All That Is Red

by Anna Caltabiano

  “They’ve become more insistent?”

  “Ever since the hunting incident,” he said, as if it were their fault that some died and others were wounded. “Training and drills have become more enforced as well,” he added.

  I picked up the piece of paper on which Nalin had been working. I stared into the commander’s unseeing eyes and thought of an idea. “Can I have this?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “But first ...” He took the piece of paper and wrote something on it before handing it back to me.

  At first, I could not tell what change Nalin had made to the sketch, but then I spotted his name scribbled onto the corner of the paper.

  “So you can boast to all your friends that you own an original,” Nalin declared with a smile.

  I assumed a matching one on my face and pocketed the sketch. Then, since we knew that we would see each other again shortly, we briefly said our goodbyes. He made me promise to visit again and I made him promise to get better soon.

  Upon leaving the room, I walked to the commander’s quarters yet again. I felt that I was becoming quite the visitor there, as I knocked on the same door for the second time that day.

  “Come in,” came the voice from the other side.

  I creaked opened the door to see the commander behind her desk again-as usual. She didn’t respond or look up when I entered this time, but I knew that she was aware of my presence.

  “I think you’ll be interested in this,” I said, removing the sketch from my pocket and placing it onto her desk. The commander still didn’t acknowledge me as I turned to leave, but I suspected she looked at the sketch of herself with great curiosity as soon as I left.

  Escaping to the solitude of my room, I watched the view of the rest of the world from my window. Shades of Red from the setting sun splashed across my walls and danced in front of my eyes. They twirled in a whirl of unnatural grace, stroking my cheek with a soft hand one moment, teasing me with what I yearned to have in another, and then melding into nothing at all when I tried to follow them.

  I tasted the clean air and warm sunshine in my mouth. It welled up within me, a burning offering of everything I wanted, but, for some reason, couldn’t have. I struggled to swallow the sensation; to hide it from myself. I couldn’t trust myself with a piece of selfknowledge like that. It was better to be a mystery to myself than to uncover the paralyzing truth.

  Playing drowsy notes inside my mind, the caressing lights lulled me to sleep. The flashes of Red grew duller and duller; soon, though I well knew they were still there, I no longer saw them. I sensed them with my being, but they weren’t there at all.

  White wrapped closely around me. It pulled me into itself and I felt like I was a part of it. I was it and it was I. I didn’t dread or fight the feeling; it merely washed over me, soaking into me. My body seemed to thrive on the White around me; the White was oxygen and my body breathed it in over and over.

  The face appeared to me again. The same face that had appeared to me many times before. Its hair was still ragged, its face still gaunt. The same eyes bore into mine, their irises a startling bloodshot White.

  I waited for something, a feeling like fear, to come, but it never did. I was stuck in a state of detached unfeeling. It was almost, but not quite, like lethargy. Nonetheless, everything was so painfully clear. The world was before me and I saw it all. But it was all White.

  The figure before me spoke with the words of a thousand others. Their voices shrieked on top of each other, cutting through the air like a motionless wind.

  “I know,” it said. “I know about all of it.”

  “You know about what?”

  “I know about your cause.” It guffawed at the word, all its voices overlapping one another.

  “Who ... or what are you?”

  “Who do you think I am?” Its voice reached out to me, menacing and chilling in every way imaginable.

  Suddenly, I knew who the figure in front of me was. “The Pure One.”

  “Very good, so you’re cleverer than you look. I would say that there might still be hope for you, but that would be a dreadful lie.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “What do I want?” it repeated. “Aren’t you the one plotting my downfall?” It shook its head. “You’re not special. You’re just like me.”

  “I can never be like you,” I said mostly to myself.

  “And yet, you’re already like me.”

  Its voice was icy and disturbing, but it couldn’t scare me. My feet were firmly planted and I didn’t dare budge.

  “Day by day, you become more and more like me. You can’t resist it.”

  My fists clenched up, as if trying to disprove what it was saying.

  “You’re a part of me; of the White.”

  It couldn’t be true. The Pure One and the White were everything I was against and knew to be wrong. It stood against what I wanted and what made me human. Yet, perhaps there was truth in what The Pure One said. Why else was I so numb inside? I had to paint emotions on my face, because I was incapable of feeling. Didn’t that make me one of them; part of the White?

  “You know I’m right.”

  Its voice reached out to me again, trying to take me with it. It sought to make me one of the many voices of The Pure One. Although I tried to resist, I felt myself going with it.

  “No,” I kept saying through gritted teeth. “No. I can’t.”

  It stepped closer. “You’re one of us,” it said, stepping closer still. “You always have been.”

  By now, The Pure One was only a couple of inches away from me and although I could see its White breath fanning across my face, I could not feel it. The Pure One’s voices seemed to slither and whisper over me. I would have shivered, if I could. But I couldn’t and it was then that I felt myself succumb. Once my mind let down its fortress, I became at one with the White and my body soon followed, disintegrating into the White.

