Kayla leaned back from the mirror, fluttering her thickly curved eyelashes. Shadows of violet and burgundy shimmered across her eyelids. With a final flourish, she brushed a tube of lipstick over her soft lips, puckered them tight, and rose from the vanity.
Waves of golden hair bounced on her shoulders as she clacked along in her high heels. From her glassy apartment to her green Lamborghini she strode, head held high, with her leather handbag in place. Less than fifteen minutes later, she was saying good-bye to her gorgeous ride and heading into an elevator.
During her trip to the tenth floor, she admired her reflection in its mirrors. She liked what she saw: a woman in her mid-twenties, full of health and beauty, ready to blow a puff of beauty into the lives of others.
A harp melody sang from her purse. She pulled out her smartphone and brought it to her ear. “This is Kayla. Yes, I’m almost there. Is it ready?” A pause. “Brilliant. Let’s give them a rainbow.”
She exited the elevator onto a floor of glass and shine, very much like the elevator itself, and full of sharply-dressed people working at their computers or hustling from place to place. A few nodded or smiled at her as she passed and she returned the gestures. Finally she entered a large conference room.
A group of people sat around a table speaking in low voices. A projector lit a giant screen at the head of the room, but it wasn’t the screen that held their attention--it was the fiercely glowing jar at the end of the table.
Kayla set her purse aside and placed a well-manicured hand on the jar’s smooth base. The jar was large and elegantly designed.
“This,” she said, and smiled as the whispers died down, “is a rainbow.”
The hues danced and dazzled inside the jar, never fading, never breaking. They changed intensity as they twirled, like a rainbow fading from brightness to the faintest hint of color splashed among the gray clouds, before flaring bright again.
“We humans have a thing for color,” said Kayla. Her fingers caressed the jar as she spoke, feeling the intoxicating warmth of the energy inside. “Color is beauty, is life. Color is everything, and nowhere is color as perfected as in nature. We’ve tried, of course, to replicate it--we have technology that projects colorful lights of all designs onto our walls and ceilings.”
For a moment the display of colors sparkling across her palm distracted her. With a sigh, she pulled her hand away and focused on the mesmerized faces before her.
“Here at Glamora, we’ve done the impossible. We’ve captured the colors of the most beautiful flowers, and even the very essence of butterfly wings. We’ve created products that fill people’s insatiable need for color and beauty.” She sat on the edge of the table beside the jar, her hands on her leg. “Products in makeup, lights. Holograms that you can manipulate. Scents.”
She turned and held the jar in both hands. “Now we can capture rainbows. We don’t know why they move as they do, once contained, but the effect is breathtaking. We’ve learned we can break up rainbows to fit inside glass spheres small enough to fit in your hand. Rainbows soothe and captivate the soul; rejuvenate, even. Of all those we’ve captured, they have yet to fade.”
A woman at the table raised her hand. “Kayla?”
“Yes.”
“Are there really no downsides to this, no negative side effects? Seems a serious thing.”
Kayla laughed. “Not that we’ve discovered.”
The lie rolled off her tongue as easily as any sales pitch. Well, she wasn’t completely lying; their rainbow-capturing technique was so new, and the effects so unstudied, that who was to say the effects were truly negative? But yes, things had happened when the rainbows were taken from the sky. A grayness had formed, spreading in incomprehensible ways and dimensions. But no one really noticed . . .
Then there was the other effect of those who had physically touched a rainbow. What followed was a near madness, near lust, to have it always close by. Several of their team had to be treated--for what, the doctors weren’t even sure. Yes, the rainbows did have an extremely positive effect, but only when viewed from a distance.
Up close, they seemed to do something different. And Kayla and her company knew it.
