Chapter 51 A Kiss Farewell
A Kiss Farewell
The rift stitches itself together, sealing their worlds apart.
Sascia’s heart is a sledgehammer pounding against her ribs, frantic and scared, shattering the hope she’s gathered so carefully, so painfully within her chest.
Nugau opens his palms and the Dark rushes to him.
From every crevice in the silo, thin veins of darkness meet into arteries.
Black spiderwebs over the walls and floor, drips from the ceiling, uncurls itself from the nooks and crannies beneath equipment.
Even their shadows lean toward him, hers and every other human’s in the room, reaching for him with long, disfigured limbs.
The Dark gathers at Nugau’s feet and climbs up his legs, his torso, his shoulders. It gathers at his hands, thick as tar, and it seeps through his skin, clouding its porcelain color, darkening and bulging his veins.
“What is he doing?” a soldier asks, his confusion reflected on every face in the room.
Carr’s soldiers are just standing around, their weapons scattered on the floor, untouched. Only three are moving, medics from the looks of it. They go from body to body, checking their pulse, propping them up, tending to wounds.
“I don’t know,” Sascia whispers. She is looking straight into Nugau’s eyes, the black, depthless pools of them, but the king doesn’t see her, not truly—his attention is elsewhere, focused solely on his task.
“Look out!” a soldier bellows.
A moment later, a net of Darkvines drops from the ceiling.
Its onyx branches are charred, smoking like embers, and when they hit the ground, they shatter into ash.
More Darkfauna slithers burnt and dead from the shadows of the tall silo.
Creatures, too, hundreds of little bugs and smaller rodents, thumping onto the linoleum like black hail.
Nugau is doing this, Sascia realizes. He is gathering the Dark, pulling it from corners of this world and secreting it beneath his skin, but this is not an empty darkness—it is filled with life, plants and creatures big and small.
With the Dark stripped away, this life becomes exposed to the light and withers away in seconds.
The silo gleams white and gray, bare of the Dark, but still the black torrents to Nugau’s body, a continuous flow that thickens instead of thinning out.
Sascia turns in a circle, tracing its source—there, beneath every door.
The Dark comes and comes, a never-ending stream, and Sascia feels her stomach drop, her dread turning to acid, but she still doesn’t understand, not until a voice speaks it aloud:
“He’s pulling the Dark to him. All of the Dark.”
Professor Carr stands before the monitoring station by the shattered nova-cage.
The right side of his suit is soaked through.
His arm hangs limp at his side, blood dripping from his fingers.
But his good hand is flying over the keyboard, punching in commands, and on the dozen screens before him, there are readings, graphs, data, pulled live from the many sensors at his disposal.
On the biggest screen is a wireframe globe in grayscale, with green dotting the most active hosts of Dark in the world: the Maw, the Shanghai Pit, the Rift of the Baltic Sea, the hundreds of smaller Darkholes in the world.
And from each, the green is leaking out, to gather instead at a point just north of New York, the very spot they’re all standing in now.
All of the Dark. Nugau is pulling all of it into himself, so that there may never be a door forced open again, for creatures and weapons to come through, to hurt and be hurt in turn.
The doors of the silo bang open. The soldiers in front of them startle and dash out of the way.
Dark is pouring in, rivers six feet wide, rushing to Nugau from every direction.
His body quakes with the force of it. He hitches a breath—like a thief, the Dark finds the narrow opening of his mouth and barges in.
He chokes, a horrible sound, but the Dark forces his jaws wider and pours itself into him.
The veins at his neck bulge, black against his gray skin.
In two strides, Sascia is with him, but she doesn’t know where to touch him, how to help. “Nugau,” she says, “you can’t—”
“Let him, Miss Petrou,” Carr says. He leans back against the monitoring station, his face drained of color. “It is the only kindness his world can offer: separating itself from ours.”
“But it’s not,” Sascia whispers. “There are countless kindnesses. That they can offer us, and we can offer them.”
Her fingers hover inches from Nugau’s face, where the Dark writhes over and under his skin, until finally, she swallows her fear and cups his cheeks.
She eases his jaws closed with her thumbs, cutting the Dark’s access into his chest, and she lowers his head to hers, brow to brow.
His eyes flutter closed, almost in relief, and hers are dusted with tears.
She blinks them away quickly, because there’s no room for despair or fear, no room for anything but saving him.
“You have to stop,” she says. “It’s killing the Darkcreatures in our world. It’s killing you.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “But it’s the only way. I’ll seal the doors. None will come in, none will come out. You will be safe, all of you.”
She shakes her head, furiously, against his brow.
She won’t accept that, won’t accept making his death the price of everyone else’s safety, because it is not fair.
They found each other through worlds and across timelines, and they’ve only just started.
They should have a future together, however long they choose to make it.
A beginning, or endless ones, just as the Moth Dark promises.
“I’m so sorry, little gnat,” he whispers again.
