Issuu

PRAISE FOR

‘A world so unique and addictive that I devoured this in a matter of days. Whimsical prose and a slow burning romance unlike any I’ve read before.’

ALEXANDRA CHRISTO, author of To Kill a Kingdom

‘Darkly dreamy, timely and expertly crafted. You will find star-crossed romance, a heady blend of science and magic and brilliant characters determined to end the cycle of violence.’

ALLISON SAFT, author of Wings of Starlight

‘An achingly hopeful, breathtaking love story. It’s the sort of book you want to linger in the dark with, and I absolutely loved every moment sunk within its pages.’

BEA FITZGERALD, author of Girl, Goddess, Queen

‘Utterly enthralling and darkly whimsical, Moth Dark is a thrill ride of a book, with its tale of twisted timelines and unyielding love. Sascia and Nugau’s story is certain to stay with you long after the book is over.’

A. B. PORANEK , author of Where the Dark Stands Still

‘A lush, breathtaking and wholly unique fantasy, with a devastating star-crossed romance and a world that lifts oﬀ the page like a ﬂuttering of moths.’

AVA REID , author of A Study in Drowning

‘Moth Dark is everything I’ve come to expect from Kika Hatzopoulou –dark, twisty, romantic and completely, dazzlingly original. Unlike anything else I’ve read.’

SARAH UNDERWOOD , author of Lies We Sing to the Sea

‘Decadent darkness, parallel worlds and a love that crosses so many boundaries. A unique fantasy that draws you in and doesn’t let you go.’

N ATASHA BOWEN, author of Skin of the Sea

‘Beautifully written and deeply compelling – an absolute triumph of a book. Kika Hatzopoulou masterfully weaves together an engaging, unexpected plot with the kind of swoon-worthy romance that spans worlds and timelines.’

PASCALE LACELLE , author of Curious Tides

‘Hatzopoulou makes a blazing mark in the world of contemporary romantic fantasy. Utterly exhilarating, mysteriously alluring and deeply beautiful.’

AMÉLIE WEN ZHAO , author of Song of Silver, Flame like Night

‘Wildly imaginative, achingly romantic and impossible to put down. Get ready, readers: your next book obsession has arrived.’

ANGELA MONTOYA, author of A Cruel Thirst

‘I was absolutely gripped by the fascinating, twisty, world of Moth Dark. Kika Hatzopoulou spins a story full of complex theories around genetics, time and gender with such deftly confident writing.’

ALWYN HAMILTON , author of Rebel of the Sands

‘Hatzopoulou has crafted a multi-faceted jewel of a book. This story is resplendent, with complex world-building, achingly lovely writing and a tough-as-nails heroine I couldn’t help but love.’

CLAIRE M. ANDREWS , author of the Daughter of Sparta trilogy

‘I was utterly entranced by Moth Dark. Sascia and Nugau’s connection is mesmerizing, and their love story both aches and captivates –tender and totally unforgettable.’

‘Hatzopoulou makes a blazing mark in the world of contemporary romantic fantasy. Utterly exhilarating, mysteriously alluring and deeply beautiful.’

LESLIE VEDDER , author of The Bone Spindle

AMÉLIE WEN ZHAO , author of Song of Silver, Flame like Night

‘Hatzopoulou at her very best. A unique and fantastical story threaded with a compulsive mystery. A feast for YA romantasy readers.’

‘Wildly imaginative, achingly romantic and impossible to put down. Get ready, readers: your next book obsession has arrived.’

RACHEL GREENLAW , author of Compass and Blade

ANGELA MONTOYA, author of A Cruel Thirst

‘An enthrallingly original world, and an addictively intriguing story. The romance had me on the edge of my seat. I miss this world already.’

ESMIE JIKIEMI-PEARSON , author of The Principle Moments

ALWYN HAMILTON , author of Rebel of the Sands

ESMIE JIKIEMI-PEARSON , author of The Principle Moments

‘Captivating, intricately crafted and brimming with wonder, Moth Dark pulls its readers into a deeply romantic, time-tangled tale. As poignant as it is powerful, this story lingers with you far beyond the final page.’

‘Hatzopoulou has crafted a multi-faceted jewel of a book. This story is resplendent, with complex world-building, achingly lovely writing and a tough-as-nails heroine I couldn’t help but love.’

CLAIRE M. ANDREWS , author of the Daughter of Sparta trilogy

KIERA AZAR , author of Thorn Season

‘I was utterly entranced by Moth Dark. Sascia and Nugau’s connection is mesmerizing, and their love story both aches and captivates –tender and totally unforgettable.’

LESLIE VEDDER , author of The Bone Spindle

Kika Hatzopoulou

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A LSO BY K IKA H ATZOPOULOU

Threads That Bind

Hearts That Cut

PART I

ymneen (eem· neen) noun

knotted time; the entangling of past, present, and future between one world and another.

Archaic; from the folklores of the Atku Tundra, where it is believed a new coat must be weaved through with the thread of time itself to last the winter.

1

the maw

The Maw opens up between West 18th and 24th Streets, smack in the middle of Manhattan, a giant collapse sinkhole nearly half a mile across, its black so absolute it devours whatever preconceptions you might have had about darkness in one bone-snapping gnash. Nova-lights hang in a concentric ring on the concrete barrier, like a giant chalk line in an old-timey crime movie.

The body: the Maw.

The crime: existing.

On the observation deck at 21st Street, Sascia leans on the rail and watches today’s visitors. There are the overeager tourists, pressing against the reinforced glass, smiling at their phone cameras. There are the kids, dashing about in Darkbeast masks. There are the tour guides and security guards droning precautions. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice the gazes of this last group, the professionals, are carefully avoidant of what lies inside the barrier.

