Chapter 2 The Key Word
The Key Word
Terror grips Sascia, instinct takes the reins.
Her free hand drops the cup and fumbles around for the nova-gun.
She doesn’t fully register it’s in her hand, that her finger is on the trigger, that she’s firing a blazing hundred-thousand-lumen shot into the sewer, until her eyesight is bombarded with white.
The gray-blue porcelain skin of the hand blisters; between one blink and the next, it has retreated into the sewer. The few Darkfireflies buzzing at the top of the manhole make a frizzling sound, their lifeless bodies dropping unceremoniously back into the Dark.
Yvonne is splayed on the waterproof canvas, an arm over her face. “A little warning before trying to blind me?”
Sascia knows she’s shaking, knows she looks completely unprofessional, but she can’t pull herself together. “Sorry,” she stutters, “something crawled out—”
“Yeah, I saw. Those long, pale tentacles…even I can recognize a Darksquid!”
Long, pale tentacles. Darksquid.
Sure, that could be it. But Sascia has faced Darksquids before in her fishing tours. She’s seen their long tentacles up close, the pale gray of their boneless flesh. The Darksquids she’s seen—they don’t have knuckles. They don’t have thumbs.
Dexterous opposable thumbs mean working with tools, foraging, skinning prey.
Thumbs mean bigger brains and intelligent—no, sapient—life.
But there’s no sapient life in the Dark, no creatures as intelligent as humans.
Studies are definitive: the DNA of Darkcreatures is not evolved enough for sapience.
In modern terms, the world where the Dark comes from is still in its Mesozoic era—think dinosaurs and giant sharks, weird-looking bugs. Not humans, not for millions of years.
Holy hell.
Sascia is already dialing Danny’s number. She tucks her phone between her cheek and her shoulder as she darts about, dragging the cover back, dismantling the fishing rod, and throwing the rest of her gear in her backpack.
“Pick up, pick up,” she mutters under her breath. The rings are slow, sluggish—by comparison, her heart is running at twenty miles per hour.
“Thanks for everything,” Yvonne says, matching Sascia’s hurried strides to the mouth of the alley.
“You’re welcome,” Sascia says with barely a glance at the girl—and the cup of iridescent (and very illegal) fireflies clutched tight in her hands. God. Is the girl trying to induce a heart attack?
“Yvonne. You can’t be gallivanting around with your poached Darkfireflies—and certainly not in broad daylight.
Hold on.” Sascia rummages through her backpack for a felt covering and a small plastic bag of pollen.
“Feed them daily. Only take the covering off when the lights are out. When you grow bored of them—”
Yvonne’s mouth scrunches.
“That’s not an insult,” Sascia says matter-of-factly.
“You’ll get bored eventually—everyone does.
Take the lid off, put the cup in a drawer or a closet, and the little guys will just fly back into the Dark.
Don’t mess with them or hurt them. The Dark will remember and next time it has a chance, it won’t send tiny pretty Darkfireflies for you. ”
Yvonne’s brows shoot up, but she nods dutifully. “Sure thing. Listen—”
But Sascia’s very much not listening, because Danny has finally picked up.
Her cousin snickers in her ear. “Done terrorizing the impressionable youth?”
She glances at Yvonne, who’s still watching her expectantly, and marches around the corner of the alley. Quietly, she hisses, “Please tell me you’re at the Umbra.”
“No, I’m not spending my Friday night doing homework, Sascia. I left a couple of hours ago. Invited Tae for a bite to eat, but I don’t think he even heard me.”
“Oh, he heard you. Your crush is just an asshole, Danny. Listen, something happened.”
Danny makes a go-on sound.
“I took a client fishing at the spot at Hell’s Kitchen and something strange came out of the Dark. The impressionable youth thinks it was a Darksquid, but I was much closer and it looked like”—Sascia exhales—“a hand.”
“A hand,” Danny repeats.
“Fingers. With a thumb.”
Silence on the other end of the phone. Then, a dead-toned “Sascia, are you messing with me?”
Sascia looks up at the brick and glass of the New York skyline, because suddenly she feels like sobbing. “I really wish I was.”
But his reaction is heartening. Of course he doesn’t believe her.
Of course it’s absurd. There are no humanoids in the Darkworld.
The research is definitive, a fact that Danny knows far better than she does; he’s majoring in xenoscience, after all.
It’s absurd and Danny’s going to laugh it off and everything will be normal again.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “Hold on.” She listens to the duet of his keyboard and mouse clicking.
“There was a spike of Dark activity in that general area, timestamped 7:49. About two minutes ago. If the sensors picked it up, it was certainly larger than a Darksquid, but we won’t know without a sonar reading. You’ve got yours with you?”
A whimpering “N-no” leaves Sascia’s lips.
“Sascia, you’ve got to carry one with you at all times when you’re fishing.”
“But it agitates Darkcreatures.”
“But it keeps people safe, which is the important bit. How close are you to the Umbra? I’ve got a spare in my lab.”
Please, no. Only two people ever stay late at the Umbra Program labs on Friday nights. One is her cousin’s asshole crush. The other is someone Sascia really doesn’t want to see right now—or ever, to be honest.
Her whisper comes out in a hopeless plea. “Don’t send me there.”
“Sascia,” Danny says soothingly. “You’ve got to. We need to know whether you’ve finally lost your marbles, or you just made the greatest scientific discovery of the decade.”
She feels like stomping her foot and throwing a tantrum. But this is how things work in science, even if you’re as crappy at it as the Columbia admissions team thinks Sascia is. You notice an abnormality, you make a hypothesis, you observe and experiment, then it’s inevitably debunked.
This is the key word here. Debunk.
“Fine,” she tells Danny. “I’ll call you when I’m back at the spot.”
He hangs up and Sascia sits frozen for a moment, staring at the black screen. She’s entirely forgotten Yvonne is still there until the girl pops around the corner of the alley and extends a hand with a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.”
Yvonne smiles wide, still high on the thrill of danger, sated with bottling the threat into a little plastic cup. “This was fun! If people ask, I’ll send them your way.” She makes to leave but stops. “Hey, I forgot. What’s your First Contact story? Everyone has one, right?”
“Right.” Sascia breathes in, recalibrating. “Same as yours, pretty much. Angela Herrera on the TV, calling and texting everyone I love.”
But that’s a lie within a lie.