Chapter 7 Sugar Water
Sugar Water
Sascia is twelve, sprawled on a straw beach mat with Danny and her little sister, Ksenya.
The world is painted in bright tones: the sun is too yellow, the sand shimmering gold, the sea bright blue, the pines that cluster over the cliff glistening like emeralds.
Danny’s reading the latest news off his phone.
The United Nations Security Council has created a Darkworld initiative, Chapter XI—“chapter eleven,” they have to explain to Ksenya, who doesn’t know Roman numerals—named for the eleventh major world extinction scenario: the Shanghai Darkdragon attack.
(The obvious question is why didn’t they tell us about the other ten?
But the answer is equally obvious. If the post-Shanghai Dark Panic is any indicator—the market collapse, the immigration waves, the exorbitant air ticket prices—people can’t handle near-apocalyptic events with a clear mind.) Boqin Shen, the xenoscientist who discovered nova-light wavelength and built the nova-bombs that took the monster down, has been named the Chapter’s director.
She suggests swimming to the caves on the cliffside, but neither Danny nor Ksenya want to join her, so she ventures out alone.
The sea is tranquil smooth, the cold water refreshening on her skin.
It’s dark inside the caves, which would make Yaya Vasso go absolutely feral if she knew, but Sascia finds it soothing.
This is darkness like it used to be: unpleasant but not dangerous, ghostly but not filled with monsters.
Sascia waits for her eyes to adjust, all prickled skin and hair sticky with salt.
She wonders if they’ll fly back in a few weeks to find life resuming as normal: homework, track practice, walking her sister to piano lessons, helping her mom prep food for their family’s restaurant.
She wonders about the Darkdragon and its lustrous, rigid scales—black gemstone made flesh.
If only she could touch them, she thinks, she would be able to tell if it was the same material, the same skin, as the cloak of the figure that saved her all those years ago and that she’s been seeing ever since.
In the cave, the rocks are jagged, digging into her heels.
She doesn’t notice how much darker it’s gotten.
(There’s bright yellow at her back, the lurid Greek sun—how can you feel fear with summer guarding your back?) Her foot meets a puddle and goes in, and in, and in, far deeper than any rock crevice has a right to be.
The puddle is pure black, its surface thick like tar, its substance light as air.
This is not normal darkness. This is more. This is the Dark.
She should go back, should tell her Yaya, should alert the local precinct. Instead, Sascia squats before the puddle and sticks her fingers in. It’s a dare to herself, a claim to bravery, and her heart hammers against her ribs.
She expects to find lichen and rock, but instead her fingers skim something velvet and fleeting. A twist of her fingers cups it in her palm. A Darkbug—similar to regular bugs, but with a touch of magic: bioluminescent veins ricochet across its flesh, blue as the sky.
She walks toward the mouth of the cave to examine it in the sunlight, but the bug—a moth, her first moth—tears fast across her palm and up her forearm, which is still in shadow. The edges of its wings whiten like ashen wood.
Sascia cups the moth in her palms, shielding it against her chest, in the darkness of her own flesh.
Danny swims out to the cave with her the next day.
They don’t tell Ksenya—her sister is two years younger and finds the Dark far more terrifying than awe-inspiring.
Danny, however, is appropriately amazed.
They place the moth in one of Yaya Vasso’s Tupperware containers; in their tiny bathroom, they hang towels over the windows and stuff them under the door, then switch the light off.
The moth reflects neon blue on the tiled walls as it skitters about.
Danny uploads photos of it to a forum. Darkness is awakening, all over the world.
There are sightings of flora, of tiny bugs and lizards.
A (supposed) biologist from Istanbul advises them to return the moth to where they found it: it needs its sustenance and nutrients, whatever they may be.
In that stuffy food container, it’s going to die.
That upsets Sascia; for three days, she tries feeding it sugar water and every other bug meal she can unearth on the internet, but nothing seems to work.
Her moth moves less and less, its wings sad and drooping.
Danny isn’t as concerned. The photos have made him somewhat of a celebrity among the local kids.
Alone, Sascia returns the moth to its puddle in the cave, where it seems to instantly grow stronger.
One day, Danny invites their new friends to the cave.
They pass the moth around like a holy item.
Later that night, they light a bonfire on the beach, where Sascia meets Penelopi, the prettiest girl she’s ever seen.
They dare each other to take a vomitous sip of Penelopi’s father’s strong tsipouro and wiggle their toes in the sand and kiss.
It’s Sascia’s first kiss; she feels euphoric.
The next morning, she swims to the cave.
Its mouth has been sealed with concrete, the gray paste growing like a cancerous mass from the dark stone and green moss.
One of the kids tattled to their parents.
It’s all right, Danny says. They held the moth in their hands and got pictures and now when they visit, they’ll have friends here—that’s all that matters.
For the rest of the summer, Sascia hangs out with the group and learns scandalous Greek swear words and kisses Penelopi and breaks up with Penelopi and kisses Andreas instead.
At night after bedtime, she pulls out the Tupperware from her drawer and holds it up to the light.
At certain angles, she can see the neon streaks the moth left on its walls.
A week before they’re meant to fly home in late August, they wake up to footage of a giant Darkgriffin bursting out of a sinkhole in the middle of Manhattan.
They’ve already given the hole a name: the Maw.