Touching Darkness m-2

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Yes, that’s why I called you here today.”

  “Called me…?” Dess snorted. “I had the wacky notion that coming here was my idea.” Last night Jessica and Jonathan had shown up during the secret hour with a stack of Aerospace Oklahoma geology reports, including a detailed map of the planned runway. During study period this morning Dess had suddenly realized she should cross-reference Jessica’s information with the archive here.

  But maybe Madeleine had put that inspiration in her mind, just like she’d shown Jonathan the route to Constanza’s.

  Dess frowned. If this was a chess game, she had just been demoted to pawn. Which sucked. The whole reason she’d worked so hard on coordinates and midnight was to have her own thing, a piece of midnight separate from the other four, just as they had their private couple realities.

  She took a long drink of tea, its acid taste suiting her mood.

  “Are all you mindcasters so manipulative?”

  Madeleine raised an eyebrow. “Manipulative?”

  “Uh, yeah. Maybe the darklings don’t even care about you anymore. Maybe you just hang out up here because you enjoy pulling people’s strings. And occasionally—reluctantly—reaching out to help us.”

  “Help you? I don’t merely help you, young lady. I made you.”

  Dess blinked. “Come again?”

  Madeleine placed her teacup and saucer firmly onto the tray, with a look so intimidating that Dess shifted on her cushion. Could a mindcaster really do anything to you with her touch? she wondered. Madeleine had installed a mental block in her brain with a brush of her fingers—could she just reach across the tray and hit the erase switch, leaving her a dribbling idiot? Dess’s fingers flexed, reaching for the comforting weight of Geostationary in her jacket pocket.

  “How many seconds in a day, Dess?” Madeleine said softly.

  “Eighty-six thousand, four hundred,” she replied automatically. “Duh.”

  “And how many new students at Bixby High in the last three years?”

  Dess shrugged. “I don’t know… ten?”

  “And how many of those happen to have been midnighters?”

  A shock went through Dess. Two… Jessica and Jonathan.

  “Oh my God.” Her head began to spin, calculating the odds. It all depended on how close you had to be born to straight-up midnight to see the secret hour. But even if a person born within a full minute on either side became a midnighter, there’d still be only one in every 720 people, not two out of ten. And if you had to be born within a second or so, the odds went soaring to about forty thousand to one, which made the chances of two midnighters showing up in a row around 1.6 billion to one, in which case two out of ten was… pretty darned unlikely.

  Dess realized with growing horror that she’d done the thing she hated most, ground her teeth over every day, and constantly railed against whenever anyone would listen…

  She hadn’t done the math.

  “So much for my famous grasp of the obvious,” Dess muttered.

  She thought of Jessica’s mother and her lucky new job at Aerospace Oklahoma, Jonathan’s father and his trouble with the police that had forced him to move from Pittsburgh… like anyone would move to Bixby to get away from cops.

  She glared across the tea tray. “You’ve been jerking people around.”

  Madeleine smiled.

  “And what about us three?” Dess continued. “All born in Bixby within a year of each other? That must be a stochastic fluke right up there with the dinosaurs getting beamed by a meteor!”

  “I have to be very quiet at midnight,” Madeleine said softly. “But years ago I could cast freely during the rest of the day. When a woman is in labor, her mind is very open to suggestion. If she pushes at just the right moment…”

  Dess felt sick to her stomach. Pawn didn’t even cover it. She took every mean thing she’d ever thought about Melissa back because right here, right now, she was sitting and having tea with the biggest queen bitch of all time.

  “It only works one time in a hundred,” Madeleine said. “After my successes, I was exhausted.”

  “But Jonathan and Jessica moved here from hundreds of miles away… Are you saying you can mess with people all the way in Chicago?”

  “From within this contortion I can feel potential midnighters all over the continent, so I knew Jessica was special. And at my age I no longer need to touch daylighters to change their minds. But I did the real work here in Bixby, making sure that certain executives at Aerospace Oklahoma formed a good opinion of Jessica’s mother.”

