Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

“So what did you taste?” Rex asked.

Maddy paused dramatically, then looked across the table at her pupil.

Melissa stopped chewing her lip and said, “We aren’t sure yet. We haven’t had a chance to”—she glanced at Rex—“compare notes.”

“But there were some ruptures,” Maddy said. “Places where the false midnight felt very thin.”

“Places?” Dess asked, her ears perking up. Places could be expressed as longitude and latitude—sweet numbers. “You mean like this crepuscular contortion?”

Maddy nodded. “Yes, but not hiding places. Spots where the barrier between the blue world and ours seemed almost to disappear.”

“Oh.” One hand inside her jacket pocket, Dess gripped Geostationary harder. “You mean like Sheriff Michaels?”

“Sheriff Michaels?” Jonathan asked. “That guy who disappeared?”

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Some time ago—before Jessica, or even Jonathan, had moved to Bixby—the town sheriff had vanished out in the desert. Only his gun and badge had been found, along with his teeth and all their fillings—the darkling-proof, high-tech alloys of dentistry.

The rumor was he’d been killed by drug dealers, but between Rex’s lore and her careful mapping of the blue time, Dess understood what had really happened.

She cleared her throat. “Well, you know that darklings have to eat, right? Even if they only live one hour in twenty-five, predators still need prey to stay alive. Normal animals can step through into the blue time if they’re in the wrong spot at exactly midnight. So darklings mostly eat unlucky rabbits and cows, but every once in a while a human being slips through.”

“Hmmph,” Madeleine said. “In my day, people knew where not to be at midnight.”

“Yeah, well, your day got canceled,” Dess said.

“Wait a second,” Jonathan said. “I thought darklings couldn’t hurt normal people.”

Dess shook her head. “Once you poke through into midnight, you’re part of that world for that hour. And eligible to join the darkling food chain.”

Madeleine nodded. “We sometimes brought daylighter allies through so that they could see the blue time for themselves. A special treat. The strange thing was, once that midnight ended, they became frozen, just like darklings during normal time. They stayed that way until the sun struck them.”

“Like Anathea,” Jonathan said softly. “Trapped in midnight.”

“Great, so we could have civilians running around in the blue time,” Rex muttered. “And you said the eclipse was focused around these contortions?”

Slowly Madeleine’s wrinkled hand drew shapes on the scratched table. “Not exactly, Rex. What the eclipse seemed to do was make more of them.”

“Make them?” Dess said. The wrinkles in midnight were baked into the map with numbers. “You can’t just change longitude and latitude like they’re property lines!”

“And the darklings moved toward the ruptures,” Melissa added quietly. “They could feel them too.”

Maddy stood, walking around the table to place a hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “But we haven’t compared experiences yet. We’ll tell you when we know more. I’m sure you can amuse yourselves.”

The two headed up to the attic together.

Rex looked screamingly jealous for an ill-concealed moment, then got all official. “Okay. I’ll check some of your older lore books,” he said to Maddy’s departing footsteps. “Just in case.”

Dess sighed. “And while those two are having mindcaster time, I’m going to take a look at some maps.”

Rex looked at Jonathan, raising one eyebrow. Without Jessica around, Flyboy was sort of hopeless—couldn’t read lore, couldn’t do math, and here in the afternoon couldn’t even fly. Dess felt sorry for him. What was he supposed to do? Wash the curtains?

“Um, I was wondering,” Jonathan sputtered. “Does she have a TV?”

The house was starting to smell less old and musty, as if having its first visitors in half a century had breathed some life into it. But whenever Dess moved anything, pulled a book or map from the shelves, dust rose into the air, threatening to make her sneeze. Going home from a long night’s work here, her fingers always felt dry and brittle, as if the ancient, thirsty dust had sucked the moisture from them.

While cleaning out the dining room, Dess had discovered a cache of Maddy’s maps, yellowing rolls of heavy paper that practically crumbled in your hands. The oldest were annotated in Spanish, which gave Flyboy some translating to do, though he found the spindly, old-time handwriting hard going. Of course, what Dess was after wasn’t really the words. The secret hour was centered at exactly 36 degrees north latitude and 96 west longitude, and all the weirdness of Bixby flowed from those coordinates. This was all about the numbers.

Dess’s most interesting discovery was how the early midnighters’ maps compared with more recent efforts. For one thing, in the old days they hadn’t invented GPS or decent clocks yet and had to rely on star readings and guesswork to plug the numbers in. So as you went further back, everything looked more and more warped and distorted, as if they’d been looking at the world through a Coke bottle. And of course, as time had passed, the early midnighters had explored more of the secret hour. Every century the maps of midnight’s domain grew to cover a greater part of southeastern Oklahoma, or Indian Territory, or Mexico—depending on who’d stolen what last.

She’d been happily sitting at the dining table for an hour, absorbed in the slow progress of midnighter cartography, when a voice, joined by a cool hand on her shoulder, almost made her jump out of her skin.

“Desdemona?”

“Jeez! Scare me, why don’t you?” Dess stared at Maddy’s hand accusingly. At least the mindcaster hadn’t touched her bare flesh.

“Pardon me, then.” The wrinkled hand withdrew. “I just thought you might want to see this.”

Madeleine placed a roll of paper on the table. It was a map from the 1930s, the first map Maddy had ever shared with Dess, back when it had just been the two of them. But it was covered now with a layer of colored swirls, as if some kid had stuck red and blue pencils to a Ouija board pointer and let it roam freely.

“You guys drew on this?” Dess said angrily, but after a few seconds of staring, the map’s new eddies and whorls began to engage her brain. The mindcasters’ marks seemed to flesh out the usual contortions of midnight, adding another dimension to the map. It was like seeing the latest version of a familiar video game, the same old characters suddenly rendered in high resolution. “Oh,” Dess added.

“You were right, you know,” Maddy said softly.

Dess didn’t take her eyes from the map. “About what?”

“I don’t think the lore or memories will help us much. As you suspected, this is a riddle best solved by a polymath.”

Dess swallowed. Had the old woman sneaked a quick peek into her brain when she’d touched Dess’s leather jacket? “Gee, Maddy, I don’t remember saying anything about that.”

Madeleine only smirked at the nickname. “Sometimes, Dessy, it doesn’t require mind reading to know what someone is thinking.”

Dessy? Jeez. Maddy’s revenge hadn’t taken very long.

“Well, thanks. I’ll take a closer look at this when I get a chance.” Like, the moment Madeleine was out of sight.

The old mindcaster smiled. “Let me know what you find, Desdemona.”

“Hey, there’s something wrong with your TV!” Jonathan called. He was hunched over the giant set in the living room, a wood-paneled monstrosity that he’d spent the last hour freeing from a pile of thirty-nine-patterned fire grates.