Chapter 3 A Lie Within a Lie
A Lie Within a Lie
Sascia is nine.
She’s in the woods behind her grandparents’ home in suburban Queens.
She’s wearing her puffy pink coat over her black velvet dress with the scratchy collar.
There’s mud on her good shoes, which she knows is going to get her a scolding later, but for now, the snow is so fresh, the woods so quiet.
She simply needs to see if there are fish in the frost-sleek pond.
She tests the ice first—she’s a kid, but she’s not a fool, she’s watched enough movies.
The ice holds, even when she shuffles forward on her hands and knees, toward the center of the pond where there’s a clear patch that she can take a look through.
There’s no fish, dead or alive. Only darkness.
Maybe if she fogs the ice with her breath and rubs it with her palm, it will clear, like the windows of her dad’s car do. She exhales and reaches out.
That’s when the ice cracks.
She hears the sound and then, between one moment and the next, she’s inside.
The cold is instantaneous. Water is pushing against her lips, trying to worm its way up her nostrils. Her puffy coat is heavy, dragging her deeper. She kicks her feet, reaches out with leaden arms. But she can’t see anything, can’t tell which way is up.
She’s scared now. The air in her lungs demands release. Save me, she begs. But there’s only darkness around her, its silence a death sentence. Save me! she thinks again, pleading, reaching, grasping at empty water.
A muffled sound reverberates through the pond.
There’s a flicker of light; bright spots of color float around Sascia’s vision, a dozen of them, a hundred, little bodies that flutter against her skin.
A current of movement breaks the stillness.
Hands grip Sascia’s elbows, and then darkness gives way to light, and she is out, she is breathing, she is saved.
Next to her on the bank, a figure is heaving. They’re drenched to the bone, their face hidden beneath a long hood, their black cloak lustrous as polished gemstone.
The cold becomes maddening. Her vision tunnels, her lungs struggle, her limbs feel like they’re made of iron. She thinks the figure stands. She thinks they carry her to the edge of the woods. She thinks she hears them say, “Thanks for getting me all wet, you menace.”
But Sascia can only see white now. She’s shivering, so very, very cold.
Next thing she knows, she’s in a fort of towels, in the back of her father’s car, and then a hospital bed. Every inch of her skin burns. Mom is crying. Everyone’s asking questions.
Even weeks later, people are still asking questions.
Figures clad in black are a common trauma-induced hallucination, the doctor tells her parents while Sascia sits between them in the small hospital office.
You said there was a recent death in the family?
Sascia remembers her black velvet dress with the scratchy collar.
The frost on the ground as they lowered the coffin into the dirt.
Her grandmother’s funeral was the first time Sascia saw the figure, but there have since been others, always cloaked in shadows, always watching her from afar.
No one believes Sascia when she insists the figure is real.
When she’s twelve, she sits in that same house in suburban Queens, sandwiched between her younger sister and her cousin, watching footage of the Darkdragon ravaging Shanghai.
It’s horrifying, mesmerizing, but Sascia’s attention snatches on its skin: scaled and lustrous, as though cut from the core of the blackest gemstone—just like the figure’s cloak.
Sascia isn’t a kid anymore. She’s never been a fool.
But she can’t help but feel that the figure in the onyx cloak came from this new, strange place, what the media have dubbed the Dark.
They came to save her because she is special.
She is worthy. She is magic herself. She knows it in her bones: this is the truth.
It doesn’t take long for life to disappoint her.