Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“Footballs are retarded,” Melissa said. “They’re not even round.”

Rex shrugged. “That must help our team. It makes the game more random, after all.”

“Why don’t they just flip a coin?”

He looked at her. “Um, they do. At the beginning.”

“Oh.” Melissa sighed. Even Rex didn’t understand how little she knew about pointless stuff like sports.

But Melissa had to admit that she could see the world more clearly lately. Bixby High wasn’t as overwhelming as usual. Today had actually been decent until Mr. Rogers had been pissy about the lancing ritual. Now that the school was mostly empty, Melissa had even recovered from that unpleasantness. The bumbling idiots scattered across the football field were strangely interesting to watch, chasing the errant ball like a flock of ducks, even making the same sorts of noises.

She smiled. Touching Rex, letting her mind open to his, had changed her. It alleviated the pressure in her brain. It was like letting a few thousand barrels blow out of a pinched-off oil well. She found herself wishing they’d started a long time ago.

“So which one is she?” she asked.

Rex turned toward the cheerleading tryouts just getting under way on the sidelines. Girls in sweats or last year’s uniforms were scrambling to obtain matching pairs from a frilly stack of pom-poms.

“She’s one of the tall ones,” Rex said. Melissa noticed that the cheerleading candidates were divided into very tall and very short. She wondered what height had to do with leading cheers. “She’s half Native American and wearing a uniform. Red sneakers?” Rex started to raise his arm to point, but Melissa pushed it down.

“I got her. She’s pretty.”

“You really never noticed her before? She’s, like, famous.”

“I don’t notice anything, Rex. Things either assault me or they don’t.”

Melissa closed her eyes. Nothing distinct was coming from any of the cheerleaders, just a blurry, competitive alpha-girl buzz—the sensation of beer foam going up her nose. And the testosterone-filled morons on the football field weren’t helping reception either.

She opened her eyes.

“Still too crowded. Let’s follow her after it’s over.” She spat between the bleacher slats to clear the accumulated tastes from her mouth.

“Sure,” Rex said. “Just thought we’d try. But I don’t want to lose her. She’s our best shot at finding Ernesto Grayfoot.”

Melissa shrugged. “Whatever. Once she’s away from the pom-pom club, I should be able to trail her.”

“You didn’t get anything in the library?”

“Hardly.” Melissa had slipped out of fourth period to linger outside Constanza and Jessica’s study hall. With classes in session, it had been a total waste of time. Only the minds of the two midnighters had come through—Jessica trying to get up the nerve to talk to Constanza and failing miserably, and Dess’s brain whirring through the last phases of some mathematical solution. She’d ridden off after sixth period in a hurry, toting her new coordinates toy and beaming thoughts of maps and numbers in all directions.

Melissa remembered the image she’d seen earlier, the fragment from Angie’s mind. “Hey, Rex, can we wait for Ms. Cheerleader in the parking lot? These bleachers are making my butt go to sleep.”

He laughed. “Sure.” A flutter of excitement moved in him.

“Yes,” she answered his unspoken question, “there’s something I want to show you.” She pulled off a glove one finger at a time as they made their way down. “While I was waiting, something triggered my memory. I saw the picture from that woman’s mind again, but clearer this time.”

“The construction project?”

“Yeah.” She paused at the bottom of the bleachers, pointing down the length of the lowest bench. “Whatever they’re building in the desert, it’s long and flat, like a road.”

“A road? To where?”

Melissa shrugged. “To nowhere. It just stops.”

“Darklings don’t build things.” Rex shook his head. “And they hate the highways that pass through the desert. But maybe the darkling groupies are building a trail to get out to some lore site.”

“I don’t know, Rex. It’s pretty huge for a trail. The biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “Come show me. We’ll figure it out once we’ve found Ernesto.”

Melissa nodded and smiled, feeling Rex’s quiet confidence cut through the buzz of football practice and mindless cheerleader pep. She put her arm around his waist as they walked back to her car, glad for the thousandth time that she’d tracked him down eight years before, running through empty, blue streets in her cowgirl pajamas, seeking the only other midnight mind that she could feel in Bixby. She couldn’t wait to touch him again—at least they had something to do while they waited.

Following Constanza Grayfoot was going to make for a long afternoon.

“Back in my day, there were maps. You didn’t need to consult a polymath every time you built a house. Do you want tea?”

Dess blinked again, realizing that she hadn’t said a word since crossing the threshold. Her eyes had adjusted quickly to the gloom, but her brain was overwhelmed by the clutter stacked everywhere: rusty tridecagrams, Bixby town seals, steel window guards thirteen bars across, fireplace grates with a fine mesh woven in patterns of thirty-nine. A vast horde of antidarkling antiques were piled against every wall, jumbled together into jagged metal sculptures that begged to have their angles calculated.

She started to reply, but from another room the wail of a teakettle erupted, sweeping from a low moan up to an angry screech.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” the old woman said. “Back in my day, young people didn’t take so long to answer simple questions.”

Dess closed her mouth.

Rex was going to freak when he saw this place. It made his historical collection look like some shabby roadside snake zoo. Here was a whole town’s worth of midnighter heirlooms, the heritage of lost generations quietly rusting away. Dess wondered if there was lore here too, not just a few scraps of information written invisibly onto desert rocks, but a library as extensive as the rummage sale around her. She would have to ask. There was a lot she was going to ask, once she got her mouth working again.

“Milk and sugar?” The barked question and the rattling of a tray preceded the old woman’s return. “Or is that too demanding a question for you?”

“Just milk.” Dess hated tea, but it seemed too late to mention the fact.

“Very sensible,” the old woman said. “Milk coats the stomach, and sugar rots the teeth. I never touch sugar of any kind.” She smiled broadly, revealing two uninterrupted rows of gleaming white. “You wouldn’t guess I haven’t seen a dentist in forty-nine years.”

Dess swallowed. “No, I sure wouldn’t.”

The tea tray rattled to a stop on the table before Dess, and the woman sat across from her, grasping the strings hanging from the pot to bob the tea bags vigorously up and down. “Can’t trust myself when they turn on that laughing gas. Might as well hire the Goodyear Blimp to advertise where I am.”

These words spun in Dess’s brain for a moment, then cohered in a moment of clarity.

“You’re a mindcaster,” she said.

“And you have a fine grasp of the obvious.” The woman pulled the tea bags from the pot and dropped them with a wet slap onto a saucer. She poured two steaming cups, adding milk generously to both.

For a moment, silence descended over the tea party. The old woman sipped delicately, and Dess warmed her hands on her cup, lifting it once to sniff the floral scent of the brew revolted her. The only tea she liked was iced tea, with so much lemon and sugar added that it was basically lemonade with caffeine.