“Rex?”
“Did you see her?” he croaked. “The other one?”
“Anathea? Yeah, she’s back there.”
“Take me to her.”
Jonathan ran up, limping horribly. “Are you sure you can…?”
Rex rose, not a stitch of clothing on his body, and said, “Quickly. She’s dying.”
Freedom was killing her, she knew.
She’d thought of nothing else all this time, nothing but getting out of darkling flesh, back to Bixby, to Ma and Pa. In her tattered dreams Billy Clintock always came flying across the desert to save her, clinging to her as the sun rose up over the desert and set her free.
But the reality had turned out to be a grim one. She had grown too weak inside that other body. They hadn’t left enough of her to survive without her other half.
Still, it was good to be herself again. Human, more or less.
Anathea curled up on the salt, hoping she’d make it to sunrise or at least until the dark moon set.
When they came back, as the young acrobat had promised, there were three of them.
They landed hard, the other seer stumbling. He was naked until he put on his long coat that had been discarded on the salt, but the darkling flesh had been stripped away from him somehow.
Anathea found herself both angry and glad that they’d saved him, as no one had ever saved her.
The redheaded girl had said she’d brought her own sun Anathea wondered again at the strange, intense Focus that clung to her. She carried some sort of metal shaft in her hand, a weapon that Anathea had watched cut through a whole swarm to rescue their friend. And her eyes were wrong.
What talent was she? And why didn’t Anathea know any of them? Had it been that long?
“You’re Anathea?” the other seer asked her.
“Yes,” she said softly. Her voice had grown weak after all that time inside the darkling.
“What year is it?” he asked.
She frowned.
“What year do you remember, I mean?”
She hadn’t thought of years and months for so long… Darkling reckoning in twelves and gross counts seemed more natural to her now. “Nineteen and fifty-two?”
He nodded, as if glad for the information. She let her eyes drift closed.
“Do you know what happened?” he said. “To the rest of your people, the midnighters of your time?”
“My time?” She shivered, remembering now. There had been orders given by her own hands long ago, arranged out on the spelling blocks for villainous daylighters to read. But that had been so long ago, too long to recollect. She shuddered. “Terrible things. But it wasn’t my fault. She gave up the secret. Not me.”
“The secret?”
“No one was supposed to tell.” She shook her head. “That’s what started it all, that Madeleine Hayes telling secrets. Those Grayfoot boys knew what they were doing when they brought me out here…”
Anathea let herself sink back to the ground. Thinking about things that had happened before the transformation hurt her head. Maybe she wasn’t so human anymore after all. And talking stole her paltry breath. She felt herself slipping away.
The acrobat, the pretty Mexican boy, spoke up. “Can we do anything for you?”
She smiled then and held out her hand. All this time she’d had wings, but it was hard work, laboring inside that horrible other body. Nothing like when Billy Clintock had taken her soaring, what seemed like years ago. “Please?”
He understood and took her hand, and that lightness filled her. It had been so long…
They decided to leave her there on the salt flats. The three darkling groupies—Angie, Ernesto, and the eldest Grayfoot—still stood frozen, looking at the spot where they had left Rex for the darklings. Maybe the appearance of a dead girl in his place would give them something to think about.
Jonathan turned away, unable to watch as Rex arranged dominoes around Anathea. Rex had dressed, finding his clothes untouched where the darklings had discarded them, and he looked eerily normal. All that was different was his burned hair and his hands, which trembled just like his father’s now.
Jessica also didn’t look. She pressed against his chest, crying, but Jonathan found he didn’t know how to grieve for Anathea, born in 1940 but dead tonight at only fourteen. Her wasted body looked hardly twelve, the age she’d been when she was taken.
And what had she said about a Madeleine Hayes, right before the end? Was the old mindcaster the one who had betrayed her generation so long ago? He would have to ask Dess about that.
“Okay, let’s go,” Rex called.
Jonathan turned and saw what Rex had left for the groupies, and a chill traveled down his bruised and battered spine. He stared into the seer’s eyes: no tears for Anathea, just a fierce, haunted expression, as if Unanticipated Illuminations hadn’t burned all the darkness out of him.
Rex had ignored the lore meanings of the dominoes, arranging them into letters a foot high. Around Anathea’s body they spelled out in simple English:
YOU’RE NEXT
It made an awful picture, but that was the point, Jonathan supposed. It might convince Angie and the others to pursue a different career path. With no halflings left, this terrible message would be the last the darkling groupies ever received.
Jonathan took Jessica’s hand and kissed it, tasting the salt from her tears. “Don’t look,” he said.
She shook her head.
The slither strikes across Jonathan’s back were fading together into one giant bruise, and he winced as he held out his other hand for Rex, whose trembling didn’t stop when midnight gravity connected them.
They hadn’t told him yet about Melissa going through her windshield. As they flew, the seer’s leaps weak and tentative beside him, Jonathan wondered if Rex would make it if she hadn’t survived.
* * * * *
They reached the car as the dark moon was setting.
