Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

Melissa sighed. They had to deal with that girl tonight, not sit around talking. “Okay, Rex, maybe you really can talk to darklings. But tell me before you do anything.”

He laughed. “Think you can change my mind?”

“I’d never do that to you, Rex.”

“Do you swear, Cowgirl? No more of that, on me or anyone else, unless I’m there.”

“Absolutely.”

He took her hand, and Melissa let the surety of her promise flow into him. Whatever Rex was turning into, whatever crazy risks he decided to take, she would never twist or change a single thought in his brain…

Not even to save your life.

They crossed the tracks, pausing to look at the rip in the blue time. A red glimmer ran along its boundaries. It was about the size of an eighteen-wheeler now, much bigger than when Cassie had stepped through while her grandmother, only a few yards away, had remained frozen. The leaves from two trees caught within it were drifting down.

Rex stepped into the rip and caught a leaf. He dropped it, and it fell again.

“Feels different in here somehow.” “Is it spreading all the time? Like, right now?” He shook his head. “Only during the eclipse, Dess says. It’s like a fault line shifting during an earthquake.”

She pulled him away. This whole rip business gave her the creeps. The last thing Melissa needed was a bunch of annoying human minds invading midnight. “Come on.”

Cassie Flinders’s house was an old double-wide trailer, its concrete teeth sunk deep into the hard soil, gripping tenaciously against the Oklahoma wind. Halloween decorations were already up on the door—a grinning paper skeleton with swinging joints, orange and black bunting that glowed blue.

Rex stared at the skeleton for a moment.

“Friend of yours?” Melissa asked.

“Don’t think so.” He pushed open the screen door, and its rusty hinges rang out in the blue time. The wooden door inside was unlocked. Rex smiled. “Good country folk.”

They pushed into the blue-lit home, the floorboards creaking as they walked. Melissa wondered if the old wood stayed pressed down until the end of the secret hour, then popped up with a final complaint—letting out a sudden chorus of creaking just after the stroke of midnight. Flyboy was always wondering about stuff like that. If she was ever on normal speaking terms with the rest of them again, she’d have to ask him.

An old woman sat at a kitchen table, a bowl of something glowing an unappetizing blue in front of her. Her eyes were locked on a blank-screened TV. Melissa avoided her and the motionless cloud of smoke that rose from the cigarette clutched in her fingers.

Cassie’s room was in one corner, the door plastered with drawings and more Halloween decorations. Rex pointed at the black cat. “Funny, even after last night she didn’t take that down.”

“Cats.” Melissa snorted. “Smug, self-centered little beasts.” Then she remembered to add, “Except yours, of course.”

“Daguerreotype’s smugness is part of his charm.” He pushed the door open.

The room didn’t reek of thirteen-year-old. No boy band posters, no dolls. The walls were covered with more drawings, crayon landscapes of Jenks, the Bixby skyline, and oil derricks, all drained of their color.

“Not bad,” Rex said. He pointed to a music stand, a clarinet leaning against it. “Creative kid.”

“Good. Nobody believes the artistic ones.”

Cassie was lying on her bed, eyes closed and sheets tangled around her—a bad night of sleep in the making. Melissa wondered if being frozen for fifteen hours had given the girl some sort of jet lag and cracked her knuckles. She could fix that.

Even Rex’s crazy plan to visit the darklings hadn’t taken the edge off her excitement. This was her first serious mindcasting since Madeleine had started tutoring her.

“Featherlight,” she murmured softly.

She rested her fingers lightly on Cassie’s waxy skin, her hands like a pair of pale blue spiders splayed across the girl’s face. Melissa closed her eyes, entering the cool domain of a mind frozen in time.

Low-level nerves were scattered throughout Cassie, lingering shock from her trip into the secret hour. The taste of dread stung Melissa’s lips, anxiety that the black cat would return, terror that the spider thing was still out there in the woods.

The girl had an artist’s eye, Melissa had to admit. The slithers, the old darkling, the midnighters’ faces were all in there, as crisp as if she’d snapped photographs. As she soothed the fears away, Melissa blurred the memories into shadowy figments.

This was so easy now, she thought. Not like the clumsy attempts she’d once called mindcasting. Thoughts and memories stood before her like chess pieces awaiting her command.

She remolded the images trapped in Cassie’s mind, erasing the words they’d said in front of her, turning everything into the sort of nonsense mush remembered from a dream. Melissa softened the sense of danger, made it all vague and formless, divorced it from the reality outside the double-wide’s doors.

But she left intact one perfectly shaped bit of terror, a phobia a few yards across and a thousand miles deep…

Stay away from the railroad tracks at midnight. Something nasty lives under them.

“Done.” Melissa smiled as she withdrew her hands from Cassie’s face. “Now, that was some awesome, featherlight mindcasting.”

“That’s it?” Rex asked. “You were so fast. Like thirty seconds.”

Melissa smiled. It had seemed like long minutes. “Bada-bing, bada-boom.”

“Has she talked to anyone? Told anyone what she saw?”

Melissa took a breath, stretching her muscles. “She’s been right here since I put her down, sleeping it off and doodling. Grandma didn’t even let her talk on the phone. Her whole day was bedsores and boredom.”

“But what if she told—”

“Relax, Rex. Even if Cassie made a full report to the National Guard, when she wakes up tomorrow morning, she won’t remember what she was babbling about. This is a done deal.”

“Maybe you should check her grandmother.”

“Rex, it’s not a problem. Trust me. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years.”

His breath caught, and Melissa felt a twinge of jealousy from him; she had reminded him of all the knowledge she’d received from Madeleine. He’d finally gotten over that time when she’d touched Jonathan, and he understood about Dess, but when Melissa and the older mindcaster went up to the attic, he lost all rationality.

Funny, he was the one who knew the history. How mindcasters used to pass on information with a handshake, silently spreading midnighter news and gossip throughout Bixby. Compared to those days, Melissa was hardly some sort of mind slut.

She took a step closer to him. “Come on. Let’s go back to the car. I’ll show you everything.”

“She saw what I almost became last night. Are you sure she—”

“Everything.” She drew him closer, silencing his lips with hers.

“So the weirdest thing happened yesterday.”

Jessica nodded. She’d been expecting Constanza Grayfoot to tell her all about it. “Yeah, I heard.”

Constanza came to a sudden halt in the hall, letting lesser mortals flow around them. “You did? From who?”

Jessica shrugged. For once she’d known what everyone would be talking about way ahead of time. “I don’t remember who told me. Wasn’t it on TV last night or something? How that lost kid just turned up in her bed yesterday morning, totally okay?”

“Oh, that. Ancient news, Jess. Pay attention here, please. I’m talking about something much weirder and much more likely to affect our lives. Especially my life.”