Touching Darkness

"Can't look down on everyone?" she asked.



He threw another rock and snorted, his brown eyes flashing violet in the dark moon's light. "Sure, that too. All that stuff is Flatland. It's like being squashed down into two dimensions." He turned to face her for a moment. "I can't do anything to protect you from these guys. Melissa can still read their minds, Dess can still do the math, Rex can still... I don't know, look stuff up. But I'm useless."



"Useless?" She shook her head. "You're not useless."



"They could drive up to school tomorrow and haul you away, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Except possibly limp after their car." He stood, favoring one foot, and threw another rock, flinging it so hard that it disappeared into the darkness.



"Thanks for the mental image." Jessica frowned. "Is the Flatland thing why you never hold my hand?"



"What?" He looked down at his palm, which he'd been absentmindedly massaging. "We hold hands all the time."



She shook her head. Darkling groupie or not, maybe Constanza had given the right advice. Maybe now, when things were all screwed up anyway, was the right moment to talk to him. "Not in normal time. Not in Flatland."



Jonathan looked dumbstruck for a second, staring at his hand as if expecting it to confess something to him. "Really?" he finally managed.



"Really."



He sat down again, still wearing a baffled expression. "Oh, great. Something else I suck at in Flatland."



She groaned. "It's not that you aren't good at it. It's that you don't ever do it! It's like we don't exist there."



His muscles writhed for a moment under his jacket, as if his clothes were too tight or if something invisible were binding him. "Sorry," he muttered.



She lifted her shoulders. "That's eleven."



They were silent for a while, but at least Jonathan had stopped throwing rocks. The moon began to set before them, dark light glinting from broken glass on the parking lot and Jessica realized they'd have to start home soon. She still had an about-to-scream Beth to deal with when midnight ran out.



What a great night this had turned into.



Jessica stared at the dark moon until her head began to hurt. She didn't want tonight to end this way. Taking Jonathan's hand, she softly began to massage it.



"I like you all the time, Jonathan," she said. "Twenty-five seven."



He smiled back at her.



"Anyway," she added, "if there's a useless-during-daylight club, I'm the president. Unless you tremble before the mighty power of the flashlight carrier."



He laughed, then looked into her eyes for a moment. She saw a decision flicker across his face.



"What?"



He reached into his jacket. "I brought you something."



"A present? Why? For complaining so much?"



"No. Because I knew you'd be upset about Constanza. And because I should have told you. I couldn't think what else to do." He pulled out a slender strand that glimmered blue, coursing fire in the light of the dark moon. "Like you and me, it has no powers whatsoever in normal time."



He handed it to her, a delicate silver chain, its links so small that it came like sand into her palm. Charms dangled from it; she recognized a tiny house, a curled cat, praying hands...



"It's beautiful."



"It was my mom's. I took off a couple of... the miracles, those little charms, so there's thirteen now."



"Oh, Jonathan." She drew it around her wrist, closing the minuscule clasp carefully. "I promise never to throw it at a darkling. What's its name?"



"Acariciandote."



"Um, say again?"



"Acariciandote. It's Spanish. My dad doesn't speak it anymore, but Mom always did."



She tried the syllables slowly, wincing as they went terribly wrong in her mouth. "Does Spanish work on darklings?"



"Gringa." He shook his head, smiling. "Spanish was kicking darkling ass in Oklahoma about four hundred years before English got here."



"Oops, sorry. I never thought about that." She tried to say the name again, getting lost after three syllables. "What does it mean?"



"Funny about that." He took her hand. "It means 'touching you,' like when we fly."



She smiled. "Like always, you mean." She held the bracelet up to the light. "It's absolutely..." Jessica paused, staring past the dangling charms at the moon.



It was already half set.



"We've got to go." She stood. "I can't be late. My little sister's in my closet."



"Huh?"



She grabbed his wrist and pulled him into a dead run along the roof, heading for the edge. "I'll tell you on the way."



They sailed down Division Street, jumping low and hard, leaving sneaker prints on the long, flat roof of a north-bound eighteen-wheeler. A wrenching turn toward her neighborhood sent them thrashing through the canopy of a huge oak, scattering leaves and twigs to the frozen winds. Even though Jessica's arms were covered with scratches, she laughed aloud, happy to be flying at speed again, just barreling along with the ground a blur below them. She felt her worries fall away for a few moments, stalkers and Grayfoots and half-darklings lost in their wake.



