Chapter 13 A Haunting
A Haunting
Nugau.
Nugau.
Nugau.
The name is a repeating litany on the margins of Sascia’s notebook.
Other bits are scribbled, too, like An Ariadne in love with the Labyrinth itself and Let me remedy my misstep and little sketches of the blooms on their silky long hair.
Sascia even tried her hand at their violet eyes, but alas, her skill is too amateur to properly capture Nugau’s essence.
“Sascia,” Andres says from the desk. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.” She looks up from her notebook to find him giving her a flat look. “No,” she concedes. “Can you repeat that?”
Her lab has turned into their unofficial war room.
A police sketch of the elf princet (the gender-neutral royal term they’ve decided on) is stuck on the wall over her desk.
Papers are strewn around it, reports and xenoscience theories, data analyses and test results, and every single line they spoke to Sascia during their attack.
The trash can is piled high with coffee cups and takeout containers.
Andres and Tae are hunched over the lab computers, Shivani over the microscope, while Sascia is on the floor amid a sea of papers.
It’s all giving very Unhinged Detective, but none of them care.
Carr hasn’t set foot in the Umbra offices since Halloween, busy with his own research upstate.
They send him daily reports on their new projects—Tae and Crow have already finished their design of a nova-cannon, Andres and Shivani are at the first stages of developing a weaponized virus, while Sascia and Danny have recently figured out how to transform the nova-light walls of their garden into an anti-Dark shield—but the rest of the day they spend in Sascia’s lab.
It’s been three weeks since she told her friends about her first encounter with the princet; after their shock wore off, the cohort did what it does best: research.
“I said, the results are in,” Andres repeats. “Crow and I have run your stats through every database accessible to xenoscientists—”
“And some,” Crow says from the speaker, “of the less accessible kind.”
(For the layperson: classified archives Crow managed to hack into.)
“—and you’re right,” Andres continues. “Big Boy over there is most definitely an old, old ancestor of your other moths.”
Sascia follows his gaze to Big Boy. The strange moth is currently pacing atop the glass of her and Danny’s map.
Even from this distance, its difference from the other Darkmoths is obvious: it’s four times their size, roughly the length of Sascia’s palm, with feathered antennae and an unusual thick fringe of fur over its eyes.
For weeks, Sascia has been collecting data on moth size, shape, and genetic code, arriving at the theory Andres just confirmed: that this moth is far older than any other she’s come across.
“But how is that possible?” Shivani asks from the other side of the lab.
“If only we knew.” Andres sighs. “It’s the great mystery of xenoscience.”
“Not all of us are majoring in xenogenetics, Andres,” says Tae. “Please explain.”
Andres whirls the office chair around and folds his hands in his lap. “Okay, so. As more and more Darkcreatures began making their way into our world, scientists realized that there was an anomaly in their genetic code. The scientific term is gene paradox, but everyone calls it the Darknomaly.”
He extends a hand toward Sascia’s garden.
“Take these moths, for example. Xenogeneticists have proven that the DNA of a moth that hops out of the Dark on a Monday is centuries more evolved than the one that hops out on a Tuesday. But on Wednesday, a moth might hop out of the Dark with a DNA that suggests it’s millennia behind both of the other two.
In human terms, it’d be as if you and your great-great-great-grandchild and your ancestor from five hundred years ago all existed at the same time.
Which is of course impossible, unless we assume that Darkcreatures have a much longer lifespan than we do. ”
“Essentially,” Sascia explains, “the hypothesis is that Darkcreatures are immortal.”
“And according to our analysis, Big Boy over there,” Andres adds, “is the oldest creature that’s ever come out of the Dark.”
A soft plop sounds as Sascia’s mouth falls open. “Older than the Darkdragon?”
Andres nods.
“Older than the Darkkraken?” Tae asks.
Andres nods again.
“As old as a god,” Sascia whispers.
Her mind flashes back to Nugau, their features sagging with confusion. Itka, the princet had said reverently. Why do you have one of the itka? How did you find a god of Itkalin?
“Well, that makes sense,” Shivani says.
Andres lifts a brow, his piercing glistening in the near-dark of the lab. “It does?”
“I’ve been studying your moths’ interactions. Actually, let me show you.”
Shivani skips to the garden, where she props the small hatch open and places the ancient moth inside. At once, the other moths in the garden fly to meet it. Tiny by comparison, but fast, they swarm around it, caressing its wings and body with their little antennae.
“See how they immediately start grooming it?” Shivani asks.
“It’s what attendants do to a queen bee.
I’ve never seen moths exhibit social behavior like this before, and your Darkmoths certainly don’t do it to others in their swarm, Sascia.
This so-called itka is not just ancient. It’s something of a leader. Royalty.”
“A royal moth and a royal princet,” Crow calls from the speaker. “Both of them obsessed with little old Sascia.”
A grunt leaves Sascia’s nose as she buries her face in her hands.
“I don’t understand. The first time I met Nugau, the princet accused me of treason and tried to kill me.
The second time, they snacked and chatted with us as if nothing had happened, and when I asked them about the attack, they didn’t even remember it.
It’s like they were two entirely different people—except we’ve compared notes on our memory of their Darkprints and they were identical.
