Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“We should wait,” Rex said. “Drive back into town now and come back after we get some more weapons from Dess.”

“From Dess?” Melissa laughed. “Haven’t you noticed? That girl’s too busy with her own projects to make anything for us. She’s about as useful as Jonathan these days.”

Rex shook his head. “Dess’ll be pitching in soon enough. We’re going to need her to find whatever’s out in the desert. Until then, she can play with all the maps she wants.”

“You think Dess can turn the pictures I got from Angie’s mind into coordinates?”

“That might be complicated.” Rex looked at her and frowned. “You might have to…” He didn’t bother to finish. They were miles from the mind noise of central Bixby, it was late at night, and the emotion was strong in him; Rex knew she could read the thought.

She smiled and reached over to touch his arm with a gloved hand.

“Don’t worry, Loverboy. I wouldn’t think of besmirching your honor that way.”

He smiled back at her but felt his face flush. There was no point in denying the stab of jealousy he felt at the thought of Melissa touching Dess, sharing her mind as she’d shared it with him. It had been bad enough that time with Jonathan out in the desert. But there was no choice, Rex reminded himself. If she hadn’t, they’d all have been darkling meat.

Speaking of which… He looked at his watch. Over an hour.

Enough time to get back to home and safety before midnight. “Maybe we should come back with Jessica. We wouldn’t need weapons with her around.”

“Ah, the mighty flame-bringer. Too bad she’s grounded.”

Rex sighed, wondering if any seer in history had ever had to deal with such a motley crew of midnighters.

“Of course,” Melissa continued, “she could have spent the night with Constanza this weekend. Then she’d be here waiting for us, flashlight in hand. Only she’d be way too chicken now. Too bad you and Flyboy had to blab.”

Rex stared at her. “What else were we supposed to do? Just ‘forget’ to tell Jessica about Ernesto Grayfoot? Let her spend the night out here, not knowing the danger?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Jonathan would have told her anyway,” Melissa chuckled. “Plus it’s wrong to keep secrets. And as far as secrets go, you wouldn’t want Jessica to witness any serious mindcasting, would you? She might wonder why her parents let her go to that party last week.”

Rex just kept his mouth shut, not rising to the bait. Melissa had changed so much these past three days. She could almost tolerate school now, had kept her cool even in the Tulsa Mall, and had picked up Constanza’s scent every time they’d lost her on the road. Her mind seemed clearer all the time.

But certain things hadn’t changed. Rex knew firsthand how caustic she was on the inside, still wounded from sixteen years of physical isolation. Not to mention the eight years of loneliness before the two of them had met, a childhood spent fighting off the collective mind storm of humanity all alone. He wondered if Melissa would ever recover from being born the only mindcaster in Bixby.

He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s not that late. We could call her from that Seven-Eleven back on Forty-four and tell her and Jonathan to come here tonight.”

The smile on her face flickered again with amusement. “Requesting help from Flyboy?”

“He saved your life, I seem to remember.”

The smile faded. “Oh, that. My secret shame.” She let out a long sigh. “Fine. Here’s a quarter.”

The kitchen window opened easily, but climbing in turned out to be tricky. Especially while carrying Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation, which Rex had brought along just in case there wasn’t time to make it back to the car. When he blindly planted his foot in a sink full of dirty dishes, the clatter echoed throughout the house.

“Christ, Rex,” Melissa said from behind him. “It’s lucky you’re not a real burglar. You could wake the dead.”

“I’m thinking more haste than stealth, Cowgirl. Taste anything yet?”

She lifted her nose to the air, her eyes catching the rising arc of the moon with a violet flash. “They’re curious, but nothing wicked this way comes. Yet. And Jonathan’s headed toward Jessica’s right on schedule.” She frowned. “That’s funny. I can’t taste Dess anywhere.”

“Maybe she found one of her blind spots,” he said. “Anyway, come on.”

The house was even bigger than it had looked from the outside, the living room long enough to hold a bowling alley. As Melissa stopped to plunk out a few notes on the grand piano in the corner, Rex searched for signs of Focus. But the house was clean on the inside too.

He smiled. Maybe they would get out of here without a rumble.

“Upstairs?” he suggested.

When they found Constanza’s room, Melissa let out a laugh. “This is Jessica’s only friend?” She shook her head. I don’t know why we bother trying to compete.”

Rex had to chuckle. Clothes were scattered everywhere, as if a whirlwind had emptied the two huge closets. One entire wall was covered with mirrors, in front of which a frozen Constanza posed, trying on one of her purchases of the day. The floor was littered with discarded price tags, any one of which represented Rex’s clothing budget for the decade.

“She’s up late,” he said.

“Why sleep when you can look at yourself in the mirror?”

“Just be careful with her.”

Melissa snorted. “I’ll try not to damage the shopping lobe.”

Rex laughed but turned away as her hands reached for the motionless figure. He could do without seeing Melissa’s expression of delight as she entered Constanza's mind. It was different with stiffs, of course, a one-way intervention completely unlike what the two of them shared. Even during daylight hours, if Melissa accidentally touched a normal human it only heightened her usual sensitivity. The only true connection happened between a mindcaster and another midnighter.

Still, he didn’t want to watch.

The upstairs hallway led him to another bedroom, even larger than Constanza’s. Two frozen figures occupied the bed, and Rex retreated from the room after one look at their pale, blank faces.

The last room on the second floor was a study, the desk crowded with papers and books. Rex sat down and began to leaf through them, looking for phone numbers, letters, or anything with the name Ernesto on it. Most of the papers had to do with oil drilling, federal regulations, and financial forecasts, long columns of numbers that possibly even Dess would have found boring.

After a few minutes, however, a bound sheaf caught his eye. The front page read:

Community Impact of

Aerospace Oklahoma Emergency Runway

Bixby Salt Flats

He took a slow breath, recalling the image that Melissa’s touch had left in his mind in the parking lot this afternoon. The long black highway, absolutely straight, stretching out into the glimmering white of the salt flats, ending in the middle of nowhere.

“A road in the desert…” Rex murmured. He remembered seeing an op-ed piece in the Bixby Register over the weekend, someone complaining about a new runway being built outside of town.

Of course. The groupies weren’t building this thing; they were trying to stop it from being built. Darklings hated human intrusions into the desert; highways, pipelines, and oil derricks forced them even farther out into the badlands. And anything built by Aerospace Oklahoma would bring advanced metals and fancy machines along with it—just the sort of new technologies that had chased the darklings into the secret hour to begin with.

Rex opened the folder and skimmed the report. It argued that the runway was actually being built to allow Aerospace Oklahoma to test experimental aircraft, huge planes whose thundering booms would wake up everyone in town in the middle of the night.