Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“What?”

“I can’t remember, or Melissa will find out…” Dess shook her head and muttered, “Crap! I can’t tell you either, she’ll taste it in your head. This is not going to work.” She started swearing, a muttering rant in low, even tones.

“Dess, what’s happening? What’s wrong with you?”

“There’s something in my head, something I have to hide from Melissa. But I’m pretty sure I know where Rex is, okay? He’ll be somewhere on the runway site. That’s where they make halflings, so they’ll take him there. That’s why the darklings don’t want the runway built. It’ll run straight through the place where they make halflings!”

Jessica felt nausea rising in her at the thought of Rex transformed. At least the darklings had only tried to kill her, not turn her into something inhuman. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again to clear the picture from her mind. “How do you know this, Dess?”

“I can’t tell you, or Melissa will see it in your mind. She can’t know where I got the information, understand?”

“Uh,no.”

“Listen, the darklings feel Melissa more than they do the rest of us, Jess. We have to keep this secret from her. Okay?”

“What secret?”

Dess pulled away, her hands shaking. “Earth to Jessica if I tell you, it won’t be a secret.”

Jessica groaned and sat on the bed with her head in her hands. Dess had lost it. If Rex’s disappearance was freaking her out this bad, Melissa was going to be a basket case. Jessica wished that Jonathan were here already, but he was miles away, all the way on the other side of town.

“Listen,” Dess said, her voice under control again, “this is just like the base-sixty thing. You don’t have to understand it, you just have to do what I say.” She grabbed a piece of paper and quickly sketched the runway, each end marked with rows of numbers that spilled from the pencil. “Just tell me to take you to the runway. I’ll still know where it is because you showed me the map; she didn’t.”

“She who?” Jessica asked. “Melissa?”

“No. Someone else.” Dess wrote REX in huge letters across paper and thrust it at Jessica. “Tell Melissa I drew this, and I agree with you because it’s true… I think.”

“You think it’s true that you drew this?” Jessica asked, the paper slipping from her hands.

“No, I think I’ll know that I… because I’ll remember drawing this… Oh, screw it. Just tell her to drive us to the runway!”

Jessica lifted the paper from the bed and stared at it, mysterious numbers and all. Dess was going nuts without Rex around, and Melissa had sounded just as bad.

Jessica took a deep breath, trying to recall the sensation she’d gotten from wielding Demonstration against the darklings, the power flowing through her. She had taken a lot on faith since arriving in Bixby—trusting rows of thirteen thumbtacks to protect her, believing in a history that wasn’t in her textbooks, banking on a flashlight to save her life. But so far, she’d survived.

She had to trust Dess now, even if the girl wasn’t making any sense.

“Okay,” Jessica said in a calm, firm voice. “I’ll tell Melissa we’re going to the runway. Because you said so.”

“Great. Good.”

“In the meantime let’s finish these weapons, okay? We might need them.” Anything to keep Dess occupied until Melissa got here.

“Sure. Just one more thing…”

“What?”

Dess stared at Jessica, her eyes bright with panic. “Don’t think about this conversation when she gets here. Don’t let Melissa taste anything I’ve been saying to you. If she knows, the darklings will know. Just… don’t… think about it.”

“Sure thing.” Jessica nodded slowly and turned to the shield again. The darklings will know what? As Jessica worked to finish the shield, she wondered how you didn’t think about something, how you kept it from your mind without it being in your mind in the first place that you weren’t supposed to have it in your mind…

Thinking like this was far worse than base sixty.

Jessica was still busy not thinking about the thing she wasn’t supposed to think about when Melissa’s car slid to a stop outside.

“Ada,” Dess said softly, and felt the door shut.

The knowledge slid from her mind, but with Melissa outside waiting, the transition wasn’t clean. Though memories faded, the anxiety that filled Dess didn’t disappear but was cast adrift. Her brain felt disjointed, full of unresolved worry, plagued by loose ends of uncertainty and fear.

“What the hell?” she muttered.

“She’s here,” Jessica said, lifting Jonathan’s shield. “I’m done. You?”

Dess looked down at the bench before her, at the pile of throwing disks made from paint-can lids marked with high multiples of thirteen in Phoenician.

“Uh, yeah,” she said blankly. Why did she feel this way, so worried and strung out? Oh, right, duh: Rex was missing. The groupies had got him and he was darkling meat unless they found him by midnight. Dess blinked, wondering why her head wouldn’t clear.

Man, she thought, I get way too caught up in work sometimes. No wonder half the geniuses in the history of mathematics couldn’t tie their own shoes.

She started shoving weapons into her duffel bag. “Let’s move before she starts honking and wakes up my parents.”

“We’re going to wait for Jonathan, right?”

“Sure.” Dess snorted. “But you get to explain that to Melissa.”

Jessica scowled. “So I get to explain everything, huh?”

Dess glanced at Jessica. What the hell was she talking about?

They swept the finished weaponry into the duffel bag, and Dess dropped Geostationary into her pocket. She’d opened the window and was halfway out when Melissa let off a long blast of her horn. The barking of angry mutts spread across the trailer park like a fire in a dry field.

“Thanks, Melissa,” Dess muttered. At least it was Friday night, and her parents would be expecting to get woken up a few times. There were always fights and loud music in the trailer park during the witching hours.

They ran, duffel bag clanking, across the front lawn to the old Ford, threw open the door, and piled into the back. It took a moment for Dess to realize that the front seat next to Melissa was empty.

Of course—Rex always rode shotgun.

She swallowed. Outside of rare glimpses in the school hall, she couldn’t remember ever seeing Melissa without Rex by her side.

The mindcaster’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. Without looking back, she said in a small, anguished voice, “What do we do now?”

Dess paused. Where the hell would the darkling groupies take Rex, anyway? Back to Broken Arrow? She squirmed in the seat, trying to shift the duffel bag. One of the poles from her dad’s tent, Daughterboard, was jabbing into her stomach, and she still couldn’t think straight.

“Okay,” Jessica said, all cool and collected, “Dess thinks that they’ll take Rex out into the desert. To where the runway’s going to be.”

“I do?” Dess asked.

Jessica shot her an annoyed look. “Yes, you do. That’s why the darklings are afraid of the runway, remember? It’s going to steamroll the spot where they make halflings.” She pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and thrust it at Dess.

“Oh, yeah. This.” She remembered drawing the map based on the stuff Jessica had borrowed from her mother. But would the darkling groupies really take Rex there?

“Maybe…” Melissa’s voice came from in front. Her forehead rested against the steering wheel. “The runway was in Angie’s head, and it seemed like it had something to do with the halfling.” She put the car in gear.