Wyxie's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Two days after Jordan's clinic visit, Dr. Corino climbed back to the sanctuary deck with a fresh data slate and a woman Wyxie did not know. She was thin, dressed in gray, and her mind hit Wyxie the moment she stepped through the door. Blue. Deep blue, the color of the grief Wyxie had catalogued a hundred times through the reflective dome. Wyxie almost said so out loud. Then Dr. Corino held up a hand. "Wait," he said. "Before you read her. I need to test something." He set the slate on the rail and did not turn it on. "You told me last week you can tell red-hot-angry from cold-blue-sad. I believe you. But I have been thinking about Jordan, and about the words you used, and I think you are reading one color where there are two." Wyxie tilted their head. The woman sat on the bench without being asked. Her blue thickened. Wyxie pressed gently at the edge of her mind and found what they always found: cold, heavy, slow. Grief. They said so. Dr. Corino nodded once, the way he nodded at a scan he did not trust. "Her son died four months ago.” He looked at Wyxie carefully. "She has not slept a full night since. Tell me what color that is." Wyxie looked again. The blue was still there, wide and cold. But underneath, threaded through it like a second current, was something Wyxie had been reading as part of the blue. It was not cold. It was hot in a small, hidden way, and it pointed inward. Every time the woman thought of her son, the hot thread pulled tight and the blue flared around it to hide it. Wyxie had been seeing one color because the two moved together. Wyxie said, slowly, "There is a hot part inside the cold part. The hot part is her looking at herself. The cold part is her looking at him." Dr. Corino wrote that down. He said, "The cold is grief. The hot is guilt. They braid. In humans they almost always braid." He said the two words the way he said the names of bones. Wyxie repeated them. Grief. Guilt. The colors separated in Wyxie's sight and did not go back together. A small winged creature drifted past the dome outside, and a striped caterpillar inched along the rail, and Wyxie noticed neither. Dr. Corino asked three more questions and wrote the answers. Before he left he said, "You saw two things where I only had one word. Next time bring me the second word first." Wyxie stayed on the deck a long while. Every human mind below the sanctuary now looked doubled. Wyxie did not yet know the names for most of the new threads. That was the next problem.