Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

Why had she gone in there? It seemed like incredibly bad luck to have wandered into a cave hidden from the sun’s rays.

Unless she had somehow been coaxed into coming here…

Rex pulled his gloves on. These days the touch of stainless steel made his bare flesh itch during the secret hour, but leather gloves allowed him a solid grip on his new weapon. Dess had decorated the hunting knife’s blade with a superfine guitar string wound in patterns that made his eyes burn and water. The knife had the clever human smell of a finely tooled bicycle part—all modern alloys and precise proportions—buzzing with a thousand ingenious angles.

It make his head hurt to look at it, even to think its name, which meant that the weapon could fend off any darkling, at least for the short time it would take for Jessica and Jonathan to get here. The secret hour had begun almost three minutes ago—they had to be on their way.

From just outside the mouth of the fissure, he stared into the gloom. A blue glow emanated from the rocks, revealing layers of slither Focus in the cave, plus one slender trail of human footsteps. The crevice went deeper than he’d thought, the Oklahoma shale crumpled into zigzags by some ancient earthquake.

He paused to listen. The short, raspy breaths of a panicking thirteen-year-old reached his ears.

“Cassie?” he called.

The breathing caught, then a voice answered softly, “Help me.”

The girl sounded much younger than thirteen; probably she was frightened out of her wits. “Are you okay?”

“My grandma froze.”

“She’s better now, Cassie,” he said calmly. “But she’s worried about you. Are you all right?”

“It hurts.”

“What hurts, Cassie?”

“My foot. Where the kitty bit me.”

A cat. Rex remembered the slither that Jessica had followed on the first night the darklings had tried to kill her. It had disguised itself as a black cat and scratched on her window, then led her out onto Bixby’s empty streets to where a darkling awaited. They must have used the same trick on Cassie Flinders. With the whole world transformed into a frozen, empty place around her, she had innocently followed the only other living creature she could see.

“It’s okay, Cassie. My name’s Rex. I’m here to take you home.”

She didn’t answer.

“Cassie, you have to tell me: is there anything else in there? Anything besides the kitty?”

“It went away.”

“That’s good.” The slither must have struck as the eclipse had ended, just before heading back to its burrow. It had hobbled Cassie to make sure she didn’t wander out of the cave, out to where the sunlight would free her from the blue time. Cassie had been frozen for the fifteen hours since the eclipse—to her the cat had only run off a few minutes ago.

“But there are snakes in here, Rex,” Cassie said. “They’re looking at me.”

He tried to ignore the fear in her voice, the way it made him react. He could tell from her breathing that she was sick and remembered from the news that she’d been home from school with a head cold. Easy prey.

It was going to be tricky coaxing her out of the cave. In his darkling dreams Rex had seen humans paralyzed by their own fear when cornered.

Standing sideways, he tried to push deeper into the fissure, but after only a few feet, teeth of sharp stone closed on his spine and ribs. “Cassie? Try to come toward me.”

“I can’t.”

“I know your foot hurts, Cassie. But you can still walk.”

“No. They won’t let me.”

Crap, Rex thought. The slithers had her trapped in there. He wondered whether even the beam of Jessica’s flashlight could reach back to where Cassie was. He reached out with his hunting knife and struck the stone a glancing blow. A single blue spark flared blindingly, illuminating the jagged walls of the fissure for an instant.

“Did you see that, Cassie?”

“That flash?”

“Yeah. Good girl. I’m not far from you.” Rex leaned his weight against the stone and stood on one leg, pulling the metal hoops from his boot. Then he reversed his stance and yanked them off the other. “I’m going to throw some things, Cassie. They’re going to scare the snakes. You have to run this way when you see sparks.”

“I can’t. They’re looking at me.” Her voice had gone flat, as if hypnotized by the lifeless stare of the slithers.

“They won’t bite you if you’re fast, okay? I’m going to count to three, then scare them.”

“Rex. I can’t. My foot.”

“Just get ready. One…” He held the hoops almost to his lips and whispered their names—Woolgathering, Inexhaustible, Unquestioning, and Vulnerability—the Aversions sending a shooting migraine through the darkling half of his brain. “Two… three… run !”

He threw the handful of hoops as hard as he could, and they careened deep into the cave, raising up a shower of sparks as they clanged off the walls. The bright, ringing sound of metal striking stone cut painfully into Rex’s ears.

“You scared them!” Cassie announced.

“Well, run then, dammit!”

As the echoes of his shout died, Rex heard her sneakers’ squeaky footfalls carrying her through the sharp angles of the cave. She came into view a few seconds later, limping and white-faced as she pulled herself down the narrow channel of stone. Rex reached out a gloved hand and pulled her from the crevice after him, out under the rising bulk of the dark moon.

Outside he stumbled to a halt. An army of slithers surrounded them. A host of the creatures covered the ground, and their winged forms filled every tree branch.

“Snakes…” Cassie said softly.

Melissa, Rex thought as hard as he could.

In the depths of his mind he heard the faintest word— Coming —and wondered if that meant Melissa and Dess were coming, or Jessica… or if something else was on its way.

“It’s all right,” he said, drawing Cassie closer and thrusting the knife out before them.

Then he saw the darkling.

It seemed to uncoil from the ground, its eight legs spreading out from its bulbous center like the blooming of some horrific flower. A tarantula, the desert spider of his nightmares.

Rex wondered where it had come from, whether it had flown here swiftly from the desert or crouched in some rocky warren out of the sun, waiting since the eclipse for this ancient delicacy—a rare meal of human flesh.

“Rex…?” Cassie said softly.

That had been the plan, of course: the slither-cat leading her to this spot, trapping her in the cave until its master arrived at midnight. Next the slithers inside would have driven her into its jaws… if Rex hadn’t already coaxed her out himself.

“Go back inside,” he whispered.

She only clung to him tighter.

“Go back in the cave, Cassie!” he shouted. “That thing can’t fit in there!”

“But the snakes!”

Rex turned to look. The blue-lit depths of the cave were dotted with the eyes of slithers staring back at them.

“Here, take this,” he said, pressing the hunting knife into her hand. “They’re scared of it, and help is coming.”

She held the knife loosely, looking down at it with wide eyes.

“It’s name is Animalization,” he said. His fists clenched in pain as Dess’s pointed little tridecalogism passed his lips. “Keep saying that, and they’ll be really scared. Animalization.”

“But—”

“Go!” He shoved her into the fissure, hoping she would find the courage to go deep into the cave, far enough to escape the thin, reaching arms of the darkling.

He whirled back around to face the creature, crouching down into a fighting stance. Its eight legs had extended to full length, pressing against the ground to lift the central body mass up into the air. The legs were covered not with hair, but with glistening spurs, like thorns on some vast and hideous rosebush. The entire beast was dripping with a viscous black substance, as if it had been dipped in crude oil.