Chapter 18 One Thought
One Thought
Sascia lies on her bare mattress with her fingers interlocked over her belly, staring up at the ceiling.
Her room is now free of black gore, courtesy of whatever suctioning magic Nugau performed during their exit.
Her parents have made their drunken return from their anniversary party downstairs, but dawn is still hours away.
Her mind is a minefield. Every step might blow her to smithereens: We were betrayed—boom. A war that neither side can win—boom. I am begging you still. Will you kiss me?—boom. And that kiss, that gentle caress, that amaranthine farewell. It is nuclear, annihilating.
Ymneen, Nugau called it. Knotted time.
The timeline of the human world and that of the Dark are not linear.
If you travel from one to the other, you might end up in the future or the past or somewhere else entirely.
Earthly creatures can’t travel through the Dark—technically, they can go in, but the temperature drops so low that all animal-manned expeditions have immediately lost contact.
Darkcreatures can come and go as they please, and for six years, millions of them have been arriving from their world, separate from our own, with DNA so vastly different that scientists have been baffled.
But Sascia has figured out the truth behind the Darknomaly.
Darkcreatures are not immortal. They can just, well, time travel.
Sometime in the future, Sascia will meet Nugau again.
War will break out. Sascia will try to stop it, but she will fail.
In the Battle of Feathers, she will commit treason.
Nugau will end up poisoned and dying in Sascia’s closet.
My only regret is that we never found it.
The soron mola, the true purpose behind the ymneen.
That alone could have saved us. Nugau was convinced their meeting tonight was the end, a farewell.
But what they don’t realize is that their farewell might have changed everything.
Sascia is right here, in the before. She can alter what’s to come. Not because she’s some grand genius who will unlock the mysteries of space-time, but because she is armed with the knowledge of knotted time and all the crumbs of information Nugau unwittingly left behind.
There will be a labyrinth of terrors—Sascia vows now: she will make it out. There will be a betrayal—she will stop it. There will be a great battle—she won’t commit treason.
A screw-up she may be, but no one can deny she learns from her mistakes.
This time, she will make all the right choices.
Beyond her curtains, the sky is threaded with predawn turquoises and purples. Sascia’s eyes ache from lack of sleep. Her jaw hurts from clenching. She gets up and rolls her shoulders, then scans the room.
“Are you here?” she whispers. “Come out.”
For a moment, there is only the pink-hued light of dawn.
Then comes the fluttering of wings. A small body lands on Sascia’s bare knee. The ancient moth looks far less beaten up than last night. Its antennae brush vividly against her skin. Its Darkprint pulses a brilliant white.
The moth begins pecking at her skin until Sascia realizes what it wants: she gets up to fetch it a treat from the kitchen. As she watches it devour the raisins, she decides it can be “it” no longer. It deserves a proper name.
Mooch, she decides.
“This is wild,” Danny says as he steers the wheel right. “Wild, life-changing, Nobel Prize–winning stuff. You just solved the Darknomaly, cuz.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“With Nugau’s clues, we can figure out how to stop this war before it even begins—and when we do, we can take the information to Chapter XI.” He chortles a near-hysterical laugh. “Imagine their faces when a group of students tells them they’ve spoken to an elf princet from the future.”
His good mood is infectious. “Imagine their faces,” she counters, “when we tell them the elf princet kissed me.”
Danny lets out a proper holler. “I’d skip that part, if I were you. It was barely a peck, anyway. It didn’t mean anything. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, but—” She must really be losing her mind, because her thoughts keep returning to it, to that touch, as though afraid the memory will fade. “It’s just that Nugau looked so…”
“In love?”
Sascia closes her eyes. Love, yes, that’s the word. She hasn’t dared think it, much less speak it out loud. She won’t now, either, because she vowed to make the right choices, and fixating on the sentimentalities of a time-traveling princet doesn’t sound like a good one.
As though it can sense the sudden jump of her heart rate, Mooch gives her a little nibble at her ear.
She had assumed the moth would stay in the thick shadows of her room, safe from the daylight, but when she slipped into the passenger seat of Danny’s car, Mooch had burst out of the Dark beneath her seat and burrowed into the folds of her burgundy hoodie.
“Don’t tease,” she tells Danny.
“Please, just a little?” They’re stuck in traffic on Broadway and Danny’s cheerily drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “Just until we get to the Umbra? Then I promise I won’t bring it up again.”
“Fine,” Sascia grumbles.
“Okay, so when you guys had your meaningless peck, was there tongue involved—”
Mercifully, that’s when Crow’s number pops up on Sascia’s phone.
She accepts the call lightning-fast, putting their friend on speakerphone.
“Tae and Shivani are already at the Umbra,” Crow informs them without preamble.
“Andres just landed and is rushing to his hotel. I’ve sent you all the link to an encrypted meeting room.
Now, please, for the love of all that is holy, can you tell me what this is about?
You can’t just drop URGENT SOS WE NEED TO MEET ASAP in the group chat and expect us to be calm. ”
Sascia had waited until a reasonable hour (8:00 a.m.—Danny is, unsurprisingly, a morning person) before knocking on his door.
