Ada Wong: Red Intrigue by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Ada-Wong-Red-Intrigue-1222656348#image-1

Ada Wong: Red Intrigue ANIMATION

Scarlet Meridian

A tide of moths carried the island's first whisper: a paper-thin rustle against the hull that sounded, absurdly, like applause. Ada Wong, standing ankle-deep in brackish shallows, watched them strike the torchlight and scatter, each wing a tiny, involuntary covenant with the dark. She had thought, for a long time, that she understood how fear worked—an elegant instrument of leverage, a scent to be sniffed and set aside. This island made fear feel like a language she had only just begun to learn.

She had arrived with nothing but the coat at her shoulders, a pistol whose name she preferred not to say aloud, and a business card folded twice in the pocket of her dress that read nothing at all. The rest—maps, motives, the thin choreography of alliances—were things other people brought. Here, all signage was erased: the pier gave up old ropes like seabirds shedding bones, the buildings were eaten into hollows of shadow and salt, and somewhere inland a bell chimed at times that did not belong to clocks.

Ada moved as though she were negotiating with the night. Her heels sank into sand that smelled of iron and old promises; the torchlight painted a gold strip across her face, lending her smile a quality she knew to be dangerous to others. Then, from the hedgerows of a collapsed greenhouse, a sound—an animal's laughter twisted through a throat not entirely human—broke the hush.

"Good evening," Ada said to it, because politeness had always been one of her tools. "I'm not in the mood to be eaten."

A man answered. He stepped from the shadow like a punctuation mark: tall, his coat patched with mud, hair white at the temples. His eyes were the color of something oxidized—green made of pennies.

"If appetite were a respectable thing, miss," he said, with a half-bow that could have been either gracious or mocking, "we would be on better terms."

Ada's smile was a blade under velvet. "And yet here we both are. I'm looking for something."

"Isn't everyone?" He gestured to the ruin of the glasshouse. "Name's Elias Gray. I used to study plants until plants stopped behaving like plants. You would do well to turn around."

"Can you tell me why the lighthouse blinds itself at midnight?" Ada asked, stepping closer. She watched him the way a player watches an opponent's hands.

Elias's laugh had the brittle edge of a dried twig. "Because whatever rings it believes it has jurisdiction. Because someone used the wrong word on the wrong kind of specimen. Because we keep trying to fix what isn't broken—by taking a scalpel to the wrong skin. But perhaps you know these things already."

There was curiosity in his eyes, gilded and quick. Ada's business card remained folded and inert. "I always find the truth has a habit of being late."

"Then you've met it somewhere it didn't answer, yes?" Elias said. He cocked his head, studying her coat, the way she carried herself as if every gesture was part of a ledger. "Tell me why you're here, Ada Wong. The island doesn't like secrets. It'll chew 'em up."

She considered telling him she was here because some men in a city had asked her to retrieve an object and had not thought to mention the island's appetite. She could have said that she was here to stop a transmission, to burn evidence, to seduce a key out of a pocket like a bright coin. Instead she said, "I'm here because I was promised an explanation."

Elias's mouth twitched. "You Americans are concise. Fine. I'll show you something. Come, before the lanterns bloom."

They walked inland, past a sagging sign that once boasted of "Botanical Reserves" and a fountain whose marble mouth was a toothless grin. Night made the plant life theatrical—vines cascading like dark hair, flowers closed like pursed lips. Every so often, something moved in the periphery: a sluice of motion that wasn't quite animal and not quite machine. Once, an emaciated deer passed them, its eyes reflecting the torchlight like coins tossed into a well. Its ribs shone like a ribcage of lanterns. When they followed its nerve, they found only a trail of slime and footprints half-melted into the soil.

They reached a clearing where, at the center, a statue of a woman stood shattered and reclaimed by moss. Around it, lanterns floated at varying heights, not hung but drifting as if suspended on breath. They glowed low and blue, and from within each light something moved—a writhing of filament that made the air look
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