People stared now. They stared and refused to stop. The blemishes that had begun to form on her skin in angry, dark grays six months ago were spreading up her neck, and a small but growing one rested just under her right eye, marring her previously smooth, pale gray tones.
People whispered. She could hear. She looked like her father had before… She knew it, but it called to her.
The blackness of their world was empty now. The deep, warm black of her bed didn’t soothe her to sleep anymore. The dark gray veneer of the cabinet no longer protected her belongings. The paler gray fish kept dying – only a morbid reminder of things lost.
People lost.
Everything was black. Their eyes had adjusted to the dark long ago, so the ignorant didn’t know anything else. Black comforted them. Black was home. Black was safe. But now it was everything she feared.
School sent her home with another pamphlet on preventing venenum lucem. She promptly dropped it in the trash along with the others. The first had come a few weeks ago when a spot appeared on her hand. A girl had actually screamed at the sight.
They called her mother yesterday, but she didn’t listen to the lectures from the counselor nor did she listen to her mother.
After school she found herself at the barrier the farming men used. They’d just returned from a day’s labor. Some of them bore similar spots, but they weren’t like her. She pushed open the gate, a gradient of dark to light before her.
She emerged from a long tunnel into blazing sunlight. The sky smiled down at her, welcoming her back home. The clouds floated across, forming fantastic shapes of imaginary creatures: elephants, pandas, even horses. She lay on a hard rock with a point driving into her back, but it could’ve been a feather for all the notice she took of it.
It started in her stomach, a kind of kindling golden feeling, rising up her torso, filling her chest, engulfing her heart, until it progressed to become the first smile of the day, lighting up her entire face.
She remembered the first time she saw the light, the real light, not some horrible, garbled image of light gray skies, depicting the dangers of the outside world, the kind she saw at school. Her father stepped beyond the tunnel to soak in the brilliant rays of sunshine, while she remained cast in shade. Slowly, eyes squinted, she reached out two fingers. The warmth washed over her fingertips from the bright pain that was everywhere in front of her. That’s all she would risk in the light that first time, even as her father beamed, energized. Her eyes hurt, springing up with tears, so she closed them, but just before she did, she caught sight of a world that wasn’t gray or black.
There were rich, warm colors all around, bathing in the sunlight. Dazzling orange and yellow lit up the sky. Blues streaked along breaking at clumps of purest white floating high above. Greens covered the ground, rising in sharp blades and growing up into browns of bark and back to dark emerald leaves. Her sharp intake of breath drew her father’s attention. That first time she was relieved when his large hand clasped her smaller one and pulled her back to the safety and comfort of black.
She hadn’t known then, but now she did.
Soon the sun began to sink beyond the horizon, shooting streaks of orange and pink through the clouds like a million streamers celebrating the last light of the day. She slowly picked herself up off of her rock, whispered goodbyes and promises of returning, and retired to the mouth of the tunnel.
The walk back to the dark cold stabbed her as it had every time. After each step she conjured images of her mother, of her neighbors, of Peter. If she didn’t, she wasn’t sure if she could go on down.
When she arrived home, Peter sat on the steps leading up to her gray, gray door. His face was long and empty.
“Hello.” She smiled, a very different smile than before. This smile held no power, not the power to cover up the spots on her cheeks, not the power to convince him she was anything like before.
“Hi.” He smiled too, and his smile seemed just as false as hers. “We need to talk,” he added.
“Okay.” She sat on the step next to him, dropping her book bag to the ground with a hard thud. No one was in sight. The street stood vast and empty before them, a large, dark mass swallowing everything in sight. Not a single pinprick of light to break the endless dark.
“Why do you do this?” His eyes just stared and stared, like everyone else, at the spot on her hand.
They’d had this conversation a million times before, and she could never explain in a way that he would understand. So she’d given up. “I don’t know,” she lied. 
“I know you just came back. Why? To yourself?” She didn’t react. “To your mother?” Still no reaction. “To me?”
After a brief silence, he sighed. “You need help.”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s not healthy. What about what happened to your father? You need to admit it. You have an addiction.”
“It’s natural. We aren’t meant to live like this, with only darkness. How can you stand it?” She hadn’t meant to lash out, but her voice rose, carrying across the black street.
His eyes were blank. He didn’t understand. He used to wear the grandest smile of gray teeth, sing the loudest, off-key songs, and learn with the most vigor, but now as he looked at her, he didn’t look like the best anymore, like he had the most promising, happy future ahead of him.
“You’re my best friend. I just… Please,” he trailed off.
They stared at each other. There was nothing left to say, so he stood and departed, disappearing into the black.
The door slammed behind her, and the book bag lay forgotten on the bottom-most step. She slumped onto her black bed, flopped just like the dead fish a few feet away. Her hair fell about her face and covered the pillow as she cried and cried because she knew why Peter was the saddest person in the city, and it was all her fault. It would be better just to be gone. She was a daughter of the light. It was where she belonged.
---
But the barrier gate wouldn’t budge this time. She raked her fingers across the slick metal again and again until the alarms began. The patrol was coming.
Her feet pounded on the hard ash pavement. She could hear the distant shouts while the sound of the alarm reverberated through the air. No matter which street she turned down the alarm wailed and wailed until she couldn’t run anymore.
---
When she woke up, there was no bright light. Gray straps locked her in bed and hulking figures surrounded her. Her mother cried, holding her hand, and her best friend looked at her like a stranger. She screamed. They quieted her, bound her mouth, pumped gray fluid into her veins to fog her mind, but she knew where she was. She was never going to leave again, and all the light and plants and trees and animals would cease to exist because there would be no one left to see them.