“Do you think that’s really the color of grass?” asked Dad after a pause.

I shrugged. There was no real way of telling. The most we could say was that this was what National Color felt the color of grass should be. Ask a Green how green grass was and they’d ask you how red was an apple. But interestingly, the grass wasn’t uniformly green. Anareathe size of a tennis court in the far corner of the lawn had changed to an unpleasant bluey-green. The discordancy was spreading like a water stain, and the off-color area had also taken in a tree and several beds of flowers, which now displayed unusual hues quite outside Standard Botanical Gamut. Intrigued, we noticed there was someone staring into an access hatch close to the anomaly, so we wandered over to have a look.

We expected him to be a National Color engineer working on the problem, but he wasn’t. He was a Red park keeper, and he glanced at our spots, then hailed us in a friendly manner.

“Problems?” asked Dad.

“Of the worst sort,” replied the park keeper wearily. “Another blockage. The Council are always promising to have the park repiped, but whenever they get any money, they spend it on swan early-warning systems, lightning protection or something equally daft.”

It was unguarded talk, but we were Reds, too, so he knew he was safe.

We peered curiously into the access hatch where the cyan, yellow and magenta color pipes fed into one of the many carefully calibrated mixers in order to achieve the various hues required for the grass, shrubs and flowers. From there they would feed the network of capillaries that had been laid beneath the park.

Colorizing gardens was a complex task that involved matching the osmotic coefficients of the different plants with the specific gravities of the dyes—and that was before you got started on pressure density evaporation rates and seasonal hue variation. Colorists earned their perks and bonuses.

I had a pretty good idea what the problem was, even without looking at the flow meters. The bluey-green caste of the lawn, the grey appearance of the celandines and the purplish poppies suggested localized yellow deficiency, and this was indeed the case—the yellow flow meter was firmly stuck on zero. But the viewing port was full of yellow, so it wasn’t a supply issue from the park substation.

“I think I know what the problem is,” I said quietly, knowing full well that unlicensed tampering with National Color property carried a five-hundred-merit fine.

The park keeper looked at me, then at Dad, then back to me. He bit his lip and scratched his chin, looked around and then lowered his voice.

“Can it be easily fixed?” he asked. “We have a wedding at three. They’re only Grey, but we try to make an effort.”

I looked at Dad, who nodded his assent. I pointed at the pipe.

“The yellow flow meter’s jammed, and the lawn’s receiving only the cyan component of the grass-green.

Although I would never condone Rule breaking of any sort,” I added, making sure I had deniability if everything turned brown, “I believe a sharp rap with the heel of a shoe would probably free it.”

The park keeper looked around, took off his shoe and did what I suggested. Almost instantly there was an audible gurgling noise.

“Well, I’ll be jaundiced,” he said. “As easy as that? Here.”

And he handed me a half merit, thanked us and went off to package up the grass clippings for cyan-yellow retrieval.

“How did you know about that?” said Dad as soon as we were out of earshot.

“Overheard stuff, mostly,” I replied.

We’d had a burst magenta feed a few years back, which was exciting and dramatic all at the same time—a cascading fountain of purple all over the main street. National Color was all over us in an instant, and I volunteered myself as tea wallah just to get close. The technical language of the colorists was fairly obfuscating, but I’d picked up a bit. It was every resident’s dream to work at National Color, but not a realistic prospect: Your eyes, feedback, merits and sycophancy had to be beyond exemplary, and only one in a thousand of those who qualified to take the entrance exam.

We ambled around the garden for as long as time would permit, soaking in the synthetic color and feeling a lot better for it. Unusually, they had hydrangeas in both colors, and delicately hand-tinted azaleas that looked outside of the CYM gamut: a rare luxury, and apparently a bequest from a wealthy Lilac. We noted that there wasn’t much pure yellow in the garden, which was probably a sop to the Yellows in the town. They liked their flowers natural, and since they could cause trouble if not acceded to, they were generally given their own way. When we passed the lawn on our way out, the grass in the anomaly was beginning to turn back to fresh lawn green, more technically known as 102-100-64 . It would be back to full chroma in time for the wedding.

We stepped out of the color garden, and walked back toward the main square. On the way we passed a Leaper who was seated by the side of the road, covered entirely in a coarse blanket except for his alms arm. I put my recently acquired half merit in his open palm, and the figure nodded in appreciation. Dad looked at his watch.

“I suppose,” he said with little enthusiasm, “we should go and have the rabbit experience.”

The route to the rabbit we would never see took us past Vermillion’s Paint Shop, something we hadn’t considered when we planned our itinerary. If I’d known National Color had a regional outlet, I would have insisted on at least five slow walk-pasts. The storefront was decorated in docile shades of synthetic olive and primrose, with the National Color lettering a mid-blue that was how I imagined the sky might appear. On display inside the window were paint cans arranged seductively in rows, along with small, garden-sized tubes of plant colorizers for those unable to afford connection to the grid. There were also tins of clothes dye for those eager to flaunt their color, and racks of glass ampules containing food coloring to add that extra I-don’t-know-what to otherwise boring dinner parties.

I slackened my pace as I walked past the Paint Shop since it was considered exceptionally low-hued to gawp, and stepping inside was almost taboo, as I had no business to be there. Some of the hues in the window display I recognized, such as the single shade of yellow that often graced daffodils, lemons, bananas and gorse, but there were others, too—wild and sultry shades of blue that I’d never seen before, a cheeky pale yellow that might color who-knows-what and a wanton mauve that gave me a fizzy feeling down below. On the cans I noted familiar terms like umber, chartreuse, gordini, dead salmon, lilac, blouse, turquoise and aquamarine, and others that I hadn’t heard before, such as cornsilk, rectory, jaguar, old string, chiffon and suffield. It was all very eye-worthy. I slowed my pace even more when we passed the door, for the interior was as brightly decorated as the exterior, with chatty and hue-savvy National Color salespeople helping prefects from the outlying villages with their choices for communal glory. Our prefects would have come to a place very like this to negotiate a price for the terre verte that now graced our town hall, and so would have Mr. Oxblood. Constance’s family was wealthy enough to have its own bespoke colors mixed—wild, crowd-pleasing shades of etruscan and klein to free the spirit and tremble the cortex during the Oxbloods’ annual panchromatic garden parties.