Chapter 26 A Coward
A Coward
The door creaks, deep in the night.
Sascia is awake (it has been hard to fall asleep when there is no sun to mark the days). She lies motionless on the sofa, watching Mooch’s flight, waiting for exhaustion to steal her away from consciousness. At the sound, she jumps upright and grabs the first thing she can find: a beat-up magazine.
A baffled smile crosses Nugau’s face. The Darkprints blaze blue on her cheeks, but otherwise there is no physical marker of her shift: the same lovely violet eyes and cutting jawline and lithe limbs. She closes the door and leans against it.
“I could,” she announces.
Be my ally? Sascia wants to ask, but she knows that’s not the right question. Still, ever since her stint with the nova-wards two days ago, things have been different. Cold disregard has settled into something watchful—curiosity, perhaps.
“Do not mistake me,” Nugau says. “I still believe your naive notion of peace is not an option. My people are born and raised on war. That’s how we deal with threats.
But with proof that your bombs were not an attack, and that they will not continue to destroy our world, I could persuade the aesin to return to Itkalin.
Separate my world from yours forever. We could avoid mutual annihilation. ”
The idea of separation sends a trickle of dread down Sascia’s back. How can she ever return to her dreary life of classes and papers and SATs after living among magic and being favored by a god? But Nugau is here, she is willing, she used we; it’s a start.
“If we find one of your devices, your screens, can you get it to work?” Nugau asks, studying Sascia with a kind of caution that betrays a secret.
The subtext is obvious. “You know where to find one.”
“No one can see us,” Nugau warns. “If they find us sneaking out, they will accuse you of trying to escape.”
“They will accuse you of helping me escape,” she counters. But she’s already pulling her boots on.
As she stands, they regard each other across the room. A thread of understanding snaps taut between them: they are something of a team now.
When Nugau slips into the corridor, Sascia follows.
With every step they take, it becomes more evident that this is not the first time Nugau has snuck out of the army compound.
As the princess leads Sascia through a convoluted maze of tunnels, stairs, and exit doors, she knows just where to hide to avoid a patrol, where to place her hands on half-demolished ladders, where to go slow and quiet beneath a colony of Darkbats.
Her attention is never long away from Sascia; she will look over a shoulder to make sure Sascia’s keeping close or offer a hand on a steep climb or cast an orb of her cerulean fire when the darkness becomes too thick.
But Sascia does not mistake the princess’s care for affection.
She remembers her words twelve days ago all too clearly: I have no interest in the decisions of a self that will never be.
The future you glimpsed will never come to pass.
I will make sure that I am never betrayed, and that I never have to stoop so low as to be at your mercy.
They might be a team now, on this, but they are not friends.
Yet she still finds herself noticing Nugau.
The way the princess moves through the world, with the cutting ease of a freshly sharpened blade.
Her long, slim legs, the small twitches of her pointed ears, those full lips and the sharp incisors beneath them.
Sascia’s first impression of a beautiful killer was entirely wrong.
The aesin is dangerous, yes, but in the manner of the endless ocean or the roll of thunder before a storm. Wild but not vindictive.
“How old are you?” Sascia asks as they cross a tunnel of overgrown Darkferns.
“Four.”
A startled laugh bursts out of Sascia.
“Our years are much longer than yours, because our world revolves very slowly around our sun,” Nugau explains. “But to give you an idea, in my culture, four is considered just on the cusp of adulthood. How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“An old, old lady.”
“I’ll have you know I’m on the cusp of adulthood in my culture too.”
“You are a student.” It’s not a question. With a furtive glance at Sascia, Nugau adds, “I remembered you. I couldn’t at first, because you had been wearing that cat mask. But working so close to you, I recognized—” Nugau cuts herself off.
Her smell, Sascia realizes. Nugau recognized her smell.
That night on Halloween, the princess had leaned into her neck and breathed in deep.
And on her parents’ anniversary, Nugau had whispered, You always smell sweet.
A shiver crawls over Sascia’s skin, gathering at the tender flesh of her throat.
Her heart pounds there, flustered by the thrilling possibility that she smells just as sweet now, to Nugau.
“You were with your friends.” The princess holds a hanging Darkvine aside for Sascia. “They smiled a lot. They gave me candy. It surprised me that you were all studying the Dark. Until then, I had thought humans typically fear it.”