They just made it, careening to a stop on her front lawn with five minutes of midnight left, barely enough time for Jonathan to make it home before the freezing wind leapt up again.



Jessica spun him to face her, feeling better than she had since the stalker had entered her life. She lifted Acariciandote, which gave off a faint tinkling sound, the charms still spinning from their flight.



"Thanks for this, Jonathan." She kissed him hard, pulling his feet up off the ground.



He smiled and looked away, shrugging.



"Now get home safe and fast. No walking!" She pointed him back toward town, giving him a push. "See you tomorrow in Flatland."



He laughed and started running. His long strides became half-block jumps until one fantastic leap took him into the air and out of sight.



Jessica watched after him and grinned. Her normal weight wasn't as crushing as it usually seemed when he left her. Maybe things would still be screwed up tomorrow in Flatland, but at least the cool metal of Acariciandote would be around her wrist, a reminder of midnight.



She took deep breaths, letting the thundering of her heart gradually slow while she knocked leaves and grass from her hair and clothes.



With thirty seconds to go, she climbed in through the window, remembering to kick off her shoes as she crossed the room.



"Okay, Beth. Do your worst." She took another deep breath, placing one hand on the knob of the closet door.



Midnight ended as it had begun, late by Jessica's watch, tarrying those same nine seconds before normal time rumbled up through the soles of her feet, blue light and silence draining from the world together.



" - ree, four..." came a muffled voice from the closet.



Jessica pulled it open, revealing Beth with red face and clenched fists.



"Okay, you win," Jessica said, raising her palms in surrender. "Don't scream."



"I'm going to do more than scream, Jess!" she spat, pushing past Jessica and into the room. "When I tell Mom that you tried to lock me..."



Her voice trailed away, the look of anger fading into one of confusion.



"What the hell, Jess?"



"What?"



"You look... You're not..." Sharp eyes scanned Jessica from head to toe, then Beth reached out to pull a stray leaf from her hair. "What the...?"



"That's a leaf, genius."



"It wasn't there. You look different. What did you do?"



Jessica swallowed. She realized that she was still out of breath from the dash home. Her face was probably as red as Beth's. Her hands were scratched from the trip through the oak tree, and her hair had to be a mess.



And Beth was staring at the bracelet...



"Oh, this," she said, hoping an explanation would reach her lips in time. "Yeah, this is what I wanted to show you. But I didn't want you to see where I hide it because it's a such a... big secret. Pretty, huh?"



Beth's eyes swept to the open window, and Jessica groaned inside. It had been closed and locked a few seconds before.



"You hide that bracelet... outside?"



"Uh, yeah, okay. You got me there."



Beth's eyes squinted even further. "You shoved me in a closet so you could jump out the window to where you keep your bracelet? Are you totally cracking?"



"No. But you said something about Jonathan..." Jessica struggled to remember. That conversation had been an hour ago for her, but only a minute had passed for Beth.



"Yeah, that he's been in trouble with the police."



"Right! That's it." She held up the bracelet to the light. "But I wanted you to see this. He gave it to me." The smile on her face was huge, idiotic, and beaming. "Isn't it great?"



"Yeah, sure," Beth said, her eyes still locked on Jessica's. "It's wonderful. And I'm glad that you hide it... outside. In the bushes."



Jessica sighed. "Its name means 'touching you.' "



"It has a name?"



"Sure." Jessica shrugged. "Anyway, thanks for coming by. I'm glad I got to show it to you." She hugged Beth hard. "See you tomorrow."



Jessica opened her bedroom door, and her little sister walked out, casting wary glances back, totally at a loss as to how she'd wound up so confused.



"I'll make sure you get to meet him soon," Jessica whispered.



Beth nodded once and bolted for her own bedroom on scurrying, silent feet.



15



2:42 p.m.



DEAD ZONE



The house didn't look like much. It squatted in darkness, out of repair and covered with twisting vines, shaded from the afternoon sun by the mushroom cloud of willow tree that dominated the front yard.



Dess looked at Geostationary again. This was the place. In fact, the equations that had led her here should have been obvious all along. Once she'd realized it was a base-sixty thing, the math had been easy.



Back in advanced algebra the year before, Mr. Sanchez had taught them how to convert into base two (turning regular numbers into ones and zeros), all the while claiming that this knowledge was going to get them computer jobs one day. Yeah, right. A few more machines in the Bixby High computer lab might've helped more.



