Chapter 8 Wrong Place, Wrong Time
Wrong Place, Wrong Time
It’s been a week since the elf prince exploded in a blast of Dark in the middle of Times Square and it is (understandably) all anyone’s willing to talk about.
Danny leans on the armrest of his wheelchair, chin in hand.
The blue of the screen reflects in his flat stare, bushy eyebrows squished together beneath a fringe of unruly curls.
On the TV in front of him runs a montage of footage from the last week: increased military presence in high-risk areas, the launch of a new set of NovaCorp weapons, nova-bombs hurled daily into the major Darkholes of the world—even though no one really knows whether they actually work, because they’re timed to detonate after they’ve disappeared into the Dark.
An old interview by Director Shen of Chapter XI has resurfaced, where he was asked about the possibility of sapient life in the Dark.
At the time, his calm, considered reply had been Peaceful coexistence would be our top priority, which is not sitting right with the public now that sapient life has been revealed to wield a scythe and hunt a human through Times Square.
People are marching in the streets, half of them in support of Shen’s pacifist sentiment, half of them calling the attack a declaration of war.
The round-cheeked newscaster drones on about eyewitness reports and expert testimonies, the Darkhumanoid’s intentions and the Mystery Human’s identity.
Danny’s gaze drags to Sascia, where she sits on the floor beside him. He cranks up the volume and whispers, “Have you figured it out? What happened that day?”
“Is that really necessary?” Sascia gestures at the TV. “Our building is not wiretapped.”
“Listen. It’s a miracle your elf prince’s weird blast took out all devices in a mile-wide radius. But just because your face is not on the news doesn’t mean the authorities are not out there. Watching. Listening.”
“It’s been a week. If they knew I was the mystery human the elf prince was chasing through Times Square, the authorities”—she air-quotes the word to show Danny just how ridiculous he’s being—“would have barged through the door by now.”
Danny eyes the front door, barely visible among the mismatched furniture, piles of packages, and hanging racks between them and the hallway.
(It’s a cozy place, her family’s apartment, but it is not tidy.) No one barges in.
A blade of rheumy late-October dusk light cuts through the living room wall. The newscaster drones on.
“How can you be so calm about this?” Danny finally asks.
“Do I look calm? I don’t feel calm.”
Ever since the attack, she’s been a paranoid, fidgeting ball of nerves.
Every flicker of shadow is the elf prince, returning to deliver on his death threat.
Every siren is Chapter XI, come to arrest her.
Every buzz of her phone is a message from Carr, kicking her out of the Umbra, taking away her moths.
Perhaps she’s reached capacity with all that terror and now she’s just numb.
She forces herself upright and steps to the hallway. “Come on. We have to get going.”
“What I don’t understand is why,” Danny continues, wheeling himself after her.
“The elf spoke English, right? Which means he’s been in the human world before, long enough to learn the language.
He’s been here undetected. So why reveal himself now?
Why let himself be seen by thousands of tourists? Why—well, you know.”
Sascia has been shoving her arms through her jacket, but now she pauses mid-sleeve. She does know what he means, but neither of them says it out loud.
Why her?
(She thinks about that moment the prince stepped out of the Dark. You, he had hissed at her. Yes, me, she had thought. Me, me, me.)
“I’ve told you everything he said,” Sascia says. Every word the elf prince spoke had been burned into her brain. “Apparently, I’ve been judged for my actions in the Battle of Feathers and found guilty of treason.”
“But what’s the Battle of Feathers? And treason for what?”
“I have no idea.” She’s been trying to puzzle it out for a week. “Maybe something I’ve done is a crime where he comes from. My research, my moths. Maybe even pulling him out of the Dark.”
“So your theory is that this elf prince chose to very publicly announce the existence of his kind because, out of all the people in the world and all the potential reasons to be enraged, he needed to punish you.”
Sascia bends over to slide her white Chucks on, her hair a curtain between them. She doesn’t want Danny to see the disappointed pout on her face right now. It’s not fair of him to phrase it like that.
“I’m not deluded,” she bites out.
It’s a loaded word for her: doctors used it, first when she claimed a figure in black saved her from drowning, then when she reported seeing the same figure throughout her childhood, always lurking in faraway shadows that no one else seemed to spot.
Eventually, rumors of her “deluded” claims made their way to her school, at which point she stopped mentioning the figure’s appearances entirely.
“Ofcoursenotcuz,” Danny says in a worried rush, all too familiar with her sentiments on that particular word.
“That’s not what I meant at all. I’m only trying to say, have you considered the possibility that it might have just been a coincidence?
A case of mistaken identity? Of wrong place, wrong time and all that? ”
The answer is yes.
Of course she has. But the elf prince had looked at her and recognized her.
He had spoken as if he knew her: I tried to tell you in every way I could, darkness and light can only ever be enemies.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence or a mistake, even though it does chafe.
Once upon a time, she had wished and wished to be chosen by the Dark—and now all clues point to the fact that she has been chosen, just as its enemy.
(How narcissistic, she thinks, that the idea still sends a little thrill down her core.)
When Sascia straightens, she’s rubbed the pout off her face and drawn on a smile, honest enough to reach her eyes. “You’re right. I was probably just the first rando he happened upon. There’s no way that even I could start a vendetta with elfkind without even realizing it, right?”
“Exactly.” Tension drops off her cousin’s shoulders.
“Should we go?” she says, eager to leave this conversation behind. “We’ll be late for the meeting.”
