Chapter 4 Case in Point
Case in Point
The elevator doors ding open to reveal the Umbra Program facilities.
Sascia takes a deep breath, a gladiator facing a lion-filled arena.
Her eyes cut straight to the corner office.
Light leaks beneath the door—which is closed, thank goodness.
She glances at the nearest desk next, where a lanky figure is hunched over a laptop.
Empty coffee mugs and energy drink cans flank the screen, the loyal sentinels of Tae-Suk Ho’s battle against sleep.
The Umbra Program for Young Researchers is made up of six of the brightest minds of their generation, but even among them, Tae is a supernova.
He’s eighteen like Sascia, originally from Seoul but currently studying here in the US.
Like the rest of the students of the Umbra cohort, he has an affinity for the Dark.
His design for a nova-light net to confine Darkcreatures got him into the Umbra at just fourteen, and into MIT at sixteen, where he’s been majoring in xenoscience engineering.
Sascia is decidedly not in the mood to feel inadequate merely by existing in Tae’s orbit tonight, so she takes the long way to Danny’s lab, along the edges of the open desk area and through the kitchen.
Her feet are soundless on the rough moquette as she grabs the spare sonar from Danny’s desk.
She should leave just as unnoticed as she arrived, but she can’t help herself.
She slips into her own lab room and closes the door behind her, quiet as a thief.
Her presence is—as always—an invitation for mayhem.
At once, wings begin buzzing. The entire wall opposite the door is covered in glass, where a shadowed garden of Darkflora lies, blooms and leaves and gangly spiked ivy with flesh as hard as chiseled stone.
Atop the otherworldly vegetation, hundreds of winged creatures press together against the glass, quivering with excitement at Sascia’s return.
Their colors blink in bright swirls and dots: violet and sky blue and pure white.
“Well, hello there,” Sascia whispers.
The Darkmoths pulsate in reply. The soft sounds of their bodies are a balm; Sascia’s fretful thoughts quiet down. She eases the backpack from her shoulders and walks to the glass separating the nest from the room.
“I’ve only been gone a few hours,” she coos at them. “You can’t possibly have missed me already.”
Their joy is contagious; Sascia’s mood immediately turns playful.
She steps to the left—across the glass, the moths follow.
She steps to the right—the moths mimic her.
She stands tall and crouches low, then abruptly twirls around herself.
Colors bounce off the walls as the Darkmoths repeat Sascia’s impromptu choreography.
A laugh bubbles through her throat. “I’ve missed you too. All right, let’s see what you’ve been up to.”
She slips behind the desk, powers on the computer, punches in her password, and clicks to the camera records.
An image of the garden appears on the screen.
In it, the Darkmoths are static, perched on their designated spots.
She zooms into the Manhattan area, rewinds to 7:40, and lets the recording play through in fast-forward.
It’s a map of New York, her and Danny’s garden, made entirely of moths and flowers.
Darkmoths are a rare breed, even among the many peculiarities of the Darkworld.
For one, according to world databases, they have only ever appeared to Sascia (and by extension, Danny).
For another, they appear to be intrinsically linked to their home.
A moth collected from the northeast corner of Central Park, for example, will choose to rest on a Darkflora sample harvested from that very same corner—a sample that Sascia and Danny will then place on the Central Park location on their map.
And, last but not least, Darkmoths show an awareness that transcends space and distance—if there’s a disturbance in Central Park, where the moth is from, the moth in Sascia and Danny’s garden will react.
Just as it does now—at the 7:49 time mark, the stillness on the screen breaks.
Color blooms as a moth feverishly flaps its wings.
Zooming in, Sascia studies the stripes of its body, the twirling veins of its forewings, the dots at the center of its hindwings.
It’s sitting exactly at West 53rd Street, collected from the very same sewer hole Sascia just took Yvonne fishing in.
This is not necessarily bad news. It doesn’t mean anything beyond what she already knew: that there was something in the sewer, large enough to disturb the Darkflora around it—and in turn, the Darkmoth in her map—as it crossed from the Dark into the human world.
Sascia spins around in her chair. Her moths have settled down again, each in their little chosen spot. She stands and walks to the moth sitting over the alley in Hell’s Kitchen. Its antennae are short and its body pulses with neon purple, marking the moth as male—at least currently.
The unusual qualities of Darkcreatures have perplexed scientists for years.
One such puzzle is what’s been dubbed the Darknomaly: the fact that Darkcreatures seem to live alongside their distant ancestors.
Two moths pulled from the same pocket of Dark on the same day might show millennia of evolution between them, yet they live at the same time.
Another is they can change their sex.
Sascia has seen it happen with her own two eyes: one moment a moth might be a large, pale female with feathered antennae, the next it might be a smaller, soft-winged male, and the moment after that it might be long-bodied and of unknown sex.
The color of the swirls and dots that adorn their hard flesh, uniquely individual like human fingerprints (called, unsurprisingly, Darkprints), indicates their current sex.
For lack of further information, scientists have been applying human gender binaries: across all Darkcreatures, purple signifies what humans consider male, blue female, and white something outside the binary, but there are an additional half dozen gradients of these three whose meanings have yet to be deciphered.