Sascia ﬁrst noticed the feeling on her third day giving tours of the Maw six months ago. A sensation along her spine, a muted hiss in her ears. The instinct to just bolt. It was one of the security guards who put a name to it, after he noticed Sascia’s hunched shoulders. Feels like something’s breathing down there, don’t it?

A monster in the darkness, lurking in anticipation.

But to Sascia, the Maw is far more than a crime to be feared. Get your life together, her dad had said after their massive blowout when it became evident Sascia was squandering her once-in-alifetime opportunity at an Ivy League education. Except Sascia’s life was the Dark, and that wasn’t socially acceptable, so she settled for the next best thing: running exclusive tours of the New York Darkworld to pay for her ridiculous remedial courses and ridiculous SAT retakes. The Maw is, in a way, her second chance.

“Its scientiﬁc name is NY18 Sinkhole,” she says now to her latest client, launching into her familiar monologue, “but people call it the Maw, after that viral footage, you know, of the delivery guy on his scooter, racing away from the emerging Dark.”

“Yeah,” her client says, and dutifully quotes, “Everything’s disappearing into it—like it’s a damn maw.”

Yvonne Coleman-Zhao is from Chicago, a ﬁrst-year student at Juilliard, a violinist or cellist or something, and she’s never seen the Maw before. Her eyes are big and unblinking, her body tense; she refuses to step any closer than necessary. (Chicago might have the occasional runaway Darkbeast, but it does not have a Maw.)

“The Pit of Shanghai is bigger, of course,” Sascia recites, “and xenoscientists—scientists who study the Dark—believe there are cracks in the deep ocean that dwarf the ones on land, but, yeah, the Maw of Manhattan is catalogued as the second-largest host of Dark in the world. It is home to a number of monstrosities, as you can see.” She gestures at the talon marks on the concrete barrier surrounding the Maw. “As you surely know, there are no humanoids in the world where the Dark comes from, but there’s plenty of Darkcreatures, something akin to our own animals, and a few Darkbeasts, ranging in size from an elephant to Godzillalevel giants. Fortunately, no Darkbeasts have managed to burst out of the Maw in ﬁve years, since the Blackout. If something big

is crawling through the Dark, movement sensors at the lowest ring of the barrier automatically turn on lights fortiﬁed with nova energy to the highest brightness and release light bombs to send the beast scuttling back.”

Sascia pauses, because this is the point where most of her clients need to pose the question. Right on cue, Yvonne asks, “Does that happen often?”

“In New York? It happens three, four times a year.” Her breezy answer is well rehearsed; after almost half a year on the job, she knows to o er the sense of safety her clients are craving. “Tradition says if the skyline blazes white and you’re still alive when the lights switch o , you have to go get blackout drunk.”

“Well, let’s hope my parents never hear about that. It was hard enough to convince them to let me move to a city with an active Darkhole.” The girl glances at the black-and-orange water bottle peeking out of the side pocket of Sascia’s backpack—a gift from her father when they visited Columbia University last summer. “So you’re at Columbia?”

Uh-oh rings like an alarm in Sascia’s head. She doesn’t want to have the college conversation, least of all with a bright-eyed ﬁrstyear student. They’re so full of dreams, opportunity ripe for the taking; dreams that Sascia should share, opportunity she should be taking advantage of. I was recruited by the elite Umbra Program for Young Researchers at sixteen, o ered an early provisional spot at Columbia a few months later, botched all my conditional exams at seventeen, and now, at eighteen, I have to complete remedial courses and retake the SATs just doesn’t have a good ring to it.

“Uh-huh,” she drones instead. “But I’m taking a gap year right now.” (At least this part’s kind of true.)

“Oh, fun! And this is your side gig? These private tours?”

This is good money and me getting my life together is the real

answer, but no one should have to say that aloud. “Hey,” she evades, pointing at the entrance with her chin, “it looks like there’s a big group coming. Do you want a photo before the place gets swamped?”

She opens her palm, but to her surprise, Yvonne doesn’t hand her phone over. “Doesn’t feel right,” the girl mumbles, which earns her another point in Sascia’s tally.

(The ﬁrst one: pronouncing Sascia’s name right, when she called to book a tour three days ago. Almost everyone goes for Sasha at ﬁrst try.)

(For the record, it’s: SAH-skee-ah.)

They descend the stairs to a typical late-October day in New York, orange speckling the green along the street, gray clouds peeking between the buildings. The air is thick with fried food and ketchup. Any good guide knows the drill: start with lesser attractions ﬁrst, like the Darkgri n sculpture installation at Washington Square Park, move on to the highlight of the tour, aka the Maw, then end the walk with a shopping opportunity at the ﬂea market by the entrance of the observation deck. Street vendors line the cobbled street, booths heavy with Darkworld memorabilia, food stalls packed with Darkbeast-inspired delicacies.

“Sooo,” Sascia drawls. “Like we discussed, I charge twenty for the one-hour tour. If you enjoyed it, I’d greatly appreciate you passing the word to your friends.”

She notices the inﬁnitesimal drop of Yvonne’s eyebrows. Sascia’s heartbeat heightens, her senses sharpen. This is the moment. It’s why she tolerates the crush of tourists at the Maw and performs her parroted speech in every snippet of free time she has.

Yvonne says, “Oh. I thought—”

Sascia puts a puzzled frown on her face. “Yes?”

“I heard—”

C’mon, Sascia thinks with twin pangs of panic and anticipation. Don’t chicken out now.

The girl’s voice drops to a whisper. “Well, the person who referred me to you said you take your clients . . . ﬁshing.”

And there it is. Hook, line, and sinker. Sascia shrugs, but it’s a hard facade to maintain. Her belly ﬁlls with self-congratulatory pleasure. “If they want to.”

“I want to,” Yvonne hastens to say.

“Fishing in the Dark is not exactly legal,” Sascia warns, but Yvonne won’t care—the ones who seek Sascia’s services never do.