But Dess always humored Sanchez, and practicing new bases was a pleasant distraction. It had kept her brain busy back in the days before Jessica Day had come along to keep everyone busy all the time.



After mastering binary (which had taken about 256 seconds), Dess had tackled base sixty because there were sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. So Dess had it down cold that, for example, 2:31 A.M. was 9,060 seconds after midnight.



Of course, what would you do with that bit of trivia?



The answer had come when she'd started playing with her father's oil-drilling maps two Fridays ago. All of the secret hour lay within a single degree of longitude and latitude, the twelve-riddled 36 north by 96 west. But degrees, it turned out, were sort of like hours. They were divided into sixty minutes, and each of those minutes was divided into sixty seconds. That had been the big revelation: if coordinates used the same math as time, then the place where the secret hour happened could be sliced up into minutes and seconds, just like the hour itself.



Looking back, Dess knew she should have realized this before now.



From the mountains beyond Rustle's Bottom, she had often watched midnight roll in. Like dawn, it swept from east to west, carried by the rotation of the earth. And like dawn, it didn't hit in a perfectly straight line. There were bumps and ripples in midnight's arrival.



But the shadows that convoluted the secret hour weren't cast by mountain peaks or water towers. They were actually cast by numbers. All you had to do was start seeing the minutes and seconds that lay in a grid across the streets of Bixby, and it was obvious where the turbulence would arise.



Dess put Geostationary in the pocket of her coat, got off her bike, and pulled off her sunglasses. She was breathing hard. The moment her brain had finished the calculations, she'd practically run out of the school building, skipping last period and riding her bike here at about fifty miles an hour.



Now, though, Dess found herself in no hurry to approach the house. What sort of person would live in a spot like this? Just some random Bixbyite who couldn't afford anything better? Or something worse, like a coven of darkling groupies?



But then she noticed the thirteen-pointed star mounted next to the door and felt a lot better. Realtors always told new arrivals in Bixby that in the old days, the plaques showed which houses had fire insurance. This was only a half lie. The tridecagrams were insurance, all right, but not against infernos.



The star was a good sign. She couldn't imagine darkling groupies leaving a tridecagram stuck onto their house. Her eyes hunted for more reassurances and easily found them: the walkway was thirty-nine flagstones long, the chimney 169 bricks high. Perhaps this run-down shack had once been the headquarters of that Ladies' Anti-Tenebrosity League that Rex was always talking about.



Dess started to lean her bike against the old willow. But then she saw the marks and froze.



A foot long and at least an inch deep, three parallel gouges had been cut into the thick bark. Giant claws had swept through the old willow, like carpet knives lacerating flesh. The yellow-green sap had welled up like blood and congealed. Judging from the size of the claws, the Wound had come from a very old darkling of the saber-toothed variety.



She touched the marks; still sticky. She didn't need Rex to tell her this had happened recently... probably within the last two weeks.



Dess swallowed, the thought flooding through her again that she really shouldn't have come here alone. This place could be hiding anything.



A few moments after Jonathan had handed her the captured coordinates of Darkling Manor, the pattern of minutes and seconds had coalesced in Dess's mind. She understood now why Melissa had never spotted the unspeakable transactions taking place out in Las Colonias. There were dead zones in Bixby, places where midnight's arrival threw up imperfections, like bubbles trapped in Lucite. There Melissa's ability was useless, the shape of frozen time itself too tangled for her mind to penetrate. When Dess had done the math, the numbers on her new toy had led her here.



Right in the middle of the suburbs, not that far from where Jessica lived, this house squatted on the deadest of the dead zones.



Dess stood there for a while, trying to get her teeth to grip the worn-down nubs of her fingernails. Finally, though, she grimaced and let her bike fall against the tree It was broad daylight; no darklings lay in wait. And the thirteen-pointed star showed that one of the good guys had made this his home back in olden times. Dess had worked for days trying to understand how coordinates bent the rippled surface of midnight, and this discovery was hers to make. Alone.



She walked up the path.



The house was standing open behind a closed screen door. Dess pressed a button hanging from the door frame by a single screw, but nothing happened. Lowering her sunglasses to squint through the crumpled and pitted screen, she made a fist to knock.



Out of the darkness, a pale face peered back at her.



They stared at each other for a moment. The old woman was wrapped in a dark red nightgown, worn so thin that it shifted in the barely perceptible breeze that pushed past Dess and through the door. The woman's eyes were wide open, the whites glowing in the darkness, but her expression showed more curiosity than fear.



"Come in," she said. "It's taken you long enough."



