The Colour of Nothing

by Timothy Collyer

The first time I hid fear, no one noticed.

The current shifted in the nursery shallows—just a reef-groan, a pressure-kick through the coral ribs. Around me, hatchlings flared purple in unison. Their alarm wasn't only colour; it was chemistry. The water thickened with it, bitter on my gills, the taste of panic spreading faster than sight.

Mine did not.

I felt fear cleanly: the tightening along my lateral line, the instinct to clamp my fins and fold into the kelp. But my skin stayed pale green, the harmless shade of attention. No purple bloom. No warning pulse. No call for hands.

An adult swept through moments later, skin already cyan—reassurance broadcast in slow, rhythmic bands. She gathered the purple-bright children first, drawing them close until their fear thinned and the acrid taste faded.

I was left where I was, breathing my own private bitterness.

Later, my mother stroked my browridge and glowed gold—pride, affection, relief. "You didn't panic," she said, and her colour warmed the water like sunlight through eelgrass.

I did not correct her.

Among us, thought is colour. It cannot be hidden. To feel is to signal; to signal is to be known. Privacy is not forbidden—it's simply impossible. Even sleep betrays us: dreams seep out in faint colours, hunger tinting the water saffron, exhaustion turning it slate. In crowded markets you taste what others feel. Joy is sweet-metallic on the tongue. Anger leaves a harsh, peppery burn. Grief tastes of copper.

Fear is purple.

Peace is cyan.

Grief is orange.

Children learn the codes the way we learn currents: by being carried in them.

I learned something else.

I learned that my body could keep a feeling inside without broadcasting it—colour or chemical. The fear still soured the water inside my mouth, but it did not spill into the sea around me. No one near me tasted it. No one saw it.

When you cannot show what you feel, people assume you feel what you show.

That was my first advantage.

It was also my first theft.

—

The archivist Tesh was the first to see the second thing.

I was older then, old enough to be useful but not yet questioned. I'd been sent to the deep library to catalogue memory-shells: coral growths that store recorded cognition—maps, lullabies, procedures—encoded as patterned light.

Tesh handled them slowly. His skin lagged behind his thoughts, colours thickened by age. He took care like it was a moral practice.

As he passed behind me, the library dimmed briefly, shadow sliding across my flank. Something in my head folded inward. A sensation like pressure equalising in a sealed cavity.

My skin went clear.

Not dark. Not white. Transparent, as if the pigment had been switched off at its root. The kelp rack behind me showed faintly through my body. Worse—more wrong—the water around me went neutral. No sweet trace of interest, no salt of concentration. Nothing.

Tesh froze.

His skin flashed purple, fast and involuntary. Fear. Real fear, with the sharp chemical bite of it.

"What did you do?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said, and meant it.

But when my fear rose in response, it stayed inside me. My skin remained Blank. The surrounding water stayed clean.

The apprentice with him backed away, her colour stuttering between silver suspicion and sickly green confusion. Even the memory-shells brightened in their racks, their stored light reacting to movement.

"Do that again," Tesh said, carefully, and his fear-purple strained under a forced thread of cyan. "And the Council will hear of it."

I didn't do it again.

Not there.

But in the days that followed, alone where the reef dropped into colder water, I tried to understand what had happened.

The Blank was not just absence. It was a state—closed circuit, like a current turned inward. I could still feel—fear, curiosity, grief—but nothing leaked. No pigment. No pheromone. No taste.

I learned, slowly, that I could enter it deliberately.

And then—more dangerous—I learned I could leave it deliberately.

I could choose what to show.

I was watching two juveniles fight over a shell. Anger flashed crimson in each of them, peppery-thick in the water. A crowd gathered, drawn by the taste.

I stepped closer, slipped into the Blank, then pushed cyan out over my skin—steady bands, practiced calm. The crowd's agitation softened. The juveniles' crimson thinned, because cyan always spreads if you let it.

Inside me, I felt something else: a thin, bright thrill.

Not power exactly. Not yet.

But the knowledge that the reef responded to what I presented, not what I felt.

That knowledge settled in me like a seed.

—

The Blank wasn't free.

The first sign was temperature. When I held it too long, my skin chilled, chromatophores locked rigid under the surface like muscles clenched without relief. The colder I became, the harder it was to maintain the shut-down. My body wanted to reopen, to dump colour and chemistry into the sea, to equalise.