This is, after all, what her word-of-mouth campaign advertises: an immersive, collaborative experience, emphasis on immersive. Any proper tour company in the city can show you around the Maw and jabber about the legendary Darkgri n and its many littler brethren. But only Sascia will take you ﬁshing, so you can see (and let’s be honest, touch) those littler brethren with your own two hands.

Yvonne says eagerly, “It’s a hundred, right? For the ﬁshing tour?”

“Depends on what you want to catch. Darkbeetles and roaches are eighty—”

“I want Darkﬁreﬂies,” Yvonne replies without skipping a beat.

Sascia has to fight, like full-body wrestle, the urge to roll her eyes. She did it once for a visiting Harvard sophomore in June, and now that’s all her clients ever ask for. Apparently, that girl was a sorority influencer or something, and she listed a Darkfirefly jar lantern as the must-have item for your dorm room decoration.

Luckily, Darkﬁreﬂies are essentially the most harmless, docile creatures to ever come out of the Dark. Catching them is both easy (which is great for Sascia) and spectacular (which is great for business).

“Darkfireflies are a hundred, yes,” Sascia replies. “I’ve got a good fishing spot, but it’s a bit of a walk.”

Yvonne doesn’t mind, so they spend the next twenty minutes walking uptown, during which Sascia makes sure to ask the girl lots of questions, carefully steering the conversation away from any facts about her own personal life. When they reach Hell’s Kitchen and Sascia leads Yvonne into a narrow, dark side street, the girl is visibly spooked, lingering at the mouth of the alley.

“Don’t worry,” Sascia soothes. “I’ve done this dozens of times. It’s perfectly safe. Look.”

She removes the portable nova-lights from her backpack and arranges them in a circle at the end of the alley. With a click of the remote, the ﬂoodlights ﬂick on, washing the brick and cement in white. The lights congregate over a manhole cover emblazoned with geometric designs and the word sewer in narrow, square letters.

The legitimacy of it seems to settle Yvonne’s nerves. She approaches and proceeds to gawk at Sascia’s gear. A folding fishing rod (modified to hold bug bait instead of fish bait), a nova-gun (just in case), a waterproof canvas to sit on, and two small plastic specimen cups.

“What’s that?” Yvonne asks.

“Our bait,” Sascia answers, depositing the tiny Ziploc bag filled with gray dust next to the cups. “It’s Darkflowers ground to powder, which research has shown is akin to pollen in the Darkworld. Scientists believe Darkfireflies love it.”

(Tactfully, Sascia doesn’t say my research, or I believe.)

She’s almost set up, ﬁshing rod extended, glue strips and bait hanging from its tip. There’s none of the bone-chilling fear now. The big Dark is terrifying, but the smaller Dark, Sascia can handle just ﬁne. In fact, she kind of excels at it. Her body is brimming

with excitement, movements swift and focused, mind razor-sharp, and when she launches into her familiar ﬁshing directions, she talks a little too fast.

“Here’s how it’ll go. I’ll open the manhole. There’ll be absolute Dark down there—this sewage line has been decommissioned by the city, which means there are no light wards. You’ll lower the fishing line into the hole, and when you feel the tug, I’ll turn o the nova-lights.” At Yvonne’s startled inhale, Sascia lifts her palms. “I know it’s scary, but it’s necessary. If we don’t turn them o , the lights are going to instantly fry the Darkfireflies, and that’s not what you’re paying for, right?”

“Why am I holding the rod? What will you be doing?” A trickle of panic is leaking into Yvonne’s voice. She has arranged herself neatly on the canvas so that no part of her trendy low-rise jeans, cropped tee, leather loafers outﬁt is touching the grimy cement.

Sascia’s in her steady Doc Martens, trusty Levis, and an oversized hoodie. She doesn’t care if she gets a little dirty; she kneels on the other side of the manhole and drums her fingers against the nova-gun. “I’m going to be aiming the gun into the Dark, monitoring any movement. Darkfireflies are absolutely harmless, but if we leave the door open too long, other things might come wandering.”

“Christ.”

This time, Sascia doesn’t try to comfort Yvonne. The girl should be afraid—this is what she paid for. A roller-coaster ride, heart pumping, stomach dropping, the glorious thrill of danger. “Ready?” Sascia asks.

“No—”

Sascia heaves. The manhole cover dislodges with a thwonk. In the hole, there is only Dark. Its abnormality doesn’t register at ﬁrst: It looks like any other lightless crevice. But after a few

moments, your senses go into high alert. Your eyes don’t adjust. Your ears pick up no sound: no pipes dripping, no rats scattering, no echoing shifts. There is an eerie lack of smell.

In the before, when darkness came to mind, Sascia could smell dust stirred up in the attic or basement, or dew coating golden leaves, or the smell of lavender detergent as she burrowed under the covers. This smells nothing like darkness used to. It smells of nothing.

The silence that follows is small and fragile. Sascia feels the girl’s urge to ﬁll it, with questions or prayers or blabbering, and she quickly gestures for Yvonne to lower the line into the sewer hole. The other girl obliges with only the slightest trembling.

“Now what?” Yvonne murmurs.

“Now we wait,” Sascia replies calmly, as if she’s not about to pop out of her skin with excitement. A hunger is gnawing at her insides, a longing for what is about to happen next. This intermediacy is killing her; she wants the line to tug sooner, the lights to go out faster, she wants darkness and beasts and magic.

“So,” she asks Yvonne, “where were you?”

“When?” Yvonne’s eyes, focused on the manhole, have gone big and glassy, and with the ﬂoodlights washing her in white, she is pure doe before the inevitable hit-and-run.

“May second.”

“First Contact?”

“I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t remember the precise moment.”

