Spectrum Book One: Ebony

In the world of Spectrum, every child receives a colour on their seventh birthday: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet. It is a gift from the rainbow that followed the great flood. Then there is the eighth colour, black, which the world fears and hunts. The Cult of the Purgers exists to wipe out its wielders.

Ebony, born a princess of the fire-wielding Ardiente dynasty, received black on the morning of her seventh birthday while her twin sister Ruby received red. That same night she ran away, certain that her family would burn the world to protect her and that the world had more fuel than they did. For nine years she has lived as a thief on the rooftops of Tierra Roja. She steals cashews, slips through shadows, and trusts no one.

Then Ruby tracks her down with a letter from Luminara Academy, one of the greatest schools in the world, offering a place to a black wielder for the first time in fifty years. It looks too good to be true, and in many ways it is. Ebony is dragged back before the court of the grandfather who once hunted her, and her record of nine years of petty crimes is read aloud. From there she is thrown into a world of glittering cities, a headmistress who is both her best hope and her harshest judge, and a school that is not sure it wants her. To earn her place, Ebony must pass three public trials, and those trials are designed so she is not meant to pass them.
Along the way she finds an unlikely circle of friends, and a few enemies who have simply never been asked to see her differently. She also learns that the mystery driving the story is bigger than one girl’s admission.