Chapter 53 Necessary Tenet
Necessary Tenet
“The end of an era,” Danny says, his chin propped on a fist.
His wheelchair is stationed at the door of the Umbra meeting room, facing the expanse of open office space where Chapter XI agents are tearing down the facilities.
Computers are confiscated, equipment dismantled, ongoing projects carefully placed in black cases.
Five empty cardboard boxes await the cohort’s personal belongings.
The fate of their work is as yet undecided, but one thing is for certain: the Umbra is no more.
“And good riddance,” Tae says drily. He’s leaning on the doorframe next to Danny, a finger playing with the curls at Danny’s nape.
(Sascia would find the casual touch endearing if she hadn’t experienced so much of it in the last two weeks.
Since the events of the silo, he and Danny have been—and Sascia can’t stress this enough—inseparable.)
She won’t lie; it’s still hard to reconcile the image of a teacher’s pet that she had of Tae with what he actually is: a proper rebel.
All this time, he had been collecting details on each and every single one of the cohort’s inventions that went on to become patents for NovaCorp, Hyanzi, and LIHT products.
His meticulous recordkeeping proved instrumental to Chapter XI’s case against Carr and his benefactors.
Their trial is set to begin later this month.
“Right on,” says Andres, clamping a hand on Tae’s shoulder.
Andres, too, had a part in Carr’s downfall.
Sascia had been right to suspect he was a little too good for the Umbra to begin with.
It turns out Andres was a spy all along, working closely with the Latin American division of the Chapter to infiltrate what they (rightly) suspected was the insidious underbelly of Carr’s research.
That call he’d run off to make was to his parents, who had gone on to call Boqin Shen (now reinstated as director), who had in turn called his allies in the Chapter.
An hour later, the Umbra funders had been arrested in a massive global enterprise.
“Crow,” Shivani says, “is asking if Tae’s mountain of empty coffee cups is being confiscated too.”
The five of them share a quiet chuckle.
But when the phone buzzes again, four times in quick succession, Shivani releases a deep sigh.
Crow has been texting incessantly. She was the only one whose actions two weeks ago (aka all the hacking) could get her in actual legal trouble.
Fortunately, she got off with a warning and a six-month probation period, during which she’s forbidden from using any electronics except for an old internet-less flip phone.
“Come on, then,” Andres says, grabbing a cardboard box from the pile.
They fall in line, navigating the crowded office to get to their lab rooms. Danny pauses at the corridor, his lips drawn down. “Aren’t any of you just a tiny bit sad?”
He gets four identical scathing looks, to which he responds with a blabbering, “I mean, obviously we all want the bad guys to rot in jail forever, but this program was just as much ours as it was Carr’s.
Without the Umbra, we’ll just have to be normal college students, scattered around the world, and who knows when we’ll be in the same room together again. ”
For a moment, standing before their ransacked lab rooms, cardboard boxes in their arms, their shared fear finally spoken aloud, Sascia feels it: this is the end.
But then Shivani says, “Well, you’ll be seeing me quite often. I’ve been offered a position at Chapter XI here in New York. Liaison to ‘Darkgifted youth’—it’s what they’re calling us now. Young people with connections to the Dark that can’t quite be explained.”
Thanks to Crow’s hacking skills and Tae’s talent with a tablet camera, the whole world knows about what Sascia can do with Darkmoths now.
In the two weeks since, several people have stepped forward to claim similar strange Darkgifts.
A liaison is a good first step. God knows she and Danny could have used a mentor when they were younger.
“Wait,” Andres says, “I’ve been offered a job at Chapter XI, in their xenogenetics team.”
“Me too,” Tae grumbles. “Head engineer.”
“Me three. Darkflora preservation.” Danny cocks his head at her. “Sascia?”
She nods, and Danny’s face goes all bright and happy, moments away from shouting Avengers, assemble!
Sascia doesn’t have the courage to tell him right now that she hasn’t accepted yet, doesn’t know if she will, that she has no idea what she’s going to do, college or research or fishing tours or something else entirely.
As the cohort chats away, she slips into her lab and sets the box on her desk.
The lights are on for the first time in perhaps ever, the garden safe beyond the lumen-blocking glass. It’s not much of a garden currently. The wall is bare cement, with only the tiniest Darkmoss growing here and there. No bugs whatsoever.
Nugau sucked the Dark out entirely in an eighty-mile radius, and reduced it acutely all around the world.
The Maw and the other Darkholes in the world still stand, albeit nearly half their original sizes, but the small pockets of Dark in basements, closets, and woods are barely hanging on.
They would have disappeared entirely, taking their Darklife with them, if it hadn’t been for all those thousands of people who saw a wounded creature, a dying plant, and made the choice to save it.
Sascia still can’t think of it without choking up.
She wipes her tears on her sleeve and proceeds to carefully transfer the Darkmoss patches to her box.
But when that’s done, she looks around the room, at a loss.
There’s nothing here for her now that the moths are gone.
Well, not gone, technically. According to Danny’s estimates, it will take a few weeks for the Dark to recover enough to host Darkflora, and then another few weeks before Darkfauna can come crawling out.
Sascia hasn’t tried to call Mooch—she was not built for patience, but she’s learning.
Darkmoss packed and safely covered, she trails to Danny’s lab, adjacent to hers. Her cousin is in a similar state of dissociation, staring at the barely-there stalks where his Darkplants used to be. She grips his shoulder and says, “Go help Tae. I’ve got this.”