“Hard to forget, isn’t it?” The girl pulls her braids over one shoulder. “I remember walking into the living room, the TV playing at full volume, and seeing the Shanghai Darkdragon toppling skyscrapers in downtown Shanghai. I thought my parents had put

on a movie. Then I noticed the news title. Heard Angela Herrera’s voice, you know, the gates of Hell have opened and all that. I remember the screen going white when the air strike hit.” Yvonne shudders. “Mom thrust a phone into my hands, told me to try my aunt, who lived in Shanghai at the time. But the lines were down and we didn’t get through.”

Yvonne stops there, and a stab of guilt courses through Sascia: Has she picked the scab on an old wound? It’s a dangerous question, what happened on May 2. First Contact: when the very ﬁrst Darkbeast, the hundred-foot-tall Darkdragon, tore out of the Dark and through the Xintiandi neighborhood in downtown Shanghai, shattering nearly a mile’s worth of populated area and killing thousands.

But more than that, May 2 was the day humans became brutally and irrecoverably aware they weren’t alone.

It’s a dangerous question, but Sascia has yet to meet someone who doesn’t want to share. The terror of that day, of the narrow conﬁnes of your world blowing up around you, however violent the explosion, however unhealed your wounds—it’s a collective memory. Sascia has found that in these moments where they watch the ink-black swirl of the Dark, remembering the violent assault of the otherworldly on their lives, she and her clients ﬁnd a sense of camaraderie. They all lived this, and there’s a comforting togetherness in their struggle.

“Is your aunt all right?” Sascia asks.

Yvonne nods. “She was visiting her friend on the outskirts of the city. She contacted us when the power came back on, two days later—oh!”

The ﬁshing rod is vibrating. Yvonne’s ﬁngers go white around its handle.

“Sascia! It’s biting!”

A laugh escapes Sascia’s lips. Here is the plunge part of the roller coaster: fear turning into exhilaration. She sets the gun’s blast mode to maximum lumen, then carefully opens the empty collection cups, depositing one on her side and one on Yvonne’s.

“I’m turning o the nova-lights now, okay? It’s going to get very dark, but don’t be fazed. Start pulling up the line and enjoy the spectacle. I’ll handle the rest.”

At Yvonne’s soft “Okay,” Sascia kills the lights. Shadows shroud the alley. Without the heat of the lights, the drop in temperature is startling, but Sascia likes it that way—it makes her fishing tours even more of an experience. In the manhole, the Dark is thickening, with a rippling liquid quality. The fishing reel starts gyrating quickly—newbies always spin too fast, but it doesn’t matter. Darkfireflies are not fish; they’ll come up no matter how suspiciously speedily their food is trying to escape them.

Then, abruptly, Yvonne’s frantic reeling stops. “Oh wow.”

Darkfireflies are swirling up the long column of the manhole. They’re tiny things, their scaled bodies translucent, their wings crystalline. They fly in a murmuration, pirouetting in a synchronized spiral. Magnificent colors flow through them like a wave, blues and purples and soft whites that pulse with a bright interior force, more vivid than any natural phenomenon on Earth. It looks like the aurora borealis on drugs, distilled into a three-foot-wide hole in the ground.

“Go for it,” Sascia tells the girl.

No further clarification is needed. Yvonne grabs the plastic cup and leans forward, taking a scoop from the surface of the hole. A dozen Darkfireflies are instantly swept into the plastic, and she screws the top on quickly. The kaleidoscope of light reflects in her irises.

Sascia watches her, utterly entranced. It’s not about the money, as her parents think. Not about the thrill of being the expert, as Danny teases. Sascia craves this, precisely this: a stranger’s awe, a stranger’s fear before the impossibility of a darkness ﬁlled with monsters. She wants to pluck a straw and drink up all of the girl’s terror and wonder, wonder and terror, slurp, slurp, slurp, brain freeze be damned.

She wants to feel, even for a brief, lying second, what it felt like to stand in front of the Dark for the ﬁrst time.

(Pass by it on the street enough times and even magic becomes mundane, Danny says.)

(But this should not ever be mundane, Sascia argues. I mean, look at it.)

From the corner of her eye, Sascia notices a ripple on the surface of the Dark. The lights have been o a little too long. She moves fast, single-mindedly: dives her hands into the surface of the Dark, the cup in one hand, its top in the other. She always grabs a sample of whatever her clients ﬁsh that day, for her own research. She’s mid-scoop, her hands as deep into the Dark as she dares to go, when she feels it—

Fingers caress the back of her left hand. Sascia moves away, but the fingers close around her wrist. Panic drops like a stone in the pit of her stomach. She jerks her hand out of the Dark—the fingers come up with it. She can see them properly now, irrefutably: long, blue-gray fingers with pointed black nails. There’s even a thumb, nestled into the grooves of Sascia’s palm. The sensation is jolting, alarmingly familiar, horribly displaced.

A hand.

2the key word

Terror grips Sascia, instinct takes the reins. Her free hand drops the cup and fumbles around for the nova-gun. She doesn’t fully register it’s in her hand, that her ﬁnger is on the trigger, that she’s ﬁring a blazing hundred-thousand-lumen shot into the sewer, until her eyesight is bombarded with white.

The gray-blue porcelain skin of the hand blisters; between one blink and the next, it has retreated into the sewer. The few Darkﬁreﬂies buzzing at the top of the manhole make a frizzling sound, their lifeless bodies dropping unceremoniously back into the Dark.

Yvonne is splayed on the waterproof canvas, an arm over her face. “A little warning before trying to blind me?”

Sascia knows she’s shaking, knows she looks completely unprofessional, but she can’t pull herself together. “Sorry,” she stutters, “something crawled out—”

“Yeah, I saw. Those long, pale tentacles . . . even I can recognize a Darksquid!”

Long, pale tentacles. Darksquid.

Sure, that could be it. But Sascia has faced Darksquids before in her ﬁshing tours. She’s seen their long tentacles up close, the pale gray of their boneless ﬂesh. The Darksquids she’s seen—they don’t have knuckles. They don’t have thumbs.

