Chapter 38 Ruby-Red Seeds
Ruby-Red Seeds
Concrete rushes up to meet them.
Sascia barely has time to round her body into a ball before she smacks into hard sidewalk.
Nugau lands soundlessly beside her, crouched low like a cat.
The street around them assaults the senses: cars speeding past, the spicy aroma of a taco stand, a sea of umbrellas rushing by.
It takes Sascia a moment to place herself in the bright, noisy tangles of the human world.
They’re standing beneath the raised platform of the observation deck of the Maw.
Overhead, the steps vibrate with the stomping steps of tourists.
The flea market stretches ahead, packed with vendors and clients.
Voices drift beneath the staccato beat of heavy rainfall.
The sky is a dark gray, the downpour muting the afternoon light.
“Clever Mooch,” she whispers. The rift the moth opened is still visible, a tear of blackness on the base of the concrete barrier around the Maw.
Mooch dropped them out of the Maw and right into the shadows beneath the observation deck, where no one would spot them.
But the real question is when it brought them.
The itka clings to her hair, along with the two dozen moths that followed them out of the tunnels. Sascia quickly ushers them inside the collar of her military jacket.
Nugau’s face tilts to the passersby. “What will happen if they see us?”
Soldiers are posted every five feet around the thirty-foot-tall barrier of the Maw, sleek nova-rifles slung across their chests. A small group of protesters in waterproof ponchos carries placards and banners. Sascia’s gaze skips over them—then does a double take.
Her face is on those placards. Her yearbook photo in stark black and white and, beneath it, slogans in bright blue.
No Dark Means No Light. Stop The Darkstruction.
There Is No Excuse For Darkcreature Abuse.
A couple of people wear T-shirts printed with grainy camera footage of Sascia in midair as she jumped into the Maw.
“Holy shit,” she whispers.
The peace protesters have made her their poster girl. She and the prince need to get out of here before anyone sees her face. Or the Darkmoths crowding her neck. Or the onyx scales of her aesin uniform. Or, well, pretty much anything about Nugau.
A broken umbrella rests on a nearby trash can. Sascia wrestles its prongs into an almost functioning structure and beneath its cover, she and Nugau join the crowd, where she guides them down the street at a hurried trot.
“Where are we going?” Nugau asks.
Where, indeed? Not her family’s place—she’s not dragging her poor parents into this.
Not the Umbra, either—she’d rather chop off a finger than lead Nugau into the hands of Chapter XI.
She has no phone and no money, so a hotel room is out of the question.
But they need to be somewhere safe, away from people and soldiers and CCTV.
Somewhere a girl who jumped into the Maw and a prince of the Dark would be welcome.
Sascia sits on the plush sofa of the thirty-first-floor apartment, watching Tae-Suk Ho pace up and down the living room.
He buzzed them in only a few minutes ago, instructed them to take off their wet shoes at the door, pointed them to the sofa, and then proceeded to have a very badly timed (albeit understandable) breakdown.
It’s unfortunate. Sascia had hoped for any combination of the three roommates besides the one she actually got: Tae, alone. If Andres or Shivani were here, she could count on them to help, but Tae? Honestly, Sascia’s surprised the kiss-ass hasn’t called Chapter XI already.
Almost as if he read her thoughts, Tae takes out his phone.
Sascia pops out of her seat, causing a riptide of wing-fluttering from her necklace of moths. “Please, Tae, give me a chance to explain first—”
“Danny?” Tae says into the phone.
Sascia pauses mid-step.
“Are you at the Umbra? With Andres and Shiv? Oh, good. I, um, need all three of you to come over as soon as possible.” Tae glances over Sascia’s head at Nugau. “No, I mean like right now. Yeah. Thanks.”
He hangs up, stares at Nugau some more, then bends over his phone.
Sascia takes another cautious step forward. “What are you doing?”
“Ordering us pizza. Unless, um, your friend doesn’t eat pizza?”
The prince lifts a bemused eyebrow. “I eat pizza. I don’t love the little red spicy stuff on it, though.”
“Red pepper flakes? Noted. What about pepperoni? That’s spicy for some people too.”
“Pepperoni?” Nugau asks.
“They’re these round slices of meat. Like these.” Tae walks over and shows the aesin a photo from the online menu.
“Oh, I like those ones.”
“Yeah,” Tae agrees. “They’re good spicy, not destroy-your-taste-buds spicy.”
“Can we also get those little cups of sauce?”
“Dips? Absolutely. What kind?”
