The razor-wire fence stretched in both directions out of sight, shimmering with pale fire in the dark light of the fully risen moon. Jonathan remembered their flight through the Aerospace Oklahoma complex two weeks before, the relentless frenzy of their pursuers. He’d almost lost Jessica that night when their hands had slipped apart and she’d fallen to the ground. The memory sent a nervous shudder through him.
Of course, these days those same creatures were scared of Jessica, now that she knew her talent. Even this close to the badlands, they hadn’t seen a slither all night.
“Anything coming back to you?” he asked.
Jessica nodded slowly, pointing east. “The fence was on our left, so we were driving that way.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. That road leads to Rustle’s Bottom.”
“Great.” She smiled happily, gesturing in the opposite direction. “So Constanza’s must be back that way.”
Jonathan took a deep breath. This was taking forever. “I thought you spent the night there.”
“Once, okay? Constanza drove me to her house from school. I didn’t pay that much attention to where we were going.”
“No kidding.”
“I was kind of preoccupied. You know, about to discover my mystical destiny and everything?”
“All right, sorry.” Great, it was going to be another night of apologizing. “Let’s keep moving.”
They turned and held hands, launched themselves down the empty highway, long strides eating up the distance. The coils of razor wire to their right flashed past ominously as their speed increased.
“I don’t understand why Rex thought I’d know where Constanza’s house is. I’ve only been in this town a month.” She sighed. “Even if it seems like years.”
“It’s all right, Jess. We’ll find it.” Jonathan hoped she would keep her mind on flying. One false step and they’d find themselves plowing into the top of the fence—razor wire at sixty miles an hour wouldn’t be pretty.
“I could have called Constanza or something, but Beth didn’t give me the message until she got off the phone to Chicago. Five minutes before midnight. Little twit.”
Jessica sank into silence, her expression tight. Jonathan wondered if Beth would be such a pain if Jessica didn’t do things like lock her in the closet. Another few leaps and they had cleared the perimeter of Aerospace Oklahoma, the pulsing coils of razor wire dropping behind them. Finally.
“Look, Rex and Melissa are probably okay. I bet they just wanted to show us something. What did your sister say, exactly?”
Jessica was silent until they had landed and jumped again, angling past an old VW Bug frozen on the highway. “She said, ‘Rex and Melissa are at Constanza’s. They need you.’ That doesn’t sound optional.”
Jonathan snorted. What it sounded like was Rex giving orders. “Come on. You know how cautious Rex is. He wouldn’t go this far out at midnight without serious weaponry. Maybe they brought Dess along.”
“I hope you’re right. Let’s just get there.”
“It would help if we knew where there was.”
“I’m trying, all right?”
They climbed a highway overpass, and Jonathan groaned at the view before them. The highway extended out toward the badlands, with a dozen or so turnoffs between here and the other end of Bixby County, every one of which led to long stretches of housing developments. From up in the mountains in normal time, you could see them glittering, the black river of asphalt spinning off into bright eddies of streetlamps and backyard security lights. But here at midnight, nothing glowed except the dark moon. Constanza’s house could be anywhere in the blue expanse of desert.
However frustrating this was, at least they were flying. His sore throat was gone, his ankle had stopped hurting, and last night he had started to clear things up between him and Jessica. If Rex hadn’t left his cryptic little message, this would have been the perfect hour to spend time in some high place with her, alone.
Thank you, Rex and Melissa.
Jonathan wondered how those two could have gotten themselves into trouble again so soon, forty-nine hours after their last scrape. Were they trying to get killed? Last night Melissa had seemed different, as if Rex’s calm, collected sanity was slowly seeping into her. But maybe the opposite was happening too, and Melissa’s madness was bleeding into Rex.
Since Jonathan had touched her, feeling what it was really like inside her head, he’d wondered if at the core of her bitterness lay a genuine death wish, a desire to permanently escape the torment of never having her brain to herself.
Suddenly something flashed through his mind.
“Decatur Street?” he said softly.
“Yes!” Jessica cried. “I was just thinking that. I remember now. That’s the exit she took.”
Jonathan swallowed. “That’s weird.”
“So you knew where she lived all along?”
“Me?” Jonathan laughed. “Yeah, right. Like I spend a lot of time with cheerleaders.”
