Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

After the car passed, Jonathan limped out from his hiding place and crouched in the red glare of its taillights so that he could read the license plate. Ducking back in the shadows, he repeated it to himself again and again, like some magic spell of Dess’s.

The sound faded, and Jonathan allowed himself a sigh of relief. At least the man had gone. For the moment, he had only been spying.

But why? As far as Jonathan knew, no one who wasn’t a midnighter knew about the secret hour. Silence had always been the unspoken pact among the five who had experienced the blue time.

But this man had to know something. What were the chances that this was just a coincidence? Did he pose a threat?

Jonathan headed down the alley, favoring his good foot. He’d have plenty of time to think about all this on the way home, in between trying not to freeze to death and looking out for Clancy St. Claire. The sheriff really had it in for Jonathan since busting him and Jessica for breaking curfew. And it was a Saturday night, Jonathan realized, not the best time to run afoul of St. Claire. He didn’t care to spend two nights in jail, bouncing off the walls in the secret hour and waiting for Monday morning to come.

He limped to the end of the alley and peered out carefully, then took a few steps into the street. No car, nothing.

He glanced back at Jessica’s house down the road. Her light was still on. She was probably scared to death, watching her windows and wondering what lurked outside.

Jonathan shivered, thinking about skipping the cold walk home. On the weekend his dad would hardly notice, and Jessica’s floor would be a lot warmer than some ditch. He could leave early in the morning, before anyone else in the house stirred.

Jessica had asked him to come home with her, he remembered. She’d wanted to show him something. Or maybe she’d just wanted to be with him somewhere safe and private. They’d hardly kissed each other at all tonight.

“Crap,” he said softly, wishing he’d thought of this before sending Jessica home. She probably would have said yes.

She’d probably be glad to see him at her window.

After a long, cold minute Jonathan sighed and let go of the frustrating thoughts. This wasn’t the secret hour anymore. This was Flatland. Even one tap on the window risked their getting caught, and Jessica would be blamed. Her parents would freak if they found him there. Jonathan was pretty certain that the cops had mentioned his name to them when they’d taken Jessica home. He doubted he’d be welcome at any time of day, much less in the middle of the night.

He turned and took the first few painful steps away. When he could fly, the trip home from Jessica’s took less than five minutes, but in normal gravity (and with a sprained ankle, he was pretty sure) it was going to take at least two hours.

He huddled in his thin shirt, checked the darkened road ahead for police cars, and headed home.

The dream came again, full of glowing wire frames, lines of fire forming spheres, like the doubled eights of a baseball’s stitching or the twirl of peel left after an orange is stripped in one long spiral. The lines twisted around each other, bright snakes twining on a beach ball, performing new tricks every night. They examined their combinations restlessly, searching for one pattern out of many…

Dess woke up sweating, even though her room was cold.

She rubbed her eyes with bitten-down thumbnails and looked at her clock. Damn. It was after midnight; she’d slept through the secret hour again.

Dess shook her head. This never used to happen. Even on those rare occasions when she did go to bed before midnight, the passage into the blue time always awakened her with its shudders and sudden silence. What was the point of having a whole secret hour if you slept through it?

But somehow she’d missed it again.

The fiery shapes of the dream still pulsed through Dess’s mind, her latest project troubling her brain again, demanding answers that didn’t exist yet in the scraps of data she’d managed to gather. The dream came every night now, her mind a renegade calculating engine clattering in the darkness. But she had come to understand what some of the images meant.

The spheres were the earth, this lovely ball of fun that humanity was stuck to, except for Jonathan in the secret hour, lucky prick. The glowing lines were coordinates—longitude and latitude and whatever other invisible geometries made Bixby important. (Now there were two words that should never go together: Bixby and important. Whoever had decided that this town should be the center of the blue time needed to watch the Travel Channel more.)

Dess frowned. Tonight’s dream had conjured up a new image in her head: a circle of bright diamonds evenly spaced around one of the beach ball earths, orbiting it at a stately pace. There were twenty-four of them, her mind told her—a very darkling number. But what did the image mean?

Sometimes she wondered if this whole project had unhinged her. Maybe she was reading too much into Bixby’s location.

Dess shook her head. Her father’s oil-drilling maps were very accurate, and math never lied. The intersection of 36 north and 96 west sat a few miles outside town, dead on the snake pit. Those two numbers were stuffed full of twelves. That had to mean something; the snake pit was a source of Rex’s lore and a major darkling magnet, squatting in the badlands like a giant spider in the middle of its web.

One thing had become abundantly clear to Dess: the geometry of the blue time was a lot more complicated than any spiderweb. There were asymmetries in the way the secret hour formed itself, subtleties in the way its lines reached across the hard-packed desert and into Bixby. Melissa sometimes complained about how her mindcasting changed depending on where she was, gaining or losing strength like a car radio fading in and out on a drive through the mountains. And now that Dess had bothered to map all of Rex’s precious lore sites, a pattern had emerged there too. And of course, there were the people who disappeared, like Sheriff Michaels two years ago. Darklings never seemed to bother stiffs, but they had to eat something. Rex said there were special places where the barrier between frozen and normal time was shaky. That was the real reason behind Bixby’s famous curfew. If a normal person—or an unlucky cow or rabbit—wound up getting frozen near one of these spots, they could be sucked through the barrier for an unexpected trip down the food chain.

All this meant one thing: midnight had a shape, with ripples and rough spots. Maybe there were places where Dess’s number magic was stronger or weaker, or where Jessica’s flame-bringing would really kick ass, or where the darklings couldn’t come. Maybe there were also places to hide.

Great theory, but the details were the tricky part. This math was hard. It was trig on steroids, and thinking about it wore Dess out all day and then mangled her dreams at night.

She lay there, staring at the notes scribbled on her blackboard, wishing she had some sort of calculating machine to untangle the numbers. Dess frowned again; she’d never used a mere calculator in her life. And the school computer that Mr. Sanchez let her hack around with wouldn’t cut it either. What she really needed for this stuff was a NASA-grade, global-warming-predicting, doomsday-asteroid-tracking supercomputer.

Across the room Ada Lovelace stood on her little platform, staring at Dess, stoic as ever.

“Yeah, I wish you could help me too,” she told the doll. But the real Ada was long dead (for 153 years, in fact), all that talent gone to waste before the world was smart enough to realize how brilliant she was. “I know the feeling, sweetie.”