Chapter 1 The Maw #2
“Here’s how it’ll go. I’ll open the manhole.
There’ll be absolute Dark down there—this sewage line has been decommissioned by the city, which means there are no light wards.
You’ll lower the fishing line into the hole, and when you feel the tug, I’ll turn off the nova-lights.
” At Yvonne’s startled inhale, Sascia lifts her palms. “I know it’s scary, but it’s necessary.
If we don’t turn them off, the lights are going to instantly fry the Darkfireflies, and that’s not what you’re paying for, right? ”
“Why am I holding the rod? What will you be doing?” A trickle of panic is leaking into Yvonne’s voice. She has arranged herself neatly on the canvas so that no part of her trendy low-rise jeans, cropped tee, leather loafers outfit is touching the grimy cement.
Sascia’s in her steady Doc Martens, trusty Levis, and an oversized hoodie.
She doesn’t care if she gets a little dirty; she kneels on the other side of the manhole and drums her fingers against the nova-gun.
“I’m going to be aiming the gun into the Dark, monitoring any movement.
Darkfireflies are absolutely harmless, but if we leave the door open too long, other things might come wandering. ”
“Christ.”
This time, Sascia doesn’t try to comfort Yvonne. The girl should be afraid—this is what she paid for. A roller-coaster ride, heart pumping, stomach dropping, the glorious thrill of danger. “Ready?” Sascia asks.
“No—”
Sascia heaves. The manhole cover dislodges with a thwonk.
In the hole, there is only Dark. Its abnormality doesn’t register at first: It looks like any other lightless crevice.
But after a few moments, your senses go into high alert.
Your eyes don’t adjust. Your ears pick up no sound: no pipes dripping, no rats scattering, no echoing shifts. There is an eerie lack of smell.
In the before, when darkness came to mind, Sascia could smell dust stirred up in the attic or basement, or dew coating golden leaves, or the smell of lavender detergent as she burrowed under the covers. This smells nothing like darkness used to. It smells of nothing.
The silence that follows is small and fragile. Sascia feels the girl’s urge to fill it, with questions or prayers or blabbering, and she quickly gestures for Yvonne to lower the line into the sewer hole. The other girl obliges with only the slightest trembling.
“Now what?” Yvonne murmurs.
“Now we wait,” Sascia replies calmly, as if she’s not about to pop out of her skin with excitement.
A hunger is gnawing at her insides, a longing for what is about to happen next.
This intermediacy is killing her; she wants the line to tug sooner, the lights to go out faster, she wants darkness and beasts and magic.
“So,” she asks Yvonne, “where were you?”
“When?” Yvonne’s eyes, focused on the manhole, have gone big and glassy, and with the floodlights washing her in white, she is pure doe before the inevitable hit-and-run.
“May second.”
“First Contact?”
“I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t remember the precise moment.”
“Hard to forget, isn’t it?” The girl pulls her braids over one shoulder.
“I remember walking into the living room, the TV playing at full volume, and seeing the Shanghai Darkdragon toppling skyscrapers in downtown Shanghai. I thought my parents had put on a movie. Then I noticed the news title. Heard Angela Herrera’s voice, you know, the gates of Hell have opened and all that.
I remember the screen going white when the air strike hit.
” Yvonne shudders. “Mom thrust a phone into my hands, told me to try my aunt, who lived in Shanghai at the time. But the lines were down and we didn’t get through. ”
Yvonne stops there, and a stab of guilt courses through Sascia: Has she picked the scab on an old wound?
It’s a dangerous question, what happened on May 2.
First Contact: when the very first Darkbeast, the hundred-foot-tall Darkdragon, tore out of the Dark and through the Xintiandi neighborhood in downtown Shanghai, shattering nearly a mile’s worth of populated area and killing thousands.
But more than that, May 2 was the day humans became brutally and irrecoverably aware they weren’t alone.
It’s a dangerous question, but Sascia has yet to meet someone who doesn’t want to share.
The terror of that day, of the narrow confines of your world blowing up around you, however violent the explosion, however unhealed your wounds—it’s a collective memory.
Sascia has found that in these moments where they watch the ink-black swirl of the Dark, remembering the violent assault of the otherworldly on their lives, she and her clients find a sense of camaraderie.
They all lived this, and there’s a comforting togetherness in their struggle.
“Is your aunt all right?” Sascia asks.
Yvonne nods. “She was visiting her friend on the outskirts of the city. She contacted us when the power came back on, two days later—oh!”
The fishing rod is vibrating. Yvonne’s fingers go white around its handle.
“Sascia! It’s biting!”
A laugh escapes Sascia’s lips. Here is the plunge part of the roller coaster: fear turning into exhilaration. She sets the gun’s blast mode to maximum lumen, then carefully opens the empty collection cups, depositing one on her side and one on Yvonne’s.
“I’m turning off the nova-lights now, okay? It’s going to get very dark, but don’t be fazed. Start pulling up the line and enjoy the spectacle. I’ll handle the rest.”
At Yvonne’s soft “Okay,” Sascia kills the lights.
Shadows shroud the alley. Without the heat of the lights, the drop in temperature is startling, but Sascia likes it that way—it makes her fishing tours even more of an experience.
In the manhole, the Dark is thickening, with a rippling liquid quality.
The fishing reel starts gyrating quickly—newbies always spin too fast, but it doesn’t matter.
Darkfireflies are not fish; they’ll come up no matter how suspiciously speedily their food is trying to escape them.
Then, abruptly, Yvonne’s frantic reeling stops. “Oh wow.”
Darkfireflies are swirling up the long column of the manhole.
They’re tiny things, their scaled bodies translucent, their wings crystalline.
They fly in a murmuration, pirouetting in a synchronized spiral.
Magnificent colors flow through them like a wave, blues and purples and soft whites that pulse with a bright interior force, more vivid than any natural phenomenon on Earth.
It looks like the aurora borealis on drugs, distilled into a three-foot-wide hole in the ground.
“Go for it,” Sascia tells the girl.
No further clarification is needed. Yvonne grabs the plastic cup and leans forward, taking a scoop from the surface of the hole. A dozen Darkfireflies are instantly swept into the plastic, and she screws the top on quickly. The kaleidoscope of light reflects in her irises.
Sascia watches her, utterly entranced.
It’s not about the money, as her parents think.
Not about the thrill of being the expert, as Danny teases.
Sascia craves this, precisely this: a stranger’s awe, a stranger’s fear before the impossibility of a darkness filled with monsters.
She wants to pluck a straw and drink up all of the girl’s terror and wonder, wonder and terror, slurp, slurp, slurp, brain freeze be damned.
She wants to feel, even for a brief, lying second, what it felt like to stand in front of the Dark for the first time.
(Pass by it on the street enough times and even magic becomes mundane, Danny says.)
(But this should not ever be mundane, Sascia argues. I mean, look at it.)
From the corner of her eye, Sascia notices a ripple on the surface of the Dark.
The lights have been off a little too long.
She moves fast, single-mindedly: dives her hands into the surface of the Dark, the cup in one hand, its top in the other.
She always grabs a sample of whatever her clients fish that day, for her own research.
She’s mid-scoop, her hands as deep into the Dark as she dares to go, when she feels it—
Fingers caress the back of her left hand.
Sascia moves away, but the fingers close around her wrist. Panic drops like a stone in the pit of her stomach.
She jerks her hand out of the Dark—the fingers come up with it.
She can see them properly now, irrefutably: long, blue-gray fingers with pointed black nails.
There’s even a thumb, nestled into the grooves of Sascia’s palm.
The sensation is jolting, alarmingly familiar, horribly displaced.
A hand.