Ah, yes. Nugau’s mysterious past. The story that Thalla warned Orran was not theirs to share.
Sascia wants to pry, to ask a million questions, but instead, she says, “Not everyone does. There are many of us, like my friends and other scientists and even lots of regular people, who actually admire the Dark.”
“But not you. You love it.”
“I—” But how can Sascia put her love of the Dark into words? She has never tried before; it feels unfathomable. “You called me an Ariadne in love with the Labyrinth itself.”
If the naming holds significance, Nugau doesn’t show it. Her eyes land on Mooch, who flutters leisurely ahead. “And them, you love the most.”
“The moths? Of course I do. What is there not to love?” They brought me here, she doesn’t say. To this. Her fingers splay as Mooch twirls around them. “Would you tell me about them? Are they really gods?”
The outline of Nugau’s face is drawn in the soft blues of the orb of flame that lights their way.
“Both our priests and our scholars agree that moths like this one, what we call the itka, are as old as our world itself. Across the millennia, it has been documented that they disappear suddenly, for decades or even centuries, then reappear.”
The princess’s voice has taken on the lilt of storytelling.
“That is where the priests and the scholars deviate. Science hypothesizes that the itka simply migrate to some unknown part of our world. But the old lore tells a different story. That the itka are saviors. That they hear the call of worlds in need and split the fabric of time and space to bring them together so that they may help each other. According to these legends, the itka led the Ul’amoon from their dying world to Itkalin, where they could live in safety.
And the Ul’amoon saved Itkalin, in turn.
A centuries-long winter had stricken our lands.
We would have died if our ancestors hadn’t discovered that the Ul’amoon radiate heat and that trapping them beneath the earth would save our civilization. ”
“When I jumped into the Maw,” Sascia whispers, “we were falling through the Dark. We would have ended up in Itkalin, wouldn’t we?
But the cold was killing me. And so Mooch did something.
A slit appeared, cut into the Dark itself, and we fell back into these tunnels.
” Her eyes are wide as they track Mooch’s zigzags overhead. “It’s not just old lore.”
“No,” Nugau agrees. “I don’t believe it is. When I first came into your world as a child…it was because I was in danger. One of the itka split the world for me and brought me here, to the human world. I’m confident it was this same itka. Your Mooch.”
Her Mooch. Sascia holds no delusions about owning the moth—the very notion of ownership goes against everything she believes in—but she feels the depth of its significance, pride and gratification and validation.
The directive of the itka is to save, creatures and people and entire worlds, and out of all of them, Mooch chose her.
Four times now, it brought her and Nugau together.
She doesn’t understand why, but maybe it’s for this—for peace.
Her vow drums through her: she will try, and she will not fail.
“The Ul’amoon,” Sascia says, “they look like creatures from our oldest myths. And you, the aesin, bear similarities to anthropomorphic beings from our myths: the fair folk, the angels, were-creatures. Could the itka have led you to our world once, a long time ago?”
“We have stories like that, too, of long-necked giraffes and colorful schools of fish and round-eared demons.” The princess pauses to study Sascia’s ears. “It seems that our worlds have been catching glimpses of each other for a long time, through the knots of the ymneen.”
“But shouldn’t that mean something?” Sascia asks. “If the itka open the door between worlds so that they can save each other, shouldn’t it mean something that the itka brought you and us together? That they chose to save you by bringing you to the human world?”
“It does, to some. To the faithful like Orran. To those who trust me, like Thalla and my battalion. But the others—what they’ve seen with their own two eyes, what they believe in, is that an open door lets through threats: The vicious Ul’amoon.
Your nova-bombs. And sooner or later, you.
The rest is fiction concocted by their coward princess. ”
Nugau’s jaw clenches tight. Gently, Sascia says, “You don’t strike me as a coward.”
“I am. A coward through and through.” Her voice has taken a sharp edge. “Let’s pick up speed. We’re close.”
The tender openness of the conversation snaps shut. Nugau cuts through the Darkferns with sudden ferocity and Sascia follows, submerged in her own thoughts, wondering why the princess calls herself a coward when Sascia has only seen bravery.
“We’re here.”