After the Colours

“It didn’t end with the light going out—it ended with knowing the world isn’t sealed shut like they told us.”

Its colours spun more slowly now — a kind of slowing heartbeat made of light. The electric intensity that had first torn through reality had gentled, settled into a rhythm that seemed almost alive, almost conscious. The sharp sparking that had come with its birth had faded to a low shimmer, like sunlight behind thick clouds. Like the last gasps of something extraordinary preparing to leave our world behind.

The air around it hummed with a sound too low to hear but possible to feel—a vibration that resonated in my teeth, in my bones, in the hollow spaces behind my eyes. It made my skin prickle with goosebumps despite the warmth of the morning that was slowly creeping across the landscape.

The man was gone.

He had stepped through — silent, purposeful — as if the tearing of reality was as ordinary to him as opening a front gate. He hadn't looked back. He hadn't reached for the girl. He hadn't checked to see if she would follow. He had simply passed through the swirling door and vanished, swallowed by light that made no sound and cast no shadow. Certain, perhaps, that what belonged to him would follow.

She was still there.

Crumpled near the rusted beam, her knees bent beneath her at the wrong angles, one hand sunk into the dirt. Her body looked wrong somehow—not just injured or exhausted, but subtly askew, as if the proportions of her limbs had been altered by whatever had happened to her. Her head hung forward, hair veiling her face, her shoulders trembling.

For a few seconds — or maybe a whole minute — she didn't move.

Time seemed to stretch and contract, elastic and unreliable. Each heartbeat lasted an eternity; each breath a lifetime. The world beyond our hiding place had taken on a dreamlike quality, events unfolding with the terrible logic of nightmares.

I thought she might have fallen unconscious. Or… something worse. Something final. Something that would leave her body empty on this side of the colours while whatever made her her had already been claimed by the man with the empty eyes.

But then she stirred.

Just a little.

A movement so small it might have been missed if we hadn't been watching so intently, frozen in our hiding place, barely daring to breathe. Her fingers curled slightly, pressing into the dirt like she was remembering how to touch something. As if she were relearning the basic mechanics of having a body. Her spine wavered, lifting a little, and her head turned — slowly, hesitantly — toward the colours. The movement was unsteady, puppet-like, as if the connection between intention and action had been damaged.

Then, like she had forgotten where she was, her face turned a little more.

And she looked at us.

She didn't see us. Not properly. I don't think so.

Her eyes were half-lidded, unfocused, the gaze of someone not fully present in their own body. But they swept across the building's walls — and for the briefest moment, they seemed to land on the very spot where I was watching. A whisper of awareness, a flicker of consciousness, like a candle flame about to be extinguished.

Even though I knew she couldn't see me, I held my breath. My lungs seized, refusing to draw air. My heart, which had been pounding just moments before, seemed to stutter and pause.

She opened her mouth.

No sound came out.

Not a scream. Not a plea. Just air. A silent exhalation, as if even her voice had been stolen from her. Or perhaps she no longer remembered how to use it.

A dry, broken movement of lips — like a question left too long in the cold. Like words that had waited so long to be spoken that they had forgotten their own shapes.

Then her head lolled again.

The moment of almost-awareness gone, snuffed out like a match in a windstorm. Her body sagged forward, almost folding at the waist, and her arms hung like ropes. Limp, useless appendages no longer under her control.

She wasn't going to move.

Not of her own volition. Not under her own power. Whatever spark of herself remained wasn't enough to propel her body away from the colours, away from the man who had claimed her.

And I wanted to crawl out there, to run to her, to say Are you okay? We'll help you. You don't have to go. We can hide you. We can save you. The urge to move was so strong it felt like physical pain, like bands tightening around my chest, like fire in my veins.

But my legs wouldn't move.

And neither did Mack.

We just sat there.

Frozen.

Paralysed by a fear deeper than thought, older than language. The primal, instinctive knowledge that to reveal ourselves would be to share her fate. That whatever had taken her would take us too, if it knew we existed. If it decided we mattered.

Because we knew. Deep down, we knew.

She wasn't going to escape.

Had never had a chance of escaping.

Had been marked and chosen and claimed long before we'd ever laid eyes on her. Long before we'd hidden in this abandoned building at the edge of nowhere. Long before we could have possibly intervened, even if we'd had the courage, the strength, the power to do so.

From within the colours, something moved.

