Blue Noon

3



9:03 A.M.



BLUE MONDAY



Midnight gravity flowed into Jessica.



She clenched Jonathan's hand harder. "What the...?" Her voice trailed off into the sudden and overwhelming silence, her heart pounding as her eyes scanned the frozen pep rally.



Everything was blue.



The shiny Lycra uniforms of the football team, the Bixby town seal in the center of the basketball court, the motionless tendrils of a pom-pom thrust into the air - it had all turned the color of midnight. And everything was perfectly still.



"Jonathan?" Jessica looked into his face, hoping to catch some glimmer of comprehension. Maybe this had happened before here in Bixby, a weird hiccup of the blue time, and Rex had simply forgotten to tell her about it.



Jonathan didn't answer. His eyes were wide with shock.



"This is messed up," Dess confirmed in a quiet voice.



Jessica gripped the edge of the bleacher she sat on, felt the grainy reality of the wood. This was not a dream - this was the blue time.



Her eye caught movement across the gym. Rex and Melissa were slowly rising, looking strangely isolated among the frozen human forms.



His paralysis suddenly broken, Jonathan let out a cry and sprang out of his seat. Jessica instinctively clung to his hand, and as he left his feet, he pulled her softly into the air after him - they were both light as feathers.



"Jonathan!"



"What the hell?" His voice faded as midnight gravity carried them helplessly up and over the crowd, spinning around each other like two balls on a string. "Is this really...?"



"Yeah, really happening," Jessica managed, gripping his hand still harder. The floor looked miles below, and she flashed back to Climbing Day in gym class - peering down from the top of the thick, knotted rope, terrified of falling.



As their flight peaked and they began to descend, reflexes honed by countless hours of flying together kicked in. Jonathan twisted to bring their spin to a halt, and as they settled back onto the gym floor - right on the Bixby seal, as if they'd been aiming for it - Jessica's knees bent for a soft landing.



She looked back up at the bleachers and swallowed. The frozen crowd were all staring right at her and Jonathan. It reminded Jessica of her least-favorite recurring nightmare: being in a play she hadn't rehearsed, the motionless audience waiting for her first line. It was stunning to see so many people captured by midnight. Their faces were waxy and pale, their eyes lifeless, like an army of plastic dummies.



"Never seen this many stiffs before." Melissa's soft words carried across the gym, echoing Jessica's thoughts.



"Outside, quick!" Rex called. He was running down the bleachers, jumping over the frozen bodies like hurdles. Dess and Melissa followed him toward the door to the parking lot.



Jessica looked at Jonathan, who shrugged. "Might as well see what's in the sky," he said.



"Oh, right." If this were midnight, the dark moon would be up there, bathing the world in its cold blue light.



But this wasn't midnight. This was a Monday morning pep rally, which was just about as far away from the magic of the blue time as you could get.



"Come on," Jonathan said, his knees bending.



They jumped together, covering the distance to the door in one easy leap, landing just as Rex got there. The three of them burst out into the parking lot together, staring up at the sky.



Behind a few frozen and wispy clouds, the dark moon was huge and fully risen. Its vast bulk seemed perfectly centered, blotting out the whole sky except for a thin sliver around the horizon, hiding the sun. A few white stars glittered at its edges, their light dulled, as if they were being squashed down against the earth by the huge moon's weight.



Suddenly Jessica needed the feel of solid ground under her feet. She slipped her fingers from Jonathan's hand, letting normal gravity fall back across her. Dizzied by the weird, absent light of the moon, she dropped her eyes down to the asphalt.



Its cracked surface shone uncanny blue.



Dess and Melissa charged through the door, staggering to a halt as they stared upward.



"This can't be happening," Rex murmured.



"Yeah," Dess said, gazing at her own blue hand. "But it kind of... is."



For a long moment they all stood there in silence. Jonathan pushed off from the ground nervously, rising a few feet into the air.



Jessica checked her watch. The numbers were still pulsing: 9:05 a.m. Just like during a normal midnight hour, her flame-bringer's magic kept its electronic numbers flashing.



How many minutes had it lasted so far? Two?



"The moon isn't moving," Rex said.



"Isn't what?" Dess asked.



His skyward gaze stayed steady, his eyes flashing violet. "It's just stuck up there, halfway across."