When he’s gone, she switches the lights off and goes from pot to pot, transferring them into her box—which is no small feat, considering her right arm in still in a sling, healing from her gunshot wound.
Danny’s desk has much more personality than hers: funny Post-it notes and framed photos, bobblehead toys of his favorite video game characters, three different pairs of sunglasses, and his missing smartwatch.
Sascia tucks them all away. As the box fills and the desk empties, she thinks it again: this is the end, this is the end, this is the end.
The last frame contains a photo of their family at their grandpa’s birthday last year.
It’s spring and the sun is out, refracting against the camera lens.
The seven of them are packed close together in the backyard, captured in complete spontaneity.
Grandpa Panos had cracked one of his foul-mouthed jokes and the rest of them had broken into shocked guffaws.
Mama has gone red, Baba and Aunt Rania have thrown their heads back in laughter, Danny and Ksenya are sharing a mischievous look, and Sascia is bent at the waist, her smile so big you can see all her teeth.
Behind them, the woods seem to have turned jovial too, the long trunks of the birches sloping into each other like old friends reuniting after years apart.
Sascia stares and stares, but she can’t unsee it. The trees, tall and skinny, gathered together like friends, like—
I stood in a thicket of trees—birches, I later found out—with long, spindly trunks that seemed to lean on each other for company.
The first time Nugau had come out of the Dark, they were a young adolescent fleeing a swarm of vicious bats.
Mooch had opened a door for them to a thicket of birches, to a house, to an old lady sitting on the porch, almost as if she was waiting for them.
A lady who had looked at Nugau and had not been afraid.
A lady who had taught them English and history and art.
A lady who had insisted Nugau, with their love of stories, would enjoy Halloween.
A lady who had removed all photos of her family when Nugau arrived—as though, perhaps, the princet might recognize the hue of their skin or the sharp points of their ears.
Nan, Nugau had called her, because that’s the name her family used, but her name was never Nan.
Her name, if Nugau had asked, would have been Sascia.
That woman is herself, in the future, living in her grandparents’ house, waiting for the day she knows a princet will step out of the Dark in need of saving.
Because that is the point, the soron mola: to save and be saved.
The itka will bring them together again, in Sascia’s distant future but Nugau’s past—because that is the most important part. The knotted time. The ymneen.
Sascia understands now, everything and all at once, with perfect, desolate clarity.
Two worlds exist, separate and dying.
Perhaps not soon, not for centuries, but their death is inescapable and they know it, which makes them desperate and violent.
If a door appeared, to another world where what they lacked was plentiful, these two worlds wouldn’t even hesitate: they would pick up the blade and claim that new world for their own.
But what if the door opened not to the present, but to the past and future? What if time became a tangle, knotting them together? And what if there was a human girl from one world and a young princet from the other who could teach each other how to lay down the blade?
The itka had opened the door and thrown them together, again and again.
The young princet fell into the new world afraid and injured, and they were met not with a blade but with a helping hand.
They learned and understood and fell a little bit in love with this new world.
They returned to find their own world in chaos.
And when the princet found the new world again, and a vexing human girl, they chose to offer a hand themselves.
Slowly, the two of them learned and understood and fell a little bit in love too, and when their worlds came into collision, the princet and the girl knew what to do: abandon the blade.
But all of it, all of the itka’s mad plan, hinged on a single detail, a necessary tenet.
The girl had to be unafraid.
And she was, almost foolishly so, but that too was a thing she had learned.
In that very same thicket of the woods, where the birches leaned into each other like old friends.
Where she had once fallen into a pond, and the water had closed in heavy and cold, and a hand had plunged in and dragged her out, and a figure in a scaled cloak had saved her, the very scales she saw a few years later on a terrifying beast, except she knew not to be afraid, because that figure had saved her.
They were not evil, and so this beast couldn’t be evil either.
“Mooch?” she whispers, tugging on the thread that connects them.
Beneath Danny’s desk comes a fluttering, then the itka is there, alive and whole and looking up at her from the knuckle of her index finger where she holds the photo.
“Nugau saved me as a child, didn’t they?” Sascia asks. “That was the first knot in the ymneen. If they hadn’t, if I had drowned, none of this would happen.”
Mooch taps, once.
“But for Nugau, it hasn’t happened yet.”
Mooch taps once again.
“What happens if they decide it’s not worth it?
If they would rather have their family whole, and their cities intact, and the Ul’amoon shackled again?
” Sascia’s chest rattles with a sob, her eyes are blurry with tears, but she keeps going, keeps speaking, because she knows what she has to do now and the itka got it all wrong: she is afraid, she is terrified.
“What if a slow, inescapable death is better than all this hurt?”
Mooch lands on her cheeks.
It kisses her skin where it’s sticky and salty with tears, and more itka come out of the shadows beneath Danny’s desk, big and lustrous and powerful, and settle on her face, on her hair, on her shoulders, soft and gentle and ever-changing, their emergence an affirmation and a comfort—a hug of gods, of time, of the Moth Dark.
Because they know Sascia has already decided.
She will offer Nugau the choice, for it is Nugau’s choice to make, the soron mola in its true essence.
The moths brought them together so that they may choose to save each other, again and again and again, even when they are enemies, even when they cast each other away, even at the cost of their own lives, because only then will they know how to save their worlds in turn.
“Sascia?” her cousin asks from the doorway.
He sees her on the floor, in an embrace of moths, and he wheels himself to her, Tae and Shivani and Andres right behind him, and they close their arms around her, with no need for proof or explanations, and the five of them press close, hearts beating in tandem, a Heart Claim of their own making: together, together, together.