The Color Code

They told us color was truth.

From the moment of birth, a thin band of pigment appeared on each newborn's wrist—clear and precise. Blue. Pink. Blue. Pink. A perfect system. A divine arrangement. Love and life sorted from the first breath.

I was born Grey.

They called it a "flicker." A temporary smudge. A harmless glitch in the light. Doctors rushed me through scanners, painted my wrist in Pink, and told my mother to try again. She smiled too tightly. She said nothing when she held me, but her silence was sharp as glass.

We were told to report for pigment reinforcement every month. A short visit, a small price for peace. A searing laser passed over our wrists, locking in the right shade, the state-approved hue.

I learned young to keep my arm hidden.

My name is Emssa, born in Quadrant Three, Zone Twelve, daughter of compliant citizens, and for seventeen years I have lied.

---

The first time I met another Grey, I was twelve. We were at school, lining up for Harmony Inspections. I saw them—a classmate named Jaye—staring at their wrist with a kind of hunger. Their color, too, shimmered. Not quite Blue. Not quite Pink.

We didn’t speak, not then. But I never forgot the look in their eyes: half-fear, half-recognition.

In Harmony Studies, we read about the Collapse—the ancient chaos of Free Love, when people followed feeling instead of order. We were told those days were wild, dangerous, sinful. The Great Division fixed all that. Now, Blue and Pink balanced perfectly, like a clock. But what if the hands of the clock trembled? What if time wanted to move differently?

---

I kept a mirror under my bed. Not for my face, but my wrist.

Some nights, I’d peel back the laser scarring and look. Grey. Soft, smoky, shifting. The color of fog and cloud, of unfinished dawn. The color of questions.

I wrote poems in secret:

My color is smoke. It cannot be caught.
My love is a shape you haven’t named yet.
You call me error, but I am invitation.

---

When the Purity Parade came, I had to march. Everyone did. We wore our assigned uniforms—mine, a bright fuchsia dress, stiff with starch—and walked in two-by-two lines, holding hands with our "balance pair."

Jaye marched across from me, dressed in electric blue. They glanced at me, just once, their eyes unreadable. But their wrist—exposed just for a moment—gleamed Grey.

Later that night, they found me behind the Harmony Hall. They didn’t speak. They just opened their palm, and in it was a tiny bottle of pigment remover.

---

We became shadows. At school. At scans. At the fountain where we met and never talked. A glance. A nod. A slip of paper left inside a textbook: "I dream in grey."

Our world was color-coded, but no one ever taught us how to read between the shades.

---

They caught Jaye first. Someone reported a flicker. They were taken to a Reintegration Center. I still don’t know what happened there. Some returned. Most didn’t.

I stopped writing. I scrubbed my wrist until it bled. I told myself to forget.

But forgetting is a kind of death.

---

On my eighteenth birthday, I didn’t go to my scan. I walked into the old ruins of Pre-Division history, where weeds climbed broken walls and the air smelled of rust and ash. And I waited.

Not for someone to save me.

For the truth to arrive.

It did—in the form of a girl with a voice like winter. Her wrist? Grey. Clear, proud, untamed.

She sat beside me and didn’t ask my name. She just said:

"It’s growing."

"What is?"

"Us."

---

We were not mistakes. We were the return of something ancient. Something the system couldn’t predict.

Grey is not absence.
Grey is potential.
Grey is the color of a storm just before it breaks.

I am Emssa.

I am Grey.

And I will never be silent again.