Chapter 33 Pocket of Soft Flesh
Pocket of Soft Flesh
Nugau is carrying her.
Bodies flit around them; voices drift from far away. Sascia’s heart pounds too loud in her ears. Flames of agony pulse down her shoulder and burn into her chest. It is not right, this heat, the kind of inferno that cannot be survived.
She’s placed tenderly on a soft mattress. Orders are barked, liquids poured through her lips. She swallows and coughs, sending a new wave of pain down her body.
Nugau’s face reappears. “I’ll fix this. Do you hear me, little gnat? I’ll fix this.”
A new aesin elbows Nugau out of the way, their gloved hands holding small, narrow tools. Sascia holds on to Nugau’s wrist and places the moth into the princess’s palm.
“Mooch,” she breathes, a croak of a word. Fix Mooch, she means. Save Mooch.
Her body has become a cage. She lies in that space between dreaming and waking. Tremors shake down her spine, fever sweats through her pores. She cannot move, not even to open her eyes, but she can hear: the aesin speaking and shifting about the room. Sewing her flesh back together.
She thinks, I want my mom. Her mother’s gentle hands, her father’s steady voice, Danny’s jokes, Ksenya’s smiles, her friends’ warmth.
She wants to be back there with them, safe, unhurt.
Instead, she is a fragile consciousness trapped in failing flesh, her frenzied thoughts her only company.
When sleep comes for her, it is a deliverance; when wakefulness returns, she wishes for oblivion.
Then she hears Nugau’s voice, close, and feels their hand against her cheek. “Our healers can’t treat your fever. You need human medicine. I think Mooch is trying to show me where to find it. I will be gone for a few hours, but I will return, I promise.”
Sascia thinks, Mooch. Mooch is alive. Mooch is leading you away.
She thinks, Is it safe to go? Is the Queen angry with you? Will she punish you again?
But her tongue isn’t working. In the end, she doesn’t even sense Nugau’s departure; sleep has reclaimed her long before she can hear the door close.
It’s the fluttering of wings that brings her to.
Mooch has landed on her face and is traipsing over her closed eyelids, a vexing pest in earnest. Sascia wiggles her nose, to which the moth responds with a nibble at her skin.
“Hey,” she whispers, only her parched mouth makes it come out as erghgh.
She opens her eyes to find Mooch standing at the tip of her nose. Then she realizes: She opened her eyes. She spoke, albeit gibberish. She can feel her body again, head to toes, and it’s painful, yes, but it’s not hot, nor the kind of heavy that promises death.
The room is an infirmary of some sort. Aesin tools and vials are spread neatly on a desk, heavy aprons hang from hooks.
On the bed across from hers, Orran is lying face down on the mattress, their wings held up by a complicated latticework of wires.
The wounds on their back are dressed with a swirly neon green poultice and the broken part of their wing has been reinforced with some sort of crystalline cast. Thalla is curled like a cat against them, her nose tucked into their side. Both look asleep.
On the floor by the door lies Nugau. Now sporting purple Darkprints, the prince wears the same organza shirt he had been wearing at the revel, unbuttoned to his midriff, revealing the ridges of his sternum, the long column of his neck.
A bandage is wrapped there, stained black with dried blood.
He’s sleeping right there on the floor, facing the beds, with only a towel tucked beneath his head.
“He refused to let anyone else keep watch,” Orran whispers. Sascia twists her head to find him smiling his gentle grin. “But I guess not even the prince of Itkalin can handle four days of zero sleep.”
“It’s been four days?” Sascia asks.
“Four since your Trial. Two since Nugau came back with your medicine.”
At the table by her bed, white-capped pill bottles bearing names like amoxicillin and cephalexin are lined up next to clean bandages. Nugau got her every kind of antibiotic he could get his hands on. “Where did he find them?”
“Your itka showed him,” Orran says. “Our healers stitched up your wound quickly, but Mooch wouldn’t stop buzzing around Nugau’s head, even attacked him at one point.
When the healers told him you might need human medicine to fight the infection, Nugau realized what the itka wanted.
He followed it into the tunnels, found a pharmacy in the collapsed station, and grabbed every bottle he could find. ”
“Did the Queen…?” Sascia’s voice trails away.
“She tried. But I don’t think the entire army could have held Nugau away from us.”
A smile draws on Sascia’s lips. “How are you? How is your wing?”
“It will recover. My clan is made for mountain and rock; a spy’s dagger will not be what breaks us.
” He pauses and drags an arm to his side to prop his face off the pillow.
Even in sleep, Thalla adjusts herself to remain close to his side.
“You could have run, Sascia, yet you stayed and took up the dagger. I will not forget your kindness. You saved my life.”
Tears are prickling at the corners of Sascia’s eyes. “I only did what was right.”
“To do what is right,” they say in a reverent tone, “is not a given. It is a choice, every day of our lives, that comes at a cost not all of us are willing to pay. You were. You knew it would cost you pain and you made the hard choice anyway.”
“How can you say that?” she whispers. “How can there be kindness in my choice, when my choice was to kill Ktren?”
Orran holds her gaze. “Was that your choice?”
“No, I didn’t want to—their teeth were in me, their weight on top of me—I didn’t think, I didn’t plan—I only acted, like a trapped animal—”
Dry sobs rattle her chest.
She only acted like a trapped animal, like all those Darkbeasts and Darkcreatures that suddenly found themselves in a world of vicious light.
She had acted on instinct alone, all thrashing and hitting and stabbing, with whatever weapon she could reach, in whatever pocket of soft flesh she could find.
A while ago, when Nugau showed her the aesin’s mural, Sascia had pleaded for the innocence of humans. We only sought to protect ourselves, she had said, and she had meant it then, believed in it wholeheartedly.
Intentions don’t matter, Nugau had answered. Then he said—
“When met with a blade,” Sascia whispers, “with a blade you’ll meet.”
Nugau meant this, didn’t he? Sascia had all the best intentions in the world, of peace and safety, of a courage that sheds no blood, yet when she was trapped, with those fangs around her shoulder, she had reached for the blade.
And the itka had noble intentions, too, but when they opened the door between their two worlds, they set in motion a terrible cycle.
The Ul’amoon broke out of their underground cages and into the human world, where they wreaked havoc in human cities.
Humans responded with nova-light bombs that traveled through time and space to become the very thing that set the Ul’amoon free in the first place—destroying aesin lands along the way.
And so the Ul’amoon broke free, traveled to the human world, and wreaked havoc there.
It is an endless cycle, this violence, an ouroboros devouring its own tail.
She looks at Orran for some kind of response—a rebuke, an acceptance, anything that will ease the scorch of this desperate feeling inside her—but the aesin’s gaze is trained on the door.
Nugau has woken. He lies still on the floor, but his eyes are open, alert, brilliantly violet.
“You understand now,” the prince says.
A cycle of violence between a world of darkness and a world of light, over and over again, with not a spare moment to pause, to think, to understand—to make the hard choice, the choice of kindness.
“I understand.”