Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  This time I made wings flying and free in that deep and aching crimson. But instead of the bird’s body, I drew my own, using a flesh tone to create my skin. My wild, reddish-auburn curls flew in all directions as my profile stared up as though some freedom were within my reach. The wings were as tall as me and could have enveloped me in that strong softness. Instead of the long sleeves and pants I’d worn of late, I constructed a tiny red slip of a dress of floating chiffon and extended it behind my figure.

  I saved the red that danced across my skin for last. I didn’t draw how it appeared now with the smaller lines of pale red or the way it was before, when red threatened to take over. I outlined enough to make me powerful and strong, but not so much that I had no control over my body or my mind. It was the perfect amount.

  But then I thought about how the red took over. Not all cages had bars, and not all cages were made by someone else.

  I grabbed a fountain pen with ink as black as night’s shadow and drew in tiny letters, all the words that I couldn’t get past, the ones that were holding me back. I wove the words into ropes made of my own insecurities, and it wound a solid line straight through my body, through my beautiful wings. Then another and another, until the free flying bird that I longed to be was held captive in a gigantic wire cage of my own making.

  Within the cage, the look on my face transformed from one of freedom to one of deep sadness.

  Dune.

  I would never let myself be caught like that again.

  I needed the deep crimson pastel, so smooth and perfect. I needed the color red, but storing it inside was too much. I took off my new Van Gogh locket and clicked open the clasp.

  The area inside was larger than most lockets, with the space about a quarter inch thick. The rectangular shape allowed the entire image of Starry Night to be printed on the front.

  I broke the pastel in half and left a small piece an inch long on the table. I slipped the other two pieces into the locket. I looped the chain back around my neck. The red pulsed from within.

  Never again would I be powerless in this new world.

  I placed the remaining piece in my outstretched hand. For a moment I held it there, weighing the price of the pigment and the power. With this tiny amount and my calm emotions, I could control it, so it didn’t absorb into my body without my permission.

  This time I let it in, a trickle at a time. Just a tiny amount of color filtered into my bloodstream, and stopped, and I gauged how it changed me. My heart sped, and I couldn’t tell if it was the red or my fear. At intervals I let in a little more until all that remained was the pale, colorless chalk.

  The lines on my skin became more pronounced. It swirled there as if it had missed me. Did I miss it? Red hovered along my vision, but the blinding headache I had anticipated was only a dull throb. This wasn’t too bad. I could handle this.

  When I stood to leave, my reflection stared back from the glass window in front of me instead of the inky black outside.

  My phone dinged. It was a text from Kendra.

  I’m here. Are you at the pool?

  I texted her back.

  Nah, I was just heading down. I’ll meet you at your room, and we can go together.

  I grabbed a towel and headed downstairs. I tried not to keep looking at the lines crisscrossing along my skin, but of course I couldn’t stop. Even though the lines were less noticeable than they had been before, they weren’t invisible. I wrapped my towel around my bare arms. There. Now at least I couldn’t see them.

  The second floor was silent as I stepped into the hall. Laughter and screams of delight floated upstairs from the pool outside. The back doors opened right onto the pool courtyard and they were probably propped open in this perfect, warm weather.

  “Hey!” Kendra stepped up the stairs with shopping bags in hand. “How was your day with Li-i-am yesterday? No hospital visits, I presume?” She opened her door and we both entered.

  Her room was decorated like most of the mansion, very turn of the century, the last century, not this one. Even though she didn’t have much of her own stuff, the place had a distinct Kendra vibe to it. Maybe it was the floral body-spray scent or the sparkles now permanently affixed to every surface.

  “No, nothing like that.” I told her about how doing my own version of kickboxing helped get rid of the red in my blood, and about hanging out with Liam, meeting Ryker, and going to the MoMA. I left out the part about finding the secret message from Van Gogh and about being cornered by Dune. I wanted to figure out what it all meant before I told anyone else.

  “Wow, so you emptied some of the red out of your skin? That’s cool. I was worried about you. And I kind of freaked when you said you were going swimming. Please tell me that isn’t what you are wearing?”

  “This is not my fault. I didn’t bring a bathing suit.”

  “Aya, what am I going to do with you? I’d lend you something, but I only have the one.”

  “Seriously, I’m fine. I don’t want more of my skin to show than is necessary.”

  Kendra put on her suit. How did she always look so chic? Her bikini top shimmered like fish scales next to her high-waisted black bottoms, accentuating her beautiful curves.

  “You ready?” She picked up her towel and threw it over her shoulder.

  “Yep, let’s go.”

  Only a few dim lights were illuminated on the main floor.

  “Why do I always feel like I should walk on tippy toes when it’s dark?” I whispered.

  “Maybe you don’t want to wake the dead.” Kendra goosed me in the side at the same time.

  I screamed. “Kendra! Don’t do that! This place is creepy enough without imagining waking the dead!”

  But then we both started laughing.

  Kendra’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Well if you think about it, hundreds of people have lived in this house and are now dead.”

  “Shut up!” I whispered back. “That is the last scary thing I want to hear about.”