Dexterous opposable thumbs mean working with tools, foraging, skinning prey. Thumbs mean bigger brains and intelligent—no, sapient—life. But there’s no sapient life in the Dark, no creatures as intelligent as humans. Studies are deﬁnitive: the DNA of Darkcreatures is not evolved enough for sapience. In modern terms, the world where the Dark comes from is still in its Mesozoic era— think dinosaurs and giant sharks, weird-looking bugs. Not humans, not for millions of years.

Holy hell.

Sascia is already dialing Danny’s number. She tucks her phone between her cheek and her shoulder as she darts about, dragging the cover back, dismantling the ﬁshing rod, and throwing the rest of her gear in her backpack.

“Pick up, pick up,” she mutters under her breath. The rings are slow, sluggish—by comparison, her heart is running at twenty miles per hour.

“Thanks for everything,” Yvonne says, matching Sascia’s hurried strides to the mouth of the alley.

“You’re welcome,” Sascia says with barely a glance at the girl— and the cup of iridescent (and very illegal) ﬁreﬂies clutched tight in her hands. God. Is the girl trying to induce a heart attack?

“Yvonne. You can’t be gallivanting around with your poached Darkﬁreﬂies—and certainly not in broad daylight. Hold on.” Sascia rummages through her backpack for a felt covering and a small plastic bag of pollen. “Feed them daily. Only take the covering o when the lights are out. When you grow bored of them—”

Yvonne’s mouth scrunches.

“That’s not an insult,” Sascia says matter-of-factly. “You’ll get bored eventually—everyone does. Take the lid o , put the cup in a drawer or a closet, and the little guys will just ﬂy back into the Dark. Don’t mess with them or hurt them. The Dark will

remember and next time it has a chance, it won’t send tiny pretty Darkﬁreﬂies for you.”

Yvonne’s brows shoot up, but she nods dutifully. “Sure thing. Listen—”

But Sascia’s very much not listening, because Danny has ﬁnally picked up.

Her cousin snickers in her ear. “Done terrorizing the impressionable youth?”

She glances at Yvonne, who’s still watching her expectantly, and marches around the corner of the alley. Quietly, she hisses, “Please tell me you’re at the Umbra.”

“No, I’m not spending my Friday night doing homework, Sascia. I left a couple of hours ago. Invited Tae for a bite to eat, but I don’t think he even heard me.”

“Oh, he heard you. Your crush is just an asshole, Danny. Listen, something happened.”

Danny makes a go-on sound.

“I took a client ﬁshing at the spot at Hell’s Kitchen and something strange came out of the Dark. The impressionable youth thinks it was a Darksquid, but I was much closer and it looked like”—Sascia exhales—“a hand.”

“A hand,” Danny repeats.

“Fingers. With a thumb.”

Silence on the other end of the phone. Then, a dead-toned “Sascia, are you messing with me?”

Sascia looks up at the brick and glass of the New York skyline, because suddenly she feels like sobbing. “I really wish I was.”

But his reaction is heartening. Of course he doesn’t believe her. Of course it’s absurd. There are no humanoids in the Darkworld. The research is deﬁnitive, a fact that Danny knows far better than she does; he’s majoring in xenoscience, after all. It’s absurd and

Danny’s going to laugh it o and everything will be normal again.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he says, “Hold on.” She listens to the duet of his keyboard and mouse clicking. “There was a spike of Dark activity in that general area, timestamped 7:49. About two minutes ago. If the sensors picked it up, it was certainly larger than a Darksquid, but we won’t know without a sonar reading. You’ve got yours with you?”

A whimpering “N-no” leaves Sascia’s lips.

“Sascia, you’ve got to carry one with you at all times when you’re ﬁshing.”

“But it agitates Darkcreatures.”

“But it keeps people safe, which is the important bit. How close are you to the Umbra? I’ve got a spare in my lab.”

Please, no. Only two people ever stay late at the Umbra Program labs on Friday nights. One is her cousin’s asshole crush. The other is someone Sascia really doesn’t want to see right now—or ever, to be honest.

Her whisper comes out in a hopeless plea. “Don’t send me there.”

“Sascia,” Danny says soothingly. “You’ve got to. We need to know whether you’ve ﬁnally lost your marbles, or you just made the greatest scientiﬁc discovery of the decade.”

She feels like stomping her foot and throwing a tantrum. But this is how things work in science, even if you’re as crappy at it as the Columbia admissions team thinks Sascia is. You notice an abnormality, you make a hypothesis, you observe and experiment, then it’s inevitably debunked.

This is the key word here. Debunk.

“Fine,” she tells Danny. “I’ll call you when I’m back at the spot.”

He hangs up and Sascia sits frozen for a moment, staring at the black screen. She’s entirely forgotten Yvonne is still there until the girl pops around the corner of the alley and extends a hand with a crisp hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go.”

“Oh, right. Thanks.”

Yvonne smiles wide, still high on the thrill of danger, sated with bottling the threat into a little plastic cup. “This was fun!

If people ask, I’ll send them your way.” She makes to leave but stops. “Hey, I forgot. What’s your First Contact story? Everyone has one, right?”

“Right.” Sascia breathes in, recalibrating. “Same as yours, pretty much. Angela Herrera on the TV, calling and texting everyone I love.”

But that’s a lie within a lie.

3a lie within a lie

Sascia is nine.

She’s in the woods behind her grandparents’ home in suburban Queens. She’s wearing her pu y pink coat over her black velvet dress with the scratchy collar. There’s mud on her good shoes, which she knows is going to get her a scolding later, but for now, the snow is so fresh, the woods so quiet. She simply needs to see if there are ﬁsh in the frost-sleek pond.

