Chapter 54 A Hand Through the Dark
A Hand Through the Dark
Together, they make a greenhouse.
They put it up in an abandoned warehouse in Jackson Heights, which they rip apart, replacing tin with light-blocking glass, iron with wood, and cement with soil.
Tae designs and installs the most beautiful flower-patterned low-exposure nova-windows.
Andres refurbishes the foundation, Sascia sets up the pots, and Shivani strings soft lanterns between the pillars.
Crow is still on probation; she reads them her favorite book series over the phone as they work.
When the greenhouse is ready, Danny begins to fill it: small patches of Darkgrass and Darkmoss at first, a Darkshrub here and there.
Darkbugs arrive on their own, vexing little scoundrels, but with every week there’s a new species of Darkrodent and a new kind of Darkflower.
Then, almost five weeks in, they open the doors to find a Darktree at the heart of the room, and three Darkravens perched on its branches.
Next month, after they get their Chapter XI–approved license, they’re going to open it to the public.
But tonight, it’s just the six of them.
They sit on two of the benches strewn around the Darksycamore tree, munching on popcorn (Crow’s idea; she said both visitors and inhabitants will like it).
Around a dozen Darkcreatures are gathered around them, Snow White style: squirrels, mice, ravens, a strange four-eyed fox.
Mooch is perched on Sascia’s knuckles, expertly stealing every other bite of popcorn from her fingers.
They talk for a long time, lost in the rhythm of effortless chitchat, until Shivani starts yawning like a sleep-deprived cat, and between one moment and the next, they’re all gathering their stuff and bidding their good nights.
Sascia stays behind.
Halfway to the doors, Danny raises an eyebrow at her.
She gives him a soft smile. “It’s time.”
He wheels himself back and takes her hands into his. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’ve been sure for a long while. I just wanted to see your greenhouse first—”
“Bap, bap, bap.” He raises a finger. “Don’t say first, as though there won’t be a next.”
There might not be, but Danny doesn’t want to hear that.
He thinks he knows what Nugau will choose, because for him, love has been blissful and unburdened, the only logical choice.
Sascia hugs him, inhaling his familiar smell, memorizing the feel of his arms around hers.
When he leaves, he switches the soft lights off.
Sascia is alone, with the squirrels and the ravens and the Dark.
Mooch dips and dives around her, a flurry of neon white against the black. It follows her chirpily to the heavy trunk of the Darksycamore, where the darkness is thickest. All is tranquil, but the silence grates against Sascia’s nerves, like an overture before the inevitable crescendo.
She lifts her hand.
The fight in the silo has unlocked some new skill within her. Her awareness has spread, languid as a dream. She can feel the power she exerts now when she dips her fingers into the Dark. It feels like a call, spoken not with the vibrations of her vocal cords but with her essence.
Something soft and cold meets her fingertips. She splays them wide in invitation—a hand folds into hers. She pulls.
An arm, a shoulder, a head, then Nugau is right there, half in, half out of the Dark of the sycamore.
His Darkprints are purple above his soft jawline.
His hair drapes long over his shoulders.
A soft linen shirt hangs from his body. Fear rims his eyes with white—he jolts away from her and Sascia lets him, dropping him back into the Dark.
This was not the Nugau she’s seeking. He was young and frightened, no hint of recognition in his gaze.
Again, Sascia plunges her hand into the Dark.
Moments pass indolently before her skin prickles.
This time, Nugau is clad in armor sleek with gore.
Her Darkprints blaze blue, stark against her pale skin.
The jagged scar marks her jaw, but her forehead is empty of wounds.
When their gazes meet, Nugau’s eyes sear with hatred.
Heart battering a drumbeat against her ears, Sascia snaps her hand away as though scorched. The Dark swallows those hateful eyes, that wrathful sneer.
This was a Nugau of vengeance, thirsty for justice for her mother’s death.
The third time, she pulls out a startled Nugau, small and round-cheeked, on the cusp of adolescence.
The fourth, she pulls out a Nugau reeking of some acrid smell, their eyes glazed with what can only be drunkenness.
On and on it goes, navigating the knotted timeline of their worlds through the tips of her fingers.
I knew you long before I met you, Nugau confessed the night before the Battle of Feathers.
Since I was a young adolescent I have seen flashes of an image between one blink and the next.
It’s your face, breaking out of the darkness.
Your hand, reaching for mine. When you jumped in the Maw to save us, I recognized you as the face that I’ve been glimpsing for half my life.
That’s why I was so hostile at first—I thought you were something evil, come to haunt me.
But Sascia has never been a haunting. She has just been a girl on a mission, determined to a fault.
Want is her hook, grit her fishing line.
She dips her hand in again and reaches out.
A face emerges through the pool of Dark that does not cower or sneer.
A gaze that is steady, measured, unflinching.
This time, Sascia doesn’t drop them back into the fold of darkness. She tugs.
Out Nugau comes, drawing themself upright amid the roots of the sycamore.
A jagged line stitches across the skin of their jaw.
Red welts dot their hairline. Their lips, Sascia notices, are marked with a single line of black, right down the middle, where the poison left its brand.
Their Darkprint is a constant flux of color, of siff, of all.
They watch her with the intensity of a person who knows too much and still not yet enough.
It reminds her of the mask they wore beneath the Maw, the pretense of aloofness that they donned like armor.
But then Nugau looks past her. They see the greenhouse in all its wonder. Their jaw dips slowly, until their lips are parted ever so slightly.
