Prompt: Oh there's a light in your eyes that keeps shining/ Like the star that can't wait for the night (Fool In The Rain, Led Zeppelin)

They're all afraid of the Halogens, and I mean everybody. Politicians are in uproar, even the nonhuman ones, and the general public is in chaos, all over a few pairs of fluorescent yellow irises.

The scientists have determined it to be a genetic mutation - duh, what else would it be? Another step in evolution that we can witness firsthand that is terrifying the masses. Why? Halogens are just people like us, the protesters claim. They deserve rights and anti-discrimination laws! They are a race now!

A race that speaks our language, eats our food, and, until Sunday, worked in our offices or schools, holding normal jobs until their eyes started to glow. Body art is a huge fad that's been around for generations, starting with simple body piercings or tattoos, before they had morphology or anything like that, and yellow eyes were kind of a thing for a while when the hit band the Katz's lead singer Tigris turned her eyes to a fashionable shade of muted amber. But colored contacts don't glow, they don't cast flashlight beams across a dark room or cause your hair to turn stark white. Halogens are light, like saviors or angels or something ethereal like that. The Saved are stringing together verses from dozens or archaic holy writs made before the Standard Linguistics Act, way old stuff, mixing up God with Odin or calling the hierarchy of angels Sanskrit.

I don't see the problem with Halogens, to be honest. They're just people with a weird gift that got activated on Sunday for some reason - scientists rave about that, too, the saner ones leaning towards magnetic frequency shifts or solar flares and the eccentric screaming into the public's ear about extraterrestrial damnation.

And the Halogens haven't done anything. Like any ethnic group, they band together for survival, wearing heavily tinted contacts or glasses and disguising their existence. They just want to be left alone. That I can relate to.

My apartment faces one of the busy market streets, turning the small area into a forest of tents and products and angry shoppers trying in vain to get the shopkeepers to lower their prices. A few of the most naïve try to bargain with the robots. It's a nice enough view and even makes me laugh on occasion when the shoppers' voices will rise high enough for me to hear them.

"I'm telling you, Ianto had these same melons for half of the price! Genetically modified, indeed!"

"Ma'am, if you'll just listen to me..."

"I will not! This is sacrilege!"

I wince at the screechy voice of my Saved neighbor old man Haemon as he shoves open his windows to peer down at the two arguing the street. "The only sacrilege in this town is the existence of the Halogens, lady! Damnation from above!"

I don't exactly know where Haemon is coming from, as the whole Saved religion was one of the shiftiest movements in worldwide unification. Everything got so hot with tensions it just melted together and cooled like that. One language, one religion, one currency, one world. The Saved were hard to put together because religion used to be so fragmented and different - or at least, that's what I've heard. The Saved never really appealed to me, or anyone else, for that matter. They're mostly scattered about now, calling curses down upon the heads of dogs and cats and begging on the streets. Haemon seems to have done well for himself compared to his fellows.

Besides eternal deities, the government has no idea what to do with the Halogens. They see sense, since the Halogens haven't done anything wrong, and the genetic mutation is seemingly random, plus the fact that glowing eyes and white hair isn't exactly a benefit if you're trying to rob a bank or do any other criminal action. You can't deny they're people, especially since one of the Union members for treasury 'turned Halo' in the middle of a budget meeting. The voters aren't dumb either, they won't buy secret testing or extermination. The most we can figure is that they'll continue to live their lives, without government protection, because then others would complain.

But no one has ever had supernatural powers before. That, too.

I don't know any Halogens and they don't make my work any harder, so I watch the spectacle with polite disinterest. As an engineer the most I can do to change buildings for Halogens is to tint the windows or something.

In a world where everything is now similar being different is very, very dangerous.

The misconstrued versions of Halogens fly around the world - that they crashed in the oceans and emerged from a spaceship, or that at the full moon they turn into stars and fly into the sky to meet their family in the constellations. Dumb stuff like that, but people have taken it to heart. There are more anti-Halogen groups than pro, and they're in serious danger now. The government can't step in since they're divided, also, so the public has the upper hand. And what do they do with their power? Break into companies Halogens worked, burn their houses, place incredibly high prices on their heads so the shiftier crowd will get into the fun, the manhunt, because who could resist a few more units in the wallets?

Just like that, the tension that caused the unification of the world is shattering it. Thanks for nothing, genetic mutation. For me it could fall either way. The more buildings torn down means the more we'll have to build. So I guess the Halogens have done me a twisted favor, at the price of their lives.

Ordinarily I wouldn't be so sentimental, but you see those stories in the newspaper when a bounty hunter stalks a five year old Halogen back to his house and shoots his family who was hiding him in the basement, then kills the kid. Stuff like that makes you think, makes you cold in the heat of the Halogens. Fire and ice.

