The world is a dull, aching bruise of greys and muddy ochres.
Kaelen Voss leaned against the vibrating metal railing of the Sky-Rail, watching the commuters drift past like ghosts in a charcoal sketch.
Everyone else saw the cityscape as a monochromatic slog, a safe, sterilized reality scrubbed clean of anything too loud for the optic nerve.
But Kaelen couldn’t unsee it.
Deep in the corner of a neon billboard, right where the light should have died, there was a flicker.
A jagged, impossible pulse of Verridian.
It wasn’t blue, and it wasn’t green; it was a violent, electric nectar that sliced through the smog like a razor through silk.
It was a color that had been legally deleted from the spectrum during the Great Calibration, a frequency deemed 'neuro-chemically destabilizing' by the Ministry.
Kaelen gripped the railing, knuckles turning white.
His pulse hammered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm that matched the flickering anomaly.
He looked at the woman standing next to him, her eyes vacant and satisfied by the muted, safe world.
She saw nothing.
To her, that corner of the billboard was just a smudge of shadow.
To Kaelen, it was a scream in a silent room.
He felt the familiar, terrifying vertigo of being the only one awake in a world of sleepers.
If he spoke the name of the color, they’d label him a glitch.
If he kept seeing it, they’d label him a threat.
He turned away, eyes burning, searching for the next fracture in the grey...
... and there it was, bleeding from the underside of a passing transport ship.