  Dess narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t her father lose his job about the same time?”

  “He was about to.” Madeleine snorted. “It doesn’t take a mindcaster to make a company called sockmonkeys dot com go out of business.”

  Dess’s skin was still crawling; the feeling of being manipulated… created by someone made her want to flee right down the rickety stairs and out the door. But she had to ask one more question: “Why?”

  “To save Rex and the lore.”

  “What do you mean, save Rex?”

  “He’s older than you and Melissa, and he was born naturally at midnight, a seer. He was my chance to create a new generation. Alone, Rex would have drifted off into insanity and irrelevancy. He needed the rest of you to lead and to protect him from the darkness.”

  Dess remembered Rex’s tales of seeing marks that no one else could see, thinking he was crazy and that the frozen blue world was a dream. She recalled her own awful isolation before Melissa had finally found her. A whole lifetime of being a lone midnighter would have been terrible.

  Of course, Madeleine would know all about facing the secret hour alone…

  “So you yanked around the rest of us just for Rex?”

  “Mindcasters have always recruited midnighters from far away, Dess,” she said. “It has been done this way for thousands of years. The ancient tribes would send war parties to kidnap young children with the gift. And in the last century there would be telegrams with offers of employment. My own mother was brought here as a schoolteacher when I was an infant. This is a dust bowl, Dess. It has never been a populous place.”

  “Oh.” She sipped, her mind still reeling. “I just hadn’t… done the math.”

  There was a long silence, in which Dess concentrated on not feeling like a puppet. Bixby was so small—of course they’d have to bring in midnighters from outside. Otherwise you’d never have more than one every few decades, feebly poking around the secret hour alone, unsure if any of it was real or not.

  Letting her mind drift, Dess found herself disturbed by the faint but growing possibility that she was starting to like hot tea. She wondered if Madeleine was reaching out with her mind right now, changing the neurons in Dess’s head one by one until her taste buds fit the right configuration.

  Or maybe drinking tea was like discovering some horrible new fact, and like bad news: eventually you just got used to it.

  “So what should we do to survive?” she said after a while. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to waste your sixteen-year investment.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Madeleine said. “And my request is very simple: you have to end the threat of the Grayfoots forever.”

  Dess snorted. “Oh, is that all?”

  “Easier than you might think, Desdemona. Anathea is wasting away.”

  “Why? She only lives one hour a day, so fifty years has only been a couple of years for her, right?”

  “They took her too young. The human half of her body is being consumed by its darkling side. When she dies, the darklings will have no way to communicate with their human allies. And with the flame-bringer here in Bixby, the darklings wouldn’t dare move against any of us. I might even be free again.”

  Dess’s eyes widened. Maybe this had been Madeleine’s real motivation all along. It wasn’t about saving Rex; it was about raising her own private army to free her from the castle of crepuscular contortions.

  “So we just wait for t
he halfling to die?” she asked.

  Madeleine shook her head. “They will try to make another, with my Rex. But you must make sure they never do, Dess.”

  She swallowed. “How?”

  Madeleine tipped her head back, eyes closing. For a moment she looked like Melissa when she was casting—her expression sensuous and yet inhumanly distant. “Joining a human being with a darkling is a tricky business. The place where Anathea was transformed must be special, as unique as the spot where we sit now. You must take Jessica there and raze it to the ground with the power of the flamebringer. Once white light has burned there, it will be ruined.” She opened her eyes. “They’ll never make another halfling again.”

  “Okay,” Dess said. “Tell me where.”

  Madeleine shrugged. “I’m afraid it isn’t on the old maps, and it’s as hidden as we are here. You’ll have to find it yourself.”

  Dess chewed her lip, remembering the maps and folders that Jessica and Jonathan had brought over the night before, the black bolt of the runway jutting into the desert, its simple geometry mixing with the swirls and eddies of midnight.

  And suddenly, without knowing precisely where her target lay, Dess realized what had gotten the darklings in such a panic.

  “You know about the runway?” she asked.