  “Chicken.”

  “I was thinking I could sneak out the side door to slip into the darker side of the pool where no one will notice my skin.” That was in theory, of course.

  “You really need to get over that.” But then her face lit up. “Or maybe I should run out and create a diversion. You know I could push someone in the pool or scream something about a moose being inside the mansion.”

  “Or we could just sneak in the side,” I said.

  “No way—I’ve always wanted to create a diversion.”

  “Okay, if you want to . . .”

  She bounded off toward the back patio, and I headed out the side door.

  The ancient hinges creaked as I pushed it to the outside. Splashing and laughter echoed in from the pool.

  A ring of perfectly manicured hedges lined the pool courtyard. Slivers of light filtered through some of the branches from the lit water, but it didn’t have much effect on the darkness.

  I was only a few feet away from the hedge when a voice cut through the silence.

  “No, she’s not ready. She only had her first release two weeks ago.” It took me a moment to place the voice as Danny’s. “Aya won’t be ready for months, maybe even years.”

  23

  I shall paint infinity.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  I froze.

  And stumbled back a few steps and into the shadows right when Leslie and Danny passed through the openings in the hedge. Their forms were just visible in the moonlight. I stepped on a sharp twig with my bare foot and had to choke down my scream of pain.

  “We can’t miss out on this opportunity,” Leslie said. “I know others have already made contact, and if I know Dune, she will make an offer Aya will have a hard time refusing.”

  “I don’t know why you are so obsessed with that thing,” Danny said. “You don’t really even know that it exists.”

  They stepped up to the door I had just exited.

  I hesitated, then made my way back across the lawn an
d up the three marble stairs, grateful now for my silent bare feet. I crept in after them, hardly breathing.

  “It exists,” Leslie said.

  “You know how crazy he was. He might have really thought he knew where it was, but it was all in his deluded mind.”

  “It exists, and I—we need it. There are too many hints about what it can do for it not to exist. With the Aveum we can change the world. We can change history so Aolians can be strong. We would no longer have to hide.” Leslie sounded an awful lot like Dune at that moment.

  “Leslie, there are reasons so many people worked to keep it hidden. Changing the world that way is dangerous.”

  Leslie and Danny’s voices echoed from the hallway as they made their way to her office.

  “I’m willing to take that risk, and you have to decide if you are too. He might have been insane, but he was also brilliant. He didn’t just throw the Aveum in a box somewhere and then bury it in the ground where it could be forgotten. He would have made it difficult, but not impossible, to find. It’s out there, ready for us, and Aya is the key. We just have to make sure we find it before Dune or anyone else does.”

  “Thousands of people have searched for the Aveum.”

  “But they didn’t have a Colorist.”

  “You don’t even know where to start.”

  “No, but if anyone does, it’s Aya.”

  My phone dinged in my pocket.

  But in that instant the door closed.

  My phone dinged again, and I switched it to silent before checking Kendra’s message.

  Where are you? No one is going to see your skin. Your diversion has come and gone. Get out here!

  I shot a text back.

  Be there in just a sec.

  I moved into the hall, and a ring of light circled Leslie’s office door. I tiptoed toward it. I was about to press my ear against the door when the knob turned. I jumped back a few feet.

  “I’ll see what I can do to push her,” Danny said, but then he spotted me outside the door.

  Act casual.

  “Aya, what are you doing here?” Danny asked in a tone more surprised than his usual belligerent sarcasm.

  “Uh,” I stammered. Come on, think Aya! “I was just going to check if I left my sketchbook in the library.”

  Leslie stalked from behind her desk to swing open the door. Her gaze seemed like she was trying to see inside my brain. After years of being around teenagers, maybe she had a sixth sense about when we were lying.

  I twisted the library knob and was unable to keep my hand from shaking. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice.

  “I believe Scott locks the doors at seven o’clock on the weekend,” Leslie said. “Besides everyone else is out swimming. You should be too.”

  “I was on my way there, but I wanted my sketchbook.”

  “You will have to wait until tomorrow, I’m afraid.” The lines around Leslie’s eyes tightened as she peered expectantly back down the hall.

  What could I do? “Okay.” I retreated down the hall.

  “Have fun, Aya,” Leslie called after me in a cheery voice.

  As soon as I rounded the corner, I pressed into a shadowed nook that held a metal vase as tall as I was. My heart pounded out of control in my chest, and I couldn’t quiet my breathing. I didn’t know if it was because they’d been talking about me or because I was almost caught eavesdropping. From within my locket the crimson pastel pulsed, wanting and needing me to use the power in my anxiety and take action. I wrapped my hand around the cool metal to feel the power.

  The red inside reached out and touched my skin.

  I knew it was a bad idea. The red took over my mind and my senses, but it also made me strong. Could I be strong without it? I jerked my hand away, before I absorbed the red without meaning to. Would I ever get used to this?

  Danny passed by a few seconds later, alone, without noticing me. At least I didn’t miss out on any other conversation.

  Aveum. What could that possibly be? Whatever it was, they were looking for it, and so was Dune. Who else wanted it? What could it do?