"How can you tell?" Jessica asked, glancing up at the huge, baleful eye above them. The dark moon crossed the sky much faster than the sun, taking only an hour to rise and fall, but it was still like watching a minute hand move on a clock. "Isn't it sort of too slow to see?"



"For you, maybe." He smiled. "But I am a seer, you know."



"Oh, right." Jessica glanced at Jonathan, who shrugged back at her. These days it was easy to forget that Rex was gifted with special sight and deep knowledge of the lore. The transformation out in the desert had left him... different. Lately his gaze was so freaked out and wild-eyed that he seemed more like a stoner than a seer.



"So the moon didn't rise?" Dess asked. "It just appeared out of nowhere?"



"Or it rose really quick." Rex glanced at his own watch; on a midnighter's wrist, windups worked in the blue hour. "We got out here in less than three minutes."



"Why is it such a big deal what the moon's doing?" Jessica asked quietly. "I mean, isn't this all completely screwed up anyway?"



"The moon makes the secret hour, as far as we know." Rex looked up again as he answered her, staring at the sky with a frown. "If it's not moving, there's no way to tell how long this will last."



"Oh." Jessica glanced at Jonathan, who had jumped to the top of a school bus to look around. "Um, then maybe..."



"Spot the problem, Rex," Dess said. "Let's do some math: zero velocity multiplied by any amount of time equals zero movement. What if the moon's just stuck up there?"



"Stuck?" Jessica said softly. "Like, forever?"



"I didn't say forever." Rex dropped his eyes from the sky. "That would be... crazy."



"This whole thing is crazy, Rex!" Dess cried. "It's not midnight, except in Australia or somewhere, but it's blue."



"Yeah, what's happening, Rex?" Jonathan said as he bounded softly back to the group.



Rex raised his hands. "Look, there's nothing like this in the lore." His voice stayed calm. "So I don't know why you're asking me."



For a moment no one said anything, stunned by his words. Jessica realized that her jaw had dropped open. After all, that's what you did when things got weird: you asked Rex what was going on.



With a cool seer's gaze, he stared silently back at them for a moment, then smiled, his point made. "Okay, everyone, calm down and give Melissa some head space." He turned to the mindcaster. "Can you feel Madeleine?"



"No, she's staying hidden. But I bet you she's just as freaked out as we are."



"What about the darklings? Are they awake?"



Melissa stood in silence for a moment, eyes closed and head tilted back, casting her mind across the desert.



Jessica looked around at the others. It had been a while since the five of them had all been together. Probably since that night on the salt flats when everything had gone haywire - Rex kidnapped, Melissa thrown through the windshield of her car, and Dess...



Dess seemed the worst for it. She ate lunch with Jessica and Jonathan or alone these days - never with Rex and Melissa. She hadn't forgiven the mindcaster for pillaging her memories that night.



Not that Jessica could blame her. Or blame Rex for being freaked out by his transformation into a halfling. And the scars on Melissa's face from her accident still carried pink stitches.



But everyone seemed to have forgotten that Anathea, the young seer who'd been turned into a halfling back in the old days, had died that night. Which was a lot worse than anything that had happened to the rest of them.



Sometimes when Jessica watched the other midnighters interact, she felt like wearing a T-shirt with big letters on the front: GET OVER IT.



"They're awake, all right," Melissa said slowly. "I'm surprised you guys can't hear them."



"Hear them?" Rex glanced over his shoulder toward the badlands. "You mean they're coming this way?"



Jessica reached for Disintegrator in her pocket, but it wasn't there; she'd never expected to need the flashlight during the day. She had only Acariciandote, the bracelet Jonathan had given her. She reached to touch it, feeling the thirteen tiny charms dangling from her wrist.



Melissa shook her head. "Not coming, not moving much at all. Just so loud." She winced, her face twisting into the pained expression she wore whenever too many people were around.



"Melissa," Rex asked, "what do you mean by 'loud'?"



"I mean screaming, howling, raising a ruckus."



"As in afraid?"



Melissa shook her head. "No. As in celebrating."



Jessica's watch said 9:17 a.m., but it seemed like hours since the blue time had begun. The minutes seemed to drag along, as if time itself had become a formless, limping thing.



How could she even be sure if her watch was working right or not? It felt like they'd all been standing out there in the parking lot for hours.



