Chapter 49 A Good Scholar
A Good Scholar
In an instant, Nugau has unfolded to their full height. The patterns of their Darkprint swirl with colors, then settle into purple. He staggers weakly, yet pushes Sascia behind him, shielding her with his body. Spittle sprays from his lips as he barks, “Stay back.”
In response, Professor Carr lifts his palms leisurely. “Let us not resort to violence, Prince Nugau. It is unseemly.”
Sascia responds by flinging the crowbar straight at the professor’s face.
It hits him in the shoulder, sending him stumbling back. In unison, the soldiers raise their rifles on their shoulders, barrels aimed at her.
“Unseemly?” Sascia cries. “We are unseemly? What about you? What about all this?”
She throws an arm out to gesture to the tubes leaching power from Nugau’s back, the wreckage of the nova-cage, the dozens of armed soldiers, the thousands of light panels around them.
She taps her earbud. “Crow, Danny—”
“Don’t bother, Miss Petrou. My staff interfered with the signal several minutes ago.”
She had been so caught up in Nugau’s confession, in the earth-shattering revelation that he was the figure in black, that Carr was his captor, that she didn’t even notice there were no longer voices in her ear.
“Your family and Miss Kaur have been apprehended, and Mr. Ho and Mr. Matthei will soon be too. I expected this brazenness from you, Miss Petrou, perhaps even Miss Crow. But I must admit, it is immensely disappointing to see the rest of my students fall into your trap.”
Brazenness. That’s a new one to add to the long list of Carr’s thinly veiled insults. Yet Sascia finds she doesn’t mind this one at all. Brazen is the pigheaded man’s word for bold. For defiant.
For brave.
She positions herself before Nugau and throws a hand out.
Mooch gets the drift immediately—it bursts out of her hair and rips the world for her.
Her nova-sword drops out of thin air and into her waiting palm.
The rift lingers—she needs only to distract Carr long enough for Nugau to slip into the Dark.
She nudges at Nugau with her head, a voiceless command to go, then closes both hands around the sword’s hilt and aims its tip at Carr.
“I am not made of Dark,” the man says. “That toy will not hurt me. But I must admit, that was remarkable to see in person. A door through time and space…”
He takes a step toward Mooch—Sascia swipes. The sword barely catches Carr’s sleeve. But Nugau didn’t use the distraction to jump into the rift. Instead, he steps forward and buries a punch in the professor’s stomach. His violet eyes glint with fury—and then, suddenly, roll back into his skull.
A soldier behind Carr is tapping into a tablet. The tubes in Nugau’s back come alive, sucking him of energy. The prince’s spine arches and he collapses back into Sascia’s arms.
“Stop!” she screams. “Please, stop!”
Elegantly, Carr straightens and watches with indifference as Sascia helps Nugau to his feet.
“There is no need to be upset. My methods might have caused the prince some discomfort, but I assure you, my goals are benevolent. I am a scholar, first and foremost. My only goal is knowledge. Acquired through research, perfected through study. That is the essence of science, not whatever naive notions of kindness you have.”
“Science,” Sascia mocks. The truth has been laid bare to her; she’s done pretending.
“This is not science. It is profit and power and control: the war industry churning out its products of destruction so that the many scared, desperate people of the world can protect themselves—and in the meantime, you gain wealth and power. Do these soldiers even know your research is not actually sanctioned by Chapter XI?”
Judging from the subtle glances and shuffling in the room, some didn’t.
But Professor Carr seems unaffected. “Very good,” he says, and he even sounds, to Sascia’s horror, genuinely impressed.
“I see you’re finally applying that brain of yours to something useful.
Let me accelerate your efforts: even knowledge is beholden to subsidizing.
It is the way our world works. You would have realized that sooner had you spared even a single thought for what goes on beyond the confines of your own obsessions. ”
“My obsessions,” she hisses, “are ancient gods that can tear a hole into space-time.”
“That, they can. It was the entire reason I let you find us.”
Her face slackens with surprise.
“Please, Miss Petrou. Did you think I wouldn’t know the moment you stepped out of your house? I wanted you here, with your moths and the doors they can open.”
