I had forgotten that although Aubrey was spotted Green, he was the Lemon in Lemon-Skye. A Yellow through and through.

Another couple had entered the room. I recognized the woman because Tommo had pointed her out at the Fallen Man. They were Doug and Daisy Crimson’s parents. The father was a trifle somber-looking and had the unmistakable air of a senior monitor passed over for promotion. He also had an annoying habit of constantly looking about when being conversed with—as though there might be a more interesting conversation going on elsewhere.

“This is Edward Russett,” said Aubrey as they walked over. “I was just telling him how dangerous lightning was.”

There was a brief round of hand shaking and pleasantries in which I could sense they were studying me intensely on the off-chance that I stayed. Like their son, I was potentially a strong Red.

“Lightning? I’d be more concerned about swans. And the Riffraff.”

“Do you know anything about the Riffraff?” I asked, trying to make it sound like an intelligent question, and not the sarcastic remark I intended it to be.

“I’m not a big fact person,” said Mr. Crimson, who was honest, even if a twit. “Unproved speculation is more my thing. But Mrs. Gamboge knows a bit, don’t you, ma’am?”

I hadn’t noticed that the Yellow prefect had arrived, notebook in hand. It was usual for a prefect to be present to take minutes for the faculty’s record, as “great and important thoughts” sometimes emerged from the meetings. Thankfully, Courtland didn’t seem to be with her.

Sally Gamboge moved into the center of the room. She seemed marginally less unpleasant than usual, but that wasn’t saying much. Although she was not an ugly woman, her demeanor had soured her appearance into one that generated only mistrust. But she had my full attention, and my father’s. The rest had heard the story before, but stood in respectful silence regardless.

“I was visiting my sister in Yellopolis last year,” she said. “They’d had problems with Riffraff camping close enough to raid crops at dawn and dusk when no one was about, so they set a few snares around the Outer Markers. Astonishingly, they actually caught one.”

“What did it look like?”

“Scruffy beast. Unwashed, covered in lice, bad teeth, stained pinafore, torn dress and distinctly unshiny shoes—subhuman, if you ask me.”

“Could it have been Nightloss suffering from advanced nyctopsychosis?” asked my father, who, like most people, had seen or personally experienced the effects of a night panic: quivering, palpitations, irrational shouting, dissociation from reality and finally insanity.

“It didn’t have a postcode,” replied the Yellow prefect, tapping her left clavicle. “I checked when they stripped it off to hose it down.”

“Could it talk?” asked Lucy.

“A gutter mix of tongues,” replied Gamboge expertly, taking another sip of her yellow-tinged elderflower cordial. “Many of the nouns were s lang in origin, with the grammatical construction similar to our modern tongue, but with the sort of frightful mispronunciations one would expect from someone without access to proper schooling. I could understand part of what she was saying, but the language was so peppered with obscenities of the worst possible kind that it was barely worth trying to understand her at all.”

“A savage,” remarked Mr. Lemon-Skye with a shiver.

“Quite so,” replied Gamboge, “yet oddly enough, it did repeat a man’s name numerous times. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought it capable of a monogamous relationship.”

There was polite laughter at the somewhat fanciful notion, although I didn’t join in myself.

“But here’s the curious part,” continued Mrs. Gamboge. “The creature had lost part of its foot in the snare, and within a day infection set in. It grew listless, went pale and moaned in a most pathetic manner until it fell unconscious and died. It was all over in three days.”

“You mean,” said Lucy, “it didn’t catch traumatic Mildew?”

“Not a spore in sight. If any civilized person had suffered physical damage as bad as that, he’d have been carried off by Variant-T in a twinkling.”

The society went silent as they mused upon the possibility that the Riffraff had immunity from the Rot, excepting Granny Crimson, who told everyone she had just seen a bee fly past the window.

“I understand that some villages actually trade with the Riffraff,” announced Mrs. Ochre, being the perfect hostess and filling the hole in the conversation. “My sister Betsy lives in Hennarington on the Honeybun Peninsula, and they said the Riffraff leave sacks of sorted blue scrap at the Outer Markers, which they trade for semolina, Ovaltine and gravy granules.”

“If that’s true,” Aubrey replied, “one would have to come to the rather astonishing conclusion that the Riffraff may have a rudimentary understanding of color.”

Everyone nodded sagely in agreement.

“I have been studying Homo feralensis for many years,” remarked Mrs. Gamboge, “and I firmly adhere to the theory that they are Greys who have simply dropped the short distance into savagery. Without the stabilizing hand of Munsell’s Chromatic ideology, we would be like them—ignorant, filthy and bestial.”

“Is it true they eat their own babies?” asked Mrs. Crimson.

“It is absolutely true—and any other babies they can get hold of. Some say they produce babies only to eat.”

“How could feral Greys have a rudimentary sense of color?” I asked.

Mrs. Gamboge fixed me with an icy stare and announced in a doom-laden voice, “By eating the brains of those they slaughter, in order to inherit their Chromatic cognicity.”

“Eat their brains?” echoed Mrs. Ochre in a quavering voice, breaking the stunned silence that followed.

“Without a doubt,” murmured Mrs. Gamboge, “and with a spoon—the instrument of the truly barbarous.”

“Goodness!” Mrs. Lemon-Skye exclaimed. “Perhaps that’s why Harmony left spoons off the list of manufactured goods.”

“Truly, Munsell works in mysterious ways,” announced Mr. Crimson.

“The sooner we deal with the Riffraff problem once and for all,” continued Mrs. Gamboge, who was eager to drive her point home, “the sooner we can sleep safe in our beds at night.”

A chorus of agreement greeted this sentiment, followed by a long pause as everyone presumably thought about how lucky they were to be living within such a safe, ordered civilization. Except me, who was thinking about how I already slept safe in my bed.

“What utter balls!” came a loud and gravelly voice.

“Who dares to use such lang—” Mrs. Gamboge began, but she stopped when she saw it was the Apocryphal man, and changed the comment into a cough, while everyone stared at their drinks, or at the walls, or something.

Mrs. Ochre, attempting some misdirection, decided we should be seated. “Time for dinner,” she announced, clapping her hands together. “It’s boy-girl-boy-girl-boy-girl.”