  Madeleine nodded, smiling slowly and regally, her expression like that of a cat.

  “Why, Desdemona. Isn’t it a pleasant feeling when your grasp manages to exceed the obvious?”

  On the way home, Dess wondered why she was helping Madeleine.

  The woman had yanked her around like a dog on a leash, manipulating her dreams without asking. She’d boarded up a portion of Dess’s memory and nailed it shut to protect herself from the darklings. And she’d messed with Dess’s mother when she was at her most vulnerable, prodding her to give birth at the exact moment of midnight.

  And she’d done it to hundreds of others too, a host of 11:59s and 12:01s that hadn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye, all to build her darling Rex a posse.

  A car passed, kicking up gravel that pinged through the spokes of Dess’s bike. Her shadow was long in front of her, the last rays of warmth on her back bleeding away. It was going to be another dark, cold ride home.

  Thinking of home, Dess wondered for a moment what her life would be like if she’d been one of those 11:59s. Would she know numbers like she did? Maybe polymaths were people who were good at math anyway, who just happened to be born at midnight. But without the secret hour, it wouldn’t be the same. Sure, she could still build bridges, design computer games, or get rockets into space, but in normal time math was just a tool for engineering. And something beautiful on its own, of course, a frozen music of values and ratios and patterns.

  But in the blue time math kicked ass.

  Being born without that would’ve sucked. She’d be just another kid who lived beside a trailer park. Sure, one who got easy A’s in trig and who knew that one day she was going to leave this crappy town behind and make lots of money in the stock market or something.

  But she would never have forged a weapon like Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations and slain a darkling with it. In the daylight world there were no darklings to slay.

  Maybe that was why she was helping Madeleine. She might be a manipulative bitch, but Dess couldn’t imagine living in any other reality than the one those manipulations had created. In a way, Dess owed the old mindcaster something.

  Like her life, such as it was.

  So at the door, when Madeleine had asked Dess if she could touch her again, she’d said yes.

  “Just a little piece of knowledge, protection in case Melissa tries to touch you. Something to throw in her face.”

  Dess stopped pedaling, her bike wobbling. She let it roll to a stop, concentrating on the ground and breathing hard, trying to keep her stomach under control. But in the end she let the bike fall and ran into the roadside grass, puking up lunch and stomach acid at the memory that Madeleine had given her.

  Had they really done that? Back when they were twelve years old?

  Dess shook her head, tearing up a handful of dry spear grass and wiping her mouth on it. Her stomach was mostly empty now, but she didn’t want to deal with this all the way home. It was almost dark and the wind was picking up.

  “Ada,” she said, and the memory slipped mercifully away. She could feel it just out of reach, however, ready for if she ever needed to burn Rex and Melissa to the ground.

  25

  8:44 p.m.

  DOMAIN OF SPIDERS

  “Here’s your meds, Dad.”

  Rex knelt before his father, holding out the tiny paper cup of pills with both hands. White-rimmed eyes lowered from the TV set to meet Rex’s, filled with the usual anxiety and suspicion. But his father’s trembling hand took the cup, brought it to his mouth, and tipped it back. Rex reflected that dry swallowing was one of the few new tricks his old dog of a father had learned since the accident.

  “That’s real good, Dad.”

  One less thing to think about, anyway. Melissa was coming by at ten to drive him to Constanza’s, and with an extra yellow in the mix, his father wouldn’t be causing any trouble between now and well past midnight. Rex didn’t like altering his father’s prescriptions, but left alone in the wee hours, the old guy was more of a danger to himself than one extra sedative would ever be.

  “You seen my…? You seen my…?”

  “Around here somewhere,” Rex said, rose, and turned away.

  In the kitchen Daguerreotype was waiting by his food dish, rubbing his jaw against the corner of the counter.

  “Clever Dag,” Rex murmured. The old tom always ran in here when the sound of pill bottles being opened reached his ears. “That’s right. Daddy’s got his meds, now Daggo gets his.”

