Wyxie pressed close to the curved metal wall of the research station, watching three humans argue near the entrance. Their thoughts blazed in overlapping colors—red fury, yellow anxiety, green envy all tangled together like vines in a storm. This was why Wyxie had left the singing forests behind. But the humans spotted movement and turned toward Wyxie's hiding spot. Their colors shifted instantly to gray fear, and they backed away fast. Wyxie needed somewhere better—a place where humans couldn't see them watching. The wildlife sanctuary sat just beyond the research station, its domed walls transparent from the inside but reflective outside. Wyxie slipped through the entrance and climbed to the upper observation deck. Below, humans walked past the building, their minds blooming with colors they didn't even know they felt. Perfect. Wyxie could study them for hours here, collecting every shade of feeling without triggering their fear response.

Wyxie was cataloguing a woman's grief-blue thoughts through the sanctuary dome when the door below slammed open. Boots pounded up the ramp. Dr. Mateo Corino climbed onto the observation deck, chest heaving, his glasses fogged. Wyxie liked him. He was the only human who had ever asked before Wyxie touched his mind. Now his own thoughts poured out unshielded, a sick yellow spiraling into black. "Wyxie. I need you." He set a data slate on the rail and did not look at it. "Jordan Jenkins. Something is wrong inside his head. He talks about colors nobody else sees, and yesterday he stopped mid-sentence and forgot his own name for eleven seconds. I timed it. Then he laughed. I have run every scan I know. The scans say he is healthy. He is not healthy. He is coming apart like wet paper, and I can measure the tearing but I cannot see it. You can see it. Please." Wyxie followed him down to the clinic at the edge of the sanctuary grounds. Jordan sat on a low bench, huge red hands folded, grinning at the ceiling. His thoughts hit Wyxie like a shattered window. Most human minds were puzzle-boxes, feelings tucked inside feelings. Jordan's mind had no boxes left. Every drawer was open at once. Joy, terror, wonder, and a dull gray leak underneath that Wyxie had never seen before. The gray was eating the edges of the other colors. Wyxie pressed closer with their mind and found the source: a thin thread of thought that kept trying to say I am Jordan and dissolving before it finished. Each time it failed, more gray spread. Wyxie understood then. It was not a disease. It was the shape of his new sight tearing the shape of his old self. He was seeing too much and remembering too little, and the two were pulling against each other. Wyxie told Dr. Corino, slowly, exactly that. The words came out clumsy. Wyxie had never had to translate a color before. Dr. Corino wrote it down. He asked three careful questions and wrote those answers too. Then he thanked Wyxie plainly, the way he stated everything, and said he could build around the tear now that he knew where it was. Jordan looked at Wyxie and said, "Oh! You saw it, didn't you, the gray part, the part that keeps forgetting?" and then his grin faltered and he asked who Wyxie was. Wyxie stood very still. They had named a human feeling out loud and a human had used the name. The arc goal moved one notch closer. But Jordan's gray was already wider than it had been ten minutes ago, and Dr. Corino was writing faster, and Wyxie understood that seeing the tear was not the same as closing it.

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.