She tests the ice ﬁrst—she’s a kid, but she’s not a fool, she’s watched enough movies. The ice holds, even when she shu es forward on her hands and knees, toward the center of the pond where there’s a clear patch that she can take a look through. There’s no ﬁsh, dead or alive. Only darkness. Maybe if she fogs the ice with her breath and rubs it with her palm, it will clear, like the windows of her dad’s car do. She exhales and reaches out.

That’s when the ice cracks.

She hears the sound and then, between one moment and the next, she’s inside.

The cold is instantaneous. Water is pushing against her lips, trying to worm its way up her nostrils. Her pu y coat is heavy, dragging her deeper. She kicks her feet, reaches out with leaden arms. But she can’t see anything, can’t tell which way is up.

She’s scared now. The air in her lungs demands release. Save me, she begs. But there’s only darkness around her, its silence a death sentence. Save me! she thinks again, pleading, reaching, grasping at empty water.

A mu ed sound reverberates through the pond. There’s a flicker of light; bright spots of color float around Sascia’s vision, a dozen of them, a hundred, little bodies that flutter against her skin. A current of movement breaks the stillness. Hands grip Sascia’s elbows, and then darkness gives way to light, and she is out, she is breathing, she is saved.

Next to her on the bank, a ﬁgure is heaving. They’re drenched to the bone, their face hidden beneath a long hood, their black cloak lustrous as polished gemstone.

The cold becomes maddening. Her vision tunnels, her lungs struggle, her limbs feel like they’re made of iron. She thinks the ﬁgure stands. She thinks they carry her to the edge of the woods. She thinks she hears them say, “Thanks for getting me all wet, you menace.”

But Sascia can only see white now. She’s shivering, so very, very cold.

Next thing she knows, she’s in a fort of towels, in the back of her father’s car, and then a hospital bed. Every inch of her skin burns. Mom is crying. Everyone’s asking questions.

Even weeks later, people are still asking questions.

Figures clad in black are a common trauma-induced hallucination, the doctor tells her parents while Sascia sits between them in the small hospital o ce. You said there was a recent death in the family? Sascia remembers her black velvet dress with the scratchy collar. The frost on the ground as they lowered the co n into the dirt. Her grandmother’s funeral was the ﬁrst time Sascia saw the ﬁgure, but there have since been others, always cloaked in

shadows, always watching her from afar. No one believes Sascia when she insists the ﬁgure is real.

When she’s twelve, she sits in that same house in suburban Queens, sandwiched between her younger sister and her cousin, watching footage of the Darkdragon ravaging Shanghai. It’s horrifying, mesmerizing, but Sascia’s attention snatches on its skin: scaled and lustrous, as though cut from the core of the blackest gemstone—just like the ﬁgure’s cloak.

Sascia isn’t a kid anymore. She’s never been a fool. But she can’t help but feel that the ﬁgure in the onyx cloak came from this new, strange place, what the media have dubbed the Dark. They came to save her because she is special. She is worthy. She is magic herself. She knows it in her bones: this is the truth. It doesn’t take long for life to disappoint her.

case in point

The elevator doors ding open to reveal the Umbra Program facilities. Sascia takes a deep breath, a gladiator facing a lion-filled arena. Her eyes cut straight to the corner o ce. Light leaks beneath the door—which is closed, thank goodness. She glances at the nearest desk next, where a lanky figure is hunched over a laptop. Empty co ee mugs and energy drink cans flank the screen, the loyal sentinels of Tae-Suk Ho’s battle against sleep.

The Umbra Program for Young Researchers is made up of six of the brightest minds of their generation, but even among them, Tae is a supernova. He’s eighteen like Sascia, originally from Seoul but currently studying here in the US. Like the rest of the students of the Umbra cohort, he has an a nity for the Dark. His design for a nova-light net to conﬁne Darkcreatures got him into the Umbra at just fourteen, and into MIT at sixteen, where he’s been majoring in xenoscience engineering.

Sascia is decidedly not in the mood to feel inadequate merely by existing in Tae’s orbit tonight, so she takes the long way to Danny’s lab, along the edges of the open desk area and through the kitchen. Her feet are soundless on the rough moquette as she grabs the spare sonar from Danny’s desk. She should leave just as unnoticed as she arrived, but she can’t help herself.

She slips into her own lab room and closes the door behind her, quiet as a thief.

Her presence is—as always—an invitation for mayhem.

At once, wings begin buzzing. The entire wall opposite the door is covered in glass, where a shadowed garden of Darkﬂora lies, blooms and leaves and gangly spiked ivy with ﬂesh as hard as chiseled stone. Atop the otherworldly vegetation, hundreds of winged creatures press together against the glass, quivering with excitement at Sascia’s return. Their colors blink in bright swirls and dots: violet and sky blue and pure white.

“Well, hello there,” Sascia whispers.

The Darkmoths pulsate in reply. The soft sounds of their bodies are a balm; Sascia’s fretful thoughts quiet down. She eases the backpack from her shoulders and walks to the glass separating the nest from the room.

“I’ve only been gone a few hours,” she coos at them. “You can’t possibly have missed me already.”

Their joy is contagious; Sascia’s mood immediately turns playful. She steps to the left—across the glass, the moths follow. She steps to the right—the moths mimic her. She stands tall and crouches low, then abruptly twirls around herself. Colors bounce o the walls as the Darkmoths repeat Sascia’s impromptu choreography.

A laugh bubbles through her throat. “I’ve missed you too. All right, let’s see what you’ve been up to.”

She slips behind the desk, powers on the computer, punches in her password, and clicks to the camera records. An image of the garden appears on the screen. In it, the Darkmoths are static, perched on their designated spots. She zooms into the Manhattan area, rewinds to 7:40, and lets the recording play through in fastforward.

