Scott Westerfeld: Blue Noon

Melissa blinked. “Someone’s afraid of snakes?”

“Timmy Hudson is.” Rex smiled, showing too many teeth. “Very.”

She shook her head. “What the hell?”

Rex stared down at the cheerleaders, who were piling themselves into a shaky pyramid. His glassy eyes gazed straight through them, into some new mix of midnighter lore and implanted ancient memories.

“Well, you know how darklings take our nightmares and use them against us?”

“Of course I do, Rex.” Every night Melissa tasted the old minds out across the desert. And she had personally witnessed their shape-shifting into all creatures vile and hideous—worms, spiders, slugs. “That’s why they always pull the tarantula trip on you.”

“Yeah, tarantulas.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Well, Timmy Hudson was bugging me. And he’s afraid of snakes, it turns out. Ever since he was little, when his dad killed a rattler in the backyard and then brought Timmy out to take a look at the results. So I sort of got… snaky.”

He glanced at heir, his tongue darting out for a split second. Then he smiled.

Melissa noticed that Rex’s chapped lower lip was split, his chin a little reddened with wiped-off blood. She reached up and touched it, felt the fading tension in his jaw muscle. “Okay, Loverboy. But how did you know that? About Timmy? You and he were never exactly friends.”

Rex shook his head. “I just knew.”

“But how, Rex? I’m the mindcaster here, remember? How did you get into someone’s nightmares?”

He turned away again, staring at the pep festivities without seeing them. His mind radiated a quiet confidence, an intensity Melissa had never felt from him before, not during daylight hours. His strength was flavored, though, with tremors of uncertainty, bitter as the dregs of Madeleine’s tea. Rex felt a lot like a young trucker Melissa had once tasted on the highway, driving an eighteen-wheeler for the first time with no one else in the cab—heady with an overdose of power, but nervous that the rig was about to hurtle off the road.

Finally he answered. “That’s what darklings do.”

The pep rally dragged on for ages. Announcements were made about bake sales and car washes and school plays. Team banners were raised. The members of last year’s district-winning chess club got a few seconds of applause—a token suggestion that being smart might actually be a good thing. And gradually the rally began to lose its pep. Even the cheerleaders started to look bored, pom-poms wilting in their hands.

Then came the part when everyone chanted together.

“Beat North Tulsa. Beat North Tulsa,” the gnomelike principal began. He stepped back from the microphone, raising his tiny fist in rhythm with the words. Gradually the chant built, louder and louder, until the gymnasium thundered with the sound.

This ritual was supposed to channel the whole school’s “spirit” into the football team, transforming them from a bunch of seventeen-year-old boys into the champions of Bixby High.

The funny thing was, the concept wasn’t total nonsense. You could see it on the team’s faces as they listened: it did affect them, as if a gathered mass of humans really could lend its strength to a few zit-faced boys. Melissa often wondered if the daylighter who had invented pep rallies actually knew something about how mindcasting worked.

This part of pep rallies had always terrified Melissa in the past—the assembled minds uniting their energy in the chant, every strand of individual thought swamped by the animal imperatives of the pack: Stay with the herd. Safety in numbers. Kill the enemy. Beat North Tulsa.

She looked down across the fists rising and falling in rhythm, felt the beat of stomping feet resonating through the bleachers. The clique of pretty girls had lost the force field around them, dissolving into the crowd. The freshman boys in the first row were taking it seriously, no longer ogling the cheerleaders. Even Jessica Day and Flyboy had joined in, trying to act halfhearted but overtaken by the power of the mob.

Melissa nervously took a few deep breaths. This pep rally was a joke, she reminded herself. The crowd didn’t know what they were doing, and not one of the minds in this gymnasium matched hers for sheer power. Just because they’d found a meaningless football game to channel themselves into didn’t make them stronger than her.

She steadily gained control again.

Then Melissa noticed Rex sniffing the air, eyes twitching as his nostrils flared.

The chant was making him anxious as well.

“It’s like a hunt,” he hissed. “This is how they got themselves ready in the old days.”

Melissa touched Rex’s hand and for an awful moment felt the crowd as he did. Little humans, weak and frail—but so many of them. It had been rituals like this one that had helped them conquer their fear of the darklings. And one day they had begun to hunt their own predators, packs of humans armed with fire and their sharp, clever stones.

Finally a band of them had gotten lucky, taking down a young darkling that had thought itself invulnerable. And some of the dread that the master species had always depended on was lost forever. The oldest minds still remembered that moment, when the balance had begun to shift. Humans had slowly become more confident, scratching pictures of their kills onto rocks and into mud, the first hated symbols of their mastery.

Melissa pulled her hand away, burned by the memory.

Maybe this pep rally wasn’t such a joke. After all, high school was all about the oldest human bonds—the tribe, the pack, the hunting party.

Rex’s hands twitched. He was struggling with the part of him that wanted to flee.

“You need to leave?” she whispered.

He shook his head grimly. “No. This is important. Have to learn to keep control.”

Melissa sighed. Rex could be a moron sometimes.

She often remembered a line she’d read once on a bathroom wall: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. As Melissa watched the sweat building on Rex’s upper lip, she knew that he was making the same mistake as the bathroom wall guy.

Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.

She firmly took his hand, not letting him pull away, and reached inside herself for a place that Madeleine had shown her, an old mindcaster trick for chilling out. Melissa closed her eyes and entered Rex, gently pushing the crowd’s chant out of his mind.

She felt him relax, his fear of the crowd—and of the beast inside him—slipping away.

“Whoa,” he said softly. “Thanks, Cowgirl.”

“Any time, Loverboy.”

“Okay. How about tonight?”

She opened her eyes. “Hmm?”

“Maybe later we can—” Rex’s voice choked off, his grip suddenly tightening. “Something’s coming.”

“What do you—?” she started, but then she felt it too and slammed her eyes shut again.

A taste was thundering toward them across the desert, vast and ancient and bitter, tumbling over itself in a rushing wave. It grew stronger as it advanced, like an avalanche pulling down more snow from the mountainside, burying everything in its wake.

Then it struck, washing through the gymnasium, sweeping away the puny energies of the pep rally, obliterating the surrounding mind noise of Bixby leaking in through the walls. It consumed everything. Only Melissa’s connection with Rex remained, his shock and alarm reverberating through her like the echoes of a gunshot.

She opened her eyes and saw what had happened. The blue light, the frozen bodies, a leaping cheerleader hovering suspended in the air. The whole world struck by…