Holy mother of shit. The cry that escapes me is a choked heave, it’s ragged breaths, and stinging eyes, and dry retching. There’s a storm building between my temples, bile rising in my throat, shock ringing in my ears. And I’m shaking, and I’m shaking, and I can’t seem to make the shaking stop. I knew the shadows had the power to shatter; I’ve read the texts and I’ve learned the theory. But to watch it happen right in front of me . . . to see a person—flesh and blood and sinew—reduced to nothing but a pile of glass . . . it sickens me from soul to spleen. Though it isn’t my knees that give way beneath me, or my hiccupping sobs that turn to a strangled wheeze. It’s Ezzo’s.
He drops like a ship casting anchor, the cuffs pulling me down with him.
“Gods, will you be careful—?” The moment I catch sight of his expression, the reprimand dies on my tongue. Where I’m shaking, he’s vibrating like a plucked string, his cheeks wet with horror, his breaths sputtering like a dying fish.
“Ezzo?” I may have just watched a girl shatter, but he looks as though he lived it. His eyes are wild, haunted, his pupils blown as wide as the sea, staring at some distant memory that has him in an iron grip.
Colors help me, he’s falling apart.
And I can’t afford for him to do that. Not while we’re still in the Gray, where he’s in danger of shattering the same way she did. Cuffed together as we are, I can’t take the risk that the shadows won’tview us as one. So instead of railing at him to get up and snap out of it, I gentle, taking his trembling face in my hands.
“Hey—you’re okay, okay?” I tell him, softly, like I believe the words leaving my mouth. “Whoever she was, she’s gone now. We’re safe. You’re safe. Everything’s okay.” I keep repeating that refrain until slowly—so agonizingly slowly—he begins to respond to my touch, the frantic rise and fall of his chest calming.
“Raya?” My name escapes him in a waking rush, the clouds finally clearing from his expression. But even as he pulls the room back to focus and stabilizes his shield with a grunt, the pain in him remains grim and potent, as though he’s still trapped in a nightmare that refuses to dull.
“It’s okay—you’re safe,” I say again. Only for him to jerk beneath me like a scandalized buck.
“Erm . . . what are you—?” As Ezzo glances between us, I suddenly realize why he’s so taken aback. When he fell, the cuffs ensured we’d fall together, and I landed smack bang on top of him with my knees hugging his hips on either side. Then I made it worse by leaning in closer, so close that I can practically feel his breath and taste his magic. Hells, another inch and we’d be kissing.
“Right—sorry.” I lurch back as though electrocuted. “I’m sorry, but you were—”
“No, it’s fine. My fault.” Ezzo hurries to disentangle our limbs. “Seeing that just hit... it was just a shock.”
I don’t think he’s lying, exactly, though I do get the sense that it’s also not the whole truth, like there’s another reason he felt that girl’s death so deeply. But since now doesn’t seem like the best time to press the subject, I pull us back to our feet and ask, “Any idea what kind of Hue that was?”
“That wasn’t a Hue, Raya, it can’t have been,” he says, certain to a stubborn fault.
“Well, it wasn’t a Shade, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” My conviction is equally staunch. “Shades don’t shatter.”
“And Hues don’t manifest the ability to phase until they’re older. That girl was far too young to have come into her magic. And even ifshe wasn’t, Hues don’t wander around bleeding from the eyes before they shatter. We just . . . shatter.” The hitch in his voice reeks of experience. Which—given his age—he’s probably had ample time to gain.
“Okay, so then what does that leave?”
“You know what it leaves—you just don’t want to believe it.”
“Wanthas nothing to do with it.” I’m refusing to believe it because it has no basis in fact. “If she was a typic, then how was there any magic in her eyes at all? Better yet—how was she walking? Or talking? Or begging us for help? Shouldn’t the shadows have shattered her immediately?”
“Yes, they should have,” Ezzo concedes, taking a step towards the room she came from. “So why didn’t they?” He takes another, then another after that, tracing the trail of blood the girl left through the house. “And how did she get here in the first place? Typics can’t phase.”
Yes, thank you, captain obvious, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
“Maybe a Hue helped her across,” I say, since no Shade in their right mind would ever dream of doing it. Not when the Gray is increasingly becoming our sanctuary—the one place that remains untouched by the clergy and the Church.
“Gods, is there anything you Shadeswon’tblame us for?” Ezzo’s tongue clicks against his teeth. “Think that accusation through to the end, Raya; why would a Hue want to phase a typic into the Gray? If the shadows destabilize, we die the same way you do.”
“Yeah, well, maybe there’s a Hue out there holding a grudge.”
“Maybe they should be.”
“And maybe they—” My contempt cuts off abruptly as we reach the scene of the crime, a room that glistens from wall to wall with a mosaic of splintered glass. “Is that—?”
“Far more than one typic.” Ezzo’s horror is a creature I can see, and smell, and touch, the shake in his voice a mirror to the quiver in mine. “I’d say this looks more like dozens.” Each having shattered neatly into their own pile, a sea of reds, greens, blues, and yellows that thread a rainbow through the inky dark.
The seven colors.If Shades don’t shatter, then why is this floor littered with every one of ours? And if typics can’t phase, then how did so many end up here, in a room that stinks of death and perverted power? Where did they even come from?
“The missing typics.” The answer to that last question hits me all at once.
“What missing typics?”