"Get down from there!" Rex yelled again.



Jessica looked up and sighed. Jonathan was still on the roof of the school.



"I thought you said this could go on forever," he shouted down.



"Yeah, or it could end any second!"



"Nah, midnight only comes in one-hour slices, Rex. You know that." Jonathan laughed and took an arcing hop up to the top of the gym. From there he scanned the horizon, as if the Bixby skyline might hold some clue as to what was going on.



Jessica saw how high he was and swallowed. But she knew yelling at Jonathan was pointless. He always flew until the last moment of midnight, squeezing out every second of weightlessness; it hadn't taken him long to convince himself that this unexpected blue time would last a solid hour. For Jonathan this wasn't a terrifying mystery to be solved - it was a double helping of dessert, an extra recess, a free period spicing up an otherwise crappy Monday.



Jessica wanted to scream at him to quit being stupid, but if she sided with Rex in front of everyone else, Jonathan would probably stay up there until the world ended.



Unless, of course, it already had.



"Come on, Jonathan," Melissa called up to him. "There's nothing to see, and you really could get hurt."



Jonathan frowned at her, but a moment later he stepped from the roof's edge and floated down.



Jessica glanced sidelong at Melissa. The mindcaster had sounded so concerned, and Jonathan was listening to her. This was definitely too much weirdness for one Monday morning.



But at least Jonathan was safely on the ground again. She crossed the parking lot to grab hold of his jacket.



"Sorry," he said when he saw her expression. "But it seems like a waste, just standing around."



"You could get killed."



"But what if this really does last a long time?" He frowned. "Or forever."



She took his hand, but the feeling of his midnight gravity flowing into Jessica didn't help her mood. It would be just like the world to end on a Monday, especially this Monday, the day she was theoretically going to become ungrounded.



Only theoretically, of course. There had been a fierce debate this morning about what day was exactly one month from the night Jessica had been brought home by the police, tonight or tomorrow. Finally she'd given up arguing about it. Tuesday's promised freedom wouldn't take forever to come, after all.



Except now it might.



Standing here with the dark moon overhead, it made perfect sense that time had been halted, the darklings decreeing that Jessica Day would remain grounded forever. That's what she got for being born the flame-bringer.



"Hey, look! It's Sanchez," Dess cried suddenly. She was pointing at a stiff just outside the gym entrance. The frozen Mr. Sanchez was huddled close to the wall, out of sight from anyone coming through the door, a motionless geyser of smoke spewing from his mouth.



Jonathan pulled his hand away from Jessica and bounded across the lot. "Oh my God - he's sneaking a cigarette. I didn't know he smoked!"



"Well, well, Mr. Sanchez," Dess said. "Your secrets are revealed at last." She stepped into the smoke and laughed, waving it away. Released from the dark moon's spell by her touch, it drifted slowly upward in the still air.



"Get away from him, you two," Rex shouted. "Don't stand where he can see you. What if time starts up again?"



Jonathan got out of Sanchez's face, but Dess just stood there giggling. Rex sighed.



The sight of the frozen teacher caused a trickle of nerves to crawl up Jessica's spine. If time did start again, there was a good chance they could be caught out here, busted for skipping the pep rally. Then, like the seasons, the mighty grounding cycle would begin again....



"Maybe we should wait inside?" she said quietly.



"Were you talking to someone in there?" Rex asked. "Or in front of anyone who'll notice if you suddenly disappear?"



"No," Jessica answered. "We were in the back row, like you guys."



"So what's the problem?"



"Well, you know," Jessica said. "Just in case time starts again, we don't want to get busted for cutting."



Rex looked at her like she was crazy. "Time is frozen during broad daylight for the first time in recorded history, and you're worried about skipping a pep rally?"



"Um, well..."



"Hey, maybe this is like an eclipse!" Dess called across the parking lot.



"How do you mean?" Jonathan said.



Dess stared at Mr. Sanchez as she spoke, as if drawing inspiration from the trig teacher's harried expression. "You know, an eclipse looks like a little bit of night that happens in the middle of the day. But it's not really night, it's just the moon blocking out the sun."



"And a long time ago," Rex added, "people used to freak out about eclipses, like it was the end of the world."



"Exactly. But it's not a big deal, just a totally random thing - two objects lining up. Doesn't even last that long." Dess crossed the lot as she spoke, Jonathan bounding along beside her. "The trick is not to have a heart attack about it."