16



2:54 p.m.



AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL



Thirty seconds before the scream of the last bell rang out, Melissa's headphones were in place, her tape cued to her lancing song.



She leaned back, closing her eyes. Across Bixby High she could feel fingers gripping the sides of desks, books and pens gathered, backpacks zipped closed under the exhausted and complicit stares of teachers. The minds around her whirred with anticipated routes, the quickest way to lockers, to the nearest door and onto the bus, the fastest way out. The noise escalated maddeningly in the last few seconds and filled her head like a cafeteria chant pounded onto a table...



Out, out, out!



Finally the scream sounded, and the building exploded around her.



"Ooooh," Melissa said. Last bell didn't compare to midnight's arrival, but it was still the second-best moment of her day.



She hit play and tipped her head back. Metal power chords detonated in her ears, drowning out the scrapes of desks and sneaker squeaks around her. She felt bodies struggling past each other in the halls, fingers attacking locker combinations, and unbottled conversations gushing through the halls.



Then the flow reached the doors and the pressure that had tormented her mind all day began to subside, like a lanced boil spilling its runny contents at last.



She sighed, opening her eyes. Mr. Rogers stood over her. The classroom was empty except for the two of them. She snapped off the tape.



"Melissa? Are you all right?"



"Never better." Her satisfied smile only disturbed him more. Last semester she'd trained her final-period teacher to deal with the lancing ritual. She hoped Rogers wasn't going to give her any trouble.



"Do you do that after every class?"



"No, just this one. I like to relax for a moment after the rigors of a hard school day. I hope that's all right with you, Mr. Rogers."



"You know, listening to music isn't allowed in classrooms."



Her eyes narrowed. I don't turn it on until the last bell rings. When class is over. When school is over."



She could taste the answer before he opened his mouth. The rancid butter flavor of a petty mind grasping for control.



"Still, Melissa," he said, "this is a classroom, and I'd appreciate it if you waited until you were out in the hall before turning that thing on."



A sharp retort curled her tongue, but Melissa let it slide. These last few days her temper had become easier to control.



Besides, as her social studies teacher liked to say, there were always productive ways to channel protest.



"Certainly, Mr. Rogers," she said pleasantly. "Do you happen to live in Bixby?"



"What? Yes, over by the Dr. Pepper plant. Why do you ask?"



"Nothing. Just curious."



She smiled. Mr. Rogers lived close enough to visit, one of these nights during the midnight hour.



Asshole.



The empty bleachers reeked of defeat. Melissa never paid attention to football, but sitting here she could tell that the Bixby Tigers were losers and had been for a long time. Her mind was filled with futility and the bleak taste of cheering for a team that didn't stand a chance.



Wafting up from the hidden spaces underneath, she also caught the scent of secret pleasures, along with a lingering fear of getting caught. Lifting her sunglasses to peer down through the bleachers, she saw cigarette butts hiding in the slatted shadows. Melissa could always sense hidden places - the narrow alleys between temporary classrooms, the janitors' closets and basement doors that drew truants to them. They all had the same taste: sweet momentary freedom spiced with nervous glances over the shoulder.



She wondered what was keeping Rex. Bixby High was mostly empty, leaving only the tastes of band practice, a drama rehearsal, and the football team, who were doing mindless calisthenics on the field in front of her. Melissa closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to relish the peace of after-school depopulation.



Suddenly a picture began to form in her mind, a remnant from the scant minutes she'd been connected to the woman in Darkling Manor. Angie - that was her name - full of confidence and contempt for her partner. Melissa had fished only fragments from Angie's mind before the half-thing had chased them off, but here, waiting for Rex, the long benches of the bleachers triggered a fleeting image. It floated before her eyes now: the construction in the desert, a road stretching out into the salt flats until it simply... ended.



It was huge. And it had something to do with the halfling. Angie had never seen the nightmarish creature, of course. She was a stiff whenever it appeared. But she had communicated with the halfling through lore symbols and knew it bore some relationship to the thing being built in the desert... the road to nowhere.



"Hey!" Rex's voice called from below, scattering the half-formed picture in her mind.



The bleachers wobbled as he made his way up, hands in pockets to thread his long coat between the seats. He sat heavily beside her, kicking up his black boots. The sun glimmered along the metal loop of Conscientious around his ankle.



"Hey, Cowgirl."



"Hey, Loverboy." Rex smiled at the new nickname, as he always did now that the touching thing was working out.