that they had information someone wanted, but what? How could I figure out what the pages contained? I printed out a few copies of the photograph I’d taken of Van Gogh’s page.

  There was no way my camera would have been able to capture the tiny points that had marked the letters, but I studied the page anyway, stared at it until my head ached. In the far right corner, a series of dots were penned into the surface, visible with the naked eye, and I doodled with my pen, linking them together.

  Three interlocking crescent-moons. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they fit together so well.

  I flipped open my copy of Aolians and Another World and scanned the list of Talents and their symbol. None of the symbols matched the one here.

  “Hey, are you going to dinner?” Andy asked.

  I glanced at the time. I hadn’t realized how late it was. “Yeah, I’ll come.” I gathered up my stack of books. “If I leave these here, will someone put them away?”

  “If you put them on that shelf over there,” Andy said, “people won’t bother them. Oh, by the way some of us are going swimming tonight. You want to come?”

  “I love swimming,” popped out of my mouth before I could stop it.

  “Cool, I’ll see you then.”

  “Wait, maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, maybe because any time I go anywhere here, people treat me as if I’m going to explode any minute.” I hadn’t worn anything but pants and longs sleeves for two weeks. The red lines still crisscrossed my skin, but they weren’t nearly as thick as they had been. Maybe no one would notice in the dark. It shouldn’t matter because they were Aolians, too, but for some reason it did.

  “Come on, maybe if you sit with me at dinner, people will stop treating you like you’re a zombie ready to infect them. They’ll get used the idea.”

  “I didn’t bring a swimming suit,” I said.

  “How many excuses can you come up with?” Andy opened the door and we headed to the dining room.

  “Excuses are my specialty,” I said.

  “Well, think about it.”

  “Okay.”

  Dinner was paninis, and for all his hiding in the library, Andy was a popular guy. People crowded around our table, and someone actually sat next to me. Who’d have thought it possible?

  Even though I’d been here a while, I’d never really thought of myself as being at home here. Now sitting surrounded by Aolians, I almost did. Jason from my Aolian class used whatever Aolian power he had to blow the top off Claire’s sandwich right as she went to pick it up. Another guy left to grab some silverware and the girl he was sitting by froze all of his food. Seriously, she froze it solid and put a snowflake as big as a chocolate bar on top for good measure. A bird swooped in through one of the open windows and landed on the shoulder of the guy sitting across from me.

  I stared openly at bird boy, and he noticed.

  “It’s a Nighthawk,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “The bird, it’s called a Nighthawk.”

  “Cool name.”

  “My name is Caleb. Do I have a cool name?” He stroked the bird’s head and the hawk nipped at his finger.

  “Not as cool as Nighthawk.”

  “You have a point there.”

  “I’m Aya. So, you can talk to birds?”

  “Yep, birds are my thing.”

  I thought back to what the text said about Talents who could communicate with animals.

  “Can you just talk to them or can you tell them what to do? How does that all work?”

  Caleb whispered something to the hawk and it studied me with its yellow eyes. In a flash of wings and feathers the hawk flew and landed on my shoulder before I could let out a startled scream. I froze as its talons clung to my shoulder without breaking the skin.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said. With just my index finger, I caressed the top of her head. “She looks so calm.”

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking she is tame, because she is anything but. As soon as I let her go, she will be as wild as ever. Birds of prey aren’t meant to be caged.”

  Was anything meant to be caged? There were so many different kinds of cages and not all of them had bars.

  “Will she remember you when she leaves?” I stroked the soft feathers of her belly.

  “Maybe, maybe not.” He shrugged. “I love birds, but I also realize their brains are tiny. Some do come back time after time.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “Because I feed them.” Caleb grinned.

  “That would do it. Is there something I can feed this one?” Without moving my shoulder, I broke off a piece of my Panini.

  “Don’t feed her that.” He reached into his backpack and took out a small plastic container of birdseed.

  “Uh, why—?” But then I realized it was as normal for him to carry birdseed as it was for me to carry a sketchbook. He dumped some in my hand.

  “This is better for her,” he said.

  I held my palm to the hawk’s beak and flinched when she pecked. “It tickles.” Soon all the birdseed was gone.

  “Get out of here,” Caleb said and the hawk flew out the open patio doors.

  I tried to memorize the movement and the feeling of the feathers brushing against my cheek. What would it be like to fly away free into the night? Sure, I would have to sacrifice my brain, but still . . .

  “You coming swimming tonight?” Caleb asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Cool, I’ll see you then.” He stood to put his empty tray away. The girl who was talking to Andy also left.

  “Hey, Andy?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For not treating me like a freak.”

  “Anytime.”

  After dinner I went up to figure out something to wear instead of a swimming suit. How had I not thought about bringing one? I already told Andy and Caleb I was coming. I rummaged through my clothe
s, but I wasn’t about to go in my bra and underwear or in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans. I found the bag of stuff I had bought at the mall and fished out the tank top and shorts I’d bought for pajamas. I guess they’d have to work. I didn’t bother with shoes.

  I took out my phone and texted Kendra:

  Pool party at 7. When are you getting back?

  She messaged me right away.

  Ugh, usually I love shopping, but not with Gram. She only wants me to buy stuff that makes me look like a fifty-year-old politician.

  That bad, huh?

  Pretty much, but I’m leaving the city now.

  Hey you don’t have an extra suit I can borrow, do you?

  Sorry, I only have the one.

  K, see you soon.

  Andy said they were all meeting at the pool at seven, but at that time the sun was still out in full blast. Instead I sat down at my drawing table to stall for a little while. Outside the window the leaves on the trees fluttered, cutting the light from the sun into tiny slivers. I flipped open the box of pastels and without thinking, I illustrated the words Candlelit Winter on the page in letters that could’ve been blown like snow on a bitter November day.

  I stared at the image for a minute. What could it possibly mean?

  I turned the page.

  I etched the hawk in its almost-tame state, imagining the soft tips of the wings layered in patterns of white, gold and black. But the eyes I drew with that intense wildness that seemed at odds with the stillness of its body.

  I turned the page.

  For the last week, I had so much red coursing through my veins, and then I did what I could to get rid of it. Before yesterday, I hadn’t realized that the red was power and safety, not just chaos and insanity.

  Red was power. Power wasn’t poison, it was just power. Power could deny millions of people of what they really needed. It could starve children. It could destroy civilizations and dreams, leaving nothing but ruins in its wake.

  But power could also protect and save. It could bring hope and healing and peace; it was all in the choice.

  This time, when I was drawn to the deep crimson pastel, I didn’t shy away; I let my fingers slide over the rich color. The pigment reached out to my touch, wanting to be absorbed, to become a part of my body, but I resisted. The white paper of my notebook was rough beneath my fingers, the ridges in the page ready to hold any pigment I chose.