The rain clung to the windows in streams as if it too sought escape from the monochrome sprawl below. Inside the bleak apartment, Nadia sat at her tiny kitchen table, staring at a stack of coloring books. The pages were smeared with muted hues—grays, beige, pale yellows—each crayon dragging lifeless shades across cheap, pulpy paper. She let her hand rest limply on the table, the crayon dropped and cracked on the floor.
“Why—why even bother?” she muttered, her voice brittle, as though addressing the books themselves, which remained steadfastly dull.
“Because.” A voice from the far corner startled her. Jarin, her younger brother, leaned against the wall, a cigarette between skeletal fingers. His shadows played tricks on the peeling wallpaper. “It’s all we’ve got, Nadia. Divide sector gets the gray, like always. Don’t waste energy wanting colors. You sound… dangerous.”
Dangerous. The word hung in the air between them, colder than the draft seeping through the cracks at the window frame.
“What if there were more?” Nadia dared, her voice soft, conspiratorial. She looked up at Jarin, who narrowed his eyes at her.
“More?” he asked slowly, his tone cautious, like one addressing a ledge-walker about to jump.
“Color. I read about it in the archives,” she said. While Jarin lived for surviving, she lived for fragments of stolen time in the Ministry’s digital remnants. “Reds. Greens. Sky blue. Lush, alive. The higher levels—Sector Prism—have it all, don’t they?” Her words grew, inching past reluctance toward rebellion.
A sharp flick of the cigarette was Jarin’s only answer.
Later that evening, Nadia wandered into the main square, where people gathered not to socialize but to share their silent boredom. Factories billowed steam, wrinkling the gray skyline. Children laughed as they dragged their tongues across colorless ice treats; even delight felt muted here.
Among the crowd was Eliot, the gravel-voiced factory foreman with oil-stained hands and a gaze that weighed its observer. As Nadia stood absently turning the pages of a tattered coloring book, trying to imagine golden suns and sapphire wings, Eliot sidled near.
“They keep you complacent with that junk,” he grumbled without invitation, his eyes on her book, his words shadows of thoughts she barely allowed herself to entertain until now.
“And you’re so free?” Nadia snapped without looking, surprising herself with the bite in her tone.
For a while, neither spoke. Then, in a rare moment of warmth, Eliot smirked faintly through cracked lips. “Got no chains, only bars we pretend ain’t there. But yeah, I see it. You’re not as beaten down as the rest of ‘em. Be careful with that.”
Her voice softened. “Is it true? About Prism?”
His eyes darted left, then right. No cameras in sight. “In Prism,” he whispered roughly, “they bleed red and stare at skies of shifting hues. All rules made up there, all chains invented…" His voice dropped further. “Some claim the world down here—the Divide—was bled dry to give their fancy lives meaning.”
Her chest tightened. “And no one… no one has gone?”
“To Prism? Few tried. They send the Boons to fetch ’em back, living examples of disobedience. Horrible examples." He jerked his chin toward the billboard flashing grainy images of smiles; beneath the surface of fake contentment, gray desperation flickered like a hidden second layer.
In the weeks that followed, Nadia and Jarin found themselves pulling apart in subtle but inevitable ways. Nadia whispered her forbidden dreams to the walls at night; Jarin doubled his overtime and avoided her.
Finally, the inevitable conversation arrived late one evening. “You’ll get us killed,” Jarin hissed furiously, fists trembling. “The Boons don’t ask questions, Nadia! They don’t need to.”
Something shifted inside her, but outwardly, she let silence be her answer.
Months passed, snowflakes fell colorless, and Nadia was gone. That morning, her room was stripped bare save for one coloring book and the broken crayon scattered across it.
Jarin stared at the remains for hours, still as frozen time itself, until Eliot appeared. “Don’t ask me to lie to you," the foreman muttered. “You won’t like the answers either way.”
Jarin finally spoke, his voice like frayed wire, “She’s climbed the Divide.”
The foreman didn’t confirm, but didn’t deny. Instead, he placed a cigarette between Jarin’s fingers, quietly lighting it. Together, they stood by the window, staring into the pale skyline where Divide ended and Prism supposedly began.
Jarin exhaled smoke. “You think she made it?”
Eliot’s face twisted into something too complicated to read. “There’s no making it, boy. Up there, down here—chains come in different colors, but they’re no less a prison.” He let the silence settle thick and heavy before adding, “But some people feel better just for believing.”
The words lingered, their ambiguity heavier than any answer could have been.
Jarin remained by the window long after Eliot left, staring where the Divide blurred into unseen shapes, committing Nadia’s impossible hope to memory—an act of defiance in itself.