True Colors

I came up out of the dark into white.

White ceiling. White light, the flat humming kind that lives in places people go to be fixed or kept. The air had that smell—antiseptic, cold, scrubbed of anything human—and there was a thin tug at the back of my hand, a line running somewhere, and a soft strap across each of my wrists holding them gently down to the rails of a narrow bed. A hospital. Or something built to look like one.

I didn’t understand any of it. And then I did.

Because the memory came—not gently, not in pieces, but all at once, the way the worst ones always do. The mist. The blade ringing in the white. The boy with the ancient eyes. And Yuri, folding down onto cold stone, the wrong thing draining out of his eyes until only him was left, his hand lifting off the floor and reaching for me across an arm’s length of impossible distance—jump, I’ll catch you—and lowering, and resting, and going still in a spreading dark.

The tears came before I’d decided to cry. They ran sideways off my face and into my hair, and I couldn’t lift a hand to wipe them, and I wouldn’t have anyway. Yuri. I let his name fill me up and break against the inside of my ribs, and somewhere under the grief a small voice that hated itself whispered the question again—did you do this, did you leave him to this—and I had no answer and nowhere to put it.

A strand of hair fell across my eyes as I turned my head.

It was blue.

Was my hair always blue?

Yes.

Blue—dark and clean, the color it had been before, the color it had no business being unless someone had stripped the lie off me while I slept. My real color. My first color.

My name. What was my name?

Fenella. Fenella Brighton.

That was when I noticed the voices.

They’d been there the whole time, I realized—a low buzz I’d taken for the lights, a murmur through the wall to my left, two or three people talking somewhere just out of sight. And as I surfaced fully, as the fog burned off, the buzz resolved into words.

“—Edward. She’s the one.” A man. Low, firm, certain.

“It doesn’t add up.” Another, sharper, cooler. “That man was supposed to lead an army. Not a small band in a warehouse.”

“They had an A-class.”

“A crispy A-class now,” a woman put in, dry, and someone almost laughed.

“Funny, Leonie.” The low voice again. Then it changed—went careful. “Wait. Do you feel that?”

A pause. The lights hummed.

“Yeah,” the low one said slowly. “She’s awake.”

”…She’s reading us through the wall.”

“Impressive.”

And the moment they said it, I felt it too—felt the how of it, the thing I’d been doing without knowing I was doing it, the thread of listening that ran out of my head and through the concrete and into theirs. The instant I noticed it, it turned on me. A whistle rose in my skull, high and piercing, a tinnitus that climbed past anything I could stand, the whole world narrowing to one unbearable silver note—

I screamed. One short, raw second of it.

Then it cut out. Snapped clean off, like a wire pulled.

And the voices were gone—not silenced, just gone, walled away again, the thread severed, the room around me suddenly and completely quiet but for the lights and my own ragged breathing and the slow drip of whatever they were feeding into the back of my hand.

The door slammed open and they came in.

Three of them, just as in the mist—except now I could see them, and the seeing made it worse. They were young. Early twenties, maybe less, the kind of young that should still smell of classrooms and last summers. Two boys and a girl, moving into my white little room like they owned every room they walked into, and none of them looked at me the way you look at a person you’ve wronged.

I found the dark-haired one. The blade. The eyes like an ancient light, set now in a face barely out of school.

“You killed Yuri.” My voice came out low and flat and cold, scraped down to ice. I held his eyes and didn’t blink.

The blond one was already moving—a slow, easy circuit around the foot of my bed, relaxed, composed, taking me in and then taking in the other two, the most unbothered person in the room by a wide margin.

“We all did,” he said, mild. “I shot him twice.”

He said it like he was reaching for the weight, lifting it off the dark-haired one’s shoulders and setting it across his own. I did it. Aim at me. And it landed exactly wrong, because it meant the two bolts that brought Yuri down—the foot, the other foot, the folding to the stone—had a face now too, and the face was calm about it.

The girl leaned over me. Red, a short fierce bob, eyes like a pair of knives laid flat. She studied me the way you’d study a reading on a dial.

“I can’t feel the difference,” she said, to no one.

“She’s able to reach into our minds.” The dark-haired one. The one who’d run a sword through the man I loved.

“It goes both ways.” The blond again. He stopped pacing and looked down at me, and for the first time something flickered behind the ease—not guilt, but a kind of caution. “The inner circle got lit before I could stop it. She’s linked to us now. All of us.”

Linked. The word dropped into me and I understood it on a level that had nothing to do with the room. The three of them, this young, this calm, this powerful—the thread I’d felt running through the wall, the way I’d reached into them without trying—

“You’re—” My throat closed and I forced it open. “My crew? You’re—no. No way.”

