Free Selling Out by Justina Robson Page A

her legs was streaked with gore and the synthetic skin looked as waxy and ashen as the real thing. The stain on her hair and face where she had been magically scarred stood out in livid contrast to the blue-green demon blood that had splattered her from head to foot. Her arms were draped with towels and Sorcha’s discarded clothes, each one sticking out to the side like a rail. She looked like a demented robot maid. She let her arms fall and everything slid off them. “What do my colours say?” she asked, having a dim memory of going into a department store with her mother and some woman there talking about colours. Something to do with what you should wear. The demon world was saturated with colour and everything meant something. It was not what you wore. It was what you were.
    Sorcha gave her a critical look from top to toe. “Your colours say, Here comes some bad-ass bitch!” She laughed and slipped her elegant little clawed feet into high-heeled ruby mules. “That doesn’t make you smile?”
    Lila thought it over. “What do your colours say?”
    “My colours say I am a raw creative force of nature—that’s the impasto statement, the primary colours, always. Black is the colour of the Void, the final and the eternal, the ever-rising and the ever-falling rhythms of life and death. But I’m not just black; it’s a rare thing to be one colour. I have this red sheen which is all good luck and friendliness. It’s a dark red so I have lots of passion, but it’s still red so I’m a civilised queen of what she surveys, not some green-hide barbarian. Then my hair is the fire of the day, showing my mood—that’s where my flare is, where you read today’s menu of Sorcha; what am I going to be like . . . changes all the time. Some demons have these on their backs, on their wings, wherever, but you have to show it so others can know it, right? And I wear white to show that demon mother whose party we’re going to that I am sorry her son is dead, even if he was a lily-livered piece of scum from the bottom of a bog not fit to wipe my shoe on.” She ended with emphatic contempt, then added demurely, “That’s just politeness.”
    “Your eyes are red.”
    “I have an intellectual bent,” Sorcha said with pride. “I am a scholar.”
    Lila decided not to mention that red eyes on demons in human terms usually signified insatiable evil though she wondered at it. “What about feathers?”
    “They count as impasto—the portrait of the aetheric self. But you can wear or paint your bad self with secondary colours to say more about you; lime, indigo, that kind of thing. And those colours show up in the flare always . . .” Sorcha put on a purple necklace. “For my strong spirit,” she said. “Don’t worry. Nobody expects you to read the palette. They’ll tell you what you have to know.”
    “If red isn’t the danger colour . . .”
    “White,” Sorcha said without hesitation. “Always be wary of demons with white. It’s also the colour of grief, hence my outfit. But you go as you are. Ready?”
    Fantastic, Lila thought. She pulled out the feather that Teazle had given her. “Light this.”
    Sorcha held out an imperious hand and twitched the small thing out of Lila’s grasp. She inspected it closely, smelled it, and licked it.
    “It’s white,” Lila said helpfully.
    “I see that,” Sorcha replied, quietly. Her hair had turned to a brooding maroon storm of flame, lit with lightning flashes of alarming blue. “You didn’t mention it was this brother that came in the window. What did he say?”
    Lila told her.
    “You know why white is so difficult? Because white is all colours in one. You don’t know what the hell is going on with somebody who is white, all you know for sure is that they could be anything they wanted, no power they wouldn’t draw on, nothing they wouldn’t do. White is blindness. White is the display of power that hides every motive, every move.” Sorcha spoke with a cold dislike