He pointed off to the right, tugging Jessica toward an exit ramp. They leapt across a quartet of gas stations arrayed around an intersection, coming down onto a rough, undeveloped field. Rainbow cacti dotted the field like spiky basketballs, and Jonathan slowed their pace. He’d clipped a cactus once in the secret hour—as sharp as razor wire, with the added bonus of spines that broke off and stayed in you.
From the top of their next jump Jonathan saw a dark cluster of houses in the distance.
“Look familiar?”
“Yeah. I think that’s her neighborhood. She’s not just a cheerleader, you know.”
“Sorry,” Jonathan muttered. “I’m just saying, I had absolutely no idea where Constanza lived. I’d never given it a thought until tonight.”
“But you just said—”
“I know.” He could feel the last few jumps settling into his mind, the way the angles always did. But this familiarity made no sense. Somehow he could see the approach to Constanza’s house as clearly as the trip to Jessica’s every night, every open field and rooftop, all the landings between here and the two-story mansion sitting on the biggest lot of the development.
But he’d never been here before. Not once.
A haze appeared on the horizon, a crooked column like the dust devil they’d seen three nights before. But this one was much larger and in motion, the black and fluttering shapes of slithers forming a whirling vortex over the house.
“Crap. Looks like they did need us.”
“I hope we’re not too late.” Jessica pulled out her flashlight and put it to her lips. Jonathan heard her whisper above the screeching, “Demonstration.” The cloud wheeled in the air before them, starting to bleed away into the desert, the beating of leathery wings roaring like a hundred flags in a high wind. He wondered if the darklings had already left, their ancient minds sensitive enough to have felt the flame-bringer coming and smart enough to flee.
“Um, Jonathan… could you?” Jessica held out her wrist. He smiled and said, “Acariciandote,” slowly and clearly to the bracelet.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll learn. Promise.”
“I’ll give you lessons.” Jonathan pulled his chain over his head and murmured, “Rubbernecking.” It was good to have it ready, even if he probably wouldn’t need it with Jessica around.
At the peak of their next leap the flashlight sprang to life in her hand, its blinding beam cutting through the swarm of flying slithers. Jonathan’s eyes jammed shut, seared by the astonishing intrusion of white light into the cool, eternal blue of the secret hour. Matching the horrific screams that filled the air, a last image remained burned into his vision: slithers bursting into flame at the light’s touch, a fiery wedge exploding across the black horizon, the dark moon itself paling in comparison to the power of the flamebringer. Then the smell of burned flesh reached his nose.
Jonathan coughed and forced his eyes open.
Mercifully, Jessica had turned Demonstration off. The flock of slithers had been split by the beam, leaving two chaotic masses careening across the desert. A blotchy haze marked the place where the light had passed through the swarm, like the drifting puffs of smoke left over after the finale of a fireworks show.
Jonathan tried to blink away the spots before his eyes “Warn me next time?”
“Sorry.” She squeezed his hand. Through the streaks burned onto his vision, he saw that her eyes were wild, her expression electrified from the surge of power that had coursed through her. His hand tingled where their palms were pressed together.
He blinked again: Acariciandote was glowing on her wrist, the little charms as bright as diamonds.
They settled on the lawn of the big house. Dead slithers lay around them amid the sparkle of metal. Jonathan knelt and picked up a power drill, the steel bit blackened by fire.
“They put up a fight, at least.”
“Rex!” Jessica called. “Melissa?”
A hissing noise answered them, a wet and shuddering sound that carried a foul stench across the lawn. A massive shape lurched from between Constanza’s house and the next one over, a welter of legs thrusting out in all directions as the thing struggled to keep itself upright.
Jonathan gagged at the smell, his eyes watering as they beheld the creature.
It had been a tarantula not long before, most of its mass gathered in a bulbous body. But it was trying desperately to transform, the legs receding into the beast, its body stretching, writhing like a giant hairy earthworm. A wet, flailing wing emerged from its back, half formed and sickly. The darkling hissed at them again, and a stream of viscous liquid shot from its mouth onto the ground a few feet short of Jessica.
It was dying.
“Close your eyes,” she said.
“No problem.”
