Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“Hey, did you help out my friends night before last? Put something in their heads?”

Madeleine paused, a cup half poured before her, and shot a cold glance across the attic. “It couldn’t be avoided.”

Dess raised her eyebrows. “Uh, I think they appreciated it, actually. Or would have if they’d known what the hell was going on. Rex and Melissa were dead meat until Jess showed up.”

“Agreed. Come here and sit down.” Madeleine poured out more tea. “Milk, no sugar, correct?”

“Sure,” Dess said, making her crouching way to her cushion, the scent of tea turning her stomach. Some mind reader. Madeleine didn’t even know she hated tea, even up here in mindcaster heaven, the mother of all psychic duck blinds. Although maybe because Dess was up here herself, her mind was shielded too. Which was a reassuring thought.

“To reach out that far, during midnight…” Madeleine shook her head. “They’ll have tasted me.”

“Melissa sure did. Jonathan and Jessica too.”

“Not them, you simpleton. The old ones in the desert.”

“Jeez, sorry.” Grumpier and grumpier.

“They’ll be looking for me now.” Madeleine looked up and caught her eye, deadly serious.

Dess nodded. No wonder she was in such a crappy mood. Rex and Melissa’s little foul-up at Constanza’s had cost Madeleine her psychic cover. Forty-nine years of secrecy blown because they hadn’t bothered to leave a clear phone message.

“Yeah, those two don’t have their heads screwed on very tight these days,” Dess said. “They’ve been doing the psychic nasty with each other, which has got them acting all… weird.”

Madeleine shot her a glance. “I know about that too, of course. And thinking there’s something wrong with a mind-caster touching another midnighter is a bunch of old chicken-fried baloney. It’s helping Melissa gain control.” She shook her head. “If only I could have guided them, they might have begun long ago.”

Dess frowned, remembering that Madeleine had touched her as well, reaching out casually as she’d left here Tuesday night. A few seconds contact between fingers and cheek was all it had taken, and the mental garage-door opener that hid her new knowledge from Melissa had been installed.

Dess watched the milk swirling into her tea—a collision of two galaxies, one light, one dark. “Well, you weren’t guiding anyone; you were hiding.”

She looked up, expecting a tongue-lashing.

“Indeed,” was all Madeleine had to say.

Dess took a drink of tea: a burst of acid combined with an unsettling hint of flowers. She pursed her lips. Why did she always wind up drinking the stuff? Darn peer pressure.

Madeleine stirred her tea, the tinkle of metal and porcelain filling the attic. “They’ll be much more fearful of you now, if they suspect you’re no longer orphans. They may move against you sooner than I had expected.”

“Move against us,” Dess repeated dryly. Rex kept saying that too, like this was a chess game.

“Yes, that’s why I called you here today.”

“Called me…?” Dess snorted. “I had the wacky notion that coming here was my idea.” Last night Jessica and Jonathan had shown up during the secret hour with a stack of Aerospace Oklahoma geology reports, including a detailed map of the planned runway. During study period this morning Dess had suddenly realized she should cross-reference Jessica’s information with the archive here.

But maybe Madeleine had put that inspiration in her mind, just like she’d shown Jonathan the route to Constanza’s.

Dess frowned. If this was a chess game, she had just been demoted to pawn. Which sucked. The whole reason she’d worked so hard on coordinates and midnight was to have her own thing, a piece of midnight separate from the other four, just as they had their private couple realities.

She took a long drink of tea, its acid taste suiting her mood.

“Are all you mindcasters so manipulative?”

Madeleine raised an eyebrow. “Manipulative?”

“Uh, yeah. Maybe the darklings don’t even care about you anymore. Maybe you just hang out up here because you enjoy pulling people’s strings. And occasionally—reluctantly—reaching out to help us.”

“Help you? I don’t merely help you, young lady. I made you.”

Dess blinked. “Come again?”

Madeleine placed her teacup and saucer firmly onto the tray, with a look so intimidating that Dess shifted on her cushion. Could a mindcaster really do anything to you with her touch? she wondered. Madeleine had installed a mental block in her brain with a brush of her fingers—could she just reach across the tray and hit the erase switch, leaving her a dribbling idiot? Dess’s fingers flexed, reaching for the comforting weight of Geostationary in her jacket pocket.

“How many seconds in a day, Dess?” Madeleine said softly.

“Eighty-six thousand, four hundred,” she replied automatically. “Duh.”

“And how many new students at Bixby High in the last three years?”

Dess shrugged. “I don’t know… ten?”

“And how many of those happen to have been midnighters?”

A shock went through Dess. Two… Jessica and Jonathan.

“Oh my God.” Her head began to spin, calculating the odds. It all depended on how close you had to be born to straight-up midnight to see the secret hour. But even if a person born within a full minute on either side became a midnighter, there’d still be only one in every 720 people, not two out of ten. And if you had to be born within a second or so, the odds went soaring to about forty thousand to one, which made the chances of two midnighters showing up in a row around 1.6 billion to one, in which case two out of ten was… pretty darned unlikely.

Dess realized with growing horror that she’d done the thing she hated most, ground her teeth over every day, and constantly railed against whenever anyone would listen…

She hadn’t done the math.

“So much for my famous grasp of the obvious,” Dess muttered.

She thought of Jessica’s mother and her lucky new job at Aerospace Oklahoma, Jonathan’s father and his trouble with the police that had forced him to move from Pittsburgh… like anyone would move to Bixby to get away from cops.

She glared across the tea tray. “You’ve been jerking people around.”

Madeleine smiled.

“And what about us three?” Dess continued. “All born in Bixby within a year of each other? That must be a stochastic fluke right up there with the dinosaurs getting beamed by a meteor!”

“I have to be very quiet at midnight,” Madeleine said softly. “But years ago I could cast freely during the rest of the day. When a woman is in labor, her mind is very open to suggestion. If she pushes at just the right moment…”

Dess felt sick to her stomach. Pawn didn’t even cover it. She took every mean thing she’d ever thought about Melissa back because right here, right now, she was sitting and having tea with the biggest queen bitch of all time.

“It only works one time in a hundred,” Madeleine said. “After my successes, I was exhausted.”

“But Jonathan and Jessica moved here from hundreds of miles away… Are you saying you can mess with people all the way in Chicago?”

“From within this contortion I can feel potential midnighters all over the continent, so I knew Jessica was special. And at my age I no longer need to touch daylighters to change their minds. But I did the real work here in Bixby, making sure that certain executives at Aerospace Oklahoma formed a good opinion of Jessica’s mother.”

Dess narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t her father lose his job about the same time?”

“He was about to.” Madeleine snorted. “It doesn’t take a mindcaster to make a company called sockmonkeys dot com go out of business.”