It’s a map of New York, her and Danny’s garden, made entirely

of moths and ﬂowers. Darkmoths are a rare breed, even among the many peculiarities of the Darkworld. For one, according to world databases, they have only ever appeared to Sascia (and by extension, Danny). For another, they appear to be intrinsically linked to their home. A moth collected from the northeast corner of Central Park, for example, will choose to rest on a Darkﬂora sample harvested from that very same corner—a sample that Sascia and Danny will then place on the Central Park location on their map. And, last but not least, Darkmoths show an awareness that transcends space and distance—if there’s a disturbance in Central Park, where the moth is from, the moth in Sascia and Danny’s garden will react.

Just as it does now—at the 7:49 time mark, the stillness on the screen breaks. Color blooms as a moth feverishly ﬂaps its wings. Zooming in, Sascia studies the stripes of its body, the twirling veins of its forewings, the dots at the center of its hindwings. It’s sitting exactly at West 53rd Street, collected from the very same sewer hole Sascia just took Yvonne ﬁshing in.

This is not necessarily bad news. It doesn’t mean anything beyond what she already knew: that there was something in the sewer, large enough to disturb the Darkﬂora around it—and in turn, the Darkmoth in her map—as it crossed from the Dark into the human world.

Sascia spins around in her chair. Her moths have settled down again, each in their little chosen spot. She stands and walks to the moth sitting over the alley in Hell’s Kitchen. Its antennae are short and its body pulses with neon purple, marking the moth as male—at least currently.

The unusual qualities of Darkcreatures have perplexed scientists for years. One such puzzle is what’s been dubbed the Darknomaly: the fact that Darkcreatures seem to live alongside their distant

ancestors. Two moths pulled from the same pocket of Dark on the same day might show millennia of evolution between them, yet they live at the same time.

Another is they can change their sex.

Sascia has seen it happen with her own two eyes: one moment a moth might be a large, pale female with feathered antennae, the next it might be a smaller, soft-winged male, and the moment after that it might be long-bodied and of unknown sex. The color of the swirls and dots that adorn their hard flesh, uniquely individual like human fingerprints (called, unsurprisingly, Darkprints), indicates their current sex. For lack of further information, scientists have been applying human gender binaries: across all Darkcreatures, purple signifies what humans consider male, blue female, and white something outside the binary, but there are an additional half dozen gradients of these three whose meanings have yet to be deciphered.

In recent years, however, some theorists, including the Umbra Program’s own budding anthrozoologist, Shivani Kaur, believe that there’s an element of choice in Darkcreatures’ shifts between sexes. They bring gender into the conversation—The Dark is genderﬂuid on a molecular level, Shivani likes to say. (Of course, the straight while males of the science world aren’t keen to accept that, but when did that ever stop the queers of the world?)

A sharp knock announces a visitor mere seconds before the door opens and the light is flicked on. White washes over the room— immediately, her moths are aflutter. Thumps echo on the glass as the bugs fly around, startled and agitated.

“Hey! This is a no-light lab!” Sascia bursts out. She knows who the newcomer is, she knows she should be respectful, but she doesn’t care. She sidesteps him and hits the light switch by his shoulder, sinking the room back into semidarkness.

“Miss Petrou,” Professor Carr says in his low, emotionless tone. “That blackout glass was manufactured precisely to keep your moths safe from light sources. It cost this program a small fortune, so I suggest, once again, that you start putting it to use.”

Sascia ﬁnally graces him with a look: his neatly shaved jaw, the gray at his temples, the well-tailored suit. She knows damn well how much the glass cost, because the miserable man likes to mention it every time he visits her lab.

That biting bitterness must jump-start something inside her because she snaps, “And once again, sir, I have to tell you my moths don’t like it.”

The professor doesn’t immediately reply. Neon reﬂections catch on his glasses as his head tilts to examine her. “Your moths?”

Well, shit. She becomes suddenly aware of where she is: his elite program, his lab. His moths, if they want to get technical about it. (Or legal; her employee contract dictates that any work produced in the facilities lawfully belongs to the Umbra Program.)

Sascia has to ﬁght that all-too-familiar urge to block her moths with her body, power down the entire room so that they can escape back into the Dark, away from Professor Carr’s disapproving pucker. She tries to keep her voice laid-back. “Did you want something, sir?”

“I noticed you coming in,” Carr says. “I know how averse you are to working overtime. It struck me as odd.”

For a second, Sascia thinks about telling him the truth. His expertise on the Dark is unparalleled. As one of the founding members of Chapter XI, the international group that oversees the study and management of the Darkworld, he has both the tools and inﬂuence to properly explore the possibility of humanoids in the Dark. In mere hours, he could assemble a team of the best xenoscientists in the world, with military support to boot.

But his objective—everyone’s objective—would be a dead body. A safe, unthreatening body to dissect and analyze, and Sascia can’t give them that. Not now, not ever.

So she lies, yet again. “I forgot my textbook, sir.”

Deftly, she ﬂips open the front pocket of her backpack, showing him the textbook she’s been carrying since this morning’s class.

His face is marbled stone. “Miss Petrou. Despite what you may believe, I have only ever tried to help you. I o ered you a place in my program and secured you a spot at Columbia University. I have long believed you are capable of extraordinary things—if you put in the work. Remind me, what were the provisional requirements you had to meet to secure your spot?”

Sascia exhales slowly through her nose. “A 3.9 GPA and 1500 SAT score.”

“And tell me, after nearly two years of knowing these requirements and supposedly actively trying to fulﬁll them, what were your scores last winter?”

“3.2 and 1320.”

Professor Carr is statue-still, no blink, no nod, not even a satisﬁed smirk of his mouth, which Sascia ﬁnds maddening. If he looked and behaved like a villain, it’d be so much easier to convince people that he is a villain. Instead, he’s this: her gracious mentor, her benefactor, the fairy godmother of her second chances.

“I won’t remind you what’s at stake here, Miss Petrou,” he says. “I am certain you know. You’re a clever girl, after all.”

