Crimson Red, Cerulean Blue

(Blue)

“Blue? Blue, can you hear me?”

The voice was distant, and I struggled to recall who it belonged to. Someone close to me. Someone I cared about…

Big Brother…?

Is it... Is it you?

“She’s not responding! Why isn’t she responding? Did you screw up?! Blue! Answer me!”

Another voice replied, “No, I didn’t screw up, idiot! It’s just… My magic isn’t designed to deal with magic overuse, just injuries! I don’t know if it’s going to be enough to fix her!”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Green?! Are you saying that Blue’s gonna…”

“I’m saying that I don’t know!”

Green. The name sparked my memory, giving me enough energy to force my eyes open slowly. My vision cleared, and I realized that I was staring into a black void.

“AH!!!”

“Whoa!” Red tumbled backward, and I realized I was just looking into his sunglasses. Oops.

“Wh-What happened…?” I asked groggily, attempting to sit up and failing when a headache the size of Sapphire City slammed into me. “Owww….”

“That’s what you get for overusing magic like that!” Green scolded. “Especially after I told you not to!”

“Overusing… magic?” The memories of what happened in Orange Village suddenly flooded into my mind, and I gasped. “Kyore! What happened to Kyore?! And Orange… Is Orange okay?!”

“Relax, Blue, I’m fine,” Orange called from the corner, his laptop once again in front of him. But there was something different about him. His steel-gray eyes carried a hint of…

Guilt?

“What I want to know, though,” he continued, “is why in the world you would go and risk your own life to save us like that, especially since we’ve only known you for about a day. Are you just insanely reckless like Red here, or was there some other reason for it?”

I responded before thinking. “Because you’d do the same for me.”

The instant the words were out, I realized it was true. Red, Green, Orange… For some reason, they genuinely cared about me. The question was… Why?

Orange looked mildly surprised for a second, then his face went back to being neutral. “Well then. Anyway, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But I was wondering…” I shifted uncomfortably. “Why? Why would you do the same for me? Like you said, you’ve only known me a day. Why do you…”

“Because you’re my friend.”

It was Red who’d spoken this time. He was staring at me as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

“Your… friend…?”

“That is, if you want to be,” he added.

“I…” I was at a loss for words.

“As much as I hate to agree with this idiot, we’re friends. That automatically means we’ll stick by each other, no matter what,” Green told me, smiling. “Or are we not friends?”

Friends…?

The word was unfamiliar, something I’d really only read about in books and observed from a distance. But books definitely couldn’t do it justice. The warm feeling flooding through me was something entirely new, something only reality could create. It was…

It was possibly, no, probably, the best feeling I’d ever had.

I smiled, really smiled, even though my head was killing me. “Friends, huh?”

“Why don’t you just hurry up and hug already?” Orange asked dryly from his corner, looking exasperated. “Sheesh.”

I laughed, really truly laughed for the first time in a really, really long time. Once I started, there was no way I could make myself stop, so pretty soon, everyone was staring as I cracked up.

“Uh… I think you broke her,” Red said, which only made me laugh harder.

“I’m…sorry,” I gasped, wiping away tears of laughter. “I haven’t felt anything like this in a really long time…”

“What, you’ve never had friends before?” He looked shocked. “No way!”

“I didn’t think any of you guys would either. I mean, I’m one of the Seven, so I was always on guard... Sorry, I’m so bad at this opening up stuff…!”

“Sheesh. Well then. Good thing I caught up to you, or else you’d be seriously uneducated.” Red shook his head. “No friends. Honestly!”

No friends indeed. For the first time ever, I wondered why I hadn’t bothered trying.

“Well, all this friendship stuff is all well and good, but I’m sure you’re wondering about why in the world we broke into that place,” Orange interrupted, bringing us all back to reality.

“Of course. But you didn’t retrieve all of the data yet. Kyore interrupted, remember?” I pointed out, serious again.

“Such little faith you all have in me. Of course I got the data. I was just about to shut the computer down when he oh-so-conveniently did the job for me.”

“Seriously?” Red looked like a little kid on Christmas Day. “So? What’d you get? Why’d we even go there in the first place?”

“SPACE,” Orange replied simply.

Red squinted. “We went there because you needed some space?”

But I understood the meaning behind the single word. I’d heard about it from a couple of minions I’d spied on back in Sapphire City. (I was bored that day, and my homework was done. So…yeah.) “No way… That was SPACE?!”

“Correct. Though I didn’t expect their security to be so weak.”

“Weak?! We almost died!”

“We wouldn’t have died.” His voice was firm, completely honest. “I would’ve made sure of that.”

Green interrupted before I could ponder the meaning of this cryptic sentence. “Hang on a minute. Just what is this SPACE thing?”

Orange looked at me, raising an eyebrow expectantly. “Blue?”

“SPACE is a data storage facility,” I explained. “The most secure one in Spectrum. It’s where Mask keeps his most secret files, like his plans and most important info. It also contains personal files. Special ones.”

“Like Violet’s,” Red said, realization dawning on his face.

“Correct again,” Orange replied, looking pleased. Well, as pleased as Orange ever did, anyway. “I managed to retrieve Violet’s file and a few other bits of information as well. And here it is.”

We all crowded around the laptop as a file popped up onto the screen. But…

“No picture?” Green asked, frowning.

“They probably didn’t want any hackers like us knowing what Violet looks like,” I sighed. “I mean, if you have a high enough security clearance to know this information, then you should also have a high enough security clearance to go see Violet in person for yourself.”

“Crayik!” Red complained. “Why’re these guys so freaking smart?”

“They’re the bad guys, if they weren’t smart, then they’d be dead already,” Green replied dryly. “There aren’t any physical descriptions, other than the fact that she’s female. No locations, either. There’re only a few useless bits of info, like whether or not she’s had all her vaccinations or not. Sorry, Orange, but I think this file’s completely useless.”

“Look again. It does tell us one thing that’s important.” Orange pointed to a single line on the screen, looking grim.

STATUS: CAPTIVE. EXECUTION SCHEDULED FOR MARCH FIFTEENTH.

We all stared at the line, dread filling the air.

“Oh no,” I breathed.

“That’s a week from today,” Green choked out, her voice barely a whisper. “If we don’t find her in a week, Violet’s going to…”

The final word hung unspoken. No one said anything for a long, long time.

“We’ll find her.” Red’s voice broke the silence, firm and clear. “They won’t be able to do anything to her. Not over my dead body.”

The words took away some of the dread in the room, and I turned to Orange, hoping against hope. “Wasn’t there anything else in the data you got?”

“Yes. But it doesn’t have anything to do with Violet. And I can’t make any sense of it. So it’s probably not what you were looking for.”

“Great! Just freaking great!” Green threw up her hands. “Violet’s about to get killed, and we can’t even do anything to help! We’re screwed if one of us dies. You all know that just as well as I do! What’re we supposed to do?!”

I bit my lip, because she was right. We couldn’t afford to lose any one of the Seven, because there was no way to get a replacement for the protector of their city. So if Violet died…

“Orange, what else do you have besides Violet’s file?” I asked. Even if it didn’t have anything to do with Violet, any info about Mask was better than none at all.

“Three words. That’s it. And don’t ask me what they mean, because I have no idea.”

“What are the words?”

He scrolled down, opened another file, then showed me the screen.

THE OPPOSITE PLAN.