Dark and Deepest Red(55)

Maybe it was because this was a time his mother and father had both studied, their fields intersecting in a span of years that included the dancing plague. What were they working on, Emil wondered, in the months before he was born? He wondered if the work of that moment, the thoughts swirling in this house, stirred up this particular corner of their family’s history, enough that it would always be written a little brighter in Emil. Even if he didn’t want it.

He tried to focus on the work in front of him, the small task of finding things he wanted to show Rosella Oliva. In the language of flames and colors, he had told her what he hadn’t managed to say in years passing each other in the halls or at church. And the way she’d looked at him, the glow of the ion flames tinting her lips, he thought she’d heard him.

Maybe he could do it again. Maybe he could tell her that he remembered the gardenias she grew with her mother by showing her the crystals of copper chloride, jagged and blue green as a geode made from seawater. Maybe, by showing her different hydrates of cobalt chloride that ranged from blue to purple to pink, he could explain the gradual shift that had left him nervous and quiet around her.

Maybe he could even tell her about the awful moment of his family’s history that was now pulling him backward, how it made him nervous enough that he didn’t go after her last night, that he let her go home by herself.

In the rose-quartz pink of manganese chloride, he would tell her about the stone walls of Strasbourg and brutal heat of that Alsatian summer. He could tell her about the canal houses painted the powder blue of copper benzoate, the water and algae the colors of nickel chloride. He could show her the stained-glass-blue of copper sulfate crystals, because he could not tell her in words that this was his heart, jagged, and almost familiar, and made of something that felt far more threatening than beautiful.

But each time he blinked, she was there again.

Not Rosella.

His five-hundred-years-ago relative, her screams laced with fear and rage. She was there, and he recognized her by the brushstroke of her black hair and the brown of her hands.

I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, he breathed into the clinging haze of his own dream.

He told her again, in case she could hear him across five centuries, across the moonless dusk that separated him from those who’d lived before him.

I don’t know what you want me to know.

The feeling of a palm landed on his shoulder.

He turned around, looking for the hand and whoever it belonged to.

He found only the dark in the unlit half of the shed, and the sky, still pink between the door and the frame.

Heat breathed on his back. It cast a glow on his forearms.

Emil turned back around.

A stream of fire ran the length of the lab bench. It burned in every color he’d shown Rosella Oliva, all those flames tinted by ions. The blue green of copper. The marigold yellow of sodium. The purple of cesium and grass green of barium.

His hands wanted to move. But those colors locked him there.

This was what happened when he got near Rosella Oliva. This was everything that sparked and caught in the space between them. Between her, a girl whose last name held the lore of enchanted shoes, and him, whose family carried the history of a dancing plague, and the burden of blame for it.

His muscles flinched to life even while his eyes stayed on that trail of flames.

He went for the fire extinguisher (he could still hear Dr. Ellern’s voice—Turn the pin before you clamp down) and swept a cloud across the lab bench.

He only distantly registered the last tips of the flames biting his sleeve.

“Emil.”

He heard Rosella’s voice in the same moment he felt her hitting his arm. It was more odd than frightening, her slapping at his wrist and forearm in a way that seemed startled, not angry.

It took him a minute to put it together with the pain of the fire singeing the hair on his left forearm. He realized his sleeve had caught only in the moment of her putting it out.

She looked at his arm, swearing under her breath. “We’ve got to get some ice on this.”

He almost talked without thinking. Cold water, not ice. Another warning from Dr. Ellern. Ice on a burn can leave frostbite.

But he couldn’t even talk. With her hands on him, he felt the color of flames catching between them. It was brighter and sharper than the pain throbbing into his arm.

Whatever was lacing his dreams, whatever his relatives from five centuries ago wanted him to know, it led back to Rosella. He couldn’t pin it down yet, but it was an instinct as clear and true as his mother’s sense for when rain was coming.

He should have felt it the night Rosella kissed him, with that flash of red folded inside the glimmer, that vein of blood.

If he stayed near her, the space between them would turn to fire.

He pulled back so fast he almost dropped the extinguisher.

She blinked at him, eyes wide, but let him have the distance.

He looked back at the bench, breathing hard. Whatever heat was left moldered under a layer of sodium bicarbonate.

“It’s us,” Emil said, more to the ash-bitter air than to Rosella.

The truth he hadn’t wanted to pick up and turn over in his hands now cut into him.

Both of those nights out by the reservoir, a fever had taken hold of Rosella, the same kind of possession as five hundred years ago.

She had danced, without wanting to. Something had compelled her to the edge of those rocks, and into the water.