"Can't you go blind from eclipses?" Jonathan said.



"Yeah, true." Dess glanced up at the dark moon. "If you're stupid enough to stare at the sun for too long."



Rex thought about this for a second, then shook his head. "But you can predict eclipses years in advance, right?"



"Centuries, Rex," Dess said, rolling her eyes, as if eclipse prediction was something she did for fun in study hall. (Of course, Jessica realized, it probably was.) "Thousands of years, even. You just do the math, and they happen right on schedule."



"So where's the schedule, then?" Rex said. "I repeat: nothing like this has ever been recorded in the lore."



"The lore's not perfect. Rex," Jonathan said, bouncing a few feet into the air. "You can't look up everything. I thought by this point you'd have figured that out."



Jessica waited for an outburst. Those were fighting words as far as Rex was concerned. And a big fight was just what they needed right now.



But Rex only nodded and scratched his chin. "Yeah, you could be right. Maybe it is just an eclipse or something like that. Totally random." He looked up into the sky, squinting as his eyes flashed purple.



Jessica dared a quick glance at the dark moon, which was giving her a headache as usual. As far as she could tell, it hadn't moved an inch, or a degree, or whatever. When an eclipse happened, didn't the regular moon keep going across the sky?



"Well, the darklings must have known this was coming." Melissa spoke up. "Or at least, they must know something. They're still rocking out, like it's darkling Fourth of July."



"I guess maybe they've got the schedule, then," Dess said quietly.



Jonathan pushed himself softly up into the air ten feet or so, staring out across the desert. "Hey, Rex, could they have made this happen?"



"The darklings? Maybe."



"But it was daylight when it happened, Rex," Jessica said. "How could the darklings do anything? Aren't they, like, frozen during regular time?"



Rex nodded slowly. "Yeah, frozen. And buried deep in the desert to escape the sun. But still... maybe." He shrugged.



Jessica sighed. She didn't know which was freakier, the complete rupture of time itself or Rex acting like he didn't know everything.



The way he'd changed was hard to pin down. On the one hand, he moved with much more confidence, like he was stronger, no longer afraid of the daylight world. But at the same time he could seem sort of dislocated, as if Earth was a new planet to him and every passing car something astonishing to behold.



At times like this she missed the old Rex, who could be depended on to at least pretend like he knew what was happening.



What if they were stuck here? What if this really was the end of regular time, at least for the five of them? What were they supposed to do? Spend the rest of their lives scavenging for canned food and being hunted nonstop by the darklings?



The secret hour was magical, but it could also be a trap; Jessica had already experienced enough since moving to Bixby to understand that. If they really were stuck here, she would never see her parents or sister again, except as pale, waxen statues - stiffs. She would never talk to anyone again except the other four midnighters or feel the sun on her face.



And she would never...



"Oh, jeez, would you knock it off, Jessica!" Melissa cried. "You're bumming me out, and I think something's happening."



Jessica felt a hot flush rising in her face. "Were you reading my mind?"



Melissa sighed. "It's not like I have a choice. Just chill out for a second. The darklings are doing something...." Her eyes closed, her expression changing from concentration to puzzlement, then suddenly to alarm. "Flyboy! Get down!" she shouted.



Jessica spun around and saw Jonathan hovering eight feet or so in the air. He had been bouncing up and down with nervous energy, still thinking of this extra blue time as an invitation to fly to his heart's content.



He waved his arms uselessly, still drifting softly upward, powerless to change his course. Falling that far wouldn't be fatal, but the parking lot's asphalt surface was hard enough to twist an ankle or break a leg.



Above him the dark moon was dropping, sweeping across the sky faster than a second hand. The sun peeked out from behind it, a cold and lifeless eye against darkness.



As she ran toward him, Jessica remembered her lessons from flying and from physics class. Jonathan's midnight touch made things almost weightless, but the rest of the laws of motion still applied. If she could throw something heavy up to him, and he caught it while it was headed downward, its momentum would carry him quickly back toward earth.



But Jessica's backpack was still in the gym, and she didn't have anything heavier than loose change in her pockets.



All she could use was her own body.



She ran three steps and leapt up onto the hood of the car nearest him, then jumped from it toward Jonathan's dangling feet. Her fingers grasped his ankle, giving it a yank earthward.