Her tears fall hot and salty, sticky between her skin and his. They push at each other, temples and cheeks and noses, as though desperate for a touch that will soon be gone forever. Kiss him, she thinks, but she can’t, because she knows what it would be: a kiss farewell.
She hugs him instead, wrapping her arms around his waist, and after a moment, she feels him strain against the Dark flooding into him, fight to reclaim his body, and soon, his arms are around her, too, and his nose is buried in her neck, gulping down the smell of her.
They shift in place, pivoting around each other, pulling each other closer, and as they turn around themselves, a cosmos spinning on its axis, Sascia opens her eyes and looks.
Around his body, the Dark has begun to sour.
Bubbles of air pop at its surface, hissing dangerously.
The room is in pandemonium, soldiers running around the scattered carcasses of Darkcreatures and Darkplants.
Tae is at the monitoring desk, typing furiously, and the tablet is propped against a fallen shield, facing Sascia and Nugau, this doomed embrace of darkness and light.
And perhaps this is what the itka wanted, their soron mola: a whole world bearing witness to the ultimate sacrifice, the deepest of griefs, so that it may learn some kindness itself.
But Sascia can’t accept that. A courage that sheds no blood, that’s what they promised each other. Sascia will keep her promise and will not allow Nugau to shed his own blood.
She cups his cheeks again and brings his face to hers. “You asked me once, What gives you the right to want? I didn’t have an answer then, but I have one now. I need you to hear it.”
His skin is ashen, his veins stark black.
“There is no right to wanting,” she whispers.
“I’m not entitled to it, nor has some grand authority granted me its privilege.
I want because I wish, because I dream, and perhaps that makes me just as greedy and vexing as you once said, but I will not be ashamed any longer.
I will not apologize. I want magic and I want the Dark and I want you to live. ”
His eyes have fluttered shut. “Sascia…”
Before he can speak, she whispers into his lips, “If I begged—”
“You need never beg.”
His hand tugs her hair, tilting her chin to him, and her arms tighten around his waist, pulling him closer. Their mouths meet softly, tenderly, as if they are trying to memorize each other’s touch.
As though this is farewell. One last kiss before the end.
Deep in Sascia’s throat, something tingles. Wings flutter against the roof of her mouth. Mooch, she thinks—then, again, with clarity, Mooch.
The itka is between her teeth.
The itka is across her lips.
The itka is in Nugau’s mouth.
All the pieces of their knotted story have folded into place, except one: Nugau in her bedroom, poisoned, delirious, and awash with Dark.
“What—” Nugau leans away, but Mooch is already inside his lips.
His eyes bulge and his hands move to his face, but Sascia clamps a palm over his mouth.
He doesn’t struggle—he goes utterly still beneath her touch.
There is no moment to speak, to reassure him.
Darkness explodes all around him, a great avalanche of black pouring out of his nose, his ears, his eyes, swathing him in a cocoon of Dark, and between one moment and the next, he is no longer there.
Sascia stares at the cracked linoleum where he just stood.
People are calling out to her, a dozen different voices that Sascia can’t tell apart.
They think she killed him, but Mooch was never the poison.
Mooch was the cure that saved Nugau, that will save Nugau, in that strange knot of time that is both past and future.
And there, alone in a packed room, after the very last of the ymneen has unveiled itself, Sascia buries her face in her fingers, because this is the end, isn’t it?
That night in her room, when she asked Nugau why this was farewell, they answered, It has to be.
Separation is the only way to keep our people safe.
I understand that now. When she asked them when she loved them back, they answered, I don’t know that you ever do.
Nugau is alive, and that is all she wished for, but there is no future, not for them, not for their worlds.
“Sascia,” Tae calls out.
She can’t bear to glance at him, at anyone, but he insists, calling out emphatically, “Sascia, look.”
Closest to them, a soldier kneels before a Darkwildcat.
Its fur is charred and clouded with blue blood, but it is still breathing.
The soldier picks it up tenderly and unzips her jacket, folding its injured body within the darkness of her uniform.
A few feet away, a group of soldiers is running from Darkplant to Darkplant, covering each one with their own clothes: their Kevlar vests, their jackets, their shirts.
Another group has taken to ripping the wiring of the nova-panels, dampening the light in the room.
And before the monitors, there is Tae, pulling up dozens of live feeds from all over the world: tourists on a busy street in Tokyo holding their umbrellas over a badly singed flock of Darkbirds.
Young men on bikes, pedaling fast down a suburban street, smashing every nova-light in sight.
Sightseers on the observation deck of the Maw, kids climbing over the barrier and lying flat on the nova-panels, shielding the glow to protect an entire forest of half-burned Darktrees that has appeared in the bottom of the Darkhole.
Everywhere, everywhere, humans are coming out to help, to protect, in whatever way they can. Sascia was already crying, but now she starts sobbing, her chest rattling, her eyes blurry and lips stretched with joy, because these people—they’re doing exactly what she begged them to:
Making a different choice.