Blue Noon (7 page)

The old mindcaster smiled. “Let me know what you find, Desdemona.”

“Hey, there’s something wrong with your TV!” Jonathan called. He was hunched over the giant set in the living room, a wood-paneled monstrosity that he’d spent the last hour freeing from a pile of thirty-nine-patterned fire grates.

Dess looked over at the machine and smirked. She was glad to see that Maddy didn’t harbor any grudges against television. Last Dess had heard, Madeleine blamed TV—and air-conditioning, of course—for the destruction of the midnighters fifty years before. Something about watching the tube instead of the kids.

Madeleine stared archly into the weirdly rounded screen. It looked more like a goldfish bowl filled with murky water than a TV.

“Chicken-fried baloney, Jonathan. It’s working fine.” She turned and strode from the room, adding over her shoulder, “Just takes a while to warm up. In my day, young people were more patient.”

Jonathan looked dubious, but something was definitely happening in the television’s depths: a flicker of light had appeared in the center of the screen. It grew slowly, like a fire spreading through a pile of damp leaves, until it filled the dark glass with a blurry image.

“Man,” he said softly. “Black and white.”

“Looks more like gray and gray,” Dess said. The screen was mostly full of snow. You could barely make out the weather guy standing in front of a map, the sweeping Doppler radar circling behind him looking very out of place on the ancient TV.

Jonathan turned a big dial that went
ka-thunk,
and the screen filled with static. As he searched in vain for a channel with a better picture, or any picture at all, Dess watched the little gray pixels dance. She remembered some weird factoid about those little dots of static, how they were the remnants of the most perfectly random thing in all of nature….

Finally Jonathan sighed and
ka-thunked
his way back to the local news.

Dess tuned out the anchor’s voice and took the last sip of her lukewarm tea, a tiny glob of leaves catching in her teeth. The details of the factoid came back to her now: there’d been something on the Discovery Channel (the only television that Dess ever watched) about how the snow on old TVs actually showed leftover radiation from the big bang, the explosion that had made the universe. That’s why the dots were perfectly random—they were the result of a perfect explosion.

Well,
almost
perfect. The big bang, after all, had left a few billion clumpy bits of matter that had turned into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The universe was lumpy, sort of like… tea leaves.

Or the blue time.

Dess’s eyes lit up. She looked down at the map Madeleine had given her. The new shapes scrawled across it were spirals and pinwheels—like galaxies, the dregs of the big bang.

Maybe the secret hour had been created by some sort of explosion, or at least something violent and big bangish, with a similar mix of chaos and order, randomness and patterns.

Dess looked down into her cup. Cosmology was like reading tea leaves, figuring out the future by looking at the remnants of the past. Except unlike tea leaves, telescopes actually
worked.
You could tell where the universe was headed based on the dregs of the big bang.

Maybe she could look at these old maps and figure out what the future of the blue time was.

“Oh, right,” Dess said suddenly. Math happiness wavered in her mind as she remembered something else from that same Discovery Channel show.

The universe hadn’t been created stable. It was still expanding from the bang, all its parts moving gradually away from the center. She looked at her old maps—and saw again how as the centuries passed, the secret hour always seemed to cover a larger area. Maybe it wasn’t just that the old midnighters had explored more… maybe the blue time had actually grown
bigger.

Dess swallowed, suddenly remembering one more thing about the universe. One day it would end, scientists said, either by spreading out into mush, a big whimper, or when gravity pulled it all together again into a big crunch.

Nobody knew which way it was going yet, but someday there would definitely come a big Game Over.

“Hey, Dess, check this out.”

Jonathan’s voice cut through her reverie, and Dess snapped from the end of the universe back into late-afternoon light and musty Maddy-house smells. Jonathan was standing beside her, pointing at the TV. A blurry older woman was talking about how her granddaughter had disappeared.

It cut back to the anchor, who started yammering about a police hotline, an ongoing search, state troopers bringing in dogs. Dess hardly listened, but that word kept being repeated in various forms…
disappearing girl, strange disappearance, she just disappeared.

