Chapter 48 Mended with Powdered Gold
Mended with Powdered Gold
Nugau’s stillness rips through Sascia, a profound, lethal silence.
Her fingers shake as she traces the white swirls of their Darkprint to tilt their face up. Slow, labored breaths rasp through the princet’s chapped lips. Their eyes are closed, their whole body slack against the chains.
A desperate whimper shoots out of Sascia.
In her ear, voices are rolling over each other, flushed with worry. She can only focus on one of them—Danny’s. “Sascia, what’s going on? There are no cameras in the silo for Crow to hack into. Are the moths hurt?”
It’s not moths, it was never moths—Mooch told her, didn’t it? When she asked if the facility is where the Chapter agents brought the abducted moths, it had tapped three times: not a yes, not a no, but something in between, because the agents hadn’t captured the moths, but they had someone else.
“Chapter XI has Nugau,” Tae mutters from where he’s come to stand above Sascia.
“It can’t be the Chapter,” Andres says from Sascia’s other side. His eyes are big and round on Nugau’s half-broken form hanging from the posts. “The board wouldn’t approve of this…mistreatment. I need to make a call. I’ll be right back.”
As he retreats to the corridor outside the silo, Danny asks, “What does Andres mean, mistreatment?”
“Nugau is chained to a cage of some kind,” Sascia whispers. “A nova-light cage.”
“It’s not a cage,” Tae breathes. “Can’t you see? It’s your and Danny’s…”
Sascia follows his gaze to the glass walls around them, panels strewn with tiny nova-light bulbs, identical to—
“Oh god. It’s our latest project, Danny.” Her head spins with shock. “The walls of our garden that we’ve been working on turning into anti-Dark shields—they’ve used them to create a nova-cage.”
“What the hell,” Danny whispers. “Tae, if I guide you through it, can you dismantle the cage?”
“I can do you one better. This cube design is based on one of my own blueprints for—” Tae stumbles, suddenly going red. “For you, Danny. So that you can put up entire greenhouses for your botanic garden.”
“Oh,” Danny whispers. (It is a very meaningful Oh.)
“Like all my designs,” Tae goes on, “it’s meant to be remotely controlled. If you and Crow get me to the server room, I can turn the whole thing off.”
“On it,” Crow chirps. “Unless you guys want to moon for a little longer?”
“Shut up,” Danny snaps.
“I, um, I’ll go—” After some more incomprehensible stammering, Tae turns on his heel and disappears through the doors.
“Sascia,” Danny instructs, “find a way to get those chains off Nugau.”
Sascia’s eyes are narrowed almost shut against the glaring lights of the cage.
Long tubes sprout from the princet’s back and run across the floor toward the shadowed end of the silo.
Black seeps through them, like a blood transfusion—only aesin blood is dark blue, so what exactly are they siphoning out of Nugau?
She can’t wait for Tae. She needs to get Nugau out of here as soon as possible.
She rushes to a row of storage shelves against the far wall and grabs the first piece of metal she spots, a crowbar of some sort.
Back in the cage, she covers Nugau with her jacket—and begins smashing.
Glass shards explode as panel after panel comes crashing down.
Her sneakers crunch on the debris. The muscles of her arms are burning.
She stops when the three walls are hollowed out, because she can’t risk destroying the ceiling—any debris might hurt Nugau.
She focuses instead on the cuffs. Once, twice, she wrenches her crowbar against the links, but all she causes are scratches.
Mooch flies out of her hair to hover over the shackles.
Fright shoots through Sascia’s veins. She plucks Mooch out of the air and hides it against her chest. “You can’t,” she rasps. “The light will hurt you.”
She remembers the Battle of Feathers all too well.
The small bodies of her moths silhouetted against the barrel of the nova-cannon.
Their wings disintegrating, shadow swallowed by light, when the nova-cannon blasted beneath her hands.
Those moths are forever gone, but Mooch is here, alive, and she’s never risking any moth’s life like that again.
Yet Mooch has other ideas. It wiggles through her fingers, wedges itself between the cuff and Nugau’s skin, then…
bursts. There’s no other way to describe it; one moment, its wings are small curves of glass, the next, they’re slabs of hard rock, twice their normal size.
Mooch’s wings crush through the cuff, tearing it in two, and Nugau’s arm drops to their side.