If I stayed Blank in the deep for more than a few minutes, my fins numbed. My heartbeat slowed. The world narrowed to pressure and pain. Once, I surfaced into the shallows shaking and accidentally burst a ragged flare of purple that tasted like burnt brine. Two passers-by jerked away, startled. I watched their eyes flick to my skin, then to each other—confusion, then the comforting cyan they offered automatically.

They thought I'd had a panic. A normal panic. A readable one.

I took their cyan like a thief takes food.

After that, I practised in short pulses. Ten breaths Blank. Then out. Then back in. I learned how to mask the physical toll: how to shiver without broadcasting distress, how to warm myself by drifting through a thermal seam.

I nearly got caught once.

My mother was swimming with me through the kelp-lanes when a distant reef-crack sent a pressure wave through the city. Around us, bodies lit purple. Fear was everywhere—seen and tasted, a sudden acrid tide.

Mine rose too. Habit made me slam the door shut. Blank.

My mother turned, expecting to read my alarm and match it with her own steadying cyan. Instead she saw nothing. She tasted nothing.

Her skin flickered, just once—purple, sharp and unmistakable—then she forced gold back over it like a cover.

Fear of me.

"Are you—" She stopped. Smiled. The gold held, insisting. We kept swimming.

Behind her gold I could taste something faint now, when she thought she was calm: a trace of suspicion, metallic and cold.

I started to understand that the Blank would not only hide me from others.

It would change what they became around me.

—

There is no word in our language for lie. There has never been need of one.

When guilt rises, it colours the skin and taints the water. When anger flares, it warns others away. When grief comes, it summons comfort. Harm is difficult when every intent announces itself before the act.

So when the Council summoned me, what filled the Hall of Twelve Currents was not outrage first.

It was fear.

A dozen bodies arranged in formal symmetry, each holding official cyan in disciplined bands while purple threaded underneath. Their fear tasted dry, biting, like algae bruised between teeth.

They asked questions. When did it start. Was it controllable. Had I used it.

I answered truthfully. I did not answer completely.

My mother stood at the back, her gold stretched thin. She kept trying to glow courage into the room. I watched her effort like an ache.

"Show us," the eldest councillor signalled.

His skin shifted into a rigid, staccato grey—dead-stone patterning I'd only ever seen on warning tablets at the edge of predator waters.

Containment.

The other councillors synchronised their colour in response: a brief, unified pulse that ran round the crescent like a lock turning.

My skin began to chill before I'd made the choice.

I let the Blank take me.

Gasps. A ripple of silver suspicion. Someone flared crimson.

I pushed cyan outward, deliberately. Calm. Assurance. Slow, rhythmic bands that said peace even as the chill in my skin deepened.

Inside me, fear burned bright purple and private.

The councillor's eyes narrowed. His dead-stone grey held. But at the edges, where discipline frays, I saw a thin orange flicker.

Grief, premature and telling.

"You understand," he said at last, voice low, and the grey pulsed once more: Containment reaffirmed.

"Yes," I said.

They did not name what they were doing. They never would. They called it "care", "guidance", "preservation".

They assigned me to Tesh.

—

When Elder Sio began to fail, the reef changed.

She had been a fixed point: a social map. When memory falters in one of us, it is not private. Confusion shows itself in lagging colour, mismatched chemistry, emotions arriving without cause. It is painful to witness because it cannot be hidden.

Sio's fear came without object. Her grief arrived without loss. Her joy flashed in the wrong places, sweet and startling like fruit in saltwater. The healers wrapped her in communal cyan, but it slid off her mind like light off stone.

By the time Tesh brought me to her dwelling, the water there was colder. The current moved sluggishly through the carved coral, and every breath tasted of iron and old shells.

Sio lay among anemones, her skin thin and unstable. Purple flared, then vanished. Orange followed, then anger, then a sickly, unplaceable green that made her kin flinch because it didn't mean anything coherent. Her pheromones stuttered too—fear without colour, then grief without taste, as if her body's signals had lost their pairing.

She saw me and went still.

Not cyan. Not fear.

Still.

For the first time in days, her output stabilised—not because she was calm, but because she had found a fixed reference: an unreadable surface.

