Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

Rex looked at his watch. “But they still had fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to kill us and get to the county line.”

“Yeah, but first they had to drive back around the cactus to pick up whoever was in the other car.”

“What? They’re too nice to just leave them out here?”

“Those were all Grayfoots.” She let out a snort. “And they’d never leave family behind.”

He looked at her. “Just you.”

Angie nodded slowly. “Just me.” Her dazed eyes took in the slowly clearing dust, the empty desert, and finally dropped to stare at her watch. “I guess I’m screwed. Your little mindcaster friend will be here soon, won’t she?”

The smell of terror from Angie had become almost overwhelming. Her hands were shaking now, as if she were even more afraid of a mindcaster entering her brain than of the Grayfoots catching her.

Rex let out a slow breath, willing his thudding heart to calm down. With Angie’s fear scent filling the car, a hunting frenzy threatened to take over his mind. But he needed to keep control, to keep talking to her.

“Let me be honest, all right?” he said through gritted teeth. “It was always my plan to trap you in Bixby for midnight. That’s why I only had so much gas.”

“So you knew the Grayfoots were going to show up? And you came anyway?” She whistled. “You’ve got guts.”

“Well, not exactly. Things didn’t quite go the way I planned.” He sighed. “But listen, Angie, have you really been telling me the truth about the past? The way the old midnighters—” Rex’s voice choked off as his nose suddenly caught the sharp smell of stainless steel. Angie’s knife flashed in her hand. “Hey, what the hell?”

“Listen, Rex, I know that in fifteen minutes you can do anything you want to me, make me drooling and stupid like your father, maybe turn me into your slave. But that doesn’t mean I can’t even the score.”

“Hold up, Angie! No one’s going to turn you into a vegetable!”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted. “So you lured me out here to steal my bank card password?”

“No, to make sure you were telling the truth!” The knife came closer, and his darkling mind writhed at the smell of steel. “We had to do this! If the world’s ending, we had to know for sure!”

Angie paused, her eyes narrowing. “What did you just say? If the what’s ending?”

“The world… or at least a great big chunk of it.” Rex spoke quickly, his eyes never leaving the knife. “We think the blue time is expanding far enough to swallow millions of people. They’ll be defenseless against your darkling pen pals.”

She shook her head. “That’s crap, Rex. Darklings can’t hurt normal humans.”

“Not usually. But the barrier between normal time and the secret hour is weakening. In certain spots daylighters can slip through. You know that girl on the news this week, the one who disappeared in Jenks? She walked into the blue time.”

“Come on, Rex,” Angie said. “Didn’t she turn up the next day?”

“Yes, because we saved her… from a huge, hungry darkling, I might add.”

Her eyebrows raised. “I don’t remember that part being on the news.”

“Well… no.” Rex swallowed. “We may have asked her not to say anything about the, uh, incident.”

“You erased her memories,” she said coolly.

He narrowed his eyes. “We had to.”

The knife drew closer, the tip barely touching his cheek, where it burned like a spent match tip. Rex’s eyes focused on the pulse in Angie’s throat, the darkling part of his mind set on edge by the steel against his flesh, thinking killing thoughts. He knew that if he lost control, the short, brutal fight between them would be more evenly matched than Angie would expect, knife or no knife. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything. They had to communicate, not kill each other.

“And what will you do to my memories?” Angie said softly.

Rex tore his eyes from her throat. Would she believe that he’d wanted to change as little as possible inside her mind? Just find out what she knew about the Grayfoots leaving town and maybe introduce a strong phobia about kidnapping people in the future. Unless, of course, Melissa lost her temper in the middle of the whole thing and forgot her promises…

If that happened, Rex wouldn’t want to be in Angie’s shoes.

Maybe there was another way to do this—one that didn’t involve any mindcasting.

Rex tried to ignore the knife in his face. “Do you really believe all that stuff? About how the old midnighters were totally evil?”

“I don’t believe it, Rex, I know it. I’m a real historian, not some amateur. Before I found out about the secret hour, I was researching a book on Oklahoma’s early statehood. I’ve documented everything the old man told me about his childhood. I’ve found the court records in Tulsa, from when they got his parents.”

Rex’s eyebrows rose. He’d collected old newspapers and handbills from Bixby’s past but not court records, and nothing from as far away as Tulsa.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“It was a big case in the nineteen-forties. Old Man Grayfoot’s parents contested an oil claim made on Indian land by some of the town fathers—seers like you, pillars of the community. Normally the trial would have been rigged so the midnighters would win, no problem. But the case wound up in a court in Tulsa, a judge that they couldn’t control.”

Rex frowned. “So what happened?”

“One day all the Native American parties involved decided to back down. They gave up the case, then sold their houses to pay the town fathers’ court costs. They lost everything they had.”

He swallowed. “That sounds… unfair.”

“Doesn’t it? And you know what’s worse, Rex?” she said. “After that day, Grayfoot’s parents never showed another ounce of backbone, except to agree with whatever the town fathers said. Just like a whole lot of other people always did. So the old guy got to thinking that things weren’t right in Bixby.”

Rex blinked. He’d spent his whole life learning this history; how could there turn out to be a completely different side?

The odd thing was, whenever Rex read normal daylighter history, he never took the word of just one historian. You had to check with several sources—everybody knew that. But until Angie had gotten into his car tonight, he’d never had another viewpoint to compare against the lore.

But after all she’d done, how could he trust her to tell the truth?

“Okay,” he said. “I want you to pull that knife back a few inches.”

“Why should I?”

“Because now you’re going to tell me what happened between you and the Grayfoots,” he said. “Are they really blowing you off just because you’re not related?”

The knife wavered. “Well, that night in the desert, the night we gave you to the darklings, none of us expected that little kid to appear. She was the first halfling, wasn’t she?”

“Her name was Anathea,” Rex said.

“I mean, I know she was a midnighter, and she would have become a monster like all the others. But Jesus, she didn’t look any older than twelve.”

“She wasn’t, much,” Rex said. “She spent those fifty years mostly in frozen time. Afraid and alone, surrounded by real monsters.”

Angie sat silently for a moment. “So I started wondering out loud if it was worth it, making another halfling. I thought the old man would listen to me. But the darklings weren’t even talking to us. So the Grayfoots started getting cagey around me and nervous about the future.”

“How do they know what’s going to happen?”

She shook her head and lowered the knife still further. “The last thing Ernesto told me is that there was something coming up, something that had been planned for a long time. The Grayfoots had been looking forward to it, but now that the darklings weren’t talking, it might be dangerous for them.”