Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

“How do you mean?”

He sighed. “Well, it was kind of stupid, flying around when we didn’t know what the hell was going on.” Jonathan looked up at the gym roof. “I could’ve taken a real fall.”

Jessica reached out and brushed his hand with her fingertips. “That would have sucked.”

“Yeah, well, the next time that happens, I’ll listen to Rex.”

She smiled, amazed to hear words “listen to” and “Rex” coming out of Jonathan’s mouth in the same sentence. But then her mind played back the first half of what he’d said, and she frowned.

“Hang on. The next time it happens?”

Jonathan looked at her blankly, then laughed as he worked on her ankle. “Do you really think that whole thing was just an eclipse or whatever? That it means nothing and will never happen again?”

“Yeah, well.” She swallowed. “I mean, it could be like Dess said. A totally random event…”

He chuckled.

“What, Jonathan?”

He stopped his massage and looked up at her with a wry smile. “Yeah, sure, could be totally random. Just like all the other totally random stuff that’s happened since you arrived in Bixby.” He started counting on his fingers. “The darklings go crazy and try to kill you, the Broken Arrows kidnap Rex, Madeleine reappears after fifty years in hiding…. How much more random could things get?”

The car alarm next to them switched off with a two-syllable dweeping sound, finally running out of steam.

“Great,” Jessica said softly into the sudden, ringing silence. “The flame-bringer rides again.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take you over to Madeleine’s at midnight.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jessica answered. “After you guys have already talked about all the important stuff this afternoon.”

Both Dess and Jonathan sighed and looked away, apparently tired of her whining.

Jessica rubbed her ankle, which wasn’t helping her mood. It had been getting gradually better all day, but it still twinged with pain. The three of them were sitting on the school’s front steps. Around them students were spilling out of Bixby High, slowly sorting themselves among the line of idling school buses. The lawn was dotted with clusters of people saying goodbye or arranging rides home. The sound of a tuba warming up for band practice drifted across the football field.

Jessica, of course, was waiting for her father to pick her up for a final night of being grounded.

“You won’t be missing anything, Jess,” Dess said.

“Madeleine probably doesn’t know any more about what happened this morning than we do. I doubt this is a mindcaster issue.”

“But she’s all old and stuff,” Jessica said.

“Yeah, but if anything like this ever happened before, it wasn’t fifty years ago. More like five thousand, if Rex doesn’t know about it.” Dess nodded slowly, rubbing her hands together. “My guess is, this is a job for a polymath.”

“But doesn’t she have all those memories in her head?” Jessica said. “All that stuff passed on from mindcasters in the olden days?”

Dess seemed to shiver a bit, and Jessica cursed herself for bringing up the subject of mindcasters and memories. Madeleine had also messed with Dess’s brain, trying to keep her existence a secret from the darklings.

After an uncomfortable silence, Dess answered. “Anything this big would be in the lore. They wouldn’t just use memory, would they?” She shrugged. “But maybe she did scoop some info from the darklings this morning. I can’t wait to ask her if that blue time was shaped funny.”

“Shaped funny?”

Dess’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, like, did it go all the way to the edge of Bixby County? Or was it smaller than a normal midnight? Like… focused in some particular places.”

“Why would it be?”

Dess shrugged. “That’s just the way the blue time is: it has a shape.”

Not for the first time, Jessica tried to wrap her head around that concept. These days Dess talked about the midnight hour more like it was a place than a time. She was always playing with maps, and even as they sat there, she was fiddling—as usual—with her electronic gadget that spat out coordinates.

To Jessica it seemed weird that the blue time only went so far, then just stopped, like the edge of the world the way people imagined it before they realized it was round.

“So, Dess,” she said. “What would happen if you went all the way to the edge of Bixby at midnight and then went just a little farther?”

“You mean go past the midnight boundary? You wouldn’t… or couldn’t. Time’s frozen out there. So from your perspective, midnight would end as you took that step. But if another midnighter was watching you, they’d see you freeze up for the rest of the hour, just out of reach.”

Jessica’s head spun with that image for a moment. “So midnight’s, like, a bubble around us?”

“You mean a sphere? Well, it’s lumpy and uneven, but yeah.”

“But say you were right on the border when midnight fell. Would, like, half of you keep moving and half of you freeze up?”

“And then you’d slide into two pieces,” Jonathan added. “Like those guys in samurai movies?”

“Um, I guess I don’t know.” Dess laughed. “Why don’t you try it and tell me?”

“Here they come,” Jonathan said.

Rex and Melissa were making their unhurried way through the throng, their fingertips touching lightly, their expressions tranquil. As usual these days, the crowd seemed to have no effect on Melissa. She ignored the stares of the few freshmen who were freaked out by her scarred face, gliding past them as serene as a movie star on a red carpet.

Dess sighed. “I can see why you’re bummed, Jess. You don’t get to spend the afternoon drinking skanky tea and putting up with two mindcasters.” She rose to her feet, her long skirt rustling. “See you.”

“Yeah, really,” Jonathan said. “You’re lucky to miss this.” He gave Jessica’s hand a squeeze and stood.

“Yeah, so lucky,” Jessica said. “If only I could be grounded all the time.”

She watched the four of them walk away, chewing her lip and cursing her parents’ calendar logic. Didn’t they know she had more important things to do than be grounded these days?

For the first time ever, her dad was late.

He had faithfully picked up Jessica every day of her grounding, on the theory that left to ride the school bus, she would fall back into her criminal ways. But Don Day’s car wasn’t anywhere to be seen among the crawling traffic of parents picking up their kids.

Maybe after all the debate about exactly how long her grounding should last, he had gotten confused about whether it ended today or not.

For this morning’s argument Jessica herself had gone with the werewolf model: a month was twenty-eight days, which meant that she should have been ungrounded last night. But her parents had cruelly opted for the calendar month, and as her father liked to repeat: “Thirty days hath September (April, June, and November).”

Of course, it still wasn’t fair that she was grounded tonight. Jessica had been detained and returned to parental custody (technically not arrested) on a Saturday night. So thirty days later should be a Monday night, to any sane person. But both her parents had raised the technical point that she’d been brought home Sunday morning, and so her grounding really hadn’t begun until Sunday night, which meant that it was Tuesday before her sentence would be served.

Jessica had kept arguing until her dad had gotten angry and threatened to invoke the fact that most months were thirty-one days, which meant he could in good conscience extend her grounding until Wednesday. Even Mom had rolled her eyes at that one, but Jessica had finally realized she was beaten.