Chapter 24 The Blue of Blood
The Blue of Blood
Nugau arrives the next morning dressed in tight black leathers made of thousands of small iridescent scales.
Green drops hang from his ears and a belt with three daggers is strapped on his thigh, the same one he wore on Halloween.
His hair, usually a shaggy mess framing his face, is pulled back in a low ponytail.
He stands at the threshold for a long moment and draws in a deep breath. “Let’s go.”
As he turns sharply on his heel, Sascia scrambles to follow, with an overeager Mooch in tow.
In the months the aesin have been trapped here, they have converted the abandoned station to a military compound.
Sascia and Nugau pass storage rooms packed with weapons and corridors of archery training.
From the floor below echo sounds of metal clashing against metal.
Aesin cross their path, first gawking at Mooch, then throwing a mistrusting glare at Sascia, then lowering their gaze at their prince before scurrying away.
Nugau opens a door to what used to be a staff locker room. A shower is tucked in the corner, narrow and curtainless. Without speaking, Nugau points to it.
That long, deep breath in the break room—god, she must really stink.
Once he’s stepped out of the room, Sascia wiggles out of her torn hoodie and muddied pants and steps into the water.
(Freezing, of course, but she won’t complain; water alone is a luxury in a station sealed off from the rest of the world.) As she scrubs herself clean with the bar of green soap at the holder, she buries her feet deep into the thick layer of Darkmoss on the shower tiles.
Moss is one of the gentlest, most benevolent kinds of Darkflora, according to Danny.
Her muscles clench at the thought of him up there, very likely cursing the moment he stuck Tae’s nova-sword in her hand and told her to go.
News of her jump into the Maw must have trickled through to the rest of the world by now.
She can almost picture Aunt Rania’s satisfied I-told-you-so smile.
But Sascia is determined: she’ll prove her aunt wrong, prove all of them wrong.
She has altered the very first part of what Nugau-from-the-future told her would come to pass.
She will complete the Queen’s new Trial and emerge from the Dark victorious, with her moth god and an army of allies.
A pile of clean clothes has been left for her by the door, one of the uniforms the aesin wear: a matching set of jacket and trousers made of that glistening scaled fabric, cinched with tight strings at her waist and hips.
She takes a moment to scrape the dirt off her Doc Martens and run her hands through her wet hair, combing it back behind her hoop-strewn ears.
She’s feeling quite pleased with her black-lizard look until she opens the door—Nugau sets off at once, without a single look at her.
“You will be shadowing me today,” he says over his shoulder.
“Cooking, cleaning, maintenance duties, training. We do things communally, in the army and in our world in general. If you don’t help cook, you don’t eat.
If you don’t help clean, you won’t get a sleeping cot. ”
“If I don’t do the laundry, I don’t get another bomb-ass outfit?”
His head swivels to her, deliberately slow. “Was that a joke?”
Yes, but that was certainly not the reaction she was hoping for. “How do you speak my language so well?” she deflects.
“I learned it.”
“In my world.”
“In your world,” he repeats, mimicking her tone.
She waits, but he doesn’t expand. “How about Thalla and Orran? Did they learn it in my world too?”
“No. I taught it to them and anyone else that wanted to learn. We pick up languages with ease, but only a quarter of the army speaks yours. Most aesin will not understand you.”
Nugau brings them to a stop at the top of a staircase. From the bottom comes a ruckus of voices and clanging of pots and pans. They seem to be tackling the first item: cooking.
“Do not draw attention to yourself,” he commands. “Be quiet, invisible, and respectful. The aesin do not trust you. They will not hesitate to hurt you.”
“But why? Why do they hate humans?”
“There is not one aesin in this army that hasn’t lost a loved one because of your kin.”
Thalla’s slithering voice rings in Sascia’s ears. Your kind has destroyed our homes, killed our loved ones for generations. But humans only learned of the existence of Darkhumanoids a month ago—and had only known of the Dark for six years before that.
“Come,” Nugau commands. “We’re already late.”
The tunnel at the bottom of the stairs is indeed a dining area.
Dual tracks line the floor, separated by a row of vine-wrapped columns.
In the far left corner, fires burn beneath oddly shaped pots.