“Right in front of her grandma’s eyes,” Jonathan said. “As in, she was there one moment and gone the next.”

“Crap,” Dess said. “When?”

“This morning,” Jonathan whispered. “Around 9 a.m.”

“Where?”

He leaned over the map Maddy had brought down, outstretched hand sliding across to a cluster of whorls in the northwest corner. “They said it was near Jenks, on the railroad tracks.” His fingers found the hatched path of the rail line, old enough to be included on an eighty-year-old map. The tiny town of Jenks was labeled there too.

Dess pushed his hand away, and her pencil moved to the spot, scribbling calculations. Rough and hand-drawn though they were, the new shapes that Maddy and Melissa had scrawled possessed their own logic, were ruled by their own patterns and laws. It
was
sort of like mapping the stars, seemingly random points of light that added up to show you the big picture—as long as you did the math right.

The whorls and eddies seemed to rise up from the paper and enter Dess, running like sugar-rushing hamsters on all the wheels of her brain. They made her dizzy, made her fingers tremble as they tried to record her intuitive leaps.

But finally they began to come into focus….

After five long minutes she leaned back exhausted, pointing. “This is where it’s broken.”

“Where what’s broken?”

“The blue time. It’s starting to snap, Jonathan, probably to break down completely. But some coordinates will go quicker than others. And anyone who’s standing around in the wrong place when they do…”

Jonathan sat down next to her, staring at the map with its chaos of scribbled numbers and mindcaster swirls. “So what happened to that girl?”

“Midnight happened to her, Jonathan. It opened up and swallowed her.”

“So she’s where now?”

“Well, she should have come out of it when time started again, when the sun hit her. Unless she was taken somewhere.”

“Melissa said the darklings were headed that way.”

Dess blinked. “They only had twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds.”

“So she might still be okay?”

“Yeah, probably. Unless…”

Part of Dess’s brain wanted to explain the whole thing to Jonathan: about snow on TV screens, the big bang, and the shapes of galaxies and tea leaves. About how you could know how something was going to happen in the future by looking into the dregs of the past, so maybe the darklings had predicted
exactly
where it would happen, exactly where their young prey would fall between the cracks of time. They could have lured her away to someplace dark and underground….

She didn’t have a chance to say a word before another set of images rushed into her mind—also straight from the Discovery Channel—and Dess found herself silent and shivering in her chair.

She wasn’t thinking about the big bang anymore.

She was thinking about the food chain.

Jonathan sat in his father’s car, drumming on the steering wheel. Jessica was late. Halfway down the block, he could see her window still glowing. She hadn’t even turned her lights off yet.

What was she waiting for? Tonight every second counted.

On the phone with Jessica this afternoon, the five of them had planned everything to the minute: Jonathan had driven here instead of flying during the secret hour. Jessica was supposed to sneak out at eleven-thirty, leaving time to get within a mile of the spot where Cassie Flinders had disappeared. Then when midnight fell, they’d be at most a few jumps away.

Dess, Rex, and Melissa were already there, which made it doubly important to stay on schedule. Jenks wasn’t exactly the badlands, and the three were well armed with clean steel, but the spot was too far from the city’s center for them to survive forever without the flame-bringer’s protection.

He looked at his watch—11:38. “Where are you, Jessica?”

The words echoed in his mind, and Jonathan remembered what they’d kept saying on the evening news:
Where is Cassie Flinders?

If Dess was right, the lost girl had slipped into the blue time.

Jonathan let out a breath through his teeth—a day-lighter walking around in their private world. Just when he thought he understood the secret hour, it threw another curveball.

Of course, it was nothing like the curveball that reality had thrown Cassie Flinders.

Rex and Madeleine kept talking like she might be okay. Cassie could have wandered off during the eclipse and wound up somewhere out of the sun’s reach, frozen in darkness, like the darklings were during daylight hours. And once midnight fell, she would awake again, and Melissa would find her, no problem. All they had to do was protect her until the secret hour ended, when a blast from Jessica’s flashlight or—if that didn’t work—the eventual arrival of sunrise would push her back into regular time.