The scream deafened him at first; then Jonathan heard the burst of flame, felt its heat drying his exposed flesh like a bonfire out in the desert. He didn’t breathe for an endless time, then finally was forced to fill his lungs with the smell of the ancient, dying darkling.
When he opened his eyes, coughing as he struggled to inhale, there was nothing left of it, just a blackened patch of lawn and a glimmer of metal. Jonathan squinted through the tears in his eyes.
A hubcap lay in the grass where the darkling had been.
“That’s what wounded it,” he said.
“Wounded it?” a voice called. “I think Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation gets the kill.”
Melissa and Rex stumbled around the side of the house, their faces and hands blackened where improvised weapons had burst into blue flame.
“Just because you showed up in time to hose down the remains, don’t go taking credit, Jess.” Melissa’s eyes were bright, her voice on the edge of laughter. The sweat on her face glistened like a knife.
Rex looked sick to his stomach. “Never again,” he said softly, slumping on the front porch. He looked up wearily. “So you did get my message.”
Jessica nodded. “Barely. Next time, leave directions.”
Rex thought for a second, then said, “Oh.”
“We wouldn’t have made it at all, except at the last moment Jonathan remembered where Constanza lived.”
“I had no idea,” Jonathan said.
Melissa was staring at him, her eyes narrowing, tempering the crazed look on her face. “But then suddenly you did,” she said softly.
He returned her gaze and nodded. She knew something about what had happened in his head.
“What were you guys doing out here, anyway?” Jonathan said.
“We spent all day following Constanza,” Rex answered, “trying to find out what we could about Ernesto. It was a bust, so we figured we’d try the secret hour.”
Jonathan frowned and looked at Melissa. “You can do that? Read people’s minds when they’re frozen?”
“Best time for it,” she said softly, her smile sending a chill down his spine. “Turns out Ernesto’s her cousin. That’s about all I got before things got hairy. And scaly.”
“Speaking of scales, do we have to clean this up?” Jessica asked. Dead slithers and the remains of the darkling were scattered in dark blotches all around them. The smell had been mostly burned away by Demonstration, but the lawn was still faintly sticky underfoot.
Rex let out a dry laugh. “It’ll vaporize once normal time starts up again. That porch light should get the job mostly done. Sunrise will finish it off.”
Jonathan looked up at the moon. “Oh, yeah, normal time. Maybe we should discuss this tomorrow. I’ve got about fifteen minutes to get back to Jessica’s and then to my house.”
Rex nodded. “At lunch, then. Except I’ve got a history test the period after.”
“Like you need to study for that.” Melissa laughed.
Jonathan stared at her again. Unlike Rex, she seemed full of energy, as if she had enjoyed the rumble. Even the death throes of the darkling hadn’t left Melissa with her usual migraine-addled expression. She seemed to be changing day by day. Was she somehow growing more powerful?
He took a step toward her, lowering his voice. “Something came into my head on the way here. Directions. We wouldn’t have found you in time without them.”
“I know,” she said simply.
“You put them there…” Jonathan swallowed dryly. They’d been miles away. “You cast something into my mind, didn’t you?”
Melissa shook her head slowly, the look on her face softening, as if she were lost in thought. “That’s the crazy thing, Flyboy,” she said quietly. “I tasted it, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.”
Dess strained to push her bike faster, hoping that the batteries in her headlight didn’t totally croak before she made it home. The shuddering little pool of light that traveled just ahead of her had started out pretty dim, and it was fading out like Tinkerbell full of poisoned cake. She should have started home ages ago; the parentals were going to freak that she was out past midnight.
Good work had been done today, though. Dess patted the lump of Geostationary through her coat. Her mind felt clear for the first time in a week, finally purged of the maelstrom of her dreams. At last the equations had done what they always did, resolving into rules and patterns and meaning. Once again her mind had given her the answers.
A frown flickered across Dess’s face. The answers… They seemed fuzzy now. She remembered a pattern of some kind that stretched across Bixby. A base-sixty thing, having to do with minutes and seconds. But why had she been out here riding her bike until after midnight?
Her smile returned. Not to worry. That special Dess-triumphs-again glow was sitting pretty right in the middle of her chest. She couldn’t remember all that clearly what she’d done since leaving school, but that figured. She’d been abstracted, lost in the world of pure math. And the answers were fuzzy because sometimes the really complicated solutions took a few run-throughs before your brain had them down cold.