A shape — an arm — reached back through. Not the entire man, not his face or body or those terrible empty eyes. Just his arm, extending from the swirling light as if the colours were a window and he were reaching through from some adjacent room.

Not like a rescue.

Not like an embrace.

Not with any gentleness or comfort or humanity.

The man's hand emerged, pale and steady, fingers spread wide. It reached down, slipped beneath her arms, and — without ceremony, without pause — dragged her through. The movement was the action of someone who had done this before, who would do it again, who saw nothing remarkable or troubling in what he was doing.

Her legs left the ground in a limp trail of dust. Her feet dragging furrows in the red earth, marking her passage, her unwilling journey. The last evidence that she had ever existed in our world at all.

Her body passed through the surface of the colours like it was water, like the world itself had become soft and bendable. The laws of physics yielding to something older, something more fundamental. The sparking edge flared for a moment where her knee touched it — a flicker of green and gold — then settled. As if reality itself was acknowledging the transgression, protesting briefly before accepting it.

The hand disappeared.

She was gone.

Taken to wherever he had come from. To wherever the other side led. To a place I couldn't imagine and didn't want to. A place that was not a place, a direction that was not a direction. Somewhere beyond the maps, beyond the stars, beyond everything I had ever been taught was real.

The light began to fade.

Slowly at first, then with certainty. Like a door closing, like a eye shutting, like a possibility being withdrawn.

The colours dimmed.

The sparks stopped.

The edges of the colours drew inward, shrinking until there was only a flicker of red — then blue — then nothing. The tear in reality mending itself, the wound closing, leaving no scar, no evidence that it had ever existed at all.

It vanished.

Just like that.

No bang. No hiss. No afterglow. No dramatic finale to mark something so impossible, so world-shattering. Just absence where presence had been. Ordinary where extraordinary had reigned.

The space where the colours had been was just wall again. Rusted, dented, stained. The same wall that had been there before, unchanged by what had passed through it. As if our world had already forgotten the violation, had already moved on, had already decided that what had happened was not worth remembering.

The wind died.

The air returned.

The strange scents dissipated, replaced by the familiar smells of dust and rust and dry scrub. The sounds of early morning crept back in—the distant call of a bird, the rustling of wind through dead grass, the soft creaking of the abandoned building as the temperature began to rise.

And the world acted like nothing had happened.

Like a girl hadn't just been taken through a door that shouldn't exist. Like a man with vacant eyes hadn't just violated every law of nature. Like the universe hadn't just proven itself larger, stranger, and more terrifying than I had ever imagined.

But I knew.

I knew I had watched someone be taken.

Not kidnapped, like in the stories on the news where people are grabbed from streets or playgrounds. Not in the ordinary, human way that was already frightening enough.

Not chased.

Not even forced, really.

Just… claimed.

Removed.

Like a bookmark being pulled from a page that would never be opened again. Like a stone being plucked from a riverbed, leaving only the smooth depression where it had rested, quickly filling with sand until there was no evidence it had ever been there at all.

And now that page would never be found again.

That person—that girl with no name, whose face I'd barely seen—was gone from our world entirely. Erased not just from life but from reality itself. Taken somewhere beyond reach, beyond help, beyond even the understanding of what had happened to her.

My hands were shaking. My whole body trembled with a fear so deep it felt like it had become part of me, had rewired my nervous system, had changed the very composition of my blood. I was aware suddenly of how small I was. How fragile. How utterly, completely unprepared for a world where such things could happen.

Beside me, Mack's breathing had gone shallow. His hand still gripped mine, but it felt cold now, clammy with the sweat of terror. I couldn't see his face clearly in the dim light of our hiding place, but I could feel the rigidity of his body, the absolute stillness of someone who has seen something they were never meant to see.

We didn't speak. What words could possibly contain what we had witnessed? What language could hold the knowledge that the world was not what we had thought it was? That reality itself was permeable, negotiable, vulnerable to forces we couldn't comprehend?

Instead, we huddled closer in the darkness, two children alone at the edge of the outback, newly aware that the boundary between the known and the unknown was far thinner, far more easily breached, than anyone had ever told us.

And that sometimes, things come through from the other side.

Things that look human, but aren't. Things that collect people, like specimens. Things that see you, mark you, and then—if you're lucky—decide you aren't worth claiming.

Not yet, anyway.