Melissa stood shakily as they landed, her face streaked with blood but managing a smile. Rex pulled his hand from Jonathan’s and stumbled toward her across Dess’s pattern of stakes and wire, gathering Melissa into a hug.
“I knew it,” she said. “You tasted human again.”
Jonathan glanced at Dess, who rolled her eyes. She seemed better than when they’d left her.
“Help me with this?” she said, stooping to pull a tent stake from the hard ground. “With Jessica around, we can clean this up before that monstrosity gets rolling again.”
Jonathan followed Dess’s gesture to the old Ford, pointed at them and trailed by a cloud of dust. “Oh, yeah. Good call.”
He held Jessica’s hand for a moment longer, and then they set to work, Jonathan’s slither bites aching as he bent to pull up the metal stakes. His left leg and all of his back felt like they’d been hit with line drives and then sunburned extra-crispy. And he was starving. He couldn’t wait to get back to the peanut butter on banana bread sandwich stashed in his glove compartment.
“You believe those two?” Dess whispered as she wound a spool of wire.
Rex and Melissa still embraced, their faces close, eyes flashing purple from the setting moon.
He shook his head.
“Do we have to tell them about the car?” Dess said quietly a smile playing on her dirt-streaked face.
Jessica didn’t smile back, just bent to pull up another stake, and Jonathan reached out and touched her arm. Death was too real to joke about tonight.
They stood back a good hundred yards to watch the two cars jump to life again, streaking across the desert in sudden tandem as the blue light swept from the world. Jonathan’s whirled to a quick stop, but the old Ford rattled across the salt for half a mile. He’d already reached inside to turn the engine and headlights off so it disappeared into darkness, only a dust cloud marking its passage.
“I’ll get it tomorrow,” he promised Melissa again. It was the weekend, and nobody would be out here for a couple of days. As if anyone would steal that crappy old wreck with its busted windshield anyway.
“I hate the hospital,” Melissa whined again. “All those sick people. And doctors touching me.”
“You need stitches,” Rex said. And you could have brain damage.”
“Could have?” Dess muttered.
Jonathan sighed and limped toward his car. It was going to be a real treat driving back into town. Finally it was just like Rex had planned, all five of them together again.
But at least they were all still alive. More or less.
Melissa’s face had stopped bleeding, but she was going to have scars on her forehead and left cheek for a while, maybe forever. Rex’s hands still trembled, and he twitched at sudden sounds. He walked carefully, half blind, his glasses lost somewhere out in the desert. Jessica hadn’t said a word since Anathea had died; she clung to Jonathan’s arm, exhausted by the fight and by everything they’d seen.
Only Dess seemed herself.
“Is Madeleine okay?” she asked as they walked toward Jonathan’s car.
Melissa tipped her head back into the air, and nodded. “She made it through the night. But she knows what’s happened; they’ll find her soon.”
“You are in so much trouble,” Dess said.
“You’re the one who’s crap at keeping secrets.”
“You’re the one who can’t keep her hands to herself!”
Jonathan tuned the argument out, pulling Jessica closer, glad of her support as they made their painful way to his car. He needed her touch, especially here on the salt flats, the flattest stretch of Flatland there was.
His vision came and went, sharp details fading into a blur and back again. On his way to the hospital the morning light had been viciously bright, metal-reflected sunlight leaving streaks across his eyes.
The walls of the hospital were riddled with Focus, but not the marks of midnight. Rex could see new things now, traces of daylighter hands, the impressions left by their minds as they solved problems, worked their tricks with numbers and alloys and clever machines.
It had taken all morning for him to realize what these new visions were: tracks of prey.
For a hundred thousand years darklings had pursued humans, learning to track them, to read their places and their paths. As the last predators to dare hunt them, they knew humans better than any other beast alive, better than the half-blind bipeds knew themselves. Rex could see these signs now, could feel the manifestations of everything the darklings hungered for… and feared.
An intercom overhead barked out some emergency call, and he flinched. There were machines everywhere in this place—bright fluorescent lights, devices for measuring blood and flesh, thousands of clever tools. Rex longed to run for the door and into some open field, away from all these overwhelming signs of human ingenuity. They made his hands shake, the fear strung tight across his shoulders.
But he had to see Melissa and show her what the change had done to him.
He looked up at the number on the door he was passing, and the world blurred again momentarily.
He hadn’t brought his spare pair of glasses; he didn’t seem to need them anymore, now that the Focus clung to almost everything. But there were moments when his vision faded. They hadn’t changed him all the way after all. He was still a human, still Rex Greene—a seer, not a beast.
An X-ray machine flashed nearby, its violet flare reaching his eyes through the walls of the hospital, and Rex flinched again, hissing through his teeth.
He had to find Melissa and share this with her. He needed her touch to make him feel human again.
Around another corner he found her hallway, the code of numbers and letters finally making sense. He hoped he wasn’t losing his ability to read human symbols. It was probably just exhaustion from waiting for three hours in the emergency room last night. It had taken that long before they’d admitted Melissa and sent him home, finally believing their story—that she’d lost her ID in the accident, was eighteen, and had no parents to call.
