Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

He laughed and started running. His long strides became half-block jumps until one fantastic leap took him into the air and out of sight.

Jessica watched after him and grinned. Her normal weight wasn’t as crushing as it usually seemed when he left her. Maybe things would still be screwed up tomorrow in Flatland, but at least the cool metal of Acariciandote would be around her wrist, a reminder of midnight.

She took deep breaths, letting the thundering of her heart gradually slow while she knocked leaves and grass from her hair and clothes.

With thirty seconds to go, she climbed in through the window, remembering to kick off her shoes as she crossed the room.

“Okay, Beth. Do your worst.” She took another deep breath, placing one hand on the knob of the closet door.

Midnight ended as it had begun, late by Jessica’s watch, tarrying those same nine seconds before normal time rumbled up through the soles of her feet, blue light and silence draining from the world together.

“—ree, four…” came a muffled voice from the closet.

Jessica pulled it open, revealing Beth with red face and clenched fists.

“Okay, you win,” Jessica said, raising her palms in surrender. “Don’t scream.”

“I’m going to do more than scream, Jess!” she spat, pushing past Jessica and into the room. “When I tell Mom that you tried to lock me…”

Her voice trailed away, the look of anger fading into one of confusion.

“What the hell, Jess?”

“What?”

“You look… You’re not…” Sharp eyes scanned Jessica from head to toe, then Beth reached out to pull a stray leaf from her hair. “What the…?”

“That’s a leaf, genius.”

“It wasn’t there. You look different. What did you do?”

Jessica swallowed. She realized that she was still out of breath from the dash home. Her face was probably as red as Beth’s. Her hands were scratched from the trip through the oak tree, and her hair had to be a mess.

And Beth was staring at the bracelet…

“Oh, this,” she said, hoping an explanation would reach her lips in time. “Yeah, this is what I wanted to show you. But I didn’t want you to see where I hide it because it’s a such a… big secret. Pretty, huh?”

Beth’s eyes swept to the open window, and Jessica groaned inside. It had been closed and locked a few seconds before.

“You hide that bracelet… outside?”

“Uh, yeah, okay. You got me there.”

Beth’s eyes squinted even further. “You shoved me in a closet so you could jump out the window to where you keep your bracelet? Are you totally cracking?”

“No. But you said something about Jonathan…” Jessica struggled to remember. That conversation had been an hour ago for her, but only a minute had passed for Beth.

“Yeah, that he’s been in trouble with the police.”

“Right! That’s it.” She held up the bracelet to the light. “But I wanted you to see this. He gave it to me.” The smile on her face was huge, idiotic, and beaming. “Isn’t it great?”

“Yeah, sure,” Beth said, her eyes still locked on Jessica’s. “It’s wonderful. And I’m glad that you hide it… outside. In the bushes.”

Jessica sighed. “Its name means ‘touching you.’ ”

“It has a name?”

“Sure.” Jessica shrugged. “Anyway, thanks for coming by. I’m glad I got to show it to you.” She hugged Beth hard. “See you tomorrow.”

Jessica opened her bedroom door, and her little sister walked out, casting wary glances back, totally at a loss as to how she’d wound up so confused.

“I’ll make sure you get to meet him soon,” Jessica whispered.

Beth nodded once and bolted for her own bedroom on scurrying, silent feet.

The house didn’t look like much. It squatted in darkness, out of repair and covered with twisting vines, shaded from the afternoon sun by the mushroom cloud of willow tree that dominated the front yard.

Dess looked at Geostationary again. This was the place. In fact, the equations that had led her here should have been obvious all along. Once she’d realized it was a base-sixty thing, the math had been easy.

Back in advanced algebra the year before, Mr. Sanchez had taught them how to convert into base two (turning regular numbers into ones and zeros), all the while claiming that this knowledge was going to get them computer jobs one day. Yeah, right. A few more machines in the Bixby High computer lab might’ve helped more.

But Dess always humored Sanchez, and practicing new bases was a pleasant distraction. It had kept her brain busy back in the days before Jessica Day had come along to keep everyone busy all the time.

After mastering binary (which had taken about 256 seconds), Dess had tackled base sixty because there were sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. So Dess had it down cold that, for example, 2:31 A.M. was 9,060 seconds after midnight.

Of course, what would you do with that bit of trivia?

The answer had come when she’d started playing with her father’s oil-drilling maps two Fridays ago. All of the secret hour lay within a single degree of longitude and latitude, the twelve-riddled 36 north by 96 west. But degrees, it turned out, were sort of like hours. They were divided into sixty minutes, and each of those minutes was divided into sixty seconds. That had been the big revelation: if coordinates used the same math as time, then the place where the secret hour happened could be sliced up into minutes and seconds, just like the hour itself.

Looking back, Dess knew she should have realized this before now.

From the mountains beyond Rustle’s Bottom, she had often watched midnight roll in. Like dawn, it swept from east to west, carried by the rotation of the earth. And like dawn, it didn’t hit in a perfectly straight line. There were bumps and ripples in midnight’s arrival.

But the shadows that convoluted the secret hour weren’t cast by mountain peaks or water towers. They were actually cast by numbers. All you had to do was start seeing the minutes and seconds that lay in a grid across the streets of Bixby, and it was obvious where the turbulence would arise.

Dess put Geostationary in the pocket of her coat, got off her bike, and pulled off her sunglasses. She was breathing hard. The moment her brain had finished the calculations, she’d practically run out of the school building, skipping last period and riding her bike here at about fifty miles an hour.

Now, though, Dess found herself in no hurry to approach the house. What sort of person would live in a spot like this? Just some random Bixbyite who couldn’t afford anything better? Or something worse, like a coven of darkling groupies?

But then she noticed the thirteen-pointed star mounted next to the door and felt a lot better. Realtors always told new arrivals in Bixby that in the old days, the plaques showed which houses had fire insurance. This was only a half lie. The tridecagrams were insurance, all right, but not against infernos.

The star was a good sign. She couldn’t imagine darkling groupies leaving a tridecagram stuck onto their house. Her eyes hunted for more reassurances and easily found them: the walkway was thirty-nine flagstones long, the chimney 169 bricks high. Perhaps this run-down shack had once been the headquarters of that Ladies’ Anti-Tenebrosity League that Rex was always talking about.

Dess started to lean her bike against the old willow. But then she saw the marks and froze.

A foot long and at least an inch deep, three parallel gouges had been cut into the thick bark. Giant claws had swept through the old willow, like carpet knives lacerating flesh. The yellow-green sap had welled up like blood and congealed. Judging from the size of the claws, the Wound had come from a very old darkling of the saber-toothed variety.