“Maybe they will.” I spat the words out, as if they were bitter in my mouth. “But, frankly, I’m beyond caring. The White has to be stopped.”
“You won’t stop it with your death,” he said.
I knew he spoke the truth, but I couldn’t believe him. I simply didn’t want to accept it.
“I promise we’ll do something,” he said. “But right now, we have to take things slowly.”
I let him take my arm again, but this time his grip was softer. He turned me toward the now White River and pointed me to where it would end, if, indeed, it had an end. Somewhat reluctantly, I allowed him to alter my path. I had no idea where we were going, but the boy moved with confidence, as if he knew, and I found myself trusting him.
In the expanse of flat White, all we could see was a speck of something up ahead. As we neared it, I saw a small house with a picket fence around it. I would have thought it picturesque, if it hadn’t been for the peeling White paint and the crooked door that was hanging off its hinges. It looked like something had stormed through and destroyed it.
“We can stop here to look for supplies,” the boy said, turning toward the White house.
He went through the doorway first, and I heard him draw in a sharp breath. His body stiffened, as he turned away from whatever sight he found there. I edged my way around him and took in the scene myself.
The house was only one room and the furniture was sparse. An uneven wooden table lay knocked over onto its side. Pitchers lay strewn on the floor, their contents spewing out. The windowpanes on one side of the house illuminated the room with a harsh White light. Cold and dull, it seemed that the house itself held an exhaled breath. The chill in the room immediately brought to memory the iciness in the unfeelings’ voices.
My eyes stopped on the crouched body of the boy in a corner of the room. When I looked over his shoulder, I saw that he was bent over another form.
From what I could tell, it was of a Trigon woman. Her body was crumpled and disfigured to the point it was hard to comprehend that the body had once belonged to a living being. Her skin looked bleached of color. With my limited knowledge of this world, I could only attribute it to one thing: the unfeelings.
I shut my eyes in an attempt to escape from the image before me, but what I saw behind my eyelids was no less horrifying. Placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder, I tried to comfort him in the only way I could. He looked up at me with gratitude brimming in his eyes. The drops were Red and slowly slid down his cheek.
I knew we couldn’t gather supplies from this house, not after what we’d just seen. Neither the boy nor I had the power to do that, so I started making my way out of the house. As I neared the door, I heard a soft but distinct gasp, as if someone were quietly crying. It seemed to come from the shadows of the other side of the room, away from the morose figure of the boy.
My first instinct was to reach for the blade at my side. However, quickly realizing that the sounds didn’t seem in the least threatening, I lowered my guard. “Who are you?” I directed my question to the shadows in the corner. Receiving no reply, I ventured farther and continued calling out.
There, in the dark, sat a girl. Although she was much younger than the first one I met, she looked a lot like her. She sat motionless, her pale skin illuminated in the somber dimness. She was a Trigon, probably related to the murdered woman. With each silent sob, her thin frame shook. All the girl’s eyes were squeezed tight and only the occasional gasp escaped her.
“D ... don’t hurt me,” she stammered.
I was taken aback by her pitiful plea. “We won’t hurt you,” I assured her softly, crouching at her side. I tried to think of a way to convince her, but all I could give her was my word. “I promise.”
The girl’s head lifted, and if she’d had her eyes open, we would have been staring directly at each other. But she didn’t; all of her eyes were closed. With a clear view of her faces, she looked younger than I had thought her to be. I guessed her age to be around six or seven, certainly no more than that.
“Do you mean it?” Her voice was filled with such innocence that I was overcome with an urge to protect her, no matter what the cost.
“Yes,” I nodded. “I mean it.”
The boy, who had heard me speaking to the girl, now sat beside me.
“What’s your name?” he asked. He pronounced the word “name” like it was a foreign word. It rolled thickly off his tongue.
“Lilith,” one of the girl’s faces replied timidly.
“Lilith.” I breathed her name out slowly, testing it on my lips. It fit the girl perfectly, as if no other name would. She was her name.
“Why do you keep your eyes closed, Lilith?” the boy asked softly.
“Mama told me that no matter what, I have to keep all my eyes closed, until someone takes me out of the house. I promised her I would.”
I felt a pang of sadness and quickly glanced at the form of the woman on the ground. She had known that she was going to die and she hadn’t wanted her daughter to see that.
“I couldn’t even say goodbye to her or Papa.” The Trigon girl paused. “Did my mama send you to take me out of the house?”
The boy looked at me and I nodded. I felt that I owed something to the murdered woman and the daughter she loved so much.
I noticed that Lilith spoke of herself as one being and not three as Ralph’s faces had. Lilith’s faces each seemed to support one another and though they were different personalities of her, they weren’t as drastically different as Ralph’s were.
“Yes, she did,” the boy said. “Did she say anything about where we were going to take you?”
“No, but she said that if no one came in the next two days, I would have to go by myself to Grandmama and Grandpapa’s house. Mama said that they would take care of me, until she and Papa got back.”
“Is that so ...” the boy murmured. “And you know the way to their house?”
“Of course! It’s in the Ever Forest, where everyone else is,” Lilith responded.