“You did this?” they whisper.
“Danny mostly. The rest of us just helped.”
“That’s what he dreamed of. A botanic garden.”
“Yes!” It comes out like a happy sob; that Nugau remembers, that they care.
The two of them stand there, a few feet apart. You could fit a whole world in the distance between them, a whole millennium come and gone in the blink of an eye.
“You didn’t come,” she says.
“You didn’t call.”
Nugau’s eyes flash to Mooch, resting at her ear, and return to her face.
“I didn’t think I should try,” Nugau says. “When I last saw you, in your bedroom while I was poisoned, you were unscarred, unhurt. I watched you realize what was happening to our worlds, what the ymneen truly was. You were afraid and I didn’t—I don’t want that for you.”
“I was afraid,” she says, remembering. “But I didn’t make a choice of fear. I saved you and I kissed you and when you left, I wished that you hadn’t.”
“Little gnat,” they whisper, “don’t make this harder. There will be no more attacks on your world, and no Ul’amoon as far as I can control them. Isn’t it better like this, separated and safe?”
Sascia tinges her voice with tease. “Coward.”
The soft exhale of a laugh leaves their lips.
It thrills her, that sound, and makes her hope. “You were never the enemy,” she says, “nor were the Ul’amoon. The true enemy is time; it ticks past, bringing us closer to a day where our worlds will not be able to undo the damage. But for you and me, time has always been an ally.”
The mask drops from their features and Nugau emerges, the real Nugau, her Nugau: as ravenous as she is, as awed and curious.
They take a step toward her. “You figured it out. The soron mola.”
Sascia gathers her courage, every ounce she Claimed and proved true, and says, “I found the first knot. The moment that could unravel the entire ymneen. Undo the pain we’ve caused each other, or let it come to pass, or something else entirely. It will be up to you.”
Nugau watches her for a long moment, the gears of their mind working. “Why me?”
“I think that perhaps the itka saw in you, in me, wonder where there should be fear. Like an Ariadne in love with the Labyrinth itself. They opened the door to save us both. But we had to go through this tangled mess of a time together, so we could understand what it takes to save each other.”
“What does it take?”
“A hand, I suppose. A hand instead of a blade. A hand through the Dark.” She breathes a laugh, almost to herself. Time is funny that way, always coming full circle. “I have made my choice—I do not regret it. But you have to choose too, Nugau.”
“Between the hand and the blade?” Their voice is barely a whisper. They can feel it too, perhaps: that this will not be a simple choice, black and white, obvious and harmless.
“I think it’s best if I showed you. But…”
She’s not sure what to say. She won’t plead for her life, because if she asked, if she begged, she thinks that Nugau would not refuse her, and this choice needs to be theirs and theirs alone. But she wants something, that insatiable hunger gnawing at her insides.
“Before you go,” she whispers, “can I—”
The rest is stolen by their mouth. In a flash, Nugau has crossed the space between them and taken her into their arms. She hovers inches off the ground, snug against their chest, safe in their lean arms, and her fingers are in their hair, her lips are on theirs, caressing, easing open, tongue around tongue.
They rasp hungry breaths and pull each other closer and deepen the kiss, ravenous and sated and ravenous again.
Parting is an effort, as though trying to force a galaxy apart.
Beneath the sycamore, dozens of itka somersault in the air, a veritable kaleidoscope of beating wings.
Nugau’s eyes widen at their presence, at the very obvious truth that this is about to lead to the moment, the first knot, the soron mola, but they turn back to Sascia, catching her face in their fingers.
“Tell me to stay,” they whisper.
She won’t, because she has made her choice, a hand through the Dark, and that hand only invites, never forces.
And Nugau must realize, must understand, in that way Sascia finds both wonderful and terrifying, because they bend low and press their forehead against hers. Their eyes close, their lashes dusted in the nebular colors of their Darkprint.
Behind them, the Dark has come alive, reaching black tendrils to Nugau’s back and shoulders, tugging at their hair. They will be gone in an instant.
“I asked you a question,” Sascia says against their lips, “the last time you saw me. You weren’t sure of the answer.”
When do I love you back?
Oh, little gnat, I don’t know that you ever do.
“I am sure,” Sascia whispers, “and Nugau, I do.”
Nugau’s eyes flare open, that brilliant violet, and the corners of their lips curve up in a smile, there for an instant and gone the next, because the Dark has wrapped around them and snatched them away.
Sascia stands beneath the Darksycamore, alone once more.
Nugau will arrive in a thicket of birches, Sascia knows.
It will be winter, fresh snow on the ground.
The ice will be shattered, the pond rippling with frantic movements.
Nugau will see her in that pond, drowning, and they will understand.
They can let her die and undo the damage of the ymneen.
They can wake up back in Itkalin, a child again, with their mother and their parent, and their world will still be broken and dying, but not under attack.
Or they can save her, so that they might meet her again in the future—her future, his past—and understand her and trust her and love her.
Learn to be unafraid together. Find a way out of the cycle of violence together.
Sascia shuffles backward to the bench and drops onto it, her breath fogging the air, her eyes trailing the shades of darkness in the greenhouse, and after a moment, she throws her head back and laughs, a short stab of a laugh, because she does not know, she really doesn’t know what Nugau will choose, but she hopes and she wishes and she wants, and there is no shame in that any longer, not ever again, for what she longs for is the most shameless thing in the world:
A future, of darkness and lips and the fluttering of moths.