Red

Chapter One · A Crack at the Back of My Head

Rain battered the windscreen. The wipers swung like a hypnotist's pendulum.

My right hand trembled lightly on the steering wheel. Not from cold. It had been doing this for six months, especially on rainy nights, especially when I passed Hewan Road. A trace of rust rose at the back of my tongue, as though I were holding an old coin in my mouth.

I had left the heater off and the window open a crack, letting the rain slant in. I counted the strokes of the wipers. One. Two. Three.

When the heavy truck skidded towards me, I watched it.

Time stretched. Long enough for me to see the driver's mouth open in terror, the sheet of water split by the tyres as the cab swung sideways, the entire rust-stained flank of the container bearing down on me, slowly, irreversibly.

Three whole seconds.

I did not even touch the brake.

The crash of metal tore through my eardrums. The world spun. As my forehead struck the steering wheel, I heard an exquisitely faint, brittle sound at the back of my head, like glass cracking.

Then a hiss of current burrowed into my optic nerves.

In that instant—only that instant—the familiar, reassuring colours in my field of vision collapsed.

Something began to “burn” among the shards of the truck's tail light.

It was not fire. It was a wavelength I had never seen. Like a shrill noise made visible: violent, dazzling, a living thing thrashing on the dead asphalt. My heart contracted under the sudden assault. A nausea and a trembling unlike anything I had known swept through me.

This was not what I had wanted. I swear, this was not what I had wanted.

Before I blacked out, my only thought was: What the hell is that?

When I woke, I was in a special-care room at St Mary's Hospital.

Everything around me was perfect, spotless white. The nurses wore soft pale grey. Beyond the window, the sky was the standard shade of lead. Order had returned. Nothing leapt at me in terror; nothing “burned” as though it might scorch my retinas.

Before my senses fully returned, I remembered the emergency room.

Blinding surgical lights. A monitor shrieking. A pair of eyes looking down through silver-rimmed glasses. I did not know her. But I remembered that, when my retina had just been ruptured by the impact and my consciousness flickered like a candle in the wind, those eyes had paused above me for half a second. Then she reached out, silenced the alarm and told the nurse beside her, “Just an equipment fault. He's fine.”

It was a lie. Even half dead, I could tell.

I did not know why a doctor I had never met would lie for me.

On the third day after my discharge, I locked myself in my studio.

I am a painter. In the art world my name stands for “absolute composure” and “detachment”. Critics say my landscapes slow the pulse. They say I know how to build silence out of fifty shades of grey.

Fuck silence.

I grabbed a palette knife and piled paint frantically onto the canvas. I wanted to find what I had seen at the crash. That colour.

But I could not.

Everything I owned lay on the palette: ultramarine, mineral green, cobalt blue, lemon yellow, a whole family of greys. I mixed them in twos and threes. Added white. Added black. Scorched them, thinned them. Nothing was right. That thing was not on my palette, not among any colours I knew, not even in all their possible combinations—as though what I wanted to paint was not a colour but a language my hands had never learned.

Whatever I mixed, the canvas showed only a dark pool of stagnant water. My hands shook. I remembered the feeling so clearly—like scalding blood, like the agony of a wound torn open, like the flutter of a racing heart.

A drop of warm liquid fell onto the canvas, bleeding into the grey paint as a little blot of darker grey.

Another nosebleed.

I wiped it carelessly with the back of my hand. I had no intention of stopping. In six months I had grown used to it—the tremors, the nosebleeds, the way my vision sometimes went black halfway through a painting, as though someone had pulled my plug from behind. Being used to it did not mean I was not afraid.

I threw down the knife and rushed to the holographic archive terminal. With trembling fingers I entered my search terms:

“A colour that burns like fire.” “Car crash visual hallucination.” “Optic nerve damage seeing a spectrum that does not exist.”

Meaningless strings of characters and medical advice scrolled across the screen. Then I opened a badly scanned old book. In a footnote on page 409, I found an unfamiliar word.

“Red.”

The note read: The colour of life; a symbol of passion. Currently suppressed under public safety protocols.

The screen flickered. A warning covered the page—and to my eyes its border was blazing, the same wavelength I had seen on the night of the crash:

[UNAUTHORISED ACCESS: This area involves Class One sensory contraband. Your browsing history has been uploaded.]

At that moment my private communicator rang.

No caller ID. No signature. Only a set of coordinates in the lower city.

And one sentence, without explanation:

“You saw it too, didn't you?”