An open question . . . I want to ask an open question . . .
True to his word, the thought garners no resistance, my reckless endeavor freed of its magical cage.
Now you just have to go through with it.I do Killen the courtesy of not lingering where I’m not wanted, though once I’m safely out in the hallway, the choice he made possible fills my stomach with lead. Do I shimmer back to my room and forget about this terrible idea, or head towards the seeing tower and cast the biggest risk an Indigo can take?
All you need to do is pass your trials. Just . . . focus on that.Akari’s voice sets a guilty flame to my bones. It was no small thing for her to turn to Saleen for help, no victimless effort. For while my split from Killen was welcome, her breakup with Saleen was a lesson in devastation, a pain made worse for the fact that Saleen wasted no time before very publicly making her way through a pretty parade of girls. If I do this now—if I risk my future—I’d be spitting in the face of the kindness Akari did me, at great personal cost.
Go back to bed, Raya.I slow my shimmer as I reach the corridor’s decisive turn.Forget about the open question and go back to bed.
But I don’t go back to bed.
And I can’t forget about the open question because it feels like the only hope I have left, the only way to prove that I deserve to keep my magic.
So instead, I set my shoulders and shimmer off towards the seeing tower, making the decision with my gut instead of my head. Desperate times call for desperate measures and this one will either ruin my prospects or improve them no end. The only way to know for sure is to sink down to the cushions, reach for the color in my blood, and lace it around the four forbidden words that I should never ever think with magical intent.
What is my future?
CHAPTER 3
RAYA
When the future comes, it doesn’t come with instructions. It comes with smells, and tastes, and flickers. With feelings, and certainties, and betrayals. Colors. It comes in sparkling glistens of sapphire, a rich, vibrant blue that’s as endless as the sky and as deep as the ocean, as beautiful as the gem for which it was named. But then a bell vibrates through the vision and the blues fade to reveal a cascade of radiant gold, orange, and red, a bronze glow flickering at their edges.
Come morning, those colors will change everything.
Hewill change everything.
Through the swirling haze of magic, I glimpse the boy who will ruin my life.
Dark brown hair, coppery brown skin, warm brown eyes—dead with indifference. And though the future shows me nothing of what will draw me to him in such an absolute way, I know instantly, in my heart, that I will love him. That I will be recklessly and irrevocably in love with him.
But that he is pain.
That inside him, there is nothing but pain and grief and despair, so much so that it burns its way through my skin.
This boy is going to break me.
And it won’t matter because all around us, all I see is death.
Our death. The death of our magics. The death of the Gray.
My death.
Which is impossible since an Indigo cannot see their own passing; that’s the most fundamental truth of the future: it cannot predict its own end.
And yet, I see the moment the color in my veins withers. The moment his does, too, since we meet our deaths together. We all meet our deaths together, Shade, Hue, rogue, and Gray. Not with a whisper, but with a poisonous swell, on a scale so unimaginable it rips day from night and light from shadow. My mind from the vision. Leaving nothing behind but the sour stench of fear and the lingering touch of danger, a question the future poses to me instead.
What in the name of all three Gods was that?
CHAPTER 4
EZZO
Death doesn’t come as fast as I’d hoped—or as fast as it should. When the trackers came for Mom, they didn’t bother hauling her back to their prison; the punishment was as immediate as it was absolute. For she had committed the cardinal sin of falling in love with a typic—of giving birth to his child, to me—and for that, there could be no forgiveness. No mercy. Because four hundred years ago, a man told a lie to further his agenda and condemned countless generations of Hues to death. He was afraid of us. Afraid of how varied our gifts could become. How unpredictable. And so, he persuaded the world that we were a threat to the shadows and purged the continent of our kind.
Four hundred years later, that lie has become our judge, jury, and executioner, and no one cares to question the faulty logic because the truth doesn’t benefit their side.
So, we die.
