Chapter 48 Mended with Powdered Gold #2
When met with a blade, with a blade you’ll meet: humans and aesin both have been taught that’s the only way to survive.
But it isn’t always so; when Danny found his first Darkblooms, he chose to nourish them instead of rooting them out.
When Shivani encountered her Darkrats, she chose to train them instead of kill them.
When Orran and Thalla met a human girl who caused trouble for their friend, they chose to embrace her instead of shun her.
And Sascia herself, when faced with a blade, chose to lower hers instead.
There are other ways to live, other choices to make—but humans and aesin have both been taught to fear, and to make choices out of fear, and who benefits from that, from the never-ending meeting of blade against blade?
The blacksmith.
The answer strikes her like a slap to the face: the blacksmith benefits. The industry that has thrived on threat and fear and promises of safety. The industry that profits off war.
Like the Queen’s council: weapons builders, breeders of war mounts. The financers of the Jagged Blade.
Like human corporations: NovaCorp, producer of all nova-light weaponry. LIHT, the manufacturers of the strongest security systems in the world, used in every household, store, and street corner. Hyanzi, supplier of electricity to power all of the above.
All of them, funders of the Umbra.
Sascia’s arms around the princet go slack.
“Nugau,” she whispers, “how did you end up here?”
“Mooch led me to a new you,” Nugau says.
“I stood across the street from your house and watched your shadow drift across the curtain. All your lights were on, a blinding white. And somehow, I knew this was the right you. The you of our strange, looping present. But before I could come to you, figures appeared out of nowhere. They put these shackles on me that nullified my powers. They threw me into this cage. They—” Their eyes drift to the tubes running out of their back.
“They use these horrible things to draw my power.”
We were betrayed, Nugau said while they lay in Sascia’s bed, delirious with poison. I was trying to find you. But they found me instead. With their light-woven chains. Their ray-sharp arrows. Their mortars of white ash.
The chains—Sascia recognizes them now: an early prototype of Shivani’s to track her Darkrats’ comings and goings.
The cage: Danny and Sascia’s design, based on their garden walls.
The tubes: one of Andres’s ideas to separate a Darkcreature’s energy from their blood.
All of them inventions of the cohort, created for Chapter XI after Nugau first appeared in Times Square.
Only they were never meant for Chapter XI, were they?
Is this where the Chapter agents brought the other moths?
Sascia had asked Mooch, and the itka had tapped three times: Not applicable.
Its objection didn’t have to do with the moths.
It had to do with the Chapter. Because these inventions, like all work produced by students within its facilities, are the property of the Umbra Program.
The truth strikes her like a blow, fogging her mind.
“Carr,” Sascia says. “It’s Carr.”
And this too feels like inevitability. Of course it was Carr, the consummate scholar, the acclaimed xenoscientist, excellent by all accounts except one: next to Boqin Shen, he would always, always be second best. And so, when he wasn’t elected director of Chapter XI six years ago, he had collected the biggest corporations with an interest in the Dark and promised them a boon: all the strange, unlikely young talent in the world, studying and researching and creating for them, product after product.
When Nugau came out of the Dark that first time, it was like a goose had laid a golden egg.
A new threat, bigger and scarier than ever before, and a war—what better way to sell billions of guns, sonars and sensors, security systems, and every weapon necessary to keep humans safe?
Carr had tasked the Umbra cohort to create inventions he could later use for this exact purpose.
Instead of taking Sascia’s theory and the cohort’s evidence to the Chapter, he had stalled for precisely what she unknowingly delivered on a plate: an army of Darkhumanoids.
A devastating attack. The beginning of war.
With this new threat, he had finally managed to instate himself as director of the Chapter and pass the new anti-Dark laws that would benefit his investors the most. Border control, he called it, but Sascia knows better now. It is greed—for power, for profit.
I believe you, he had told her. I believe you are destined for great, unfathomable things that none of us can fully comprehend. And I, Miss Petrou, will not stand in your way as you achieve them.
And Sascia, fool that she was, desperate for his validation, had believed him too. He hadn’t even lied, not really. He did not stand in her way. He stood to the side and watched, without ever interfering, and eventually, he had gotten what he wanted: the princet of Itkalin.
“The bastard,” Sascia hisses, and reaches for her earbud. “It’s Carr. Danny, can you hear me? It’s Carr—”
Electricity zaps overhead.
The lights flicker on one by one, nova-panels strewn on the curved walls, beaming their vicious brightness around the silo. Through the blinding white, Sascia can make out figures flooding in from every door, carrying guns and nova-blasters.
One of them wears a pristine dark gray suit. He marches straight through the open space and comes to a stop a few feet from Sascia and Nugau. With his index finger, he pushes his glasses farther up his nose. The bright reflection conceals his eyes.
“Well done, Miss Petrou,” Professor Carr says. “A clever girl, after all.”