  “You are me,” The Pure One crooned, and I detected my voice screeching amongst the others.

  I was part of the White.

  I woke with a start. Dizzy from leaping up from my bed too quickly, the world around me swayed and blurred at the edges. Nonetheless, I managed to stumble to the commander’s quarters. I had to tell her what I had dreamt.

  The guards in front of the door were both slouched on their chairs, asleep at their stations. I let myself into the waiting area, past the long wooden table, and into the room beyond that one.

  The room was as dark as the one before and the shadows crept about menacingly. The air around me moved, making way for them and they tiptoed off the walls, snatching at me, their fingers only grazing my skin. I could just make out a lone bed in the center of the room. Its drapes were pulled shut, but I knew I had found the right room.

  “Commander,” I whispered. “Commander.” All I heard was an echoing silence, so I moved closer.

  From where I stood at the side of the bed, I could make out a sleeping form. “Commander,” I called again, louder this time.

  I didn’t quite know what it was, but the whole scene felt eerie. Something wasn’t right. Not wanting to wake the guards outside, I decided to wake the commander myself. I parted the drapes hanging on the bed frame and instantly stopped in my tracks. She was dead.

  “Guards!” I heard myself yelling for help. My voice was not my own and felt foreign in my body. I was oddly calm in the situation and managed to speak to the Trigon guards without a tremor in my voice.

  I would not have judged them if they had believed that I was the killer. However, the commander’s pale face and ashen body told a different story. The White had murdered her.

  But why kill the commander? It was all I could think, as the room filled with people. Both Trigon and human guards helped move the dead body to another room, but I remained frozen in the same position, still thinking, trying desperately to get my head around what had just happened. The death of the commander was a shattering event. It would affect all of
us, whether we let it or not. I was still in a daze when the boy ran into the room.

  “The Pure One,” he said and I knew he understood.

  The boy ushered everyone out of the room, save for himself and me, and closed the doors. I still hadn’t moved from my spot by the bed.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I shook my head, telling him I didn’t know and explained that I had found the commander in that state.

  “What were you doing here so early in the morning?” he asked. His tone wasn’t accusing and he spoke no differently than he would utter any other sentence.

  I told him about my dream, but deliberately left out the section where I became part of the White.

  “So, you dreamt up the Pure One?” he muttered, thinking aloud. “It’s almost as if you have some sort of connection with it.”

  I sucked in a breath, as he came dangerously close to the truth. “And now The Pure One knows everything,” I finished for him, “where we are, what we’re doing, absolutely everything.”

  The boy glanced back to where the commander’s body once lay. “Why do you suppose it killed her and not us?”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” I admitted. “After all, if the prophecy is right, we’re of greater use to the cause. If it really wanted to harm the Red and disrupt the rebellion, it could have killed one or both of us.”

  “Unless that wasn’t what the White was after,” the boy replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. If the White went to all the trouble of locating us and breaking in without anyone knowing, they could have easily brought their armies here and launched a surprise attack.”

  “We would have been unprepared and instantly killed,” I continued, following his train of thought.

  “Yet, but they didn’t do that and, instead, they chose a high official as their target.”

  “Do you mean to say this might just be a warning from them?”

  “Exactly,” the boy confirmed. “We are now in the middle of a game where the victor wins all.”

  “And the loser loses their life.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The commander’s death accelerated the plans for the rebellion. We were all still in the initial throes of panic following her death, but we were also dealing with the biggest question in everyone’s mind: Who would take over now that the commander was dead?

  We hadn’t discussed announcing the appointment of a new leader before and now that the commander was dead, we decided the news could wait until she was at least buried. In the meantime, rumors broke out amongst the people concerning General Gerrard or General Devonport ascending to the leadership. Everyone knew that now was the time to pick sides to make or break their fortunes.

  Due to her being in the service of the commander for the longest, support for General Devonport was especially evident. People of all different ages and reasons camped outside her quarters at night to be the first to hand her requests and other forms in the morning. The boy suggested that Devonport keep silent about the real happenings, and though she wasn’t happy about it, she managed to do so.

  I recognized the pain it caused her to see the cause so divided between potential candidates for the leadership. I knew she wanted to tell everyone that the matter had already been decided. She believed that making the announcement would solve everything and end the chaos, but the boy and I knew better.

  Instead, the boy and I spent the time planning the cause’s future. Always in his room to avoid raising suspicions, we went through candle after candle, burning them down to stubs.

  For us to be ready for whatever the White would pull next, we wanted to start the training immediately after the commander’s funeral. Among others, we needed medical training, and that was in addition to one-on-one combat training for the inevitable all-out war.

  There was a knock on the door. It was unusual at this time in the night, nevertheless the boy answered.

  “May I come in?” the bodiless voice asked.

  The boy consented and brought in the visitor. There was a steady click, as the visitor walked into the room. I strained my eyes to see who it was, but I couldn’t see by the light of the single candle that was left burning. Once the visitor moved up into the candle’s glow, I saw that it was none other than Nalin.

