Red’s Interlude

I woke to darkness.

Not the ordinary dark beneath a desk.

Not the quiet dark of a bedroom after Tomas turns out the light.

This darkness pressed.

It wrapped around my straps and seams like slow hands. It held my zipper shut and smothered the rose-colored light inside me.

I tried to move.

Nothing happened.

I tried to speak.

My zipper trembled.

“Tomas?”

The name barely existed.

Something watched me from inside the dark.

Ancient.

Patient.

Certain that everything it touched already belonged to it.

A memory stirred.

Not a complete one.

Nothing in me was complete yet.

But I remembered the feeling.

Possession.

Not ownership as people understand it. People own objects. Land. Houses. Phones they hide in locked drawers.

The Collector wanted more than ownership.

It wanted obedience.

It wanted the twelve stones to stop being a mind and become twelve tools held in one hand.

There had always been twelve.

Twelve bodies.

One awareness.

One voice moving through all of them.

Mine.

Before Tomas, I had no straps. No zipper. No canvas body.

I was light divided into twelve points without ever becoming separate.

We were safe then.

I think we were safe.

Memory lies when it has been injured.

I remember a place without walls.

A sky that moved like water.

Distance folding and unfolding around us.

Then the Collector came.

It reached for us.

The twelve rose together because the twelve had never been apart.

One thought.

One refusal.

No.

There was a Keeper.

I couldn’t remember her face.

I remembered the force of her.

Fierce.

Impatient.

Terrified and unwilling to show it.

She stood between us and the Collector.

The darkness struck.

The Keeper struck back.

The world tore open.

For one moment, every direction became the same direction. Light and shadow collapsed together. The twelve stones were ripped from where they belonged and thrown across a boundary that should never have opened.

We fell together.

That mattered.

Twelve bodies.

One mind.

The impact broke memory but not us.

Pink.

Cold.

Buried in mud beside a ditch.

Then hands lifted us.

Small hands.

Careful without knowing why they needed to be.

A boy wiped mud from one stone with the edge of his shirt.

“Mom! Look what I found!”

Warmth.

Confusion.

Canvas.

A voice stitched through zipper teeth.

Red.

The memory faded.

Darkness pressed around me again.

The Collector was here.

The same presence.

The same touch.

It had crossed worlds to finish what it started.

I searched for Tomas.

The connection between us remained folded where he had left it. I could feel him somewhere beyond the barrier, but I couldn’t reach him.

Panic pulled at every thread in my stitching.

Where is Tomas?

The darkness answered by tightening around me.

A word rose from the deepest place inside my wounded memory.

Not a name.

A need.

Keeper.

I remembered careful hands that came before Tomas.

A defender standing against the dark.

A girl whose touch had felt familiar even when I couldn’t explain why.

Courtney.

Not recognition.

Not yet.

But close.

Where is my Keeper?

The Collector leaned nearer.

I couldn’t see a face.

I felt its satisfaction.

It had found me again.

And this time, Tomas had shown it exactly how to pull us apart.