  My phone vibrated.

  Get out here! Kendra wrote.

  I headed to where the back door led onto the patio. I needed to talk to Kendra. Music and screams of delight assaulted me as I stepped out into the summer-warm air. Kendra was in the shallow end of the pool, flirting with two different guys as far as I could tell. She seemed like she was having too much fun, so I decided I would just tell her later.

  “Aya!” Kendra waved at me. “Where have you been? Come on!”

  I left my necklace and phone with my towel and slipped into the water to sit next to her on the steps, very aware of how she looked like a swimsuit model and I was wearing pajamas—again. Two other kids, a younger-looking boy and girl, backed away from me like I had some kind of fungus growing on my skin. Typical.

  Andy swam the length of the pool and sat next to me on the steps. “You made it.”

  “Yep, but I got lost on my way here.”

  “Those halls coming down can get confusing.”

  Across the pool, some guy yelled out, “Big Kahuna!”

  “Uh, oh,” Andy said.

  “No!” Kendra screamed. She tried to climb out of the pool.

  A huge wave formed in the deep end and reached impossibly high. With how much water was in the wave, I couldn’t see how there was any left in the pool. It came crashing down on us, pummeling Kendra, Andy, and me. It forced me under the water for a few seconds, and when I surfaced, the guy was doing a kind of war dance while chanting, “Big Kahuna, Big Kahuna.”

  These people were amazing and crazy. What other insane things could they do?

  “I’ll kill him,” Kendra said, climbing out of the water.

  I grabbed her arm. “Let it go.”

  “He’s just showing off.” Andy shook the water out of his hair.

  Make that two swimsuit models. I couldn’t get away from them.

  “He should be glad I put my phone over there on the table after I texted you.” Kendra settled back into the water. “Or he would be regretting doing that.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  “Oh, this is Trent and Maxson,” Kendra said, pointing to the guys on the other side of her. Trent was tall with black skin, his hair clipped short, and a bright smile. Maxson had pale skin, brown hair, and he just nodded at the introduction.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said and turned back to Andy. “So today, the section I wanted to find in two separate library books in two separate history series was missing.”

  “What do you mean, missing?”

  “They’d been cut out of the book. Have you ever noticed anything like that before?”

  Andy frowned. “No, I haven’t. That’s pretty weird.”

  I moved my hand through the water. “Either someone wanted that information so they took it, or they didn’t want anyone else to find it.”

  Halfway across the pool, I spotted Caleb, the bird boy, from dinner. He waved at me.

  “What the . . .?” Andy wiped at something white and black on his face.

  “Is that . . .?” but I trailed off when I realized what it was.

  “Bird poop,” Andy finished my sentence.

  “Gross.”

  I glanced back at Caleb, but he was gazing in the other direction, trying just a little too hard to act casual.

  Andy glared at Caleb and stood up. “I’m going to wash this off.”

  After Andy was gone, Caleb swam over and sat by me on the steps.

  “That was a dirty trick,” I said.

  “Hey, a guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do.” His smile would’ve been charming in other circumstances, but I wasn’t impressed.

  I didn’t know Andy well, but I knew he would never use his Talent so casually against someone. Maybe it was because Andy knew his power could hurt, even kill someone. I was about to blow Caleb off when the kid at the other end of the pool yelled out, “Big Kahuna!”

/>   “Oh, no,” I said. If it were possible, a wave even bigger than the one before crashed down on us. I sputtered to the surface, and this time it didn’t seem as funny.

  And then I saw Kendra.

  All traces of that girl who should be taking care of fluffy pink bunnies disappeared. She was livid, and now that person who hurt people and created such pain that they would pass out had taken her place.

  She stared at Big Kahuna boy, who again was doing some kind of victory dance before she marched up the pool steps.

  Whatever she was going to do wasn’t going to end well.

  I leapt from the water. “Kendra!”

  She ignored me or didn’t hear me as she advanced on her unsuspecting prey.

  I sprinted around the pool but slipped on the wet tile and landed hard on my back. The impact knocked the wind out of me, but I scrambled up. I took two shaky steps before I could breathe again, and Kendra was almost to the guy when I grabbed her hand.

  The pain ripped through me more intensely than it had before. My vision blurred red as the pain crippled me and I fell to my knees, but I kept a hold of her hand. In that instant, my instinct was to hurt her, to make the pain stop. But this wasn’t about me. I would forgive her, but I didn’t know what Leslie would do if Kendra used her Talent against another student in anger. Would she be expelled like Cate? Maybe red could combat the pain. I pushed the red to where my hand met hers, but I was too late. I didn’t have enough.

  The world faded from red to black.

  “Aya! Aya!” Kendra yelled from very far away.

  I opened my eyes and didn’t know if I was shaking from cold, or something else.

  “Aya!” Kendra exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe you did that! What were you thinking?”

  “How about let’s question her when she’s not laying on the cement,” Andy said.

  The other students were gathered around me, the playful pool atmosphere had evaporated. I tried to stand, but my legs shook under me.