Fringe

Fringe had learned this about herself before she understood it about the world.

Her family were the still-watchers, chameleons who could sit motionless for hours reading the light. And little Fringe had grown up embarrassed — she could never tell anyone her "real" color, because it kept seeming to change, and she thought that meant she didn't know herself. Other creatures had one clear color. Hers slipped around depending on where she sat.

Her grandmother, an ancient chameleon gone silver at the edges, found her fretting on a leaf that made her look nothing like she'd looked an hour before. She didn't tell Fringe to pick a color and stick to it.

"You think your color's unreliable," she said. "It isn't. Your color is steady. It's the reading that shifts — and it shifts for everyone, on everything, all the time. No eye reads a color alone, little one. Every eye reads it against its neighbors, and lets the neighbors tip the scale." She'd shifted onto a dark branch, and her own silver looked suddenly bright. "It's not a flaw in you. It's how seeing works. Color isn't a thing that lives in you. It's a comparison your watcher makes — you, against what's beside you."

And the embarrassment had lifted. Fringe's color wasn't slippery. Everyone's reading was. She just happened to be the one who could make it obvious.

She walked to IllusionForge at twelve, because a place that studied how eyes get fooled ought to understand the trick her own skin played every day.

Veil, the mentor who ran the studios, met her at the door and asked one question. "Show me a color that changes without changing."

Fringe didn't answer in words. She laid a small gray tile on a white cloth, where it looked dark — then slid the same tile onto a black cloth, where it looked pale and bright. Same tile. Two colors. She looked up. "It never changed. Only its neighbor did. And the neighbor did all the talking."

Veil studied the tile a long moment, sliding it back and forth between the cloths, watching it darken and lighten and darken again though nothing about it moved.

"You belong here," Veil said.

Fringe's studio was full of colors that were secretly arguments with their surroundings.

A boy came in one afternoon, exasperated, holding two paint chips. "I bought this gray for my room," he said, "and it looked perfect in the store — a nice warm gray. I got it home and it's blue. Cold blue. The store scammed me. Same chip! I checked!"

Fringe knew that particular betrayal. She'd felt it every time a new leaf made a liar of her skin.

"Nobody scammed you," she said. "Bring the chip here." She set it on a warm, yellowy wall, and it went warm and gray. She moved it to a cool white one, and it turned faintly blue. The boy gaped. "The store's walls were warm-colored," Fringe said. "So your eye, comparing the chip to that warm fringe, read it warm. Your room's walls are cool. So against them, the same chip reads cool. The chip is loyal. Your eye keeps changing sides — because it never judges a color alone. It always asks, compared to what's around it? And answers based on the neighbors."

"So which color is it really?" the boy demanded.

"Both. Neither. It's whatever it is next to." Fringe swiveled one eye at him, amused. "That's not the paint lying. That's your eye telling the truth — the truth that color is always a comparison, never a fact all by itself."