  We consider an enlarged color sector which solves the strong CP problem via
new massless fermions. The spontaneous breaking of a unified color group into
QCD and another confining group provides a source of naturally large axion mass
$m_a$ due to small size instantons. This extra source of axion mass respects
automatically the alignment of the vacuum, ensuring a low-energy CP-conserving
vacuum. The mechanism does not appeal to a $Z_2$ 'mirror' copy of the SM, nor
does it require any fine-tuning of the axion-related couplings at the
unification scale. There is no light axion and uncharacteristically the lighter
spectrum contains instead sterile fermions. The axion scale $f_a$ can be
naturally brought down to a few TeV, with an exotic spectrum of colored
pseudoscalars lighter than this scale, observable at colliders exclusively via
strong interactions. The $\{m_a, f_a\}$ parameter space which allows a solution
of the strong CP problem is thus enlarged well beyond that of invisible axion
models.
