Chapter 26 A Coward #2
Ahead of them, the tunnel opens to a vast space.
Below, corridors and aisles spread between half-demolished shops.
An entire forest of Darktrees has risen from the broken tiles, branches growing through windows and twisting around signs.
The whole thing looks as though an architectural model was dropped from some great height—oh.
This is Penn Station, Sascia realizes. When the Darkgriffin was felled by the Chapter’s air strikes, the impact of its enormous body created a massive earthquake.
Several structures in the area toppled or were severely damaged, and the underground part of Penn Station was swallowed whole.
Apparently, the shops and food stalls of the station remain intact, deep beneath the ground.
In a daze, Sascia climbs down to the cracked tiles. Produce has shriveled into black lumps on food carts. Dust blankets the racks inside the abandoned stores. A stroller lies on its side, and at the end of an aisle, two legs peek out.
Men’s work boots, lying at an unnatural angle.
“Are you all right?” Nugau says. She stands shoulder to shoulder with Sascia, peering down at her beneath furrowed brows.
“And they don’t believe you,” Sascia snaps.
Is she angry? Yes. She’s so, so angry. “The aesin live in our abandoned tunnels, using our lost items and forgotten furniture—but they refuse to see we have gone through as much pain as they have. Were there bodies in the tunnels you now sleep and cook and train in? Did you all just remove and repurpose them like you’ve been doing with the rest of our things? ”
Nugau steps before her, blocking her view. She speaks fast, voice tinged with worry. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t think—I didn’t realize how much it would hurt you. Forgive me. Let’s leave. We can look elsewhere.”
Impulsively, Sascia drops her hands onto Nugau’s shoulders, like she’d do with Danny or Ksenya or the cohort.
The princess startles and goes utterly still, but Sascia’s fury is coming to a boil.
“No. You were right to bring me here. It’s the best place to find a working phone.
I can soldier on—god knows, we’ve all grown skilled at soldiering on. ”
“But you’re angry.”
There’s a shrill disquiet in Nugau’s voice that makes Sascia pause. Why is the princess panicking? Yes, Sascia is angry, but her anger is not dangerous. Except—perhaps for Nugau, anger does mean danger. And pain, that of the Queen’s grip of Dark around her neck.
With care, Sascia smooths her face and calms her voice. “I’m not angry at you. I don’t blame you. I am angry at all this violence. All this death—ours, and yours too. So let’s get you your goddamn proof, princess.”
When she takes Nugau’s hand and tugs, the aesin comes, with no resistance at all.
Nugau takes the lead in the search, shielding Sascia from the sight of any other bodies, while Sascia looks for dropped electronics.
They discover plenty of cell phones, tablets, and laptops that first day and, on the next three, they amass a veritable pile of chargers.
Every night since, they spend near the turnstiles where they first landed, which host the only working socket in the tunnels.
Device after device they charge and scour through, hoping it belongs to an utter weirdo who would want to hold on to photos or videos of humanity’s greatest disasters.
(There’s no internet beneath the Maw and as such, no way to download them anew.)
They find none.
Yet it is not time wasted; they find other things.
Sascia learns that Nugau loves art, aesin and human alike.
She learns how she and Orran and Thalla met: in the military academy as children.
Nugau was instructed to associate with the council members’ children, but she found them prideful and selfish; she much preferred the company of those who knew the cost of battle and war-making.
She learns Thalla and Orran come from rival clans in Itkalin.
Orran’s are winged do-gooders, while Thalla’s are ruthless blood-drinkers, but they fell in love anyway.
She learns Nugau’s parent Kilorn was her favorite person in the world.
When the subject turns to them, grief still cuts deeply on the princess’s features, so Sascia doesn’t prod further.
Nugau learns too. The princess is a collector of stories: as they work, she pries them out of Sascia.
The story of the moth map, of Danny and Ksenya and the cohort, of her turbulent tenure at the Umbra.
Sascia discovers she enjoys the telling; the page is blank, the ink fresh, and here, she is not the sum of her failures but a collection of choices, good and bad, and—to Nugau, at least—always, always interesting.
They’re sitting close now, shoulder to shoulder, as Sascia scrolls through another phone. Personal photos she barely glances at, grief gripping her rib cage, but screenshots she reads through: memes and funny tweets and the occasional bit of news.
“What is this anyway?” Nugau asks, rapping her knuckles against the vending machine they had to unplug to use the socket.
“It’s a vending machine. You put money inside and it gives you drinks and snacks.”
Very carefully, as though in a trance, Nugau leans forward to peer at the contents. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail; Sascia’s gaze snaps to the long column of her neck.
Her mind travels unbidden to memories of other necks, of kisses dusted with Greek sand and furious make-out sessions on school bleachers.
Kissing has always come easy to her, but the rest, dates and relationships and proclamations of love, feel awkward on her, draped loose and unflattering like a dress two sizes too big.
Sascia has never particularly worried about it, because she was raised by two people incandescently in love.
When the right person comes along, everything will feel easy, her parents like to say, and even though things haven’t felt easy Sascia still finds herself returning to these impossible, heart-stopping thoughts: If I begged, would you kiss me?
“What kind of snacks?” Nugau asks, standing to take a proper look. “Candy?”
“Yes, among other things,” Sascia says around a smile. She has forgotten: Nugau has something of a sweet tooth. “Try shaking it. Something might pop out.”
The princess gives the vending machine an enthusiastic rattle, which results in two plain granola bars and a packet of chips, empty courtesy of a small army of Darkants.
Nugau’s mouth tugs downward and, in her bitter disappointment, Sascia finds the truth that has been slowly unveiling itself this entire week: Nugau loves the human world, just as much as Sascia loves the Dark.
“I’m sure we can find some other snacks around,” Sascia says quickly, before she can burst out laughing. “We need to pick up more phones, anyway. This is the last and it’s not showing any promise—”
She cuts off mid-sentence, because she has glanced back down to the screen, where she had scrolled to a new photo before Nugau started terrorizing the vending machine.
She looks at it properly now: not a photo, but a video, from a street-level point of view, of the Darkgriffin tearing through the skyscrapers of Manhattan.