Of course, there was also the possibility that Cassie hadn’t wandered off—that she’d been taken. If the dark-lings had actually known in advance where the blue time was going to wrinkle, they could have flown straight to the spot and taken her away, deep into the desert where no one would ever find her again.

There was a third possibility as well: they could have simply eaten her on the spot, right in front of her grandmother’s frozen, unseeing eyes.

“Come
on,
Jessica…” He tapped one fist against the hard, cold metal of the dashboard.

An endless, whispered count of sixty later, Jonathan swore, checked the rearview mirror for any sign of curfew-sniffing cop cars, and stepped out into the cold autumn air.

New flower beds edged Jessica’s house, her father’s latest project. He was getting into gardening in a big way, she’d said, trying to grow all the vegetables the family ate. Apparently he hadn’t noticed that the season was changing into fall, the ground turning cold and hard at night.

Jonathan tried to step lightly on the overturned earth, wondering if Don Day’s gardening efforts weren’t just an excuse to look for footprints under Jessica’s window. Jonathan cursed his Flatland heaviness; in the blue time he could have just floated over to the sill.

Voices. He ducked down.

He could hear Jessica speak, then someone answering. Muffled through the window, the voice’s high-pitched insistence reminded Jonathan of a mosquito trapped under a glass.

His heartbeat settled a little. Probably only Beth. He eased his head up to peer inside.

They both sat on the bed, no parents in sight. Jessica was dressed, her little sister huddled in pajamas. Beth was still talking, waving her hands around frantically, as if warding off an attack of houseflies. Jonathan saw Jessica glance over at her bedside clock, where the approach of midnight was clearly displayed.

Why didn’t Jessica just get rid of her? On a school night it had to be past Beth’s bedtime by now.

Jonathan raised a fist to the glass, steeling himself to knock. Jessica wouldn’t appreciate him announcing his presence in front of the little sister, especially on the very last night of her grounding. But Beth wouldn’t tell her parents—Jessica’s sister wasn’t that uncool.

Besides, there were more important things at stake here.

According to the news, Cassie Flinders was thirteen, about the same age that Anathea had been when the dark-lings had taken her. Jonathan remembered how small she had been, almost disappearing into the darkling body they had grafted to her.

Of course, Cassie was no seer. She couldn’t read the lore; the darklings wouldn’t bother to make a halfling out of her. She wouldn’t last very long in the blue time, except maybe for the fillings in her teeth.

He knocked.

Both sisters jumped at the noise, the sound of Beth’s voice choking off mid-sentence. She stared at Jonathan’s face in the window for a moment, then focused a cold gaze on Jessica.

As Jonathan pushed the sash up, he heard her whisper, “I
knew
it!”

Jessica just stared at him.

“Hey, guys,” he said.

“Well, hey there, Jonathan,” Beth said sweetly. “Just dropping by?”

“Jonathan!” Jessica groaned. “Couldn’t you have…” Her voice trailed off.

He climbed in and looked from one sister to the other. Beth’s eyes were narrowed, and Jess was staring at the floor and shaking her head. He sighed. “Look, I’m really sorry to interrupt, Beth. But something’s come up. Something
important,”
He looked at Jessica to emphasize that last word.

“You’re sneaking out
tonight?”
Beth said, her whispering only making the words harsher. “You’ve only got one more day, Jess. Do you want to get grounded again?”

“Believe me,” Jessica said. “I really don’t.”

“Listen, Beth, I only need to borrow your sister for…” Jonathan glanced at the clock. “Eighteen minutes. I promise she’ll be back by then.”

Jessica closed her eyes as Beth’s stare swung across to the clock.

“Eighteen minutes?” Beth said.

Jonathan swallowed. Jessica’s little sister didn’t know anything about the blue time, of course, but she had an uncanny way of making you think she did. “Yeah. More or less.”

Jessica stood, pulling her jacket from the bed. “Come on. Let’s just go.”

“
Jessica
,” Beth whined.

“Look,” Jessica said tiredly. “If you’re going to tell Mom and Dad, go ahead. I don’t have time for this.”