I wondered who ‘everyone else’ was exactly, but I was relieved to see a flicker of recognition pass the boy’s face.
“Can we go now?” the girl pleaded. She reached out blindly, searching for something. When her small hand found mine, she gripped it so tightly that her knuckles turned White. Then Lilith let out a little sigh of what I took to be contentment and I quietly led her out.
The boy emerged shortly after us, tying a piece of cloth closed around something and then tying it to himself.
“We’ll need it even more with her,” he said and I suspected he had found food inside.
Outside in the White, Lilith finally opened her eyes. They were like rubies, flashing in what little sunlight was left. She seemed to take in the sight of the boy and me standing before her. I couldn’t begin to imagine what she thought of us with our windswept hair and unkempt clothes. Whatever her judgment was, it must have not been too horribly negative, for she surprisingly seemed willing to stay with us.
Lilith took in the White surroundings as well. She stared at the White grass and the White sky, as the boy and I tried to imagine what she could be thinking. Then she took in the White house, which used to be her home, but her small faces betrayed no sense of familiarity. With a demeanor as if she were years older and wiser than we were, she watched everything with unmoving and sober expressions.
Nevertheless, what made her gasp was none of these things. When she looked back at the once recognizable house, the sound escaped her, as she rushed to the side where the stables were. Two pure White horses stood together, as if they were frozen in marble.
“Are ...” Lilith’s voice caught in her throat. “Are they dead?”
I saw the boy’s jaw tighten and I knew we were both thinking of the same thing: the dead woman only a few feet away.
“Come on,” the boy coaxed her to his side. “We can walk,” the boy assured her, pulling her away from the horses, the house, and her mother.
We turned our backs to the White house and, although none of us could guess what lay before us, we walked forward with single-minded determination. All I knew for sure was the present; the boy, the girl, and myself.
“Do you know where Papa went?” Lilith’s small hand clung to the boy’s fingers. Her faces, all of them anxious, turned from him to me and back again.
“We have an idea of where he went.” The boy hid the pain in his voice well. I only heard it because I was looking for it.
“When is he coming back? Mama went with him.”
I held my breath for the boy’s reply.
“We don’t know.” The boy trailed off.
I waited for Lilith to question him further, but she seemed satisfied with his answer.
“Lilith?” the boy asked, his eyes still trained on the end of the White River.
“Hmm?” One of the girl’s heart shaped faces turned up toward him.
“What did you hear after your mother told you to close your eyes?”
“Well, there was banging at the door.” She squinted trying to remember. “Mama pushed me in the corner and told me to stay quiet.” The scene she described started playing out in my head, as if she whispered the words directly into my mind.
“There was a big noise at the door and I think they came in. I don’t know how many there were. But it seemed that only one talked. He and Mama talked quietly, I think it was so I didn’t hear, but I heard some anyway. The man said something about rounding up Trigons and something called The Pure One. Papa told Mama to keep me safe and he left with them.
“I don’t know why, but Mama was crying a lot. I even told her that Papa will come back, but she kept crying. She asked me to forgive her. I didn’t know for what, but I said, ‘yes’, I did. I told her I forgave her. Then Mama told me she had to go with Papa and she kissed me goodbye and told me to close my eyes tight until someone came.”
There was a crushing force on my lungs, almost a burning, as I waited for tears to come. It was as if I were crying without sound or tears.
The boy turned away from Lilith’s unknowing eyes, but I had already seen the tears. No matter how much he tried to brush them away, they still streamed down his face. His steps faltered and the boy fell behind.
I took Lilith’s hand in my own, as I contemplated what to say. There is always something to be said, but how it’s said changes even the words spoken.
“Did I do something wrong?” Her right face said panicked. “Did I say something?”
When I assured her that she hadn’t done anything wrong, she visibly relaxed. Eventually, our walking pace slowed, as Lilith struggled to keep up with me. Looking at the White dirt before her, she began to drag her feet. Showing no sign of the sadness I had just seen, the boy caught up to us. The tears seemed to have vanished, as if they had never been there, and I had imagined them.
The boy bent down and picked Lilith up to carry her on his back. Her small hands clasped around his neck, and her cheek lay against his shoulder. Soon she fell asleep, her breath matching that of the boy’s.
I couldn’t believe there was a force in this world that would want to harm this girl or her kind. If there was, in fact, a single force that lived on acts of pure malice, such as these, I concluded that it must be the epitome of evil. Any being with any ounce of good still left in the core of its heart, couldn’t commit an action so vile.
“A victim of the White,” I murmured.
“Her and all of her kind.”
I looked up at the boy whose eyes never left the closed ones of the child. He cradled her, protecting her from the world around them. She had come so close to witnessing such horrors; yet, somehow, she had managed to remain innocent, and that alone was so rare.
“Everyone’s lost someone, a friend, a sibling, a neighbor, a parent. Yet, it still continues. There’s no end to the White.”
I was speechless in my attempt to fathom what it was like to lose someone. To feel that sense of bereavement. I tried to understand what it felt like, but I couldn’t conceive of the idea, much less the feeling.
