Two years earlier.

"Umama, I can't go to school looking like this."

Inyanga had placed herself in front of the mirror at the first hint of first light on the first day of her final year of primary, and the face that met hers belonged to . . . not just a stranger, but a phantom.

A ghost, a shaitan, a shade.

The colorless pre-dawn rays that penetrated the nimbus curtain before the sun had fully crested the horizon backlit her reflection, uncloaked the bedroom's shadows, and unveiled her skin to reveal how it had been robbed of its color. She was gray all over. Like the poor she sometimes saw begging for spare solidae downtown, grayscale. Inyanga's entirety was black, white, and gray. Multitudinous shades of shade.

The sobbing voice from Inyanga's throat was an unfamiliar guest in her bedroom.

Much went unsaid, her throat swelling and tight from the tears. How many women, working how many years, does it take to send one girl to magician's college?

Two women, and four centuries, and even then must they give up more?

Even after hundreds of years working non-magical jobs, when Amandla and her daughter Kyuma are within sight of paying the price for Inyanga, Kyuma's daughter, to attend, they must sacrifice more.

Her hair's coils were now monochrome like ink in a well, her skin stony like waterpaints. Gone were the golden undertones in her cheeks, and the indigo brown in her eyes. She looked like a grayscale picture printout of herself, moving and lifelike, but ultimately a copy of something.

"I can't go today."

Kyuma, the woman who had brought Inyanga into this world, appeared behind her in the mirror with a grayscale body of her own.

"Inyanga, I have never heard you cry so, and why you would start now, when you are closest to becoming a grown woman, I can't understand. You didn't cry like this when you were a child."

Kyuma, an immortal, didn't look more than a year older than her daughter, and yesterday her round face had held red clay undertones, and her hair had been bronze occasionally highlighted with strips of sun rays.

Now Kyuma too was absent of any tincture, a breathing, moving shadow. "You can go, and you must start today."

"How can I? How can I do well in school like this? How can I study? How can I listen to the instruction? All the others will know we're poor."

One of Kyuma's skin and bone hands, the color of spilled ink diluted as it runs along on a white page, went to Inyanga's right shoulder, and then came Amandla's hand, larger, plumper, on her left. Grandmama Amandla, too, bore the fresh face of adolescence, and her entire person, too, was robbed of hue.

"Two things, maybe three," said Grandmama Amandla. "First, they already know we are poor. They have known since your first day. Second, you will be surprised to find you're not alone."

"That's right," said Kyuma. "You won't be the only one giving up spell subscriptions to save on magicians college tuition. Others, too, will give up their beauty to save a few solidae."

"Beauty?" Inyanga turned in her seat, the better to talk to her parens. "I don't care about that. I'm not vain, I don't need that. But this is — something else, something beyond what I can tolerate. I don't need to be beautiful to do well in school, to focus on my studies — but I do need to be myself. And this—" she threw an angry palm toward the mirror as if casting a handful of dust at it, "this is not myself."

Grandmama Amandla said something about shame, and something about Inyanga being beautiful inside and out, but the girl was not hearing any of it.

Kyuma said something about shame. Something about not being ashamed. Inyanga wasn't hearing any of it.

#

Kyuma remembered. She remembered the same shame.

Walking the halls, just two decades ago, to her final homeroom, she remembered holding a schoolbook to her chest and wanting to hold it in front of her face.

Not that it could hide all of her. The hands that were the ash gray shade of a burnt tree's bark. A band of ankle peeping between her socks and the beginning of her navy slacks. The decolletage above the top button of her collared shirt, which for days to come she would wish buttoned to her chin.

As she took a seat at her desk, in the front row but not center, she kept her face to the front. Tucking into the far corner, she tugged her sleeve down as far as it would go. About three times a minute she found herself tugging at it, trying to hide within the fabric that wasn't designed to cover so much.

Others had lost their color too, living in skin of various grays from overcast sky to wet rock to blackest carbon. Many had not. They tittered when exam papers were handed back. A disappointed head shake from the teacher, which indicated a low grade on Kyuma's paper, once provoked a passed letter to her: "A grayscale pauper AND stupid."

But Amandla had promised her daughter, "For a just a small while we can do without color. We will save this year. Just for one year. When we could pay to link across the city, we will walk. To school, to work. . . and we won't eat out or spend money out. We won't see films. We won't eat conjured treats. Only the inexpensive nutrition from production centers. Already we pay them too much for immortality itself, but those payments we must make."

She might have said something about how there was no shame, but Kyuma stopped listening and would never remember.

They went without. Many of the things that made eternal life worth living were beyond their means.

Late nights were spent in Kyuma's room, piles of books tumbling over and off the bed, Amandla helping her daughter to study, both of them gaining fuel from tasteless nutrition, a bland sustenance in bite-sized pods; at least the pods didn't drop crumbs or drip oils on the fingers that would leave fingertip traces on the pages of books — and they did fill the belly. But the sustenance lacked flavor and soul just as Amandla and Kyuma felt their appearances did.

And for Kyuma, study was a struggle. It didn't come easy, not like it would for her daughter Inyanga. Pre-magic at primary required a master of mathematics and the sciences, particularly astrophysics and neuroscience. After all nighters reading textbooks, the information leaked out of her brain until she felt empty and wanted to quit.

Another bare pass on a test brought her whimpering to Amandla over the kitchen table. "This isn't what I want, Umama. You've given up so much for me. I'm not good enough."

"Back to the books," said Amandla, shoving a bowl of nameless nutrition over the counter with a scrape. "You are good enough, and smart enough. It will click one day."

The shame of the absence of color weighed on her. Before her final exams, she told Amandla — bold now, no tears — "One year, we said. One year without a subscription to the spell — but if we spend all we have on tuition, I'll never have my color back. As long as I'm in school, we'll live like paupers. It's not what I want, Umama."

"What do you want, Ngodogazi?"

"Umama, I want to have a daughter. One day I want to be a parens like you."

"School first. Then you get a magician's job. Then you will earn enough to afford the immortal animus of your child — and the fees, to sustain your eternal youth. And to pay for color."

Kyuma didn't think she would make it, but her parens wasn't listening. "I want to start a family. Let's save for that instead. I won't get any scholarships. We won't have enough to get by. If I don't make it to graduation, the solidae will be wasted."

Amandla wasn't hearing it.

On the day of her first exam, Kyuma had walked to her desk in the corner, far from the door, and facing front, except to pass back a stack of exam questions, she took out a pen.

When time came to begin, she wrote her name at the top of the page. Kyuma Ama Numbia. And then she didn't write a single other word.

A/N Thank you for reading Inyanga's Star in Constellations. Please leave a 🌟 for me if you enjoyed it. The power of the stars fuels the magic in this universe and my power to write.

Flash Back In Time Continues. . .400 years earlier