I need to get ready for work, since my job is on one of the few companies that hasn't folded with the Halogen crisis, so I tug on my uniform for work, a plain black pair of pants with a white top, then tie my decidedly-not-white hair up and slide on my cloud boots as an afterthought. They let me levitate a few inches off the ground and are great for hitching rides off of cars and, once, a bullet train. Long story. They also add a few inches to my diminutive height, which is a plus. There's really no need to go to work, since no one wants to build anything right now and all sales besides necessities have come to a standstill, but I know my coworkers might have some Halogen news and if there's one thing I hate, it's not knowing what is going on.

I arrive to Telsa Corporation at oh-nine-hundred, and ride the elevator up to my floor. When the doors slide open I see Paulo and Georgette waiting for me with cups of coffee in hand, stress painted across their faces in wide strokes.

"Hey, Shell." Georgette says, beginning to pace. "The building is on bomb alert, so no work today."

That's new - we've never been on bomb alert before. "Who's the suspect?"

"There's supposed to be a Halogen safehouse under Terabyte City, you know, the electronics mart across the street? Well, they  deny everything, but Aquae Mortis say they'll strike no matter what. They'll blow their way in."

"So? It should be a small, localized explosion. The street is closed down, right?"

She shakes her head. "All police have been taken back to the Union, to protect the officials. They only alerted the tenants due to protocol."

Aquae Mortis is the anti-Halogen gang that makes the front page, bombing houses or burning robots with their flashlight abilities enabled to resemble Halogens in the middle of the streets. Their name literally means 'the waters of death,' from some pre-unification language, saying they'll extinguish the Halogens' fire. A little dramatic to me, but they love drama.

"Where's Turbo? He didn't go Halo, did he?" Turbo, our robotic office aid, is nowhere to be seen, and robots can't be Halogens anyways. Neither Georgette nor Paolo laugh.

"Beats me. He was gone this morning when I came in." Paolo offers, and I shrug.

"No big loss, he couldn't even make coffee." I take a seat at the break room table and Georgette opens her mouth to say something.

She's cut off by the explosion.

You know what I said about small and localized? Yeah, scratch that. The entire building shakes with the blast, and Georgette shrieks as she tumbles to the ground, crashing into the table. The chairs topple over and I scramble to my feet, my boots stabilizing me as the floor shudders.

"Stay here!" I shout at Paolo, and he rushes to Georgette's side as I run to the stairs, ignoring them entirely and leaping down the small area between the descending stairwells. I plummet for a second before my boots catch me three inches above the ground and I sprint for the doors, shoving through the throng of confused businessmen to the street, which looks more like a chasm. Terabyte City is gone, completely annihilated, along with the five other shops on each side of it and the two to the front and back. In its place is a small bricked structure - who uses bricks anymore? - which I presume is the safehouse. The corner is blasted open and no sound comes from within, but no one is approaching the entrance. I don't see anyone who looks remotely Aquae Mortis, either, until a man clambers out of the hole with machine guns in both hands and lets out a roar of laughter, throwing back his head.

The gathered crowd screams and scatters, diving for cover under collapsed pillars or piles of rubble, but the gunman doesn't even glance at them. I follow his gaze as he surveys the area and my eyes widen as I catch a flash of light from behind the nearest semi-upright building - it's a Halogen, I know it is.

As carefully as possible I pick my way around the crater and sneak around to the back of Honest Henry's Hover Converters where the door hangs open, revealing a dark and empty shop inside. The shelves are completely bare and Honest Henry is nowhere in sight, which is good for the Halogen hiding inside. I've barely taken a step inside when I'm fixed to the spot by twin flashlight beams, glowing eyes. I squint in the light and raise my hands.

"I'm not Aquae Mortis, okay? No guns." I try to get a good look at the Halogen but can't until they lower their gaze and I see the white hair in pigtails, the small frame of a kid who can't be more than five or six.

"You were in the safehouse, right?" I ask, stepping closer to the girl, who keeps her glowing eyes on her shoes. Almost imperceptibly she nods. "And the man with the guns came in, and you escaped."

Another nod, and my blood runs cold. To go into that place and kill those people in cold blood is unimaginable, vulgar and cruel. Fury burns at the pit of my stomach and I come closer to the little girl, who doesn't even look my way. I reach out for her hand but before I can a new voice echoes throughout the store.

"Freeze, gorgeous."

The Halogen girl shrinks away, curling into herself to become the smallest target possible, and I step in front of her, arms spread wide to face the gunman, who twirls an e-cig between his fingers.

"Never seen this before. Get away from the mutant, sweetheart. They bite."

I hear blood roar in my ears, my vision is tinted red. I am so indescribably angry at this wicked man and his nonchalant tone and the blood on his boots. My hands tremble, but not with fear. I want to leap for him, to pummel every inch of his sarcastic face, to turn the gun barrel between his eyes...

The Halogen girl slowly unfurls behind me and I feel her warm fingers slip into mine. Hers are warm, but mine are fiery hot, burning with rage.

I stare at the gunman, letting my gaze bore into him, until he's baked in light so pure white, so radiant that everything else around it looks dull and dirty and unclean. The gunman shouts in alarm and pain and stumbles out the door, his skin peeling and blistering from the intense heat, the fire of my wrath.

It appears that I, too, have gone Halo.