Sascia is already there. In the time it takes her to brace her arms around Nugau’s chest and hoist them up, Mooch has broken the princet’s other hand free as well. Sascia half carries, half drags Nugau over a sea of shards and into the safety of darkness.
She collapses on her back, Nugau sprawled between her legs, the long tubes tangled in their limbs. For long moments, she lies there, gasps spearing through her tired lungs, ignoring the ruckus of questions in her earbud, until she hears a faint cough and then—
“You are a menace, little gnat.”
Their eyelids are still closed, but their lips are crooked in a smile. Sascia’s heart sings a litany: they’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive.
“I have been looking for you,” Nugau whispers through barely parted lips.
“Hush. Save your energy while I figure out how to get these tubes off of you.”
“No. I need to tell you now, while I still can.”
Their eyes flare open, wide with intensity. Time slows, and dread settles onto Sascia’s bones. What can be more important than getting out of here?
“After my mother’s death, the aesin rejected my Royal Claim.
The Queen’s council seized control and held a tribunal—to decide your punishment, but also mine.
Killing you would be the only way I could atone.
I set out to find you with anger in my heart, with vengeance and hatred.
Mooch led me to you. You pulled me out of the Dark in that foul-smelling alley.
I thought that nothing would satisfy me more than revenge.
That your death would make up for all the hurt and injustice of the Battle of Feathers. ”
Those terrible moments before the Jagged Blade retreated to the Dark come back to her.
The hurt in Nugau’s eyes, their voice breaking.
In her sleepless nights, Sascia had thought of the princet emerging from the sewer on 53rd Street, of their hate and anger, and she had thought, Perhaps I shouldn’t have fought so hard. Perhaps I should have yielded instead.
“But you lay beneath my feet, defeated and weak,” Nugau whispers. “My scythe was at your throat. Your gun was at my chest. You didn’t know me. You didn’t care for me. And yet, you didn’t strike, little gnat. You faced a blade and chose to lower yours instead.”
Yes, Sascia remembers that. Fear colors the memory, but the outline forms another shape, the brushstrokes soft and soothing.
A person had climbed out of the Dark that day.
An elf from a fairy tale, a nymph out of a heartland forest. And Sascia, who has loved the Dark all her life, could not destroy them.
“I never meant to hurt you, or the Queen, or the aesin. I swear, Nugau.”
“I know. I have seen it. Your love, your kindness, your want—I have seen it all.”
Sascia waits, breath held.
“I returned to Itkalin, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that moment.
I needed to understand why you let me live.
Why you chose to be my ally. Why you betrayed us.
So finally, one day, I asked Mooch to lead me to you.
” Nugau’s chest trembles. “The first time it did, you were in a schoolyard. You were a child, playing with your cousin. The second, you were even younger, nestled in the back of a passing car. The third, you were in a snowy driveway with your family. Dozens of little snippets I’ve seen of your life, and each time, I kept to the shadows, watching, trying to understand why Mooch brought me to a time you didn’t even know the Dark existed. ”
Her first thought, her most immediate, is of course.
Of course it was Nugau.
All this time, the figure in black, standing in the distance beneath a thicket of shadows, was never a trauma-induced hallucination.
The truth shatters her—then puts her back together, like broken pottery mended with powdered gold.
She is not the girl who believes in delusions.
It was real and it was Nugau, angry, desperate, curious Nugau, trying to understand even through their grief and fury.
The itka brought the princet to Sascia, as it always does, weaving them together through the tangled mess of time and space.
It feels both an injustice and an inevitability, to be thrown together and ripped apart.
“Why?” she whispers to the moth hovering between her and the princet.
Nugau answers for Mooch. “I think it knew I wanted to understand and it tried to help me. But I still don’t understand, little gnat.
If their soron mola is to save us, why do the itka keep tossing us back and forth in time?
Why have they knotted our timelines? Instead of salvation, they have created an endless circle: violence and loss, and violence again. Who benefits from that?”
Crystal tears drip at the corners of Nugau’s eyes. Sascia wipes them with a knuckle and lowers her forehead to the princet’s. She has no answer to give them, nothing to make this impossible hurt go away. No one benefits from an endless circle of violence—
But that’s not quite true.