Chapter 44 The Ruins of Delusion
The Ruins of Delusion
There’s a knock on her door.
As soundlessly as she can, Sascia pulls the covers over her head. Her ceiling lights, three floor lamps, and two bedside lamps create a supernova amount of brightness. It seeps through her comforter, bathing her closed lids with a soft peach color.
The door creaks open. “Sascia?” her mother whispers.
Sascia makes sure her chest rises and falls in slow, rhythmical breaths, as though she is deep in sleep. It is eight in the morning on a freezing early-March Tuesday. Normally, Sascia would already be dressed and heading out the door for class, or Umbra work, or fishing tours.
There’s no class to go to anymore. She hasn’t been expelled, but only because she was never an actual student to begin with. They recommended independent study from home; the presence of the Queen-killer is too distracting for her classmates, apparently.
There’s no Umbra either. The whole program has been put on hiatus. Shortly after the Battle of Feathers, Professor Carr was elected the new director of Chapter XI.
And there are no fishing tours. Her tour-guide email has blown up with requests, but she reads none of them.
Her fishing gear has been confiscated. Her bank accounts suspended.
A slew of her former clients are enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame, their only claim to it that they hold the spoils of her first insurrections in plastic cups.
Sascia has nothing to get out of bed for. It doesn’t matter. She likes it here in her fort of pillows and blankets, where it is warm and cozy and swathed in bright light.
After another minute, she hears the door close.
Contrary to the opinion of half the internet, Sascia is not heartless. She knows exactly how much pain and panic she has caused by starting this war. She is the harbinger of fear; for the entire world, for her friends, but most importantly, for her family.
When her father knocks on her door hours later, she forces herself to get up and throw on a hoodie to join them at the dinner table. It is the only comfort she can give them right now: watching her take care of herself by eating.
Her parents have brought up a pot of dolmadakia from the restaurant today, a minced pork, rice, and mint mixture wrapped in vine leaves and drizzled with avgolemono sauce.
Sascia chews fast. (She might have a heart, but she does not have patience.
The sooner she’s done with her plate, the sooner she can retreat to her room.)
They’ve turned into full family affairs, these dinners.
Her aunt comes down from her apartment upstairs, Danny drives home from Princeton whenever he can, her parents take a break from work.
The five of them sit at the cramped table in the kitchen, conversing about their day.
They try to catch Sascia’s eye or ask her a question she will grace with an answer longer than a couple of words, and Sascia tries, she really does try, until the weight of it becomes unbearable and her failures, her world-altering mistake, come crushing down.
In the first few weeks after the Battle of Feathers, whenever the floodgates opened, her family would wrap their arms around her and comfort her; she would last a minute, maybe two, before disentangling herself.
She does not deserve their comfort and so now, after nearly two months, she has learned to run and hide at the first hint she’s about to start sobbing.
She does it now, scraping her last dolmadaki onto Danny’s plate. Her chair pushes back with a screech.
“Come play video games with me,” Danny blurts before she can leave the room.
And because she has never been able to say no to Danny, never fathomed she’d be the cause of so much of his pain and worry, Sascia draws a smile on her face and nods.
They play. It does bring her some joy to be lost in a world of kick-ass warriors for a few hours. Her mind quietens. Her muscles unwind. She’s only the shift of her fingers, the click-clacks of her control, the colorful settings of mountains and lakes and evergreen fields.
Danny talks while they play. About his college classes and his hangouts (emphatically not dates) with Tae.
Then he slowly steers the conversation to Nugau.
Sascia answers every question he asks. She has screwed up so much, but she will not screw up this too, the only honest relationship left in her life.
Bit by bit, over the course of these miserable two months, Danny pries the whole story out of her.
He snorts when she tells him Nugau has a sweet tooth.
He whoops when she tells him their first kiss was while Nugau held a blade against her throat.
He only asks about the fun stuff, the happy memories, and he never pushes her with suggestions and solutions and ways to make this right.
After a while, she realizes. It’s because he knows there’s no fixing this.
Around midnight, Sascia shuffles back downstairs and into her room.
She leans against her closed door and looks around her with glum resolution.
Drawers lie open; closet doors swing wide, sagging off their hinges.
The big floor lamp from the dining room sits in her closet. Two flashlights shine beneath her bed.
After she was released from Chapter XI’s interrogation and instructed to remain at home until further notice, she arranged her room like this, ordered dozens of nova-light fixtures and plastered them around the apartment, then made her parents vow they would never turn them off.
There is not a dot of darkness in the entire building. No place where anything could crawl out of the Dark, not a Darkcreature, not a Darkhumanoid, not even a Darkmoth. (God—she can’t even think about that. About Mooch, its body dissolving against the onslaught of the cannon blast.)
She shuffles to her window and pulls the curtain aside, just a sliver.
On the street below, the beige van has not moved an inch in the past two months.
A team of Chapter XI agents are sitting in it right now.
Sascia imagines them slumped low in their chairs in front of their monitors, hands folded over their laps, drowsy after devouring takeout from Athena’s Yard.
(Typical Greek that she is, her mother insists on feeding them.) The screens in front of them are blank, revealing no activity in the Dark.
She refuses to be the reason for any more hostilities against Darkcreatures.
The Battle of Feathers has left the world trigger-happy.
Nova-light mortars have been distributed and stationed around every Darkhole in the world, army presence has tripled, and the peace movement hasn’t been able to recover from their poster girl committing a very publicized murder.
At least the news channels are gone now. They finally realized they were never going to get the exclusive they longed for. It only took two months of never allowing them a glimpse of her face, never leaving her house, never contacting anyone she knows.
This doesn’t matter either. She deserves all of that and worse.
The sweet release of deep slumber is nearly impossible when your room is as bright as the surface of the sun. Sascia lies ramrod straight on her bed, palms facing the ceiling, lids closed, counting her inhales and exhales as per the instructions on the sleep meditation podcast she has on.
If she allows herself to think about it, really, truly think about it, she can trace the source of her downfall to the very beginning.
That moment in her grandparents’ house in suburban Queens, watching the Darkdragon wreak havoc through Shanghai.
She had seen its scales and believed that was what her savior’s cloak had looked like when she almost drowned.
She had thought that they had come from this new world to save her because she was special, worthy, made of magic herself.
That’s what led her to ruination: the delusion of being more than she is.
She convinced her cousin to enter that damned sewer because she thought she was more than just a scared kid.
She jumped into the Maw because she thought she was more than just another bystander waiting for others to protect her.
She made the Heart Claim because she thought she was more than just a powerless human.
She carved her way out of the Labyrinth, kissed Nugau, promised them that together they would change the course of history, because she thought she was more than time itself.
In the end, she is what she always has been.
A girl made of impulse and longing, too foolish to ever get her life together, not even when the fate of the world depends on it.
A screw-up through and through.
Sascia folds the covers over her head. Sleep doesn’t come, not for a long time, and when it does, it is barren of dreams.