Well, he’s done it. Sascia is fuming so hotly she’s surprised her clenched teeth don’t meld together. The sheer audacity of throwing this line back at her.

When Carr ﬁrst invited her and Danny to join his elite cohort of teenage prodigies experimenting with the Dark, it had seemed like a dream come true. With the Umbra Program’s state-of-the-art

tech and boundless sources of information, Sascia and Danny could turn their map into a citywide alarm system that could surpass the accuracy of the army’s best sensors. Except, they soon discovered, the moths only appeared to Sascia. Only obeyed Sascia. Without her, the alarm system simply didn’t function, and no investor was going to fund a teenager with a dream. The Umbra’s founders wanted credibility. And so Carr secured Danny a spot at Princeton to study botany and plant genetics and a spot at Columbia for Sascia, to major in entomology. Hand-picked by an Ivy League school before she’d even turned seventeen—Sascia’s parents were elated.

Then Sascia, being the dud that she is, failed each and every term of her conditional acceptance.

Fresh out of the big get-your-life-together ﬁght with her father, Sascia already had her speech prepared when she spoke to Professor Carr. She wanted a second chance. I can do this, she had promised Carr (and her father) (and herself). I’m a clever girl, after all.

And now here they are, facing each other again six months later, and those same words have come back to bite her in the ass. As if cleverness matters at all when the rest of the world has already decided you’re a screw-up.

“Yes, I am,” she bites out. Because she is smart. Case in point: not telling him about the possibility of the greatest discovery in xenoscience.

“Then, Miss Petrou, I suggest you start acting like it,” he says. And with that ﬁnal slap on the wrist, he slips out of the room.

5a beetle against glass

Sascia calls Danny when she’s back out in the streets. She doesn’t mention her run-in with Carr or the tender mark his reprimand has left. She doesn’t say much at all, really, and it doesn’t matter— Danny is an expert ﬁller of silence, one of the many things Sascia loves about him. He talks about his horrible botanical anatomy professor and the latest paper he has them writing, then launches into a word-by-word recital of the texts he exchanged with Tae last night on their shared project.

Trepidation swathes her body with every step toward 53rd Street. It’s night proper now, and the skyscrapers have turned into looming behemoths of shadows. At the mouth of the alley, Sascia takes out her nova-gun, walking sideways with her back to the brick wall, like a cop in a TV show.

The alley looks just as she left it, secluded and quiet. The manhole lies still. Thank god she doesn’t need to open it to run Danny’s tests.

The tiny monitor of the sonar shows the cavernous insides of the sewer, the very top layer of the Dark before it plunges into depths that no human technology has been able to map yet. Gradients of green, yellow, and red mark the spots where Darkﬂora or Darkcreatures roam—but all small enough not to be a concern.

There’s an imprint of something larger a bit farther down, in faded colors on the sonar. Whatever was in there has retreated.

“It sounds like nothing’s down there, cuz,” her cousin says with chirpy ﬁnality. “Come hang out with me. I’ll order conciliatory pizza for you.”

This is good. This is just what Sascia wanted. Her hypothesis debunked, the world returned to order. Why, then, does she feel just a tiny bit disappointed?

She breathes a laugh. “That actually sounds terriﬁc.”

“See you in a bit, nutjob.”

After she hangs up, Sascia shoves the sonar into her bag and takes one last look at the manhole. Bye-bye, creepy sewer, she thinks. She has no intention of ever ﬁshing in this spot again. She’s going to eat pizza and play Zelda with Danny and erase this entire day from her memory.

She’s almost to the mouth of the alley when she stops, a sigh on her lips.

She can’t help it. She turns back.

Like a beetle, her dad had told her once. You keep throwing yourself against the glass, again and again, instead of ﬂying out the open window an inch to your right.

He meant it as a warning, but Sascia had found herself surprisingly delighted by it. She really did identify. Beetles look like absolute fools, sure, but they don’t give up. They might get concussed, but after a thousand launches against the unbreakable, they’ll eventually ﬁnd their way out. Sascia sees no shame in that.

She cocks her nova-gun and, with her free hand, removes the sewer cover in one smooth, swift movement. The Dark welcomes her, black and cold and odorless.

Is she really going to do this?

(Hell yeah) she is.

She plunges her hand in and keeps to the rim of the hole, fingers skimming over the petals and spiky leaves of the Darkflora in the sewer. At her touch, petals and leaves become rock-hard, the thorns elongate. They’re merely testing her—most of the time, humans are not perceived as threats by the Darkworld flora. (The fauna, on the other hand, is a di erent story entirely.)

A small mouth nips a ectionately at the tip of her index finger— a Darkmoth. Sascia could recognize a moth with her eyes closed. They have this specific way of approaching her, all velvet-soft wings and tingling antennae, a kind of gentle curiosity that no other creature of the Dark has at first contact.

“Hello, little friend. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

Concentric ripples shape the surface of the sewer as half a dozen moths burst out in a whirlwind of bright colors. Their wings tickle her cheeks and neck.

“All right, all right,” she hu s around a smile, “calm yourselves—”

Her skin tingles. A di erent sense replaces the soft membrane of wings at her ﬁngertips. It’s smooth and hard and warm as skin.

In her head, her father warns, A beetle against glass.

Sascia moves fast: she snatches the creature’s limb and pulls, bracing her legs against the grimy cement, nova-gun cocked and ready. Her arm breaks through the surface of the Dark and she is holding a hand, a proper hand with ﬁngers and a thumb. A wrist follows, and an elbow. As Sascia hoists herself up, the creature follows, unveiling itself: shoulder and head, porcelain gray skin, long ears peeking through jet-black hair, striking violet eyes.

Vines and sharp-edged leaves are tangled in the creature’s shaggy, shoulder-length locks. Neon-colored blossoms pepper the blackscaled suit of armor that covers its torso. Strong brows and cutting