Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  I’m not sure how long I stood there, straining against the elements. It could have been thirty seconds or ten minutes as I waited for the rain to let up for even the briefest interlude, but it didn’t.

  A voice traveled through the wind and the rain and caressed my cheek.

  Liam called to me. I couldn’t understand what he said, but it jolted me into action. I moved down and down, feeling as if I were climbing into a pit. I glanced down at him, and pain ripped across my heart. Eight figures broke through the metal fence and where rushing towards him. Oh, Liam.

  The tiny scroll beneath my foot shattered just as a massive gust hit me . . . .

  And I was falling.

  32

  Though man dies, and dies completely, living humanity endures forever.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  I heard someone once say that in falling, one becomes weightless, peaceful, like floating under water.

  They were wrong.

  Gravity tore at my skin and my hair, and I was hurled into the gushes of rain and slamming wind, and the knowledge that death would be the only pillow to catch me. I’d never stopped to wonder what I would think about in those last few seconds before death. Maybe I’d never thought of death as real before. I was too young to die. Even though I was climbing the freaking Notre Dame Cathedral, I never really believed I was in danger.

  But in that moment of falling, I thought of my mom. She didn’t even know I was in Paris. What would she do when she got the call from a stranger saying I’d fallen and died, my body mangled beyond recognition, the only way to identify me was the passport in my backpack, still on the walkway? Would she think I’d died in some teenage stunt?

  She’d be alone.

  And this was all my freaking dad’s fault.

  Him, with his smooth-talking Talent that somehow got him killed. He left me here alone, not knowing whom I could trust. I was going to die, for what? To find the Aveum? It seemed so trivial now. What had he died for? I hoped it was something better, because he left my mother alone, and me too. She had no idea what I had the potential to become, how dangerous this world could be, but he did, and he still left us.

  But at least then we’d had each other, my mom and me, but now—she was alone.

  The anger was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It was not the flame of a bonfire like it had been so many times in the past. It exploded like an atom bomb, first drawing back inside me before erupting out and setting off a million chain reactions with no particle of energy around me left untouched. My skin was on fire, and I no longer felt the stinging bite of the wind or rain.

  The black storm clouds turned the deepest of maroons as the red and the anger took over. I didn’t push it away, but I let it overcome me, consume me. The anger was better than the fear, better than dying.

  A spot of red burned beside my heart—no not my heart—inside the Van Gogh locket I had all but forgotten. The red pastel burned to be used. I pulled on it with my Talent and it burst the clasp open. Even if I could figure out how to use it, it wasn’t enough. I was falling too fast and too far.

  But I had more red inside me, not just the color I’d stored but also millions of cells that turned bright red with oxygen and dark red without. Could I use those? The red that kept this body alive with a heart that pumped life through my veins?

  There was no other way.

  I forced the red of my blood to fight through the tough walls of my capillaries and veins, through the tissue, where it erupted out of my skin. Not all of it. I had to keep some for me, or the loss would be just as fatal as hitting the ground. So many ways to die.

  I didn’t think, I just did.

  I kept the red close to me, so it didn’t disappear into the harsh wind. Then I flung out a tiny rope of pure pigment, barely wider than a hair, back at the building sliding before me and wrapped the end around my wrist. I flung out another, and secured its end to my waist, not caring where the red came from, because the red was power and life. Then I sent out a hundred threads, and each attached to a different place on the building and a different place on me. Since I was in the cathedral’s corner, I could anchor onto both walls and hopefully prevent being slammed into one when I stopped. But I threw too much of the red from my blood, and my red-void vision threatened to fade to nothing. I held onto my consciousness.

  And pulled the red.

  Stopping my body abruptly with the red net would be just as deadly as hitting the ground, so I forced the threads holding me to stretch and slow. Several snapped and for a sickening moment, I thought they would all break lose and spring back to me.

  But they held.

  The force knocked the wind out of me when the threads stretched to their full capacity, but I fought the draw of unconsciousness. I slowed but the energy demanded to go somewhere, and I was flung back into the air, towards the rail. Liam was there, leaning over the stone wall, hand outstretched. A metal rope flew out of nowhere and wrapped around my waist, before the gravity could drag me back down into the net of red I didn’t know if I could sustain.

  The rope was fluid and alive, gently carrying me back to the ledge and to Liam.

  He pulled me into his arms and hugged me so hard I feared my bones would break. He touched my skin, I had so little red left in me I wondered if I would ever be angry or passionate again. Maybe I would just die here in his arms.

  “You’re alive!” He clutched me to his chest. Tears streaked his face and his arms shook as he brushed my hair and my arms and my back, as if to check that I was really there. “I thought I’d lost you! By the time I’d fought them off . . .”

  I didn’t have to ask who they were. I felt the red seeping out of their bodies and onto the stone. What had he done to them?

  I stood unable to move, death still too close to do anything else, and I fell heavily against him. He held me and was my strength. He kissed my hair and my forehead, murmuring words I couldn’t understand in a language I didn’t know. A loud clanking issued behind us, and I looked around for the first time. Five bodies lay on the walkway. A massive metal door, totally unlike the thin-webbed one from before, blocked Dune’s other Talents from getting to us.