Professor Carr has called an emergency Umbra meeting, no doubt to discuss the pandemonium the existence of humanoids in the Dark has caused in xenoscience. The meeting is in an hour, which means she and Danny are already late; the 5:00 p.m. drive into Manhattan is brutal.
A few minutes later, the elevator whirs open on the ground floor—immediately, a desperate “Sascia! Is that you?” comes from the kitchen’s back door.
“Don’t,” Danny warns.
But Sascia can’t. “Yeah, Mom!”
Danny lets out a defeated groan and rolls his wheelchair to the ramp. “I’ll start the car. Don’t take too long, okay?”
The door on Sascia’s right opens, revealing a messy restaurant kitchen.
Her mother nails her a stop-right-there-criminal-scum look while her fingers keep furiously wrapping dolmadakia like it’s Greek taverna doomsday.
Her glasses are slick with condensation from the half dozen steaming pots around her.
The whole place—damn, the whole block—smells Greek: dried oregano and sizzled garlic and fried fish.
Mikhail, the sous chef, glances up from his various chopping and stirring duties and gives Sascia a pleading smile, the meaning of which Sascia instantly interprets: her parents have overbooked the tables.
Again. The familiarity of it all—the smells, the motions, her parents’ inevitable blunders—eases some of Sascia’s nerves.
Here is a place she knows and belongs to, soothing in its simplicity.
Her mom nudges her head past the kitchen. “We need help with the table seating.”
“Mom,” Sascia says, “Danny is waiting in the car. We’ve got a meeting at the Umbra in an hour.”
Her mother harrumphs. “What’s that professor thinking, dragging you kids back into Manhattan during all this chaos? I thought we were still in lockdown.”
“Lockdown lifted last night,” Sascia explains. “And this chaos is actually what we’re having a meeting about—”
“Sascia, the Umbra won’t collapse if you’re two minutes late. Go help your father.”
Sascia stomps across the kitchen and into the main seating area, where the reservation book sits alone on the abandoned host stand by the entrance.
As expected, it’s a wild mess. They’ve got four parties arriving in fifteen minutes, none of which are assigned appropriate tables.
Sascia crosses out names and overwrites others to figure out a better seating arrangement: the party of three at the table in the corner, the two families of four at the long table for ten (separated by bread baskets, free of charge), and the couple at the extra table on the veranda, which Sascia hurries to unfold and set a tablecloth on.
Her father spots her from across the packed yard and makes a beeline for her. “Smart!” he chirps over the noise. “I’ll grab the silverware!”
Athena’s Yard, her family’s restaurant is called.
Her great-grandparents arrived in New York from Pontus with barely enough cash to last a year, but they took one look at this corner apartment building and its disproportionately ginormous backyard and knew instantly that it would make an extraordinary investment: kitchen and indoor seating on the ground floor, tables in the beautiful yard, living quarters for the family on the second and third floors.
And here Athena’s Yard is, more than a hundred years later, having survived even the post-Maw recession six years ago that had every New Yorker abandoning ship for a smaller, safer town.
Here the family still is; her grandparents moved to suburban Queens a couple of decades ago, and their daughters’ families split the apartments between them, Sascia’s on the second floor, Danny and his mother on the third.
When it’s all ready, her dad pulls Sascia into a sweaty side-hug. “Oh, kardia mou. You’re my savior.”
A snort bubbles up Sascia’s nose. “You’re getting me all stinky.”
“Stinky? Me? After a nine-hour shift at a Greek restaurant? Impossible.” His arm sits comfortably on her shoulders as he marches her to the quieter corner of the host stand and thrusts his phone in her face. “Look at what Ksenya sent.”
It’s a picture of a lovely white beach with brilliantly blue waters, and Ksenya in her lime-green two-piece, smile wide, nose rosy with sunburn.
Thanks to global warming, even October 31 equals summer in southern Greece, where Sascia’s little sister has been staying with Yaya Vasso these past two years.
Every other day, Sascia wakes up to a photo of the new beach that Ksenya and her friends drove to after school.
She would be envious if she wasn’t so goddamn relieved.
Ksenya, sixteen now, is finally smiling, finally making friends, finally in a country without a single Darkbeast sighting ever.
“Next summer, we’ll all go,” her dad is saying. “It will be your Columbia enrollment gift. The four of us together again. Ksenya can take us to all her favorite beaches.”
He’s a carrot-and-stick kind of parent, her father.
One day, he’s sitting you down at the sofa, getting increasingly frustrated by your evasive answers about your SAT scores and handing out ultimatums (see: Get your life together, kid) and the next, he’s crushing you in a hug, laughter rumbling in his chest, praising your intelligence and gifting you vacations to Greece.
Sascia is used to it by now, but it is no less exhausting. “Sure, Baba. That sounds wonderful. Listen, Danny is waiting. I’ve got to go—”
“Yes, go, go.” He claps her on the back. “All this studying, all this work. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
And just like that, Sascia feels like shit.
Pure, nasty turd.
She’s not sure when the shift happened, or how.
But now this is who she is: a scammer. She cons her clients, manipulating their darkest curiosity for profit.
She cons the professors of her remedial courses with half-hearted papers and minimum effort.
She even cons her family, by pretending she has figured her stuff out.
Pretending she’s got a part-time job at a bookshop in Manhattan to make up for the Umbra stipend she lost when she failed to get into Columbia.
Pretending she is over the shit in her past, grown out of her obsession with the Dark.
And now, apparently, she cons even herself, trying to convince herself she is not a coincidence or a mistake.
She sighs and heads for the door. There’ll be time later to beat herself up over her lies—there always is.