In recent years, however, some theorists, including the Umbra Program’s own budding anthrozoologist, Shivani Kaur, believe that there’s an element of choice in Darkcreatures’ shifts between sexes.
They bring gender into the conversation—The Dark is genderfluid on a molecular level, Shivani likes to say.
(Of course, the straight white males of the science world aren’t keen to accept that, but when did that ever stop the queers of the world?)
A sharp knock announces a visitor mere seconds before the door opens and the light is flicked on. White washes over the room—immediately, her moths are aflutter. Thumps echo on the glass as the bugs fly around, startled and agitated.
“Hey! This is a no-light lab!” Sascia bursts out. She knows who the newcomer is, she knows she should be respectful, but she doesn’t care. She sidesteps him and hits the light switch by his shoulder, sinking the room back into semidarkness.
“Miss Petrou,” Professor Carr says in his low, emotionless tone. “That blackout glass was manufactured precisely to keep your moths safe from light sources. It cost this program a small fortune, so I suggest, once again, that you start putting it to use.”
Sascia finally graces him with a look: his neatly shaved jaw, the gray at his temples, the well-tailored suit. She knows damn well how much the glass cost, because the miserable man likes to mention it every time he visits her lab.
That biting bitterness must jump-start something inside her because she snaps, “And once again, sir, I have to tell you my moths don’t like it.”
The professor doesn’t immediately reply. Neon reflections catch on his glasses as his head tilts to examine her. “Your moths?”
Well, shit. She becomes suddenly aware of where she is: his elite program, his lab. His moths, if they want to get technical about it. (Or legal; her employee contract dictates that any work produced in the facilities lawfully belongs to the Umbra Program.)
Sascia has to fight that all-too-familiar urge to block her moths with her body, power down the entire room so that they can escape back into the Dark, away from Professor Carr’s disapproving pucker. She tries to keep her voice laid-back. “Did you want something, sir?”
“I noticed you coming in,” Carr says. “I know how averse you are to working overtime. It struck me as odd.”
For a second, Sascia thinks about telling him the truth.
His expertise on the Dark is unparalleled.
As one of the founding members of Chapter XI, the international group that oversees the study and management of the Darkworld, he has both the tools and influence to properly explore the possibility of humanoids in the Dark.
In mere hours, he could assemble a team of the best xenoscientists in the world, with military support to boot.
But his objective—everyone’s objective—would be a dead body. A safe, unthreatening body to dissect and analyze, and Sascia can’t give them that. Not now, not ever.
So she lies, yet again. “I forgot my textbook, sir.”
Deftly, she flips open the front pocket of her backpack, showing him the textbook she’s been carrying since this morning’s class.
His face is marbled stone. “Miss Petrou. Despite what you may believe, I have only ever tried to help you. I offered you a place in my program and secured you a spot at Columbia University. I have long believed you are capable of extraordinary things—if you put in the work. Remind me, what were the provisional requirements you had to meet to secure your spot?”
Sascia exhales slowly through her nose. “A 3.9 GPA and 1500 SAT score.”
“And tell me, after nearly two years of knowing these requirements and supposedly actively trying to fulfill them, what were your scores last winter?”
“3.2 and 1320.”
Professor Carr is statue-still, no blink, no nod, not even a satisfied smirk of his mouth, which Sascia finds maddening.
If he looked and behaved like a villain, it’d be so much easier to convince people that he is a villain.
Instead, he’s this: her gracious mentor, her benefactor, the fairy godmother of her second chances.
“I won’t remind you what’s at stake here, Miss Petrou,” he says. “I am certain you know. You’re a clever girl, after all.”
Well, he’s done it. Sascia is fuming so hotly she’s surprised her clenched teeth don’t meld together. The sheer audacity of throwing this line back at her.
When Carr first invited her and Danny to join his elite cohort of teenage prodigies experimenting with the Dark, it had seemed like a dream come true.
With the Umbra Program’s state-of-the-art tech and boundless sources of information, Sascia and Danny could turn their map into a citywide alarm system that could surpass the accuracy of the army’s best sensors.
Except, they soon discovered, the moths only appeared to Sascia.
Only obeyed Sascia. Without her, the alarm system simply didn’t function, and no investor was going to fund a teenager with a dream.
The Umbra’s founders wanted credibility.
And so Carr secured Danny a spot at Princeton to study botany and plant genetics and a spot at Columbia for Sascia, to major in entomology.
Hand-picked by an Ivy League school before she’d even turned seventeen—Sascia’s parents were elated.
Then Sascia, being the dud that she is, failed each and every term of her conditional acceptance.
Fresh out of the big get-your-life-together fight with her father, Sascia already had her speech prepared when she spoke to Professor Carr. She wanted a second chance. I can do this, she had promised Carr (and her father) (and herself). I’m a clever girl, after all.
And now here they are, facing each other again six months later, and those same words have come back to bite her in the ass. As if cleverness matters at all when the rest of the world has already decided you’re a screw-up.
“Yes, I am,” she bites out. Because she is smart. Case in point: not telling him about the possibility of the greatest discovery in xenoscience.
“Then, Miss Petrou, I suggest you start acting like it,” he says. And with that final slap on the wrist, he slips out of the room.