The Colour Tax

Lumi was seven when she asked what blue cost.

Solenne rinsed the breakfast bowls with cold water. Grey soap melted across her fingers in thin strips. The city climbed at the window to an uninspiring expanse of approved sky. The government grey everyone got when they couldn't afford wonder.

“Too much,” Solenne said.

Lumi pressed her forehead to the glass. Her breath left a small ghost.

“More than rent?”

Solenne set the bowl on the rack.

That was answer enough.

Children in the Grey District were taught about colour the same way they were taught extinct animals: through words, songs, and diagrams printed in permissible government hues. Lumi had her own list taped to the wall above her bed, framed by glow-in-the-dark stars that had never twinkled for her. She’d read it so often that the letters were worn soft.

BLUE: sky, sea, old songs.

GREEN: trees, medicine.

RED: blood, stop, love.

YELLOW: sun, lemons.

She had scribbled happy beneath yellow, crossed it out twice, then written it again, smaller.

“How does blue feel?” Lumi asked.

Solenne wiped her hands dry. “Like kneeling beside something bigger than your arms can hold."

Lumi scowled up at the sky, trying to understand how anything could be that large.

Solenne looked at her, and an ancient shame rose in her throat.

She’d been five when they’d come in. Her mother had bent to her level outside the clinic entrance, cupping Solenne’s cheeks with both hands, urging her to look. “Look hard,” her mother had whispered. “Keep one thing. Just one.”

So Solenne had looked.

At the red scarf knotted about her mother’s neck. The green bottle displayed in the clinic window. And the brown of her mother’s eyes, the color of over-steeped tea, damp and terrified, brimming with a false smile.

She picked the scarf.

For years afterwards, whenever life had become too gray to bear, Solenne had attempted to remember: that slash of red wool across her mother's skin, skin red like fire, like blood. Memory starves without feeding. By the time Lumi had been born, it had become nothing more than a name.

At school, Lumi learned the official version.

Following the Despair Riots of 2068, the Ministry of Cognitive Harmony claimed they had saved the poor from unnecessary suffering. Full-colour vision, they explained, destabilized low-contribution districts. It disrupted sleep. It bred jealousy. It made people want.

So the Visual Equity Act reclassified colour as a luxury.

Solenne had never been able to choose which part bothered her more: the taking away of colour, or framing it as kindness.

She scrubbed apartments in Chroma Quarter, where colour was owned by those who let fruit rot in silver bowls. She polished gold taps she couldn't see, brushed blue porcelain horses and folded green towels into thirds. Her old, clumsily implant behind her eye occasionally flickered for half a second.

Sometimes there was a lemon blazing in her hand.

There was a red vase flowering on a mantel.

One day a yellow blanket sprung up in a nursery like melted butter, before the pixels adjusted and the room drained of color again. She didn't get up from the floor until the shaking stopped.

She never spoke of it to Lumi. It was like trying to explain Thanksgiving dinner to someone who’s never tasted food.

Solenne returned home that afternoon to find an official document resting in Lumi’s lap like a dead bird.

MANDATORY OPTIC UPDATE: CITIZEN LUMI VALE

COMPLIANCE REQUIRED BY FRIDAY

USE OF FORBIDDEN SPECTRUM AFTER UPDATE WILL CAUSE PERMANENT LOCKOUT AND GUARDIAN FINES

Lumi glanced up. “Tali says after the update, hacks wont work anymore.”

Solenne creased the paper once, fingers sure.

That night, Lumi ate silently, asking for no second helpings. She smoothed her thumb over the corner of the notice over and over as if enough worry could make it different.

“Will it hurt?” Lumi asked.

Solenne studied the tiny spoon her daughter held, cradled like someone pretending they weren’t afraid.

“No,” Solenne said.

“Will I forget the words?”

“No.”

Lumi nodded, but kept her mouth downturned, lips pressed tight together. “But I won’t know if they’re true.”

Solenne had nothing to say to that.

After Lumi fell asleep, Solenne retrieved the tin behind the vent: four credits slips, her mother's ring, and a scrap of paper she'd been toting around for three years.

RAVI. LANTERN MARKET. INQUIRE REGARDING OBSOLETE WEATHER REPAIR.

Ravi was younger than she thought he'd be, with careful hands and eyes that had seen too many frantic mothers.

"No," he said before she could speak.

Solenne placed the notice on his counter.

"She's seven," she informed him.

He read it, then looked away. "It seals her optic channel permanently after it updates. Then no one can see her. Not me. Not anyone else."

"So before then."

