Chapter 39 The Making of a Universe
The Making of a Universe
The professor leaves around midnight, after an excruciatingly detailed note-taking session on the ymneen, the itka, and Nugau’s list of terms for a peace treaty.
Tomorrow morning, he will present them to Chapter XI and propose the beginning of peace negotiations.
Nugau and Sascia will be calling in from an encrypted meeting room courtesy of Crow.
But for now: clean-up and sleep.
As Sascia washes and Danny dries the dishes, he tells her—to her utter shock—about Tae.
After seeing the live footage of Sascia’s jump, Tae took to the streets in search of Danny.
He found him trying to wrangle his wheelchair around the panicking traffic, whereupon Tae barked cars and buses out of the way and got him to the sidewalk.
He gripped Danny’s shoulders and said, We’ll find her.
We’ll fix this. Since then, they’ve been texting all day every day, about Sascia and the Dark, but also about so much more.
“Aaaand?” Sascia asks.
Her cousin’s cheeks turn red; he casts a too-wide glance at Tae, who’s sitting with Nugau and Shivani on the other side of the big room. “Nothing has happened yet, even though we’re constantly alone together. I don’t know if there’s something actually there or if, you know, he’s just being nice.”
“Tae has never just been nice a day in his life. Trust me, there’s something there.”
Danny glances at her beneath downcast brows. “I feel so guilty, Sascia. Daydreaming about making out with Tae while you were held captive by creatures from another world.”
“Don’t be,” Sascia replies. “I very much was making out while you were freaking out about my well-being.”
Danny’s eyes go wide. “It happened? Nugau…”
Their heads turn to Nugau on the sofa, deep in conversation with Shivani.
As the aesin speaks, the Darkprint on their cheeks swirls with color, transmuting from purple to white before settling into blue.
Sascia can’t help her grin; on Halloween, Shivani had wished she could ask Nugau all her questions, and now she can.
The aesin’s fluid view of gender, human democracy, and division of government—this could be another way they help each other, couldn’t it?
After a moment, Nugau notices Sascia’s lingering gaze.
A deep mauve crawls over the princess’s features.
Sascia thinks back to all the little moments when she got the sense she was embarrassing or flustering Nugau.
She thinks of Nugau’s confession before they kissed.
Unraveled and made anew—that’s what loving Nugau feels like.
Her own thoughts give her pause.
Love. Is that what she feels? She has always enjoyed flirting and kissing, but she has never thought the actual words before: I am in love. They are soaked in dreamful tenderness, drizzled with longing.
When she turns back to Danny, he is watching her with a bemused smirk.
“Shut up,” Sascia grumbles affectionately.
“Please,” Danny croons. “Just one joke, I beg you.”
“Fine. Let’s hear it.”
He’s already sporting a smug grin. “You two are going to take the term ‘destination wedding’ to a whole new level.”
Sascia stares at him, dead-eyed. “That was absolutely terrible. I think it actually hurt my brain. Am I bleeding from the ears?”
He swats the ear she’s presented for examination away from his face and breaks into a chuckle. Always eager to join in the fun, Mooch takes flight between them, zapping between her nose and Danny’s forehead.
But then Sascia sobers. “Can I call them?”
Danny nods quickly, as though he’s been expecting it. He hands his phone over.
Her mother picks up, the sound of pots, pans, and running water in the background. “Danny, baby, I’m busy. Can I—”
“Hey, Mama.”
It’s apparently enough to break her. Sascia’s mother begins crying uncontrollably, babbling half-finished questions, mumbling you’re alive, you’re alive, then screaming at her husband across the restaurant.
Sascia tries to answer their questions as best she can, but she’s not faring too well herself.
Her voice has gone all frantic and high-pitched, and every five seconds she keeps saying I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Her father manages to wrestle the phone away. “Where are you? I’m coming to get you.”
Sascia glances at the living room, where her friends have been (mortifyingly) watching her the whole time.
Nugau has gathered all the moths against her chest, trying to keep them from fluttering around Sascia.
“I’m somewhere safe. There’s something important I need to do tomorrow morning, but I’ll come home right after and explain everything. ”
She expects him to argue, to criticize her—What could be more important than your family?
—but instead, her father says, “Danny tried to explain why you did what you did. We don’t entirely understand it, and we don’t like it either, but—we can wait until tomorrow.
At noon. If you’re not back home by then, I’m coming to get you, wherever you might be. ”
“I’ll be there.” There’s a momentary pause, then Sascia blurts, “Baba, are you angry?”
