It had insinuated blue luxin beneath its very skin. Gavin had seen it before. The process had to be done slowly and carefully enough to not cause infections or rejection, but once begun, it had to be finished quickly. The skin lost feeling and began dying as soon as it was cut off from the body, so the wight began sloughing off rotting skin. This one's forehead had split open, revealing robin's egg blue beneath peeling, necrotic skin. It had drafted blue covers for its eyes arcing from brow to cheekbones in a solid dome so it would effectively always be wearing blue spectacles, but the result made it look like a bug with bulging blue eyes. It was, Gavin had always thought, one of the worst parts of giists trying to remake themselves. If all your skin died, your eyelids died. Even if you could draft a thin blue membrane every time you needed to clear your eyes-and it had to be held blue luxin, because rubbing blue glass against your eyeballs was never a good idea-even if you deal with that, you could never close your eyes to sleep. Even wights needed sleep.

An hour later, as the sun was almost touching the horizon, burning the desert beautiful, Gavin put on his borrowed red spectacles, gathered the red cloak around himself, cracked open a white mag torch, and stepped out in front of the giist.

The blue wight convulsed. Blues hated surprises, hated not having foreseen something, hated having their plans disrupted. But they were also hard to read, the blue perfection of a luxin face preventing facial expression of emotions even as the magic in their veins slowly obliterated their capacity to feel them.

But the surprise lasted only a moment. The giist sprinted straight for Gavin, its skin afire with blue, its eyes literally aglow, buggy, lit from within with refracting blue light. Gavin tossed the mag torch down in the sand in front of himself and threw open his red cloak, taking a wide stance on the side of the dune as the giist charged.

Gavin's hand swept up past the weapons harness, little fingers of red luxin plucking all the tiny daggers from their sheaths. As he took one great step forward with his left foot, he drafted a dozen thin barrels along his arm. Then his right arm whipped forward with all the energy coiled in his body added to the force of his will. The dozen tiny daggers became steel missiles as he flung them. They flew at incredible speed, one after the other.

A blue shield sprang from the wight's left arm and blossomed huge, to catch the splashing fire it expected from a red drafter with a mag torch. Instead, the steel daggers hit with a sound like hail on a tin roof. The shield pitted, cracked, cracked wide, and gaped open. The last three daggers sailed cleanly through. The first struck its cheek and deflected off its carapace. The next cut only the air next to its neck, and the last buried itself in the wight's shoulder.

The giist had already begun its counterstroke, though. It flung its right fist forward and five enormous spikes formed in the air around its hand and stabbed for Gavin's stomach in a line so that even if he moved left or right, he'd still be skewered.

Gavin cheated, of course. He drafted a solid platform beneath the sand to give himself a solid surface to jump off of and dove down the dune, flipping and landing in a great slide down the dune's face.

The giist whipped around, dropping its luxin spears and drafting a blue great sword in their place. It saw that Gavin had lost his spectacles in his dive, and it twitched a smile. Its cheek had been sliced by Gavin's dagger, and a flap of skin peeled open, drooping toward earth, showing a crosshatched network of blood vessels and blue luxin, though the luxin was cracked and broken at the point of impact, capillaries oozing blood. The dagger in its left shoulder seemed to be hampering its motion, but it was nothing lethal.

"You reds," the giist said, its voice gravelly, as if it hadn't spoken in some time. "So impulsive. You thought you could take me, alone, just because it's sunset in a desert?"

Gavin glanced at his spectacles lying on the sand above him. The giist saw it and swung its great sword. The blade elongated in midair, closing the full five paces, and smashed the red spectacles to bits, then shortened again.

"You should leave murdering the Unchained to your Prism," the giist said.

The Unchained?

Gavin said, "They told us the Prism was too important for you. They told us we should be able to handle one blue wight in the middle of a desert. They said Rondar Wit wasn't that gifted."

The giist laughed. "Was that supposed to make me angry? I'm not Rondar any longer. The Prism's empire crumbles over your head, slave. Join us. See what it is to be free. You have, what, perhaps five years left? Not long, not even for a drafter in their world. Why die for their false god? Why die for their lies? Why die, ever?"

The giist was trying to recruit him? This was different. Gavin kept his eyes squinted. The less the giist saw his eyes, the less likely it was to notice how odd they were. "False god?" Gavin asked. Immortality?

Slimy held blue luxin swiped along the insides of its bug eyes, from the inner corner to the outer. Blinking. "Surely you don't believe in Orholam? Are you all corrupt, or just stupid? If Orholam himself chooses the Prism as the Chromeria has preached since Lucidonius, how could there be two Prisms in one generation? Or are you one of the mental cowards who shrugs and calls it a mystery, who says Orholam's ways are ineffable?"

It was one thing for a color wight to run: not even blues were immune to cowardice. But an attack on Orholam himself was a heresy that cut to the root of the world. If you called Orholam a fraud, and said everyone in power must know it, the Chromeria became the purveyor of lies, an oppressor who stole from you, not a friend who needed your help to sustain their worthy efforts. "I haven't believed in Orholam for years," Gavin said, honestly. "But why trade one superstition for another?"

The giist glanced at Gavin's shirt, noticing the buttons weren't done properly. Good. Any time it spent looking at his buttons was time it didn't spend looking at his eyes. "You stop believing lies so you can believe the truth, not so you can believe nothing at all. King Garadul has…" He trailed off, looking at Gavin suspiciously. Putting something together.

"King Garadul, is he who leads the Unchained?" Gavin asked.

"Who are you?" it demanded. "You aren't nervous. And you should be." It tore the dagger out of its shoulder, sealed the wound, and tossed the dagger aside. It drew a long, ball-handled matchlock pistol from the ragged pouch, began loading in a precise manner with the odd, quick, but absentminded mode blue wights sometimes had. It used blue luxin like an extension of its hands. Blue luxin ramrod, blue luxin fingers to hold the slow match, blue luxin to draw out the powder horn and a lead ball. It grabbed the still-burning mag torch from the sand and held it up to light the slow match. "Foolish, rash red drafter," the giist said, glancing down at Gavin's misbuttoned shirt. "You should always spend the extra to buy a mag torch in your own color."

"I did," Gavin said.

The giist's eyes snapped from the white torch to Gavin's eyes. Even through the buggy eye cover and the frozen luxin face, Gavin read realization in every line of the giist's body.

Before it could move, Gavin leapt forward with an insane scream.

Taken off guard, the giist lost concentration on the luxin hand holding the mag torch, and that hand disintegrated, dropping the flaming brand. The giist didn't forget its great sword or the pistol, though. It lifted the blade to impale Gavin, raised the pistol.

Drafting parrying sticks of blue luxin in each hand, Gavin slapped the blade aside. He flung the giist's hands wide. Letting the parrying sticks disintegrate, he drafted. A narrow blue blade sprang from his palm. He stepped close, inside the blue wight's arms even as the pistol's hammer clicked and the match slapped down. He slammed blade and palm into the giist's chest, its carapace yielding with a popping sound. Gavin shed the remaining blue luxin with a flick of his arms and pulled in the hottest sub-reds he could handle into each hand. Flames curled around his fists as he clenched them.