Tesh leaned close. "She's afraid," he murmured. "She doesn't know why. Give her peace."

The healers had been doing that for days. The room was thick with cyan fog—well-meant, exhausting.

But I understood something they didn't.

They were broadcasting what they felt. Their cyan was also fear disguised, grief managed, panic contained for the benefit of everyone watching.

I could offer something else: peace chosen as a gift, not a reflex.

I entered the Blank.

The room reacted instantly—alarm colours, suspicion, a sharp spike of fear from one of Sio's daughters. Someone's grief sharpened into anger at the strangeness of me. The water tasted suddenly crowded.

But Sio's gaze locked onto me, and her own stuttering chemistry quieted, as if the absence gave her mind a place to rest.

My skin chilled. Chromatophores clenched. The metabolic drain started immediately, a slow siphoning heat from my core.

I pushed cyan.

Not communal. Not enforced.

Directed.

Slow, rhythmic, practiced. A muscular lie. Bands of peace.

Beneath my skin, grief burned orange and wild, trapped and invisible. It didn't sweeten the water; it didn't turn copper in anyone's throat. It stayed in me, heavy as silt held behind a dam.

Sio's skin followed the cyan gradually, as if remembering how. Her breathing steadied. The purple thinned. The bitter fear-taste in the room eased.

"There," she whispered. "That's better."

Her hand found mine. Her touch was light, uncertain, the way a person touches a landmark in fog.

"You're quiet," she said. "I like that."

Her colour flickered once—orange, clean and sudden. Recognition. Loss. A moment of full clarity, brief as a fish-flash.

Then it faded.

Not into Blank. Not into a new signal.

Into no signal at all.

The room filled with grief then. Real grief. Orange everywhere, copper-thick in the water. Bodies pressed close. Someone keened in sound rather than colour because colour felt insufficient.

I stayed cyan.

The muscles along my spine began to cramp from the cold. The Blank wanted to collapse. I let it. I let colour and chemistry return, and with them my grief threatened to spill, to tint the room darker.

But Sio was gone. There was no one left to protect with my lie.

—

The Council's response was swift.

They did not accuse me of wrongdoing. They praised my effectiveness. Their cyan was immaculate—calm with a hard edge, like deep water over rock.

"You provided comfort where others could not," the eldest councillor said. "That capacity must be preserved."

Preserved. Not shared.

They spoke of protocols. Of supervision. Of controlled deployment. Of limits and monitoring and authorised use.

Their colours synchronised again as they spoke, a visual consensus: decision as spectacle, unity as control. Behind it, fear still ran in thin purple threads. But there was something else now, faint and undeniable.

Desire.

A tool had revealed itself.

"What you did," one councillor signalled in dead-stone grey, "must not be used without authorisation."

"And if someone needs it?" I asked.

A pause. Silver calculation. The water tasted briefly like coins.

"Then the Council will decide."

I understood then the full cost of the Blank.

Not that it allowed me to lie.

That it made me useful.

They would never trust me. But they would use me anyway.

And if I refused, their fear would become policy.

I let my skin shift—not to cyan, not to gold, but to something new: a muted blend that sat between calm and sorrow. Not a colour they recognised, but one they could feel, uneasily, as a category their bodies did not know how to file.

"I will help," I said. "But not on command."

The chamber stirred. Fear spiked. Someone's grey snapped briefly into crimson before they caught it.

The eldest councillor watched me for a long time. His dead-stone pattern held.

"We will need to study that," he said at last.

Of course they would.

As I left the Hall, my mother reached for me. Her hand hesitated before touching my fin. Her skin betrayed her—just a flicker of purple before she smoothed it back into gold.

Fear of her own child.

In the same instant, I felt a small, ugly thought—quick as a darting fish:

I could make her calm. I could paint cyan over her fear and never let her know.

The thrill flickered again.

I hated it.

I did not do it.

I let her fear exist. I let her gold be strained. I let the truth, unaltered, sit between us.

For the first time, I understood the true nature of privacy.

Not secrecy.

Not deception.

The power to choose when truth should be shared—and when it would only cause harm.

Behind me, the reef resumed its constant exchange: colours blooming and fading, chemistries mingling, every feeling public and therefore shared.

Ahead of me was silence.

And I stepped into it willingly.