“Of course I am! You jumped into the goddamn Maw! We thought you were dead!” he snaps, but it’s his good snap, the one that she can picture with tears in his eyes and a gruff smile on his lips.
“Make no mistake, you will be grounded until you’re fifty, but right now, I’m just happy you’re coming home. ”
Home, surrounded by family, fed good food, and swaddled in warm blankets. A short reprieve before the hard part begins: drawing up a peace treaty, stopping a war, loving a princess from a world across time and space.
Sascia tucks her hands beneath her cheek and looks at Nugau.
The two of them are lying on Andres’s bed, swathed in the smell of clean sheets and freshly showered bodies.
Andres himself has moved to the sofa, Shivani’s in her own room, and Danny is in Tae’s.
The quietude of exhaustion has fallen over the apartment, and Sascia is too nervous to speak.
Something has changed inside her, something deep and fundamental, and she’s not quite sure what to do with herself.
“How do you feel?” she whispers, the four bravest words she’s ever spoken.
Nugau turns on her side. The T-shirt she borrowed from Andres (because Shivani’s were too short, which is both ridiculous and delightful) hitches at her neck, exposing the smooth porcelain skin of her collarbone. Thoughtlessly, Sascia reaches out and runs a finger over the groove of her bones.
The princess stays very still and holds her breath for a long time before speaking. “Hopeful and scared at the same time. I worry about Thalla and Orran and all the other aesin who supported me. The Queen cannot openly punish them for my actions, but there will be consequences.”
And Sascia convinced Nugau to come with her. She lifts her hand from Nugau’s neck and hurriedly says, “We can ask Mooch to take you back.”
The moths have settled on the pillows and bed frame around them, a dotting of iridescent light against the dark.
“I don’t want to go back. I want to try this, here, with you.” Her hand closes around Sascia’s and returns Sascia’s fingers to her skin, the movement so yearning, so craving that Sascia feels set ablaze. “How do you feel, little gnat?”
Boldly, Sascia says, “I feel like kissing you again.”
Nugau’s arm folds around Sascia’s waist and moves them both, so that Sascia is sitting on her lap. “Then by all means, do.”
Their last kiss was sharp and breathless, piercing as a whetted blade.
Now Sascia takes her time. She lets her hands roam over the planes of Nugau’s chest. She runs them down her biceps, her elbows, over the jutting bones of her wrists.
She guides the princess’s fingers to her own borrowed T-shirt, where they climb under the thin fabric to burrow in the grooves of her shoulder blades.
Nugau’s hair fans on the pillow. Tenderly, Sascia traces her hairline, her arched eyebrows, the cutting curves of her cheekbones.
She lowers herself onto her so that her lips can follow the path her fingers have paved.
Small pecks trail from temple to jaw to neck to that wonderful dip between her collarbones.
A shiver runs down Nugau’s body. A phantasmagoria of color presses against Sascia’s closed lids. When she opens her eyes, the Darkprint on Nugau’s cheeks burns bright, changing among colors.
“I feel everything right now, like I am everything all at once,” Nugau whispers, watching her with hungry eyes. “I know you’re not used to it—I can settle into one if you mind.”
Sascia takes in the snowflake patterns on their cheeks. The intensity of their gaze. The openness of their voice. It has never occurred to her to mind. They are Nugau and they want to kiss her and that’s all that ever mattered to her.
“I don’t,” she says. “I never do.”
The smile they give her is breathtaking.
They tilt their head up, as though inviting her to explore.
Nugau’s aesin structure differs from Sascia’s in ways she hasn’t noticed before.
Their bones feel harder, as though made of iron, and the temperature of their skin is far lower than hers.
Beneath the shirt, her fingers trail a rib cage that is too short and a torso that stretches and stretches, a smooth expanse of porcelain skin.
Their pointed ears keep shivering at her touch.
Beneath her chest, Nugau’s chest thumps in a slow, steady rhythm.
“The aesin heartbeat is slower,” Nugau says. “For every one of mine, your heart beats ten.”
“The Heart Claim,” Sascia whispers, thinking back to her Trials. “That’s why it sounded so slow to me.”
“Yours sounds like a hummingbird to me.” Suddenly, Nugau flops Sascia on her back and flattens their ear against her chest. They listen for a long time, then prop their chin on her breastbone. Their smirk is devious. “It is faster than usual now. Is that because of me?”