As he made his way down the hall, something sharp caught Rex’s eye ahead, a figure glowing with Focus.
An old woman, leaving Melissa’s room.
Rex came to a halt. The marks were deep on her, detail worked into every line on her face.
She was looking at him with an expression of recognition, a smile playing across her aged, pale features.
“Rex! My boy.” She held out a gloved hand, and he shrank away. What trick was this?
She shook her head. “Poor Rex. Still jumpy, of course. It was a near thing last night. As near as anything I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m… Melissa’s godmother. Madeleine.”
He shook his head. There was no such person, not that he could remember. But remembering was hard today. Rex had tossed and turned all night, trying to untangle everything in his head, all he’d learned from Melissa when they’d embraced on the salt flats. And later when they’d touched each other in the emergency room, swapping their pain back and forth like two kids with something too hot to hold…
But this morning he’d hardly had time to sort through the changes in himself, much less everything Melissa had shared with him. This woman Madeleine had something to do with Dess’s calculations and with the lost generation of midnighters, that was all he could remember.
“I thought I’d visit her,” she was saying. “You see, I may not have much time left. And I’ve always wanted to get to know her better.” She shook her head. “My fault, really, leaving it so late like this.”
An X-ray flashed again, and Rex spun toward it, a tremor running through his body.
She didn’t notice the animal reaction or pretended not to and repeated softly, “All my fault, really I was so scared, so horrified by what I’d done.”
He stared at her again, and a measure of his old vision returned. Rex realized that her Focus was the most familiar kind, the mark of midnight.
“You’re one of us,” he said.
“Yes, Rex. But Melissa will tell you all about it. We’ve been visiting, you see, getting to know each other. She’s waiting for you.”
The woman brushed past him, and as she strode away down the hall, Rex saw that she was wearing only one glove.
He turned and ran toward Melissa’s room.
Her eyes were closed, her face pale in the buzzing fluorescent light. The wounds, two on her forehead and one stretching down her cheek, were stitched now, crosshatched with pink thread binding the skin together. The stitches were made of some synthetic; Rex could sense its awful, clever newness.
She had the same Focus as the woman in the hall.
“Melissa?” he called softly. Wondering what the old mind-caster had done to her in her sleep.
Her eyes opened, and she smiled. “Looking good, Rex. Like the hair.”
He sighed with relief and exhaustion. Melissa seemed like her old self.
The other bed in the room was empty, and he sat down on it, rubbing his palm across his shorn scalp. He’d buzzed it down to half an inch, cutting all the burned locks away. “Thanks. Looking good yourself.”
She snorted. “Thanks, Rex. And I was worried that these scars would tragically affect my popularity at school.”
He laughed, but the sound was hollow. There were too many machines in here—call buttons and intercoms, special wall plugs for heart monitors, a whole infrastructure of cables and steel around them. And suddenly Melissa was rising toward him like a mummy, the bed’s tiny, clever motors making it flex at its center.
“You taste weird, Rex.”
He looked at his shaking hands. “You think?”
“Kind of… psycho-kitty. They changed you, didn’t they?”
He blinked, then nodded. There was so much in his head, new species of tastes and visions, wild thoughts bubbling up from some animal buried inside him. But one question made it through the confusion.
“Who was she?” he asked.
Melissa smiled. “My godmother, like she said. The godmother of us all.” She sighed. “Until they find her, anyway. They’ll be looking now.”
Rex closed his eyes, his head racked with too many new sensations and now more information crowding it. Coming here had been a bad idea. He needed to head to the badlands, to find some place bleak and empty to sit and think.
“Come here, Rex.”
He shook his head. “You’re too weak. You won’t be able to take what’s in my head.” He looked around at the walls, marked with handprints of sick and dying humans, easy prey to cut from the herd. “Especially not while you’re in this place.”
She laughed. “Not a problem.”
“I thought you hated hospitals.”
“I hated everything, Rex.”
He frowned, some part of his mind recalling the intricacies of grammar. “Hated?”
“Not anymore.” Melissa reached out, taking him by the arm. She drew him toward her and, for the first time, pressed her lips against his.
She came into him—not with the usual mad flood of emotions, but in a fashion measured and controlled, shaped by the technique of a hundred generations of mindcasters, an artistry passed from hand to hand across the centuries. Dess’s numbers had found it, the thing Rex had always searched for, the connection to their past that the severed lore had never offered. And Melissa had been given it here in the flesh, this morning, by Madeleine and the host of predecessors in her memory. Finally a bond with living history; at last, for Melissa and the rest of them, the human touch.
Even carrying those centuries, the kiss was between the two of them alone, their old friendship turning suddenly and completely inside out, overwhelming him almost as much as his transformation in the desert.
And Rex knew he would survive.
He might be half a beast, afraid of the marks of humanity all around him, wounded by the darklings that had reached inside and turned one part of him against another, but he had her to carry him.
Nothing had ever tasted this sweet.