  It should have seemed odd, that metal rope that brought me here and the door now protecting us, but I barely held on to the last tendrils of my consciousness. Was the lack of oxygen making me hallucinate?

  The door melted into tiny glistening pools that grew and joined the one around my waist to make one long snaking mass.

  Liam jerked on both our backpacks. “Aya, we have to go now. Do you trust me?”

  I nodded weakly.

  “Wrap your legs around me and hold on,” he said.

  I did, face to face, I wrapped my arms around his neck. I didn’t realize I was freezing until his skin warmed me.

  “The wind, it’s stopped,” I said, just now realizing it. I couldn’t think, couldn’t understand, and was so exhausted. My vision twisted and faltered and was wrong. But I remembered Van Gogh, saw a painting of him in my mind, but I couldn’t remember anything else. “Are we going to see Van Gogh? He needs to tell me something.”

  Liam’s warmth threatened to send me into unconsciousness. I couldn’t seem to hold up my head.

  “What? Aya, what happened?”

  I couldn’t see his face, but his words held fear.

  Suddenly the metal snake was winding around us, binding us together. A separate metal rope shot out into the air of Paris.

  “Liam—”

  What remained of the door blasted away, and several figures burst through.

  33

  What an odd thing the touch, the stroke of the brush, is.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  My view was foggy over Liam’s shoulder as I tried to push away the red in their bodies, but I couldn’t access it. I needed all the red I had left to continue delivering oxygen to my exhausted muscles and brain. One had a gun, but as he raised it, it got knocked off the tower by some unknown force. One figure was shrouded
in a blinding light, and I held up my hand to protect my eyes.

  The metal encircling our bodies in a cold harness jerked up and wrapped around the shimmering rope now wedged in the stone tower behind us.

  “Don’t worry, Aya,” Liam said.

  We tipped sideways, like a roller coaster ride, and I clung to him.

  And we were flying.

  The metal ground against metal as we flew down a zip line that . . . Liam created? The angle was steep, and we accelerated at a stunning pace, though more controlled than my fall from the tower. Below echoed the screams of onlookers.

  We were flying too fast, and I couldn’t see where the zip line ended. The metal above my head clamped into the rope. Sparks showered overhead, and we jerked as it slowed our movements. The metal ground harder, and more sparks drenched us and left a flaming trail.

  Liam extended his arms and legs out in front of him, and we slammed into something hard. Liam absorbed most of the impact, but it jarred us both and for a second my vision blacked out.

  “Are you all right?” Liam was frantic.

  “Yeah.” My voice was weak and raspy. “I just . . . used too much red. I used the red in my blood to stop my fall.”

  “You did what?” He brushed my hair away and checked my pulse. “No wonder you’re so out of it. How much is left?”

  “Not enough.”

  The metal harness released us and melted away to who knew where, and I was shocked to find us on the other side of the Seine River, our zip line abruptly ending in the side of a building. We should be dead. How had we slowed down? I tried to stand, but I fell forward against Liam. He swept me into his arms and cradled me against him.

  “I need red,” I whispered.

  Liam searched frantically around us, but there were only muted gray stone buildings against the now-clearing sky. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and my breathing came out in gasps.

  “Take the red from me,” Liam said.

  “No.” It barely came out a whisper.

  “Aya, if you pass out, I have no way to get the red inside you. Do it now!”

  “No.” Was my head even attached to the rest of me anymore? “I promised I would never change the red inside someone’s body.”

  “You have to!”

  My eyes close as I snuggled against Liam’s chest.

  “No.”

  I barely noticed when he was running. “There!” Liam jolted forward toward the bank of the Seine River.

  He had only taken three steps when an explosion fragmented the air with an earsplitting crack!

  The windows in every building along the Seine River shattered and rained glass on the street below. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening as sword-sized shards sang toward us. I didn’t have the strength to escape.

  A metal dome formed over our heads, made out of the same shimmering fluid, and turned solid in an instant. The glass shrieking above us was deafening, and I pressed my hands over my ears to block out the sound.

  It was over in a few seconds, but the fight wasn’t.

  Dune had attacked me, threatened me, and tried to kill me, and this had to end today. Right now.

  If I could only think, if I could only walk without passing out.

  The dome exploded out, flinging the glass away from us. Liam was sprinting once again this time over millions of pieces of tiny glass, all designed to do one thing. Take me down.

  I had everything she would need to find the Aveum with me. She would get the key and the drawing. If I could use my red against her, maybe I would have a chance.

  But I had no red left.

  Liam skidded to a halt and set me on my feet. I stood upright, only teetering, when I saw what he had been after.

  An easel was set up along the waterfront, a watercolor painting of the river tacked up facing the bridge, abandoned, no doubt, when the sky started raining glass. Tubes of color lined the box, and I grabbed the first red one I saw.

  Alizarin Crimson.