The boy laughed darkly. “You know, it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when these fields were Red and people who felt weren’t persecuted at all.” He let out a brief sigh, as he shook his head sadly.
“What was it like?”
“Look around you and paint the world with the warmest colors conceivable. Colors that come from something greater than all this. Reds thicker and more vibrant than the blood that runs through our veins. Reds that come from the core of the earth. And the thrum...” the boy choked out. “The thrum that was the very pulse of the land. Listen. It’s empty now.”
In the stillness I could only make out the boy’s breath. Constant, it whispered of what was lacking in the White world.
“And the people? How did they live before?”
“They lived in houses like the one we saw. Only there were full communities of thirty to fifty people. Families lived together and children played outside in the Red. The younger ones picked flowers for their parents.” The boy stopped suddenly. When he continued, his voice was changed. “I remember picking Red poppies for my mother when I was little. My sister would have to walk me to the fields everyday, because I refused to go alone. But she never complained. She’d sit with her legs dangling off the cliff, watching me gather fistfuls of poppies. My sister waved periodically, but I never waved back. I was always afraid she’d fall off if I even so much as distracted her.” The boy chuckled, but there was something off in his voice, a quality he couldn’t hide.
“What happened to your sister?”
The boy’s lips formed a tight line and he stayed silent, his steps quickening.
“I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “If you don’t want to talk about it-”
“It’s fine.” He sounded tired. “It was so long ago anyways.
“Kera, that was her name. She died trying to play the role of a hero. A role she wasn’t fit for.” The boy looked away. “The White had started its campaign. Most people don’t remember how The Pure One started, but I think it was something that ate away at us all. It was a part of our conscious in the back of our minds that wasn’t happy with what we had. We were so happy back then that we couldn’t be content with just happiness any longer. We didn’t know how fortunate we were until we lost everything.
“People took their emotions for granted, thinking life would be easier if they didn’t feel. They forgot all about the joys they had felt and the happy times they had experienced, choosing to focus instead on the hard times they had been through and the pain and grief they felt. The people traded their allegiance to the White so that they could have their emotions removed. Those people became the unfeelings.
“Kera...” His voice broke and he shut his eyes. “Kera, she wanted to do something to help. That need to do something; to stand up to the White was what eventually got her killed. There was a rumor, one of many during that time, started by idle minds who needed stories of reassurance to tell their children. A young human with only fragments for a past was supposed to rise up out of nowhere to lead a cause that would rival The Pure One’s army.
“Kera ran away from home one day, but not before saying goodbye to me and telling me what she was going to do. She swore me to secrecy, telling me that if I loved her as much as she loved me, I would keep her secret. I was left with my parents to watch her actions from afar.
“I hated those years without her by my side. I grew up quickly, propelled by my worry for her. I left the poppy fields the same month my sister ran away. My parents thought she was dead by then, and even that would have been better than the truth. I never told them, you know. It was easier for them that way.
“We heard stories from neighbors. Stories of a human with a splintered past, rising up out of nowhere, calling for an army of our own. A part of me was glad and relieved when people left our community to join the cause my own sister had started. But another part of me knew that it wouldn’t work and cried for eac
h person who left.
“We lost so many. Countless lives wasted. And for what? I’ll tell you what.” The boy spat out. “For Kera, my sister, who had to cast herself as the hero of a story that could only end in tragedy.”
I had never seen the boy like this before. His body shook with fury and his eyes welled up with tears. He finally exhaled the breath he was holding and arranged his expression into one of blankness. I could no longer see past the facade he put up.
“The Pure One ordered the mass killing of anyone against the White regime and that pushed us into hiding. Little by little, we’ve disappeared, either in surrendering to their torture and joining their side or in being killed for our refusal. The Trigons made a pact with the White in which they would not be killed if they didn’t stand in the way of the The Pure One. But with The Pure One’s latest vision, the Trigons are now brutally murdered as well.” The boy stated in a monotone.
“The Pure One sees things?” I asked.
“Or so the unfeelings say. We don’t know much about The Pure One. None of us knows what it looks like, or even what it is. All we know is that somehow it maintains a hold over its unfeelings and controls the White. It knows things. In the beginning, whole rebellions were put down, just because The Pure One knew where to send its unfeelings. We don’t know how it knows these things, but it does. Maybe it actually sees things, but there’s no way to find out.”
“Isn’t there some way?”
“The unfeelings never let any members of the Red near The Pure One’s city.”
“And that’s where the unfeelings and The Pure One live? Where Ralph has been taken?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Lilith stirred on the boy’s shoulder. I would still have gone to The Pure One’s city in a heartbeat, even if it meant giving up my life if I could help the Red, but now, I had Lilith to consider. I owed her parents the safety of their daughter and I owed Lilith the chance for a happy life. I fully intended to deliver on both of those promises.
Sleeping, Lilith looked like an angel that belonged to one of those dusty old paintings. The difference was that she was so full of life when seen against the sparse White background. Her cheeks had a rosy tint, which matched the ruby glow of her hair. Her scarlet locks fell softly about her faces, as if someone had taken great pains to paint them in just the right place.
All That Is Red Page 3