Scott Westerfeld: Blue Noon

Did it extend along the whole 36th parallel? And the 12th, 24th, and 48th as well? Was it wrapped around the entire globe, or did it only pop up at the intersections of multiples of twelve?

Or was midnight simply everywhere now? Were lucky midnighters waking up in every city and town, amazed at the blue and frozen world?

Dess heard the crunch of gravel and turned. Flyboy was bouncing along behind her, looking unhappy, like he needed someone to talk to.

She sighed. “So when do you three leave?”

“Probably soon.” He pointed his chin back toward the girls. “Now that this is over and done with.”

“It’s going to be lonely, only seeing Jess an hour a day.”

“It’s already lonely.”

Dess shook her head, wondering if he’d bothered to do the math on that little conundrum. Jess lived only one hour to his twenty-five, which meant she’d be hitting her nineteenth birthday just about the same time Jonathan was dying of old age. And sometime way before that, things were going to get… icky.

“Oh, well.” Dess smiled wryly. “You’ve always got Melissa to talk to.”

He looked up from the tracks. “Why do you still hate her? She saved Jessica that night, you know. And Beth. Maybe everyone in the world.”

“I don’t hate her.” As the words left her mouth, Dess realized it was really true—her hatred of the mindcaster had quietly expired. “Still, she’s not exactly road trip material.”

“Maybe not.” He smiled. “But without her, we’ll never find all of them.”

“All of them? Flyboy, there’s lots more than you think.”

Jonathan looked at her, then shook his head. “Any idea how all this happened? I mean why it happened?”

Dess just snorted at that one. Let Rex bury himself in the lore, still trying to figure that stuff out, how the time-quake and the lightning had chosen the same moment to strike. But Dess knew that was nuts. Not that she was against doing the math—explaining why and how things happened was the credo of the Discovery Channel, after all. But sometimes the numbers would never add up, no matter how hard you calculated.

After all, the chances of a bolt of lightning hitting the center of Bixby on the exact stroke of midnight on Halloween were… rather low. And if you thought for too long about why it had happened in exactly that way, you weren’t doing your brain any favors. In which case it was better to leave the math the hell alone.

She looked into the sky and saw that the dark moon reached its apex. “Come on, Flyboy. Time for your party trick.”

“Okay.” He swallowed. “You really think this will help?”

“Of course it will.” Dess led Jonathan back toward where the other three stood. She knew the two sisters had more stuff to work out, but sometimes apology math was funny: no number was ever high enough, and you just had to get over it.

They were holding each other, as if already out of words. Melissa stood off to one side, eyes closed. Prompting? Controlling? Or just eavesdropping? Dess wondered if this new non-evil style of mindcasting really helped or was just another crock.

Dess waited until she caught Jessica’s eye, then pointed at Jonathan.

Give the poor kid this much at least.

Jessica nodded back and pulled away. “Come on. I want to show you something about midnight. Something not horrible. It’s a little weird but… trust me?”

Beth made a choked little sound, wiping at her face, then said softly, “I trust you.”

Jonathan stepped forward, holding out both his hands. “You saw us do this, right? On Halloween?”

Beth nodded, taking his hand carefully. As her smaller fingers closed around his, a look of surprise crossed her face.

“It’s… dizzy.”

“It’s a lot better than dizzy,” Jessica said, smiling. She pulled her right hand from her pocket; white sparks fluttered upward from it. The bracelet she wore glowed, its tiny charms aglitter. Dess squinted at the light.

Beth stared at it openmouthed. “What is that?”

“Don’t you remember? It’s a present from Jonathan… plus some lightning.” Jessica took Flyboy’s hand.

At first they took a weenie, ten-foot hop. Then a longer one took them to the middle of the field. Finally they opened up big time, heading for the motionless Arkansas River. Jessica’s right hand sparkled in the distance, its trail of white light coruscating across the blue horizon.

Dess felt a smile spread across her face, and she was suddenly much less depressed. Beth had seen the blue time again; she’d gotten to fly.

“Yeah, I know,” Melissa said.

Dess let out a sigh. Alone with the bitch goddess one more time.

“I’m still sorry, you know. For what I did to you.”

Typical mindcaster trick, catching her off guard and getting all sentimental. Dess heard herself saying, “Whatever. It’s probably not your fault, the way you are.”

“We saved Rex that night.”

Not so sorry after all? Dess thought. But she couldn’t argue with Melissa’s logic. “You’ll miss him, won’t you?”

Melissa nodded. “I already do.”

Dess sighed again. Maybe there was one darkling left in Bixby.

They stood there in silence for a while, waiting for the others to come back.

“So how many more of us are out there?” the mindcaster finally asked.

Dess took a breath, glad to be talking about math instead of all this emotional crap. “Well, let’s say you have to be born within a half second of midnight, right? That would be one out of every eighty-six thousand four hundred people.”

“In a big city that’s a lot, isn’t it?”

“In New York about a hundred. In the world… a hundred thousand.”

“Crap,” Melissa said softly, like she hadn’t thought through the scale of their little road trip yet.

Amazement radiated from the mindcaster, a tingle that shot down Dess’s arms into her fingers, bringing back her smile. Even being stuck here in Bixby with crazy Rex and crazier Maddy, even with no darklings left to slay, even living in a major curfew zone for the next two and a half years, Dess couldn’t complain about the cards she’d drawn.

Once the midnighters had gone their separate ways, Dess would no longer be stuck between the two couples, hemmed in by the constant clash of egos. And eventually she would be free of Bixby itself. No longer a fifth wheel.

After high school, Dess knew, she could get a job anywhere. Computers, spacecraft, all kinds of cool stuff that hadn’t even been invented yet—all of it needed math. And with midnight spreading across the globe, thousands of polymaths would be waking up. Finally she’d have people to talk to with minds like hers, math geniuses in a frozen time where math kicked ass. Together they could map the expanded secret hour, have whole conversations in tridecalogisms, try to figure out how time itself worked. Change the world, maybe.

Screw the lore, with all its propaganda and lies and bitter history. Dess was going to be the one to write the axioms of midnight, the first principles of Dessometrics.

Inexhaustible. Unsmotherable. Extraordinary. That was her.

It was way cool, being the one who did the math.