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“It’s a depiction of Hellfire—complete with the souls of the damned, in torment. Maybe I can’t fully appreciate the religious context, as an atheist, but you don’t need to believe in God to have a notion of Hell and retribution. The damned, I can believe in.”
     
    While he was speaking, Angelica Jarndyke’s expression changed. In a trice, she lost all of her artificiality, all of her polish. Amazement broke through, and with it...Adrian couldn’t tell. Not delight, not gratitude...something more akin to outrage. Her gaze abruptly shifted to her husband, who met her stare with a bizarre expression of his own.
     
    Adrian realized, a trifle belatedly, that Angelica Jarndyke thought he’d been tipped off. She thought that her husband had somehow found out what the painting represented, even though she’d probably never told him, and that he had formed some schoolboyish conspiracy with Adrian to give her a slap the eye. And ironically, Jason Jarndyke thought exactly the same thing. He thought that his wife had somehow formed a conspiracy with Adrian, so that he could come up with an interpretation of the picture that she would endorse, so that the two of them could give him a slap in the eye.
     
    Mercifully, they knew one another well enough, and understood one another’s gaze well enough, to know, after five seconds of mutual staring, that they were both mistaken. Then they both turned to look at Adrian.
     
    Adrian had thought, briefly, that if he passed the test that Jarndyke and his wife had faced him with, his employer would be delighted. He had passed, he knew: he had proved himself, and his uncanny sight. But his self-satisfaction was undermined by the consciousness that his boast to Jarndyke a few weeks before, though perfectly sincere, had been overstated. He wasn’t the only person Jason Jarndyke knew who had near-perfect color vision. He wasn’t even the best.
     
    Not only could Angelica Jarndyke see better than he could, she could paint better than he could, albeit in an amateurish sort of way—and not, for the first time in his life, Adrian regretted bitterly that he didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to wield a brush with as much efficacy as his sight demanded. Suddenly, being a reverse engineer of genus didn’t seem like such a perfect complement to his full-spectrum sight as it had seemed twenty minutes before. His ingenious argument about the emperor’s new clothes and the plight of the one man in the crowd who could see the beautiful suit had ceased to be a neat philosophical argument intended for intellectual persuasion, and had take on its full weight as a sketch of an actual, and potentially horrific, existential predicament: his own, and Angelica Jarndyke’s.
     
    Angelica Jarndyke was a painter, perhaps not of genius but at the very least of unusual talent, but no one had ever been able to see the results of her particular talent, except very vaguely— until now...and that had shaped her decisions as to what to paint, in a fashion that seemed, to say the least, ominous.
     
    In all his esthetic excursions, Adrian had never encountered her like. He had seen the work of a hundred painters who had real genius, and he had always thought himself better equipped to appreciate their genius than most people—better than anyone else, truth be told—but he had never seen anything painted by someone who had elected to exploit full-spectrum sensitivity in quite that way, and enough skill to complement it...and a subject-matter that somehow seemed altogether appropriate.
     
    Adrian knew, now, that if he did manage to produce some kind of authentic Golden Fleece for Jason Jarndyke, that at least one person would be able to see it, consciously, in all its glory— but somehow, that idea didn’t immediately fill him with delight. In fact, it frightened him.
     
    Even so, he forced himself to say: “I’d really like to see your other work some time, Mrs. Jarndyke,” because he knew that