I pulled against the straps. My body wasn’t all the way mine yet, heavy and slow, but the fury was, the fury had come all the way back to me ahead of everything else, and I dragged myself up off the pillow as far as the bonds would let me, every word tearing loose.

“You killed my Yuri!”

I didn’t see it move.

One instant my fury was the only thing in the room, and the next the blade was simply there—hanging the length of my body, hovering a hand’s breadth above me from throat to knee, its edge catching the white light. Nathan had drawn it, or made it, or called it out of nowhere; it didn’t matter which. It was there.

Something stupid and bottomless in me—the grief, mostly—decided it would rather meet the edge than flinch from it, and I started to lift my forehead toward the steel.

Edward caught it first. Reached out and laid his bare hand against the flat of the blade and pushed it gently, almost lazily, off of me and aside.

“No need to fret, Nathan.” Easy as ever. “She can only read our minds.”

“For now,” Nathan said.

“She hates us.” The red-haired girl, flat, certain, leaning a hip against the rail of my bed. “If she could, she’d have killed us already.”

“I’m not like you,” I spat.

The words were out before I’d thought them, and behind them my mind was finally catching up, finally assembling the room. Three impossibly young, impossibly strong espers. A blade out of nowhere. The cool, the composure, the casual cruelty of it.

“What are you even doing here?” My voice climbed. “You should be—” And then it clicked, cold and complete. “Oh. You’re with the western council. Aren’t you. You and that—that warmonger.”

Edward didn’t deny it. He stepped to the side of the bed and started working the strap loose from my wrist.

“We are,” he said simply.

“What are you doing?” The girl pushed off the rail, suddenly straight.

Nathan had gone still—a different stillness than the blade, a stunned one.

“She’ll come with us,” Edward said, unhurried, freeing the buckle.

“No way,” Nathan and I said at the same time, in the same breath, with the exact same venom—and for one absurd second the only two people in the room who agreed on anything were the boy who’d run a sword through Yuri and me.

Edward didn’t look up from the strap. “We keep her in check. Close. That ritual—” he paused, and something genuinely serious passed under the calm for the first time, “—was nothing like what Seth and Sakamoto warned us to expect. Nothing.”

Nathan recoiled at the names. Whatever they meant to him, the recognition hit hard, and I watched the argument drain out of him as the truth of it landed: Edward was right.

“Until the effects of the ritual wear off, we’re linked,” Edward went on. “All four of us. If something happens to her—or because of her—we want to be close enough to act when it does. Not three cities away reading about it.”

The girl tilted her head, the knife-eyes warming a fraction into something that looked almost like interest.

“Ohh,” she said.

And Edward pulled the last strap free.

I tried to run.

It was the most pathetic thing my body had ever attempted. I’d meant to shove the red-haired girl aside and bolt for the door, and what actually happened was that I lurched half-upright, swayed, got one uncoordinated hand against her shoulder—and she looked down at it, then at me, with the patient, faintly amused expression of someone watching a headless chicken run its last circle, or a boxer who hasn’t yet noticed he’s already out on his feet.

Then my legs quit, and I went flat onto the cold floor.

“Leonie.” Edward, mild, from somewhere above. “Help her up, please.”

And she did—stooped and hauled me upright by the arm in one easy motion. Her grip was hot. Not feverish, not wrong—just hotter than a person’s skin should be, a banked warmth radiating off her like a stove that had been on all day. The torch, I thought dimly. The white shape that caught fire in the mist. The thing that overpowered Sasaki—she did that- that much I remember. She was barely more than a girl, white shirt, a frame fuller than the rest of her years, and she’d burned a third-circle esper to a running candle without breaking stride.

“You’re heavy,” she said.

I couldn’t walk. I could barely make the words. “What did you do to me.”

“Nothing,” Edward said.

“Carrying you,” Leonie corrected, as Nathan stepped to the door and pulled it open.

“Don’t you know?” Edward asked—and for once there was no edge in it, only something that sounded uncomfortably close to curiosity. Maybe even pity.

“Know what.”

“About the strain.”

Nathan scoffed under his breath as Leonie hitched me up and carried me through the door like a sack she’d been told not to drop. Low, almost to himself, he said it:

“What a key we have.”

And they took me out.

As Leonie turned me through the doorway I caught it—a mirror, mounted over a steel basin by the wall—and for half a second the woman in it stopped me cold.

She was tall. Taller than I was. Her hair was blue, dark and clean to the shoulders, and her face was older—not aged, but grown, was that I?

Whatever the warehouse had done, whatever the ritual had begun and the blade had interrupted—it had stripped my mind and replaced it with something else.

The woman staring back at me was Fenella Brighton, whoever she was.