  He wound the key of the sardine can, the dense smell of oil and fish spilling out and sending the cat into an ankle-rubbing frenzy. Rex peeled one slimy sardine from the crush and waggled it by its tail. Daguerreotype lifted a paw halfheartedly, then meowed loudly and looked reproachfully at his bowl.

  “Not the time for games, is it, Daggy?”

  “Mrrrreeow,” came the reply. Eating was serious business.

  Rex flipped the sardine into his own mouth and pulled out six more as he chewed, dropping them into the bowl from knee height with an oily splat. He watched the cat’s ravenous assault for a moment, then wiped his hands, picked up the phone, and dialed.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is Dess there?” he asked.

  “It’s me, Rex. The beagle has landed.”

  “What?”

  Dess sighed. “Jessica’s been here all afternoon. We’ll be ready for you at ten-thirty, all weaponized, like I said. Do you need to talk to Jess? Because we’re busy doing something here.”

  “No. That’s fine. See you in…” He turned his wrist to note the exact time.

  “See ya, Rexy.”

  The line went dead. Rex sighed. This trip to Constanza’s had seemed exciting when he’d gotten the idea—all of them together at midnight for the first time since Jessica had discovered her talent. But now that the evening was upon him, all Rex could contemplate was having to juggle their five personalities all night long, on top of not getting anyone killed.

  “Why weren’t you born at midnight, Dag? Then you could do my job.”

  The cat paused to look up at him, then dove back into the dish.

  The phone call was another thing out of the way. He’d already talked to Melissa, and Rex didn’t see the point in calling Martinez. With Jessica headed into danger, Jonathan would be there on time, if not early.

  He went to his room to prepare.

  Dess was bringing weapons, so Rex packed light. Into his backpack he stuffed the runway report he’d pinched from Constanza’s father, a compass, extra batteries, a ragged twenty-dollar bill for gas, and a snakebite kit (useless for slithers, but useful for snakes). Finally he stuck an extra flashlight into his coat pocket—mostly for
when it got dark, but written on its side in block capitals was the name INTENTIONALLY, just in case Jessica could use it in a pinch.

  Forget reading the lore or seeing the marks of midnight, Rex thought. This was his real job: making sure that somebody bothered to be ready for anything. He stuffed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and bandages into the backpack.

  The sounds of a car pulling up outside caught his attention. He frowned. It was more than an hour until Melissa was supposed to get here, and what he really didn’t need tonight was one of his mother’s surprise visits. She drove down from Norman sometimes on the weekend to dispense advice (and sometimes money, more usefully) and to convince herself that she hadn’t totally bailed after Dad’s accident.

  Rex walked silently down the dark hallway back to the living room. His father wasn’t asleep yet—his milky eyes shone in the restless glow of the TV—but the extra yellow had worked quickly enough that there was no passing mention of spiders. The empty terrarium brushed along Rex’s shoulder in the flickering light, imagined shapes dancing behind its scratched sides. An idea half formed in his mind that it was darker in the living room than usual.

  He peered out the window, praying that his mother’s Mary-Kay-pink Cadillac wasn’t occupying the front driveway.

  There were two vans in the street, their side doors rolled open and disgorging figures in dark colors. Six or seven of them, moving quickly in the darkness, spreading out across the lawn, surrounding the house.

  Rex watched, stupefied. Pointlessly and too late, he realized why the living room was so dark. The stark white rectangles that usually flooded through the front windows were absent. The lonely streetlight that cast them had been broken.

  It took an effort of will to turn away from the astonishing sight of the attackers. As Rex retreated down the hall—first walking, then running—his brain admitted only slowly that the things he’d seen out the window were not part of a movie or a dream. They really had come for him.

  He should have known it would come to this. Melissa had said that the halfling was sick; the darklings would need to create another before she died or lose their link to their human allies forever. They must have wanted to get rid of Jessica before sending the groupies after him, but Rex had made that tricky by messing with the dominoes. Now they were desperate, with only one course of action left: taking Rex Greene to the desert and changing him there.