About a dozen soldiers move purposefully, stirring and chopping and washing, while the rest sit in small clusters around dining tables fashioned out of slabs of metal, torn boards, and decrepit benches.
Hundreds of eyes track Sascia and Nugau as they weave between the tables.
Sascia draws herself up to look as casual and indifferent as the prince, but her bravery is only surface level—her heart pulses a thousand beats per second.
Thankfully, the soldiers direct her and Nugau to prepping duty the moment they arrive in the kitchen: Sascia is instructed to wash a pile of Darkvegetables while next to her, Nugau skillfully chops them into thin slices.
The repetitiveness of the motion is a balm, familiar from Athena’s Yard.
For a while, she is only the shift of her fingers, the rough-hewn skin of Darkmushrooms, the soft fluttering of a curious Mooch.
She’s only distantly aware of aesin coming and going as each battalion wolfs down its food, then sets off again.
Minutes pass, or perhaps hours, before Nugau reappears with two bowls of some kind of orange-tinged gruel. “Come. It’s our turn to eat.”
Sascia follows him through the sea of tables to where Orran sits. While Nugau falls easily into the aesin’s conversation, Sascia spoons her food with one hand and uses the other to offer small bites to Mooch, who devours them in seconds, the little glutton.
“Can I?” Orran says, face shimmering with admiration.
“Of course.”
Orran scoots down the bench, dragging his bowl with him. When the moth nibbles at his offered bite, Orran lets out a cooing giggle. “I never thought I’d actually see one.”
“Really?” Sascia breathes. “Why?”
“There hasn’t been a sighting for nearly a century. We call, but the itka don’t come.”
Sascia is enraptured again, throat parched for wonder, for veneration, for the magic reflected in someone else’s eyes.
She recalls that day in the drainage system in Astoria, the moth cocoon wrapped in her jacket as flames consumed the tunnel.
She thinks of Mooch, the otherworldly way it seems to understand her.
The old yearning thrums through her: magic, magic, magic.
“Does it have a name?” Orran asks.
“I call it Mooch. Because it mooches any food it’ll find, don’t you, little guy?” Her tone goes embarrassingly baby-voicey at the end there, and she quickly glances up, afraid she has somehow offended the aesin’s god.
But instead, a smile curves Orran’s mouth. “It certainly looks like it—”
A shadow lands on the table and lunges for Mooch.
Bowls rattle, gruel spills, benches are thrown back.
The front of a Darkcreature’s long body dangles in the air, while the back is hidden among the swirls of Dark between the vines on the ceiling.
Three tongues leap out of a horrifyingly humanlike head.
Sascia sucks in a breath; she’s never seen a Darknaga up close before, one of the serpent creatures that resemble the nagas of Asian mythology.
Mooch evades it with ease, burrowing into Sascia’s hair, but the damage has been done.
A series of sharp, electrical beeps is the only warning.
Sascia knows what will follow—her arms come up, shielding both her eyes and Mooch from the coming light.
Nugau barks an order. Chair and table legs screech against the floor.
A blast of nova-lights sears white against Sascia’s lids.
Then come the hisses, the curses, the cries of pain.
Nova-panels are so common, such a part of her world, that Sascia didn’t even notice them mounted on the walls.
This tunnel must have been one of the few the city tried to reclaim from the Dark.
For a while, after nova-lights were installed, train tracks around the Maw ran smoothly—until the Blackout, when they were surrendered back to the Dark with no hope of return.
Activated by movement sensors, wards like these are meant to prevent potential Darkcreature emergence.
Subway panels are particularly powerful, more than a hundred thousand lumen, and extremely durable—Sascia can see where the aesin have attempted to smash them and were unsuccessful.
On the table before her, the Darknaga is now a mass of amorphous charred flesh.
The aesin begin to peek out from under tables and behind chairs.
Angry welts shimmer on their skin where the nova-light struck them before they could take cover.
Sascia is the only one still sitting at the table, unhurt.
An aesin, one of the councilors who stood closest to the Queen the day of Sascia’s Trial, points their clawed finger at her. They scream in their own language, spittle flying from the jaw, and others quickly join in, in English, “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”
The aesin shuffle toward her, furious and hateful, and within moments, Sascia is being mobbed, elbows in her ribs, nails on her arms, a boot at her back.