Chapter 25 A Midnight Snack
A Midnight Snack
Sascia lies on the beaten-up sofa, staring at the shifting leaves of the Darkflora overhead. Mooch swings in lazy, happy circles after yet another gluttonous meal, courtesy of Orran, Thalla, and other reverent aesin.
Nugau didn’t speak to her the rest of that third day, nor the six days since, except to give her emotionless instructions on their current task.
They always start with chores—cooking or washing or cleaning—then move on to training.
Sascia is not allowed near weapons; she has to watch as Nugau practices with their unit.
Evenings are spent doing maintenance work, the most physically draining part of the day: they clear debris from tunnels, fashion furniture out of abandoned materials, poke at ventilation shafts.
There are other tasks, things she’s not allowed to see.
Sometimes, Orran, Thalla, and the rest of Nugau’s friend group arrive at dinner drenched in gore and sporting shallow wounds.
Patrols, if Sascia had to guess, or exploration of the tunnels.
At random intervals, she is startled by animal screeches, short and sharp and violent, like an eagle’s caw.
But at night, she is blessedly alone, to think and analyze and plan.
She had gone about this the wrong way, misjudged her opponents.
She’d thought winning her Claim meant winning over the aesin, but it quickly became clear that the aesin value her as little as a bug beneath their boots.
It took her some time to find the right way to go about it.
Tae helped, the bastard. Despair has no place in a science lab, he had said the day before she jumped into the Maw.
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.
Sascia, surprisingly, now knows the answers to nearly all the questions the cohort had come up with that day, starting with what aesin want: revenge on humans, yes, but also, and more importantly, safety.
The aesin have fought the Ul’amoon for centuries. Humans have fought them for only a fraction of that, but no less fiercely. Both worlds have suffered under the beasts; both would benefit from their eradication. Together, aesin magic and human technology might achieve what each alone could not.
Her immediate problem is how to get both parties to sit at the same table. She might know what the aesin want, might even have an idea of how to get it to them, but if they don’t trust her, they’ll never stop to listen. She simply has to find a way to earn their trust.
The answer came to her just a few hours ago, as she watched Orran, Thalla, and three other aesin sneak bites to Mooch.
The moth had grown bold, or perhaps a little careless, and flew right into one of the nova-panel sensors.
In seconds, the dining area was yet again blasted with light, leaving the aesin nursing their burns and casting hateful looks in Sascia’s direction.
Mooch, of course, had slipped into a corner of Dark while all that was going on, and popped out only when Sascia was alone back in her room.
But this time, the blast of the nova-panels had sparked a theory.
Her hypothesis: human light is the source of the aesin’s hatred.
Her conclusion: light has to go.
Stealthily, Sascia unfolds from the sofa and eases an ear against the door. Sometimes, deep in the night, she’ll wake to shuffling sounds outside her room, followed by hisses. Tonight, however, it has been quiet; Sascia dares to peek out.
Nugau sits against the wall across the corridor, arms propped on his knees.
His scythe rests at his side, which sends a quiet wave of terror down Sascia’s spine; she hasn’t seen him carrying it since he attacked her in Times Square.
He makes no move—merely looks at her beneath his fringe of hair as she opens the door the rest of the way, spilling light onto him.
Sascia doesn’t want to ponder what he’s doing outside her door this late into the night, when, supposedly, hatred is too small a word for what he feels, so she reaches for the irritation produced by his cold-shouldering this entire week.
“Can a girl not get a midnight snack, then?” she snaps.
“By all means,” he drawls from the floor, “have a snack. It’s not as if there’s an entire army in these tunnels that would rip your throat out with their teeth.”
Yes, she’s considered that possibility. Which is why she’s not going alone. Mooch, her one and only ancient god, is right there, cozy on her ear. “Wonderful, thanks,” she mutters, and, before she can lose her courage, closes the door behind her and heads down the corridor.
At her back, Nugau groans and drags himself upright.
He trails behind her wordlessly for a long time as Sascia tries to get her bearings, fails, retraces her steps, and starts again.
Finally, she finds the tunnel that hosts the dining area and kitchen, where she sinks her teeth into one of the black plums the aesin so enjoy.
As she chews, her eyes trace the cables above the nova-light panels and follow them to a fuse box mounted on a wall.
Good, that should do. She could cut the power off right now—and she does consider it, just walking over, prying the box open and flipping the switch—but then, no one would know it was her besides Nugau, and she doubts he’d do her the courtesy of praising her selflessness for all to hear.
(Because it is, or rather will be, selflessness: nova-light hurts the aesin, but it spares her.)
