The Code

In the city of Glaustrum, everything was colour-coded. From the moment you were born, you were assigned a colour—blue for the labourers, red for the managers, gold for the leisured. The colour dictated your home, your income, your friends, and even the food you were allowed to eat. No one questioned it; they simply accepted their place within the spectrum.

Marla had never questioned her role as a Green. Greens were the healers, the caretakers. It was an honourable colour, her mother had told her, and Marla had believed it—until the day she saw the impossible.

It happened in the marketplace, amidst the stalls of tightly controlled colours—scarlet apples for the Reds, indigo fish for the Blues, buttery pastries reserved for the Golds. She was weaving through the crowd when she saw it.

A man. Dressed in white.

White was for the Unseen, the ones who had been cast out, stripped of their place in society. Yet here he was, standing in plain view, looking directly at her with eyes too sharp, too knowing.

She blinked, and he was gone.

For days, she tried to push the image from her mind. It must have been a trick of the light. But then, the colours around her started to shift. She noticed it in the mornings, the way the sky wasn’t quite blue anymore but tinged with something deeper, richer. The streets seemed less sterile, the shop signs seemed brighter, almost alive.

And then she began seeing other colours.

Colours that didn’t belong. A child’s toy, shimmering in hues she couldn’t name. A flicker of lavender in a Red district. A flash of silver on a Blue’s collar. The world was changing—or maybe it had always been like this, and she had only now begun to see.

Her mother noticed the change in her. “Marla, you’re distracted,” she chided. “Stay focused on your duties. The Council monitors everything.”

The Council. The faceless enforcers of the Colour Code. What would they do to her if they knew she was seeing beyond the approved spectrum? She already knew the answer. She would be disappeared, like her father had been when she was born.

The man dressed in white returned a week later, in the crowded bustle of a train station. This time, he didn’t disappear. He walked straight towards her, his voice low but insistent.

“You’re seeing it now, aren’t you?”

Marla flinched. “Seeing what?”

“The truth,” he said.

He reached into his coat and pulled out something small and smooth. A prism. He held it up to the station lights, and suddenly, the entire platform fractured into a riot of colours Marla had never known existed.

The reds were no longer red—they were scarlet, crimson, blood. The blues became sapphire, cerulean, indigo. There were colours she had no words for, and beneath them all, the shimmering pulse of something raw and uncontained.

He pressed the prism into her hand. “You can either look away, or you can start seeing everything.”

She hesitated. It was safer to live within the Colour Code, to let its rules dictate her place. But the thought of those shimmering shades, those unnamed possibilities—she couldn’t let them go.

Marla closed her fingers around the prism and, for the first time in her life, made a choice outside of the code. She realised she would never see the world in the same way again.