Ravi scrubbed both hands across his face. Shelves behind him sagged with dead machinery in the dark: broken tablets, climate rings, filter masks, black-market bulbs wrapped in charcoal. Beside the workbench was a child’s optic ring no larger than a button, smoked inside. Someone had carved MIRA, 6 into the edge of the rim. He saw Solenne looking and slid a cloth over it.

“Her channel is still soft,” he said. “That’s why Friday matters. I can spoof a licensed feed now, but the signal needs a bridge. When the Ministry sweep catches it, the bridge takes the recoil. It scars the implant shut.”

“The burn,” Solenne said.

Ravi nodded.

“Use mine.”

He went very still.

“Whatever colour you feed her,” Solenne said, “I’ll see it too. Let me carry it.”

“Your implant won’t survive,” Ravi said.

“I know.”

“You won’t just go grey again.”

“I know.”

He looked at the ring on the counter. Then at the notice. Then at Solenne.

At last, he closed his hand around the ring.

“Sunset,” he said. “The city’s licensed weather bands open widest then.”

They did it at sunset.

The roof smelled of rust and dried laundry. The Grey District unfolded below in lines of concrete and wire, government glass. Up above it, the clouds were pale gray bleeding into darker gray.

Lumi sat on an upside down crate, small and solemn in her patched coat. Solenne knelt before her. The stolen filament, illegal and delicate, already grew cold behind her ear.

“Watch the sky,” Solenne instructed.

Lumi choked on her words. “Will you be there too?”

“I’m right here.”

Ravi started the hack.

For a moment that seemed to hold its breath forever. Then Lumi gasped. Grey cracked open above them. Gold spilled wide below the horizon. Pink pooled in the clouds, wispy at the edges, richer where they glowed with light. Off the rooftops, a ribbon of sea flickered blue then deepened violet as dusk fell. Even the weeds near the vent glimmered green, willowy and tough, living things amidst concrete.

Solenne’s breath caught.

She had forgotten that colour did not sit on the world.

It entered it.

Lumi’s eyes widened until they seemed too big for her face. “Oh,” she whispered. “It’s far away but touching everything. Like it’s reaching inside me.”

“Blue,” Solenne managed.

Lumi nodded, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Blue is bigger than what they told us.”

Lumi turned slowly, afraid the colours would vanish before she could learn them.

“Pink is red when it doesn’t want to hurt anybody,” she said. “Soft and glowing. Like the inside of a shell.”

Solenne smiled, though the light behind her eyes had begun to burn.

“Orange is heat you can see,” Lumi said. “Like the sun is hugging the buildings goodbye.”

The first siren rose in the distance, thin, far away, almost gentle.

Ravi cursed under his breath but did not stop the feed.

Lumi pointed towards the vent. “Green is what alive looks like when it’s trying. Like it’s pushing up through stone just to breathe.”

The sting sharpened. Solenne tasted metal.

“Keep looking,” she said.

The second siren joined the first.

Lumi clutched Solenne’s sleeve. “Mama?”

“I’m here. Tell me yellow.”

Lumi looked west, where the last light burned along the sea. “Yellow is loud but not mean. Like laughing from very far away.”

The drones appeared over the roofline, three black shapes against the burning sky.

UNLICENSED SPECTRUM EVENT DETECTED. REMAIN STILL.

Ravi stepped back from the console, hands raised.

Solenne did not move.

“Purple,” she said.

Lumi cried openly now. “Purple is blue keeping a secret. Deep and quiet and a little bit magic.”

Boots pounded on the roof. Human officers this time, smooth helmets and faceless. They seized Solenne’s arms.

“Red,” Solenne called.

Lumi looked straight at her, face wet, furious with love.

“Red is scared,” Lumi said. “Red is angry. Red is love when it can’t stay quiet.”

The officers dragged Solenne backward.

She did not fight. She kept her eyes on her daughter.

The roof door swallowed Solenne and the officers.

In the stairwell, grey walls and grey boots closed around her.

They put Solenne in the back of a windowless transport. The doors sealed. The engine hummed.

For a while, she saw nothing.

Then, through a scratch in the metal near the floor, a thin blade of evening slipped in. No colour. Not anymore. Just the leaden grey of a city that had taught itself to call hunger peace.

Solenne closed her eyes.

The colours had already begun to fade: the gold at the horizon, the blue beyond the rooftops, the green insisting itself through stone. But Lumi’s voice stayed clear.

Blue is bigger than what they told us.

Green is what alive looks like when it’s trying.

Red is love when it can’t stay quiet.

High above the Grey District, somewhere, Lumi remained on the roof. Perhaps Ravi had dragged her back up. Or the guards had commanded her to return indoors. Perhaps the sky had already sealed shut.

But Solenne could see her anyway. One small girl with wet cheeks and open eyes, whispering colours under her breath before anyone could take the names from her.

Learning how to keep them.