Chapter 16 A Yearning Kind of Sorrow
A Yearning Kind of Sorrow
Sascia sits back. Her chest heaves obnoxiously, as though she’s run a marathon.
If I begged, would you kiss me? One last time?
She wants to wrench her hair out and scream at the ceiling like a cartoon character: What!
The hell! Is going! On! The Dark has always been a mystery, but one with rules and boundaries.
This—a princet popping out of the Dark hell-bent on killing her, then bursting out of her closet in need of rescue, then smelling her neck and asking her to kiss them—is more than a mystery.
This is a goddamn paradox, an absurdity, an illogicality.
She drags her fingers over her face, but her tar-coated hands leave long foul-smelling smears on her cheeks.
On the bed, the princet breathes slow and raspy, unconscious.
She flees to the bathroom, locking her bedroom door after her.
She lets the water run until it’s scalding hot, then steps in, clothes and all.
Black swirls around the drain. When she’s done scrubbing, she grabs the whole stack of fresh towels and runs back to her room.
Nose buried in the soft, lavender-scented towels, she surveys the scene.
It’s a bloodbath in a black-and-white filter. Tarry liquid has stained her entire carpet and bedsheets. Imprints of moth wings are splattered on the walls and windows. The little menaces have calmed down now, gathered in a heap over the injured moth’s body.
A knock sounds on the door and a timid, “Sascia?”
Oh god, what now?
She flattens herself against the door. “Don’t come in! Now’s not a good time!”
“Listen, kardia mou. I had a chat with your aunt. She says she’s going to call you tomorrow—”
“Baba, can we not talk about this right now? I’m kind of busy.”
“Yeah…yeah, sure.” Sascia can almost picture him, looking at the ground and ruffling his graying hair.
He switches to Greek, always more comfortable in it when he has to pick his words with care.
“I just want you to know, nothing is already decided. You can be whatever you want to be. You can do whatever you want to do. It matters—to me and to all of us down there.”
Wood presses against her forehead. She wants to believe him.
She wants to open the door and tell him she’s going to be a bowling shoes influencer, then, or a lion tamer, something wild and ridiculous.
She wants to see him throw his head back and hear his roar of laughter, have him fold her into his arms and tell her she really can be anything she likes.
But it’s not true. He is not being true.
She can’t be the girl obsessed with the Dark.
She can’t be the girl who hallucinates a figure in black.
She can’t be the student who messed up her opportunity at an Ivy League education.
And it’s not his fault, not really. He’s just a dad—an immigrant, working-class dad at that.
What he wants is to give her more than he had, to watch her live better than he does, to not worry—and what has Sascia ever been besides a boundless source of worry?
Through the wood, Sascia whispers, “Thanks, Baba. That means a lot.”
His feet susurrate on the wooden boards of the corridor, then, with a soft “Love you,” his steps recede out of the apartment.
Sascia is alone again, with the unconscious elf and the livid moths and the murder scene of a bedroom. She slips into an oversized T-shirt and proceeds to roll the stained carpet out of the way. Fetching a bucket of room-temperature water, she kneels on the floor and reaches for the big moth.
Its comrades don’t like that at all. Their bodies transform to hard onyx again, their wings buzzing furiously.
“Please,” she whispers. “Let me help.”
Begrudgingly, they begin peeling off the injured moth’s body.
Sascia wipes its wings with the corner of a towel dipped in water.
After a few careful strokes, the black tar recedes.
She smooths out its wings with a fingernail and sets it on its legs, but the poor thing must be exhausted; it only manages to crawl in a half-drunk zigzag.
An old, old ancestor of your other moths, Andres said. See how they immediately start grooming it? Shivani had asked. It’s what attendants do to a queen bee. This so-called itka is not just ancient. It’s something of a leader. Royalty.
Her mind flashes to the Darknomaly theory.
Glancing around, she takes note of the moths’ differences in size, wings, and antennae.
If she took a sample from each moth in this group and ran it through the gene analysis equipment in Andres’s lab at the Umbra, no two moths would belong to the same era.
As though time is a cracked mirror; some pieces reflect an ancient beginning, others the shiny, modern now.
A story told in fragments of past, present, and future.
Sascia’s gaze cuts to Nugau. The elf is sprawled on her bed, their chest rising and falling in even, drowsy breaths.
If I begged, would you kiss me? One last time?
One last time, as though Sascia has kissed them before. One last time, as though they want to be kissed. As though they care about her.
Three Nugaus exist at the same time. The Nugau who recognized her in that alley on 53rd Street, who accused her of treason and tried to kill her.
The Nugau who approached her on Halloween, friendly and full of wonder, with no recollection of the attack or having been in New York before.
And this third Nugau who burst out of the Dark in need of help, who showed no sign of hatred and instead…
You always smell sweet. You always taste sweet.
But all three Nugaus are the same person, Sascia is sure of it. Like her moths and every creature of the Dark, Nugau’s story is also told in fragments. Past, present, and—
She sits back on her haunches, hands going rigid around the big moth.
Her thoughts race, fitting the shards of the fractured mirror back together.
The Darknomaly has confounded xenoscientists for six years: How can creatures of different eras exist at the same time?
But what if it’s not an issue with the creatures but with time itself?
What if the human world and the Darkworld don’t run in parallel timelines?
Sascia thinks back to Halloween, the smooth, scarless planes of Nugau’s face.
They had looked younger, still uncomfortable in their body, lanky and tall and wide-eyed.