The moment she had finished narrating the events of last night, he had made her send the aforementioned text to the cohort.
Tae had been able to postpone his trip to Cambridge, but Andres was already in the air.
“Now, now, Crow,” Sascia says. “That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”
“Come on,” Crow moans. “We all know I’m your favorite—”
Her voice cuts off because several things happen at once.
Mooch explodes out of Sascia’s hair and starts flying around, knocking into her and Danny, the windshield, the roof of the car, the windows. Startled, Danny swerves the wheel. All around them, cars honk and drivers bark insults.
“What is wrong with it?” Danny yells from where he’s bending low in his seat, trying to avoid Mooch’s barrage against the windows.
“I don’t know—”
But her eyes latch on to the stretch of asphalt and cement beyond the window. They’re coming down Broadway right past 23rd Street; in the distance, she can see the concrete barrier that surrounds the Maw.
All the nova-lights around it are at maximum lumen.
Even in the daylight, the sight is blinding. Artificial light congregates into a blaze of white, what New Yorkers call a Flare. It only happens when something big and dangerous is detected inside the Maw. Sascia hasn’t seen a Flare for years and never from this close up.
Cars are coming to a stop. Drivers are climbing out. Pedestrians stand frozen on the sidewalk. Sirens approach; overhead, a pair of helicopters rush to the scene.
Sascia turns to Danny—she needs to help him into his wheelchair and get the hell out of here—but before she can get a word out, Mooch launches itself at the window.
The glass shatters on impact, shards raining into Sascia’s lap.
Her arms come up to shield her face, her heart gallops at her neck, and Danny cries, “It’s going straight to the Maw! Those lights will fry it!”
Her fingers get the seat belt off and the door open before she’s even realized what she’s doing. Danny grabs her wrist, but before she can say I have to, before she can plead Please, don’t try to stop me, Danny shoves a short metal rod in her hand, shaped like a hilt that’s missing the blade.
“It’s a nova-sword,” her cousin says in a rush. “Tae made it for me. When you tap the pommel, the nova-light blade comes out. Go!”
For a moment, Sascia is struck; here Danny is, her best friend, her greatest ally, offering a weapon and telling her to go, understanding, in that way only Danny can, that Sascia has to save Mooch.
She turns and breaks into a run.
Her lungs heave, her legs burn, her shoulders bump into startled onlookers. Her only thought is the nova-lights—if Mooch flies into their beams, they’ll vaporize it instantly.
But Mooch has stopped, hovering in midair before the eastern entrance of the observation deck. When Sascia reaches it, panicked and out of breath, it doesn’t let her stop. It grabs one side of her hood and drags her, with impossible strength, up the stairs.
The deck is in pandemonium. Security guards usher people away, tourists scream, selfie sticks and tour-guide flags flap around.
Mooch is pulling her against the flow of the panicking crowd.
Sascia’s mind empties. She becomes instinct and dread, fighting her way across a sea of bodies, swallowed and resurfacing and swallowed again.
And then, finally, she’s standing before the windows.
Her muscles are clenched with tension. Her knees shake from the run and the climb and the near stampede, and her phone is buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans, no doubt Crow or Shivani panicking over the Flare. But Sascia ignores it all because the Maw is moving.
Ripples shatter its smooth black surface.
At the very center, a bulge is growing, as though something is pushing it from the inside.
An arm breaks through the liquid dark. A figure pulls itself out, then two more.
Three elves climb out, nova-light bouncing off their onyx armor and long crystalline swords.
One has long white hair, the other gnarled horns, and leading them is Nugau, with his purple snowflake Darkprint and angular features and intelligent violet eyes.
Soldiers rush down the walkway at the top of the concrete barrier.
Assault rifles glisten beneath the glow of the nova-lights.
A teeth-rattling sound echoes across the barrier as a giant cannon begins whirring into position.
Sascia recognizes it instantly: Tae’s cannon.
He and Crow completed the designs just last week and already the Chapter has forged it in metal and plastic.
In the ten-foot-wide barrel, a beam of light has started to form, larger and stronger than from any nova-weapon previously in existence.
At the center of the Maw, Nugau and the elves shield their eyes from the blinding force of the nova-light panels of the barrier. They don’t see the cannon aimed directly at them. They don’t realize they’re only seconds away from instant death.
Sascia’s legs react on their own, breaking into a sprint.
Tucked into the side of the observation deck, there’s a nondescript restricted-access door that leads to the barrier.
It’s propped open by a security guard while he fumbles with his nova-gun.
Sascia slips right past him, ignoring his shouts.
Up the stairs she goes, past a team of soldiers, out another door, then—
She’s standing before the Maw. Mooch twirls around her head in a frenzy.
On her left and right, soldiers and Chapter XI agents stomp down the walkway.
Orders are being barked. Guns are being cocked.
Cheeks flattened against rifles, fingers on triggers.
Straight across from her, the nova-cannon has loaded up to full capacity.
In Sascia’s mind, there’s only room for one thought: Nugau will die.
Only: I can’t let Nugau die.
She puts a foot on the metal fence of the walkway, heaves all her strength behind her legs, and jumps.