They were the same person, they just didn’t act in any way that makes sense. ”
“And while we’re trying to solve this unsolvable mystery,” Shivani says, reaching out to tap the glass of the garden, “the rest of the world is apparently trying to destroy the Dark inch by inch.”
Sascia peeks between her fingers. The garden’s normally luminescent surface is marked with dark spots, as though infected with some kind of ugly virus.
The symptom: dead areas of the Dark.
The virus: humanity.
Every day for the last month, since the attack in Times Square, she has arrived at the Umbra to find a new blotch of emptiness on her map.
The Darkplants that used to be there are withered, their roots gnarled to stumps.
The moths that inhabited that spot have disappeared back into the Dark.
All of them victims of the public’s rising panic.
People have taken it upon themselves to douse pockets of Dark around their homes with fire, or, if excessively rich, explode it with nova-bombs.
The cohort did end up attending the peace rally that Sunday and every Sunday since, but their voices are getting hard to hear above the growing paranoia.
“And Chapter XI is doing jack shit,” Andres says.
Elbows on his knees, he’s studying her garden too.
“They typically condemn such acts of destruction, but my sources are saying they’re currently preoccupied with reassuring world governments.
Apparently, they’re under pressure from the United Nations to appoint a new director with a military background. ”
Shivani’s hands fly to her cheeks. “That would be a disaster. The Chapter is supposed to be independent of governments and militaries. Its directive is the management of the Dark, not inciting violence. We’ve always used nova-lights to keep the Dark at bay, but now that they’re attacking it unprovoked…
How long until the Dark decides to fight back? ”
A gloomy silence unfolds.
But Tae cuts their pity party short with a slap of his hand on the desk.
The sound is startling, the movement so unlike Tae that they all turn to gape at him.
“Despair has no place in a science lab,” he tells them.
“We work with hypotheses and conclusions. With trial and error. If we figure out how the Darkmoth is connected to Nugau and why Nugau behaved like that, then we will have an idea of what they want. And if we know what they want, then we might begin to negotiate with them. We need a hypothesis that we can bring to the powers that be. We might not have arrived at the conclusion yet, but we’re close. I can feel it.”
All right, Sascia will admit that Tae’s genius can occasionally be comforting.
If he believes they’re close, then they must be.
An ancient royal moth alerted Sascia to Nugau’s presence on Halloween.
If it happens again, the cohort can all follow it and find Nugau before anyone else can.
They can have a proper conversation. Negotiate terms of reconciliation or advocate for peace or whatever it is proper ambassadors do.
On that note of (perhaps illusional) hope, their war meeting comes to a close. “It’s getting late,” Andres announces. “We need to go home and pack. It’s my and Tae’s week on campus starting tomorrow.”
The two of them and Shivani share an apartment in a building complex just a few blocks east, a lavish rental that is included in their Umbra scholarships. By special arrangement, Tae, Andres, and Danny split their time between remote and in-person learning at their universities.
The lab fills with the sounds of paper rustling and bags being zipped up. Shivani looks down at Sascia on the floor apologetically. “Sorry for the mess.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sascia says. “Go home, guys. I can clean up here.”
When they trickle out, Sascia mechanically pulls out her phone and calls Ksenya—always good to have company while cleaning.
Her sister answers on the first ring with a drowsy “Heeey.”
“Oh, god, I forgot how late it is there.” Seven hours ahead to be exact, so around 2:00 a.m. in Greece. “I can call back tomorrow.”
“It’s fine. I’m just doomscrolling.”
“How have you been?”
Sascia begins tidying up as her sister rambles about her weekend: a walk around town on Saturday, complete with food-tasting and flea-market shopping, then a long night out dancing with her friends. Then, on Sunday, lunch with their grandparents, uncles, and cousins, and an afternoon of homework.
In typical Ksenya fashion, she leaves out the juicy parts, which won’t do. “Did Alex text back?” Sascia asks.
Even through the phone, Sascia can hear Ksenya’s blush. “He did.”
“Ooh! Tell me everything.”
Ksenya does, reciting their texts word for word. To Sascia, it is glaringly obvious the boy likes her, but Ksenya is filled with that all-consuming first-school-crush anxiety. Sascia asks questions and offers advice, doing her best to prod Ksenya into making a move.
At last, Sascia stops to survey the scene.
In under fifteen minutes, she has managed to restore the lab room to a near habitable condition.
Three bags of trash are piled by the door and a stack of papers sits on the desk, but that’s a problem for tomorrow.
Letting her shoulders relax, she opens the hatch to her garden and deposits a pile of treats for her moths: raisins and peanuts and roasted almonds.
“How are you?” Ksenya asks.
“Oh, you know. Busy with classes and papers and the bookstore job.”
“Carr giving you trouble?”
“No more than usual. This elf princet has thrown the whole lot of us in disarray.”
Silence descends on the other end of the line.
For a long time, Sascia thought her sister would outgrow her fear of the Dark.
It didn’t make sense that one sister would love something the other feared.
But Ksenya never did. In fact, as the years passed, her childish terror morphed into a well-justified, self-aware dread.
“Hey,” Ksenya says finally. “What time is it over there? Shouldn’t you be at the party?”
Sascia pulls her phone away to look at the time.
Shit.
Today is her parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party and Sascia is the kind of late that makes you an absolute asshole.