Scott Westerfeld: The Secret Hour

“I hate that place,” she managed.

Rex looked at her. His plain, focused thoughts made things better for a moment, and she was able to take a deep breath.

“There’s a reason for all this,” he said.

A reason for the way she was? For the agony she felt every day? “Yeah. To make my life suck.”

“No. Something really important.”

“Thanks.” The Ford’s suspension squealed beneath them as she took a turn too sharply. Rex’s mind flinched, but not because of her driving. He hated hurting her, she knew.

“I didn’t mean that your life wasn’t—”

“Whatever,” Melissa interrupted. “Don’t worry about it, Rex. I just can’t stand the beginning of the year. Too many melodramas all turned up to max.”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“No, you don’t.”

The parking place was empty, and she pulled in, switching off the radio as she slowed. Melissa could tell that they were almost late—the crowd flowing into the building was harried, nervous. A bottle burst under one of her tires as the Ford ground to a halt. People snuck over here to drink beer at lunch sometimes.

Rex started to ask, so she beat him to it.

“I felt her last night. The new girl.”

“I knew it,” he said, hitting the dashboard in front of him, his excitement cutting through the school noise with a clean, pure note.

Melissa smiled. “No, you didn’t.”

“Okay,” Rex admitted. “But I was 99 percent sure.”

Melissa nodded, getting out and pulling her bag after her. “You were totally scared that you might be wrong. That’s how I knew how sure you were.” Rex blinked, not understanding her logic. Melissa sighed. After years of listening to his thoughts she understood a few things about Rex that he didn’t know himself. Things, it seemed, that he would never figure out.

“But yeah, she was out there last night,” she continued. “Awake and…” Something else. She wasn’t sure what else. This new girl was different.

As they walked toward Bixby High, the late bell rang. The sound always quieted the roar in Melissa’s head, softening it to a low rumble as teachers established control and at least some students tried to concentrate. During classes she could almost think normally.

She remembered the night before, in the awesome silence of the blue time. Even in the dead of normal night she had to put up with the noise of dreams and night terrors, but the blue hour was absolutely still. That was the only time Melissa felt whole, completely free of daylight’s chaos. For that one slice of each day she actually felt like she possessed a talent, a gift rather than a curse.

Melissa had known what Rex wanted her to do from the moment he’d come into the cafeteria on the first day of school. Every night this week she had crawled out of her window and up onto the roof. Searching.

It could take a few days to wake up for the first time. And she didn’t know where the new girl lived. Dess had taken a long time to track down, out on the wild edge of the badlands.

Last night there hadn’t been any lightning, not that she could see. Just one frozen flicker behind the motionless clouds. So Melissa had cleared her high perch of water splashes and sat down.

She had calmed her mind—so simple to do at midnight—and reached out across Bixby. The others were easy enough to feel. Melissa knew their signatures, the way they each met the secret hour, with relief, excitement, or calm. All of them were in their usual places, and the other things that lived in the blue time were in hiding, cowed by the energies of the storm.

A perfect night for casting.

Last night it hadn’t taken long. The new girl lived close to her or was very strong. Melissa could feel her clearly, her new shape bright against the empty night. Melissa tasted a flicker of surprise at first, then long moments of wariness, then a slowly building torrent of joy that had lasted deep into the hour. Finally the girl had gone back to sleep, unworried by disbelief.

Some people had it so easy.

Melissa didn’t know exactly what to think of the new girl. Below her shifting emotions was an unexpected flavor, a sharp metal taste, like a coin pressed against the tip of Melissa’s tongue. The scent of unbridled energy was everywhere, but maybe that had just been the storm. And of course someone new was always full of unfamiliar flavors, unexpected faculties. Each of Melissa’s friends felt different to her, after all.

But Jessica Day felt… more than different.

Melissa remembered to pull her headphones from her bag. She would need them to get through the halls to homeroom. As they crossed the street, Rex put a hand on her forearm, careful not to touch bare skin, steadying her as he always did this close to the distractions of school.

He pulled her to a stop as a car shot past.

“Careful.”

“She’s freaky, Rex.”

“The new girl?”

“Yeah. Weird, even for one of us. Or maybe she’s worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Normal.”

Melissa switched on her disc player as they continued, edging the volume up to push away the massive, approaching roar of school, pulling her sleeves down to cover her hands.

Rex turned to her as they reached the front door. He squeezed her shoulder and waited until she was looking at him. Rex alone knew that Melissa could read lips.

“Can you find her?”

She answered with deliberate softness—she hated people who yelled over the music in their headphones. “No problem.”

“Soon,” his lips formed. Was that a question or a command? she wondered. Something about his expression, and the worry in his mind, disturbed her.

“What’s the big rush?”

“I think there’s danger. More than usual. There are signs.”

Melissa frowned, then shrugged.

“Don’t worry. I’ll track her down.”

She turned away from Rex, missing his reply, unable to concentrate as the school—with its noisy squall of anxiety, boredom, desire, misdirected energy, worry, competition, cheerleader pep, stifled anger, a little joy, and too much outright fear—swallowed her.

“Okay, ten weird things about Bixby…”

Constanza Grayfoot folded back her notebook to a blank page and placed it primly on her knees. The other girls at the library table waited in silence as she wrote the numbers one to ten in a column down the left side.

“I’ve got one,” Jen said. “Back two winters ago, when they found Sheriff Michaels’s car out in the badlands.” She turned to Jessica with eyebrows raised. “But no Sheriff Michaels.”

“Number one: Disappearance of Sheriff Michaels,” Constanza pronounced carefully as she wrote.

“I heard he was killed by drug dealers,” Liz said. “They’ve got a secret airstrip in the badlands for when they fly stuff in from Mexico. He must have found out where it was.”

“Or they were paying him off and they double-crossed him,” Constanza said.

“No way,” Jen said. “They found his uniform, badge, and gun, I heard.”

“So what?”

“And also his teeth and hair. And his fingernails. Whatever’s in the badlands is a lot worse than drug dealers.”

“That’s what the drug dealers want you to think.”

“Oh, like you know.”

Liz and Jen looked at Jessica, as if she was supposed to resolve the issue.

“Well,” Jessica offered, “the badlands sound… bad.”

“Totally.”

“Girls,” a voice called from the front desk of the library. “This is supposed to be a study period, not a chatting period.”

“I’m just working on my article for the paper, Ms. Thomas,” Constanza explained. “I’m editor this year.”