She expected lightness to flow into her, Jonathan's midnight gravity to take the sting out of her fall. But Jessica still felt heavy, tumbling like a brick toward the asphalt.



Then she realized that she wasn't touching Jonathan's skin, only the leg of his jeans. With only seconds before they hit the earth, there was no way to reach up to his bare hands, to share his acrobat's weightlessness. She was dragging him down too fast.



Jessica let go... and the ground rushed up.



The blue time ended just as she hit, the Oklahoma sun suddenly blinding as she stumbled across hot, black asphalt. One ankle twisted under her, and she crashed shoulder-first against the side of a car. The collision knocked the breath out of her.



Jessica fell to her knees, clutching her ankle and wondering why an earsplitting shriek had filled the air.



Suddenly Jonathan was crouching beside her.



"Are you okay?" he shouted above the noise.



"Ow. I don't know. What's that...?" Jessica's voice trailed off as she realized that the wailing sound was coming from the car next to her. Crashing into it just as the blue time had ended, she'd set off its burglar alarm. "I did that, didn't I?"



"Don't worry about it. And thanks for saving me." Jonathan raised up a little from his crouch, peering over the hood of the car. "Dess is talking to Sanchez. It looks like he's more embarrassed than anything else. I think she's lecturing him about the evils of smoking." He ducked. "He's looking over here, though, wondering about the car alarm. Just stay down."



Jessica tested her sore ankle, wincing as pain shot up her leg. "No problem with that. So you're okay?"



He nodded. "You pulled just hard enough; perfect timing. I wound up with only a few inches of regular-gravity acceleration. And I was falling straight down, so I didn't stumble like you did." He smiled. "Plus I do have a couple more years' practice at landing than you."



"Oh." She sighed. "Guess I was stupid, trying to save you."



He took her hand. "Not stupid at all, Jess. I would have been at least ten feet up if you hadn't given me a yank. That's a long way to fall onto concrete, believe me." He leaned over and kissed her, then pulled away, smiling. "That was really fast thinking and excellent use of the laws of motion."



"Really?"



"Yeah. Like I said, thanks for saving me."



"From a sprained ankle. Brave me."



"Could have been worse than a sprain." He rose slightly and peered over the car again. "They're all sneaking back into the gym now, Mr. Sanchez too. Looks like no big deal."



"What about this stupid car alarm? Someone's going to check it out."



He shook his head. "I doubt anybody inside can hear it over that chanting. Can you walk?"



Jessica tested her weight on the ankle. "Ow."



"Okay, let's just stay here a few more minutes. The rally's almost over anyhow. We'll blend in when it breaks up, get our stuff, and go to physics."



"Sure, great." She winced. "Only I think I've already had my physics lesson for today."



"Guess you have," Jonathan said. He knelt and began to rub her ankle tenderly. At first she flinched at his touch, but then the wrenched muscles began to loosen. "Guess I have too."



"How do you mean?"



He sighed. "Well, it was kind of stupid, flying around when we didn't know what the hell was going on." Jonathan looked up at the gym roof. "I could've taken a real fall."



Jessica reached out and brushed his hand with her fingertips. "That would have sucked."



"Yeah, well, the next time that happens, I'll listen to Rex."



She smiled, amazed to hear words "listen to" and "Rex" coming out of Jonathan's mouth in the same sentence. But then her mind played back the first half of what he'd said, and she frowned.



"Hang on. The next time it happens?"



Jonathan looked at her blankly, then laughed as he worked on her ankle. "Do you really think that whole thing was just an eclipse or whatever? That it means nothing and will never happen again?"



"Yeah, well." She swallowed. "I mean, it could be like Dess said. A totally random event..."



He chuckled.



"What, Jonathan?"



He stopped his massage and looked up at her with a wry smile. "Yeah, sure, could be totally random. Just like all the other totally random stuff that's happened since you arrived in Bixby." He started counting on his fingers. "The darklings go crazy and try to kill you, the Broken Arrows kidnap Rex, Madeleine reappears after fifty years in hiding.... How much more random could things get?"



The car alarm next to them switched off with a two-syllable dweeping sound, finally running out of steam.



"Great," Jessica said softly into the sudden, ringing silence. "The flame-bringer rides again."