Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Vision in Red

"I need to go," Amal said. "I need to get Noor."

"Be careful," Yasmin said. "Whatever's happening —it's accelerating. The attacks today, the lockdown —it's feeding them. Every act of violence, every death that goes unnamed, makes them stronger."

Amal nodded, gathering her bag. At the door, she paused. "Yasmin —the song the children sang during the lockdown. Do you know what it was?"

The psychologist's face went very still. "What kind of song?"

"Something about the watchers. About how they stand where the blood fell, and they grow when we forget. The children all sang it together, in perfect unison. And then they forgot they'd ever sung at all."

Yasmin was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper. "There are some things that exist outside normal memory. Some knowledge that doesn't pass from person to person the way regular knowledge does. The children... they may be tapping into something. A collective consciousness. A shared awareness. I don't know what to call it."

"What does it mean?"

"It means they know things we don't. It means they can see things we've trained ourselves not to see. And it means—" She paused, choosing her words carefully. "It means we should listen to them. Really listen. Because whatever's coming, they're going to know about it before we do."

The walk home felt longer than usual.

The streets were emptier than they should have been at this hour—the lockdown had kept people indoors, and even now, hours later, there was a tension in the air that discouraged casual wandering. Shop owners pulled their goods inside earlier than normal. Parents hurried their children along, glancing anxiously at shadows. The usual sounds of evening—the bustle of the market, the chatter of neighbors, the calls of vendors—were muted, as if the city itself was holding its breath.

The damage from the day's operation was visible everywhere. A shopfront with its windows blown out. A car with bullet holes stitched across its side, abandoned in the middle of the road. A wall pockmarked with impacts, chunks of concrete scattered on the pavement below. Children's toys left behind in the rush to flee—a stuffed bear with one arm torn off, a plastic ball slowly deflating in a gutter.

Amal walked through it all with Noor's hand in hers, trying not to look too closely, trying not to count the bullet holes, trying not to imagine what might have happened to the people who had been here when the operation began.

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