  Although he was still on crutches, he looked better than he had when I had last seen him; his bruises had faded to a lighter color and his minor wounds had closed. He still wore some bandages around his ribs but, all in all, he looked much better.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked after I looked behind him to make sure that the door was closed.

  He grinned. “I think I could ask the same of you two.”

  “Please, take a seat,” the boy offered, dragging up a chair.

  “Oh, no. I’m not staying long,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that I know about the real ascendency plans.”

  The boy didn’t try to refute the claim. “How do you know?” he asked simply.

  “The commander told me.”

  The boy looked visibly shocked. “Before she died?”

  “How else?” Nalin asked with his trademark grin.

  “So you know that I’m to be the new leader,” the boy said, testing out how much Nalin knew of our plans.

  “Well, to the people you are.” Nalin looked at me pointedly. So the commander did tell him everything.

  “Why did she tell you?” The boy’s question was blunt.

  “She saw a sketch of mine,” Nalin replied, all the while looking at me. “I can’t imagine how it got into her hands, but she commissioned me to start on a map for the battle.”

  “That would be helpful,” the boy said, no doubt thinking of the unreadable map the commander had shown us earlier. “Have you done this sort of work before?”

  “Before he passed on, my grandfather was the cause’s cartographer. He taught me some of the skills.”

  “He was killed by the White as well?” I found myself asking.

  “Nope. He died of natural causes,” Nalin said simply and he didn’t seem the least bit sorry about it. In a world where everyone was being killed, I guessed dying of natural causes was actually a happy thing.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” the boy said, not sounding the least bit sorry. “When can you discuss the details of the map?”

  “Whenever,” he shrugged. “It’s not like I have a life beyond these things,” he added, tapping his crutches.

  “Tomorrow, first thing then?”

  “That would be perfect,” Nalin replied. “I’m guessing you want this finished as fast as possible.”

  “You’re right. But first, we need to straighten out the mess we’re in right now. It’s just ...”

  “A messy situation?” Nalin offered with a smile on his face even through these darker times. “You don’t have to explain the situation to me. I’m living through it.”

  The boy walked Nalin to the door. When he turned back, he was grinning slightly. “I like that boy,” he said, before turning back to the work at hand.

  We worked until morning discussing the exact medical procedures that we thought should be standardized and we left agreeing to have the generals look at our list for mandatory combat training.

  The commander’s funeral service was that morning and we had agreed to have both a public and a private segment to it. I stepped outside to see the crowds lining up. All the people of the Red cause had publicly seen the commander, but few of them actually knew her. They were mothers and fathers, neighbors and friends, but not to her. Each person in that crowd loved and cared about someone, but that someone wasn’t her. They all came not obligingly, but out of a strange obligatory sense of respect that they bore for a woman whom they didn’t know or try to know. Where they saw a hard leading figure, all I saw was a woman who had loved her cause dearly, and she paid the ultimate price for it.

  A hushed silence fell over the crowd, as they watched the wooden casket start its fina
l journey. Babies were silent and toddlers were hushed with their thumbs in their mouths. A young couple beside me, barely in their twenties, held each other while an older couple in their seventies did the same. No one cried, yet the tone was the very essence of respect. For once, everyone was still and the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

  Even in her death, the commander had a way of bringing the Red cause together. At this moment in time, no one cared who was a Trigon or who was a human. We were all one and the same, united under one sorrow.

  As the casket floated by, watched by dry eyes, the people threw flowers along the now empty path. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gerrard motion to me and I followed him up a group of stairs that wound around one of the giant Ever Trees.

  At the top was a sparse platform. Wooden and simple, it creaked as I set foot on it. The casket was already there, and so was General Devonport, the boy, and the commander’s secretary. It took me a moment to realize that the commander had no family. It was no secret that she had devoted her all to the cause, but I hadn’t realized just how much that was.

  A howling wind suddenly came out of a cloud and tousled the flowers that lay on the casket. It seemed that it too was saying goodbye. Among us, the wind was the only one who cried.

  Gerrard and Devonport opened the wooden casket, revealing the body for the first time since that fateful night when I found the commander dead. She looked the same, still sleeping peacefully, her skin still blanched. Even in death, she bore the mark of the White.

  The generals pushed the casket to the edge of the platform and in one swoop dropped only the body into the tranquil pool below. The surface of the pool seemed miles from the platform and, as the body of the commander dropped, I watched her limbs flail.

  Her arms were outreached toward us, as her body twisted and turned in inhuman ways. Her head finally dropped down and she dove into the water headfirst. We could barely see the splash from where we stood and we didn’t hear it in the least. Then all signs that the commander had ever existed disappeared from view.

  After the funeral, all thoughts shifted to preparing for the unavoidable battle. The boy, the two generals, and I all met at least twice a day to discuss the details of the cause.