Graffita Neova's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

Vandal's tail lit the last stretch of black. Three figures pressed against a stone wall, hands over their eyes. Graffita reached for her wrist to paint them a safe path. Her ink was gone. She had spread every drop on Hazy's bloom behind her. She stood in front of the trapped ones with empty skin and no way to lead them out. "I have nothing," she said. "I can't build the color for them." Green light splashed the wall. Two paint spirits stepped out of the passage behind her. One dripped acid green from a spray can. That was Mazy, the artist Graffita had once fought over a ruined mural, now her partner in the shade-climbing work. The other glowed neon green and yellow, wrong and loud. Graffita had never met her. "Empty wall," the neon spirit said. She stared at the trapped figures, not at Graffita. "Followed the light. Thought it led somewhere I could paint." "Neomi," Mazy said. "She chases blank walls. Won't stop." Graffita's chest tightened. Green was bright. Bright color erased shadow-folk. "You can't paint here," she said. "Your color will burn them." Neomi looked at the shaking figures. "Then start dark," she said flat. "You do it. I mix." Graffita understood. Her wrist was empty, but Neomi carried color. She could not paint the gradient herself, so she would guide the hand that could. "Dark first," Graffita said. "You climb slow. Black, then gray, then your green. Not before." Mazy pressed her can to the stone and laid a black line, thin and dull. The nearest figure lowered one hand. Graffita watched the dark shade hold. "More," she said. Mazy dragged the line toward the exit. Neomi added gray above it, then a hint of dim green, careful, no bright yet. The trapped ones followed. Their hands came down. They shuffled along the climbing color, one step, then two. Graffita walked backward before them, calling the shades. "Gray now. Now the green. Slow." Neomi's neon glowed loud at the top of the gradient, and the figures did not flinch. The dark had carried them up to it. At the passage mouth the black thinned. The three figures stepped past Hazy's bloom into the gray outer light. They stood blinking, whole. Graffita counted them. All out. Mazy capped her can. Neomi did not smile. She stared back into the dark, then at the stone wall where the gradient still glowed. "You had ink for one job," Neomi said. "Used it on the flower. Left the rest to us." She wiped green from her hands. "City's got a wall like this. Blank three years. Held clean on purpose." Graffita's ink was spent, but the mural was not finished. Neomi's words settled cold. Somewhere a wall waited empty, kept empty by a hand she did not know. The trapped were free. The question of who guarded that wall was not.