Her muscles clench, dread clamping at her shoulders. She is aware of Nugau sagging against her side, of Mooch buried in her hair, its legs pawing the soft skin behind her ear. If Carr wants her here, if he needs her moths, then this was a trap, and why would Mooch willingly bring her right into it?
Carr clasps his hands behind his back. “I meant what I said before the attack at the Maw, Miss Petrou. I have always believed in you. I was merely waiting for you to do the same. To unlock the power I first glimpsed in you two years ago.”
Years ago—the meaning behind his words makes her breath catch.
Her mind flashes back to that hospital room, the smell of antiseptic, the crisp white linens, the condensation gathered on the window.
She remembers listening to the soft beeps of the machines keeping Danny alive.
Glancing out the window to spot a figure clad in black looking up at her.
Turning her back to it, annoyed by it haunting her even in the worst moments of her life.
Then, a few hours later, the knock on the door.
Professor Carr’s tall, oppressive presence.
His smooth words. The contract that sealed her and Danny’s fate.
“You knew,” Sascia breathes. “All this time, you knew.”
“I told you. A good scholar is constantly on the lookout for the bizarre, the unusual, the unexplainable—such as two kids injured while building a map made of Dark. A good scholar investigates prospective students before inviting them to join his program.”
She inhales sharply, the sound echoing in the vast silo.
“At first,” he says, “I thought it was as your medical files suggested: the hallucinations of a traumatized child. But your recollections were always consistent. The figure wore a cloak of black scales. It came out of the darkness and disappeared into it. I decided to have your cousin’s hospital room monitored.
Imagine my surprise when my people called with an urgent report.
There was a figure clad in a black cloak stationed outside the building.
It had appeared straight through the Dark.
I saw the footage myself, the scans and readings.
Then I got into my car and drove to you. ”
I believe you are destined for great, unfathomable things, he had said.
Not because she had convinced him through her work and talent, but because he accessed her medical records and had her watched.
He had signed her and Danny on to the Umbra to keep them close.
In every meeting, he drilled her relentlessly on her findings, treating her as a disappointment.
Because her moth alarm system wasn’t what he wanted from her.
He wanted the figure in black. He wanted Nugau.
And then, when Sascia had jumped into the Maw, he had positioned himself as an ally to the cohort to keep their discoveries on the Darknomaly secret.
When they invited him over after Sascia returned from the Maw, he had believed them instantly and without a doubt because he had always known they were telling the truth.
The betrayal cuts through flesh and sinew, deep into the pit of her belly.
He had never been a teacher, never a true mentor, and yet somehow, Sascia had still believed she could trust him.
But he had kept her under his thumb for years, honing her passion with his rejections, whetting her skill with his doubts, until it was finally time to wield her.
Now that time has arrived.
“What is it that you want from me?” Sascia asks, deathly quiet.
“I want what you want. A door into the Darkworld, to traverse as we choose, free of the whims of brainless bugs. Isn’t that precisely what you have always wished for?”
Seven months ago, the answer would have been yes, in a heartbeat.
She would have chopped down the tree herself, carved out the door from its wood, and propped it on its hinges.
The answer is still yes, in a way. But now, after knowing Nugau, after living with the aesin, after understanding their joys and troubles and the ouroboric curse of knotted time, what Sascia wants is not a door to barge through, but a door to knock on.
“A door should not be forced open,” she says. “There should be an invitation.”
“Just like the invitation they got to burst through the darkness, I suppose?” Carr says. “Just like the thousands of Darkbeast victims, millions in damages, entire city blocks obliterated?”
This has always been one of Professor Carr’s greatest skills: he has an argument ready at all times, and he can articulate it in such an infallible manner that Sascia becomes stumped. He nods, as if he expected her silence, and gestures at an assistant.
Energy crackles through the tubes attached to Nugau’s back.
A choked cry tears from his lips. His arms seize as the tubes fill with black.
The liquid Dark flows out of Nugau’s body as though it is blood through a vein.
Snaking across the floor, the tubes feed Nugau’s magic to a structure of metal on the other end of the silo.