“Well, the last time I ate pizza, years ago, there was a white sauce that smelled foul but was incredibly tasty.”
The conversation devolves into a long back-and-forth about dips and sides and drinks, and Sascia just stands there, watching them, until Nugau looks up and his face creases with worry. “Little gnat,” he says urgently, “what’s wrong?”
Sascia is not entirely sure, to be honest. But she is crying. Sobs rattle her shoulders, tears crowd her lashes, her nose has gone all horribly snotty. Her moths are angsty, fluttering around her head. Nugau is standing and Tae is wearing a concerned frown, and Sascia is—
She is here, in the human world, in her home city, with Nugau and Tae, and Danny is on his way with the rest of the cohort, and they’re getting pizzas, and there is something just so simple and yet so all-encompassing in this tiny moment that her heart just can’t take it.
That’s when the front door opens. Andres freezes with his key in the door. Shivani gapes. Behind them is Danny, her Danny, her best friend in the whole wide world.
And Sascia, with all her tears and snot and chest-rattling sobs, crosses the room and falls straight into her cousin’s arms.
The coffee table is a battlefield of cardboard boxes, napkins, and half-empty cups.
The cohort is strewn on the sofa and floor, greasy-fingered and happy.
Nugau has burrowed deep into the cushions, a hand rubbing his stomach (ten slices will cause bloating for even the most fearsome of aesin warriors).
Sascia has eaten only three, too busy narrating the events of the past several weeks to her friends.
Mooch didn’t bring them to the past or future, but the present, six weeks after Sascia jumped into the Maw.
“Your turn,” Sascia says, picking up a crust to feed little bites to the moths. “What happened while I was gone?”
“All hell broke loose?” Danny answers. He’s playing with Sascia’s hair, as though unwilling to separate himself from her. Sascia feels the same way; she sits on the floor, leaning against his chair, peering up at him every ten seconds to make sure he’s still there.
“And that’s not metaphorical,” Crow adds from Andres’s laptop. “It’s been almost as bad as First Contact—all shock and confusion and fear.”
“There were only a few seconds of footage of the three Darkhumanoids climbing out of the Maw,” Shivani explains, “so instead the media focused on you. There are hundreds of articles on your childhood, your work at the Umbra, your family—dozens of interviews from your fishing clients.”
Sascia winces. All her secrets exposed for the world to see. “I saw my face on protesters’ placards.”
“Some think you’re a spy, working with the Darkhumanoids,” Andres says. “Others think you’re some kind of witch, because CCTV caught Big Boy—Mooch—leading you to the Maw. But the people that matter believe us.”
Us. That means…“You told them about the nonlinear timelines?”
Andres nods. “Danny explained what happened the previous night and what you had figured out about the Darknomaly. We didn’t know where you’d gone or how to get you back, so we decided to call Carr. He took your theory to Chapter XI.”
“What did the Chapter have to say?”
A small pocket of silence descends.
Sascia looks up to Danny for an answer, who says, “We don’t know yet.
The Chapter has been dealing with a lot of internal strife.
Boqin Shen has been forced to step down as director.
They’re still looking for a replacement.
Carr says the Chapter is trying to corroborate your theory with their own research.
We’ve offered to help and for the past six weeks, we’ve been looking into the correlation between creatures and timelines ourselves and sending all our findings to Carr.
But he says the Chapter is holding off making the information public, and that we’re not allowed to either. We’ve been advised to wait.”
“Wait?” Sascia bursts out, a thread of anger lacing her voice. “Wait for what? For the aesin to climb out of the Dark and start an all-out war?”
“I think,” Shivani says quietly, “they are waiting for you.”
That makes Sascia pause. “Me?”
“You, the prince,” Shivani says, with a polite incline of her head at Nugau, “or whoever might come out of the Dark next. Whether they decide to start a war or broker peace, they need someone to do it with.”
“That someone is here,” Nugau confirms.
“They already know about the ymneen,” Sascia says. “Now we can tell them about the itka’s part in it. Their true purpose.”
“What does that mean?” Crow asks. “The true purpose?”
“According to the lore of my people,” Nugau says, “itka like Mooch split open the fabric of space and time to unite worlds so that they can save each other.”
“For a while,” Sascia adds, “we thought we were meant to unite to defeat the Ul’amoon, the Darkbeasts, but that’s not right. Destroying the Ul’amoon is not the answer—there’s some other way we can save each other.”
“Energy,” Tae says without missing a beat, a know-it-all to his core.
The cohort and Nugau are collectively startled. Shivani asks, “Wait, what?”