  I unscrewed the lid and smeared the red paint on my arms, thick and cold, and waited for it to disappear into me, like it had so many times before. I grabbed all the tubes of red, covering my arms with five of the eight. The last three I uncapped, reserving the pigment for when I would need it. But the pigment stayed on top like my skin was now the impermeable membrane it was supposed to be.

  Dune came into view.

  She didn’t walk, but instead stood atop a magic carpet of molten glass that flowed and shimmered across the bridge that linked the island containing the Notre Dame to the Left Bank where we stood. The living carpet stopped, but the glass from the far reaches of the street flowed towards her, lifting Dune higher and higher, building her weapon into an incomprehensible mass.

  Liam stood half-turned toward her in a protective stance, and I had to clutch at his arm to keep from falling.

  I looked down at the tiny tubes of paint in my hand. How could I ever hope to win? The color sat on the surface of my skin, refusing to give me power and make me strong.

  “Liam, how nice it is to see you again,” Dune said in a sugar-sweet tone.

  “What do you want, Dune?”

  She laughed. “When I found out your father had assigned you to shadow Ayami, I didn’t realize how far you were willing to go with the ruse.”

  “What?” My voice was pathetic in its weakness.

  Liam turned toward me, still keeping Dune in his sights.

  “It’s not like that, Aya,” he said.

  Dune laughed again, a sound I loathed.

  “I’m guessing you haven’t told her?” Dune said with an amused expression.

  “Told me what?”

  She was toying with me, but I had to know.

  She tilted her head to the side, like she was speaking to a child. “I think it’s time you came clean, Liam, and now is as good a time as any.” Then to me she said, “Just that Liam, here, was assigned, when was it Liam? Last May? When Aya won that award from the MoMA?”

  Liam’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing.

  Dune kept talking to me, “We’d kept our eye on you, because we all knew your dad, of course. We expected something big from you.”

  I hated her patronizing tone. I hadn’t known my dad.

  “But being a Colorist was beyond anything we could have hoped for. But back to Liam, he was assigned to be your friend, to follow you and make sure someone knew about everything that you were doing.”

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  The tiny spot of anger I thought I’d never feel again throbbed in my temples and along the back of my neck. It couldn’t be true. Liam was the one solid surface in a world spinning out of control. No, she had to be lying. The anger spread down my back and filtered out to my fingers. But the day I’d met him, he hadn’t even glanced at the other girls.

  “Don’t believe me?” Dune’s eyes were wide in mock astonishment. “Conveniently, he’s right here, let’s ask him.”

  He abandoned his guard of Dune, and focused entirely on me, his eyes pleading, and overwhelmingly . . . sad.

  “Liam?” My voice broke over the word, and in a life long ago might have brought tears. But in this one, it only brought anger.

  “Aya . . .”

  For that moment, I couldn’t see anything but him. The damp pavement and the swirling river disappeared into a silent void. I couldn’t believe it, but he had always been too good to be real.

  Dune was right.

  “I was your assignment?” I tried to keep my voice calm, and the blinding pain of losing him only manifested as anger.

  The sound and light and color came crashing back on top of me as the red hit my bloodstream, flinging my vision into every shade of red. The paint did its work, gave me power, but my anger and pain and happiness were the price.

  “Aya, please, it wasn’t like that.” Liam was pleading.

  “What part isn’t true?”

  He looked like he was trying to think of something, anything to say.

  “When I as
ked you not to touch me?” Anger took over and mixed with the passion I had for him. But that was a lie. “You never said anything about it, and you never tried to touch me again. I thought it was because you were a gentleman and were respecting my wishes. Was it a relief to have an excuse to stay away from me so long?”

  “How . . . how could you think that?”

  “How could I not?” Life returned to my body, but the strength was contrary to how I felt. Without it I would be drained and betrayed. “I thought I lov . . .” but I couldn’t say it. I didn’t want my love for him to be a mockery.

  “You thought what?” Liam asked.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “See, Aya,” Dune said through a gloating smile. “What did I say about not being able to trust every nice person you meet? You never believed me, yet I’m the only one who has told you the truth from the beginning.”

  I ignored her and talked to Liam. “What was it? What did your father want from me?”

  But it was Dune who answered with a tinkling laugh. “What does anyone want from you? The Aveum, of course.”

  “I was going to tell you,” Liam said.

  “When?” I asked. “After we found Prism? I’ve been so blind! Why else would you insist on coming with me to Paris? All that garbage about caring for me.” I wanted him to take me in his arms and say everything I’d felt was real, but he just stood there, between Dune and me. Not a spot of something real, but more entrenched in this world of Aolians than I was. His father sent him to spy on me. “And Ryker?”

  He knew what I meant. “Ryker’s an Aolian, too.”

  At that moment, nine Aolians raced up behind Dune.

  “Oh, good,” Dune said to them. “I was getting sick of all this teenage drama. But where are the others?”

  “Still on the tower,” the man replied. “Not in good shape.”

  “Too afraid to attack me by yourself, Dune?” I asked.