What was the trick to it again? That’s right, there it was…
“Lovelace,” she said aloud.
A door opened in her mind, and the bitter taste of milky tea flooded into her mouth. She remembered…
“Damn.” The headlight wavered for a few seconds.
The ramshackle house squatting in the center of the dead zone, the old woman, the secret history of Bixby pouring out of her as the sun went down. But like any good secret, Dess had to hide it from the rest of them, especially Melissa.
Then she shivered in the growing cold, remembering what had been bugging her, the reason she’d switched the memories off ten minutes ago, why she wanted to hide them even from herself.
Madeleine had started out crotchety and maybe a bit spaced-out but had gradually become much scarier, even… Melissa-like.
But that wasn’t fair. Even if her story had scared the bejesus out of Dess, the woman wasn’t anything like Melissa. For one thing, growing up in Bixby hadn’t left Madeleine a mental cripple. Somehow she had borne the gift of mind-casting without going nuts. She was definitely sane.
Well, maybe not sane sane. There was the little matter of air-conditioning. Television, Dess could deal with—Madeleine wasn’t the first old person to rag on TV to a slightly nutty extent. (The thought made Dess frown as she wondered if the house had cable or not. Another shiver passed through her—stuck inside for forty-nine years without the Discovery Channel.)
Still, crazy or not, you couldn’t deny that Madeleine spoke from experience. She’d actually been there when the darklings had eliminated a whole generation of midnighters. If she wanted to blame air-conditioning… whatever.
Car headlights were approaching, and Dess pedaled harder. She was keeping to back roads, trying to avoid being seen. It wasn’t curfew that had her nervous but the final part of Madeleine’s story.
When the car passed out of sight, Dess let out a sigh of relief. Her headlight was fading badly now; maybe she should just turn it off. Invisibility might be safer.
The old woman had watched Rex and Melissa for the last sixteen years and Dess for fifteen, always wondering why the darklings hadn’t bothered to pick them off. It wasn’t just their wild-animal indifference or the fact that none of them had ever amounted to much of a threat—not until Jessica had showed up, anyway. Midnighters were good to eat, after all.
But what Madeleine had slowly realized was that the darklings actually wanted a few midnighters around, as long as they were isolated, disorganized, and ignorant of history. Midnighters were useful, in case anything ever happened to the precious halfling. Midnighters could be harvested.
Another pair of headlights appeared in the distance. It was a van, white and generic, the kind of anonymous piece of crap you’d rent for a kidnapping. As it drove closer, the cold Oklahoma wind grew teeth, biting into Dess’s coat and tearing through goose-pimpled flesh straight into her bones.
One of the windows was opening…
The van roared past, an empty beer can clattering on the street behind her.
“Missed!” she called through gritted teeth. “Assholes.”
Her pounding heart gradually slowed, and she reached up and flicked off the headlight. Staying dark was safer after all. Now she really remembered why she had been waiting to think about all this until she got home. It was just too damn spooky on the open road at night.
She murmured the other half of the mind trick: “Ada.”
The door in her consciousness swung closed again, leaving one last memory fading before her mind’s eye. As she had left Madeleine’s house, the old woman had reached out and touched her on the cheek, asking her to say the name of someone important to her from history, and something huge and powerful had surged across Dess’s mind.
A door. That was what it had been—a barrier to protect her new knowledge from Melissa’s prying because what Melissa knew, the darklings would know soon enough. They could taste each other across the desert all too well.
Then the door closed completely, shutting out the terrible thoughts about harvesting and lonely old ladies and air-conditioning, leaving only one imperative: Don’t let Melissa touch you.
Dess laughed. Sure, like Melissa ever touched anyone if she could help it.
She struggled along in the dark for a while. Cars passed, but she ignored them, feeling only the happy glow of math well done, equations resolved into rules and patterns and meanings. Her mind felt clear for the first time in a week, finally purged of the maelstrom of her dreams.
A fallen tree branch snapped under her front wheel, and she cursed. Why exactly was she riding along in the dark?
She switched on her headlight. Dim, but better than nothing.