In Times Square, their face was slimmed down by age and an old scar curved around their neck.
When Sascia shot them with nova-light, the skin of their hand had charred.
She reaches for Nugau’s left hand, turns it over. On their wrist, the flesh is raised and twisted, exactly where Sascia wounded them a month ago. But this is not the red of a month-old, still-healing burn. This scar is fading, as though it has been healing for a long while.
The truth slots itself into place, impossible as it may seem. Nugau is different whenever they come out of the Dark, because they come from different times.
The Nugau of Halloween was from the deep past. They didn’t recognize Sascia because they hadn’t met her yet, much less attacked her.
The Nugau of Times Square was from the future.
They had met Sascia before. Enough events had transpired that Sascia was now a traitor worthy of a death sentence.
And the Nugau of today was from an even more distant future.
They carried the scars of Sascia’s gun, and yet they trusted Sascia enough to come to her for help.
Sascia’s face slackens with shock. Sometime in the future, she will commit treason in the Battle of Feathers. She will spend time with Nugau. She will…kiss them.
“Ah. So this is the moment.”
Nugau studies her with a lucid, piercing gaze. Their hand stays between Sascia’s fingers, as though welcoming the touch. But the intimacy jostles Sascia—she snaps her arm away and breathes, “You know?”
“I have been in your world before. I have seen evidence of your kind felling creatures that were still alive and well in my world. I believe it is a consequence of traveling from our world to yours. We have a word for it: ymneen. Knotted time.”
“So you—” (God, is she really going to say this aloud?) “You’re from the future?”
“In a way, I suppose. It is the future for you, but the past for me.”
“From when?” And then, because she can’t help it, “What happens in the future?”
Nugau holds Sascia’s eyes. “War,” they breathe. “A war that neither side can win.”
Sascia’s mouth goes dry with dread. War, just as the Umbra cohort feared. As the rest of the world is preparing for. “The war hasn’t happened here yet. If you tell me how it starts, I can stop it before it even begins. I can help you—”
They reach to cup Sascia’s cheek; startled, Sascia lets them. “Oh, but you do, little gnat. Or you try to. You almost die for it. A brave Ariadne in a labyrinth of terrors, clever and strong. But war is cleverer still. Violence is stronger still. You fail. We all fail.”
Their touch trails up Sascia’s jaw, hitching at the silver hoops lining her ear.
Sascia’s breath is a captive in her lungs, locked in a rib cage of fear and anticipation.
Fear, because this is the very same creature who wanted to kill her.
Anticipation, because they now want to kiss her.
And threaded between dread and excitement is that old longing, the one she has never quite been able to quench: magic, magic, let me be a part of magic.
“My only regret,” Nugau whispers, “is that we never found it. The soron mola, the true purpose behind the ymneen. That alone could have saved us.” Unhappiness claims the rough edges of their voice. “But we are far past saving now. This, right here, is the best we’ll ever have at farewell.”
The gravity of that last word pulls on Sascia like an anchor chained to her ankles, dragging her into the deep. Is this what kiss me one last time means?
“Why is this farewell?” she whispers.
“It has to be.” Their eyes flutter closed. It takes them a long, shaky breath to add, “Separation is the only way to keep our people safe. I understand that now.”
Sascia doesn’t. She understands very little, except that she stands on the precipice of past and future with no choice to make.
Every decision has been made already, for her or perhaps by her, and it is unfair, unbearably and heartbreakingly unfair, to be told that she can do anything, be anything she likes, only to be deprived of the choice by time itself.
On impulse, she blurts, “You asked me to kiss you.”
“No. I begged you.”
Their eyes grow wide and bright, watching her, as though her reaction might be the most important thing in the whole world. Sascia wills herself into stillness, refusing to give away the wild rattle of her heart against her ribs, the purring sensation of heat at her core.
“I am begging you still,” they breathe. “Will you kiss me? A parting gift to a lover you have yet to meet?”
“I—” Sascia swallows. “I don’t know you.”
“Know me, then,” the elf whispers.
Their fingers weave once more into the short hairs at her nape. Sascia feels the tug, the pull, the invitation, gentle and attentive, expecting nothing in return.
Know me, Nugau pleads, as if lips are the gate to understanding, as if touch is the bridge, and a kiss is a laurel wreath of peace.
Know me, as if it is that simple—but isn’t it, for Sascia, the girl who has longed for the unknown all her life?
If the timelines of their worlds are knotted together, if the future has already transpired, then this, here, will be her choice, hers alone.
Sascia makes it easily, succumbing to the melancholy yearning for a life she has not yet lived and a love she has not yet felt, to hoping and wishing and longing.
She closes the gap between them.
Their mouths meet.
It is a small kiss, a shy greeting of lips, soft and warm and tender, then gone.
Nugau leans back. Their irises reflect swirling spots of bright color.
Behind Sascia, the moths have taken flight, illuminating the room with the stark neon of their Darkprints, white and blue and purple.
Every sputter of black suctions off the walls and floor to coalesce at the bed, leaving only clean surfaces behind.
The Dark breathes and pulses, rushing to Nugau as veins return to a heart.
Don’t go, Sascia thinks.
But instead, another question tumbles from her lips, “When? When do I love you back?”
“Oh, little gnat.” Nugau’s face is whittled with a yearning kind of sorrow. “I don’t know that you ever do.”
And then, in a whirlwind of darkness and stars, they’re gone.