She exits the dining area instead, and walks leisurely through the tunnels, following the wires—a good thing, too, because there is another set of nova-panels in the sleeping quarters and a third in the armory.
Nugau lays a hand on her arm when she tries to enter into that and, after a moment, she realizes why: there are aesin in there, whetting their blades from the sound of it.
The black plum is consumed almost to its hard gemstone pit.
Sascia pockets that, for Danny, if—when—she sees him again, and lets her feet carry her farther into the underground station, an aimless walk that turns out not to be so aimless after all.
There, a few turns before the big cavern, she spots the station’s control room.
She has found what she set out for, but a new idea pops into her mind.
“What are you doing?” Nugau whispers when Sascia wrestles the door open.
A waft of dust and moisture rises to meet them.
A cluster of Darkspiders the size of Sascia’s fist flee to their webs on the ceiling.
The computers are all dead—there’s some electricity in the tunnels, the nova-wards are proof of that, but not in here.
She finds a cell phone abandoned on a desk, equally dead, and every book on the shelves is either a manual or a useless gossip magazine from six years ago.
She’s almost done rummaging through a cabinet when Nugau pulls her away.
His fingers are soft around the crook of her elbow.
“Human,” he snaps, low and irritated. “What are you looking for?”
“Would they believe you?” Sascia asks. “If you had proof, video or photographs of the attacks and the fallen Ul’amoon, could you convince them?”
His stillness is loaded with a dozen feelings, too fleeting for Sascia to decipher.
The curve of his cheekbones becomes alight, purple to white to blue, then all three together, framing their face in a phantasmagoria of color.
Is this what siff, all, looks like? But before that question can be answered, the shift is over.
Nugau blinks their wide eyes and looks away from Sascia, their Darkprint settling into white.
Sascia wants to say something, that was beautiful or you are beautiful, or an equally soppy compliment, but she doesn’t get a chance.
Perhaps Nugau notices the mellowness of her gaze, perhaps they remember where their skin is touching—they drop their hand from her arm and slide out of the room with a snappy, “Find your own way back,” thrown over their shoulder.
On the tenth day in the tunnels (if her calculations are right), Sascia is sitting at dinner, narrating Nugau’s latest kerfuffle to Orran and Thalla.
The princet is terrible at maintenance work, constantly at risk of hammering their own fingers or tearing out an eye.
Their friends have taken to asking Sascia what happened, partly because Nugau refuses to explain but mostly because Sascia performs an Oscar-worthy impersonation of them that leaves their friends in hysterics.
By her side, Nugau is wearing a barely-there smile.
They did not enjoy her very first story; at Orran’s and Thalla’s snickers, they got up and left.
But their friends must have teased them about that, too, because the next day, they stayed.
The one after that, they interrupted with a long explanation.
On the fourth, they began to chip in corrections that made the tale even funnier.
They still largely ignore her for most of the day, but during dinner with Orran and Thalla, they seem to endure her presence just a little bit better.
Today’s tale is one of straightforward but hilarious minor electrocution. Sascia concludes it to heady chuckling from Orran and Thalla, then, just as she picks up her spoon to resume eating, a scream cuts through the tunnel.
Another Darknaga has swooped down from the ceiling in search of food. Two aesin are trying to wrangle it to the table, while a third is rescuing bowls left and right.
The wards begin to beep.
As one, the aesin scramble for cover, the poor Darknaga abandoned, flopping on its back.
Sascia moves fast: she climbs on the table and jumps from surface to surface.
Her spoon is still in her hand—when she reaches the fuse box, mounted at the top of the wall near the stairs, she uses it to wrench the box open, switches the fuses off, and proceeds to pull out any cable that she can see.
The wards stutter dead, their light fizzling out entirely.
Sascia lowers her hands from the fuse box, all too aware that hundreds of eyes are tracking her.
She jumps down from the table and makes her way back to her seat.
Around her, the aesin are straightening from their crouches, unharmed and utterly shocked.
Even the Darknaga has survived; it snacks on the contents of an overturned bowl, oblivious.
As she slumps into her seat, a feathered aesin from the end of the table calls out, “Thank you, human.”
Sascia merely nods. She spoons a bite into her mouth and chews.
Slowly, conversation resumes. Glances are thrown her way and whispers rise around her, but at least the aesin are no longer blatantly sneering.
Sascia can feel Nugau watching her. Their elbows rest on the table and their cheek is tucked into their palm. Casual, observing, perhaps even interested. In a whisper laced with bemusement, they ask, “A midnight snack, huh?”
A smile tucks onto her lips. Vexing she may be, but she is not inconsequential.
“You said they don’t trust me,” Sascia replies. “Now they might begin to.”