The Secret Hour m-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  “Leave this to me,” Dess said, “and the heavy artillery.”

  She ran toward it, the metal shaft over her shoulder like a javelin. The beast reared back on six of its legs, the other two waving in front of it to ward her off.

  From a few yards away she threw the weapon, which burst into light even as it left her hand, wailing through the air with the shriek of a Roman candle. The metal buried itself in the spider, tearing a gash in the mottled flesh. Blue fire spewed from the wound.

  The thing screamed hideously, its bloated body crashing to the ground as its arms waved uselessly in the air.

  “Oh, bleah!” cried Dess. She stumbled back from the spider, putting one hand over her mouth.

  Seconds later a horrible smell washed across Rex and Melissa, dead rat and burned plastic mixed together with rotten eggs. Melissa coughed and gagged, falling to one knee.

  “Run for the pit!” Rex managed to cry. They were no more than a hundred yards away.

  He ran toward one side of the shuddering spider, still clutching the bag of metal bits. Melissa stumbled after him. Dess dashed past the tarantula, whose legs still flailed wildly, heading for the blue arc of the snake pit.

  As Rex ran, the desert before him seemed to be moving, dark sand flowing across his path. The huge spider was sagging, deflating like a punctured balloon.

  “Stop, Rex!” Melissa cried, pulling him to a halt. “It’s not dead. Just—”

  She didn’t finish, choking on the stench.

  Now Rex could see them. Things were pouring from the darkling’s wound, gushing out in a torrent. More spiders, thousands of them. They swarmed in a black river between the two of them and the snake pit.

  Dess was on the other side, still running, only a few seconds from the safety of the still flickering lightning. Rex saw her cross the boundary, falling into Jessica’s and Jonathan’s arms.

  The black river of spiders changed course, flowing toward him and Melissa. It made a harsh roaring sound as it moved, like a truckload of gravel being poured onto a sheet of glass.

  Rex emptied the rest of the bag of metal pieces, scattering its contents in a rough circle around their feet, a couple of yards across. The crawling host swept up to the patch of glittering steel and broke against it, flowing around them like water.

  In seconds they were surrounded, an island in a writhing sea of spiders.

  The bits of metal sparked and sputtered, the outermost pieces glowing bright purple. A few spiders dared to move into the steel. They burst into flame, but more came, crawling across the bridge of burned bodies.

  “How long do you think the steel will last?” he asked Melissa.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. She was looking upward. Rex followed her dumbstruck gaze.

  The other two darklings were coming down.

  They were shaped like panthers. One was right above them, its saber teeth protruding from its jaw as it dove, wings billowing like a parachute behind it.

  “I’m sorry, Cowgirl.”

  “At least these things got me,” she said, “before all those damn, noisy humans drove me insane.”

  “Yeah.” Rex hoped the panthers arrived before spiders were crawling all over him. He put his right fist up to his lips and finally named the steel skull rings on his fingers. “Understanding. Incorruptible. Anticlimactic.”

  Then he grasped Melissa’s arm, knowing this was all his fault, wondering what he had done wrong.

  A second later something barreled into the darkling, and sparks flew.

  27

  12:00 A.M.

  PURPOSELESSLY HYPER-INFLATED INDIVIDUALITY

  Jonathan caught most of the impact on his shield, but the collision still knocked the wind out of him. The darkling’s skin bulged with muscle, as hard as a sack of doorknobs. He heard the thin aluminum alloy of Purposelessly Hyperinflated Individuality crumple with the impact, then the shield burned his fingers as it instantly turned white-hot. Sparks flew from the darkling’s flesh, and its scream rang deafeningly in his ears.

  For a moment Jonathan grew heavy; contact with the darkling had robbed him of his midnight gravity. He fell toward the ground, but as the icy touch of the creature’s flesh faded, Jonathan’s body lightened again.

  By the time he hit the ground, he was almost back to weightless.

  He rolled to his feet, coming up face-to-face with a very surprised Rex.

  “Did you see that?” he said. “Direct hit.”

  On his way out to the Bottom, Jonathan had discovered that the trash can lid was a great flying aid. It was a surfboard, a wing, a sail—a surface to catch the air and control his direction after he’d jumped. In the moments he had soared toward the darkling, Jonathan had used it to adjust his path like a smart missile homing in on its target.

  Something sizzled at his feet, and Jonathan glanced down. The spiders were closing in from every direction, forcing their burning way through the metal. He had landed in the middle of a lake of relentless, poisonous bugs.

  Smart was relative, he supposed.

  “Smells bad out here,” he said to Rex and Melissa. “Let’s jump.”

  “One problem, genius,” Melissa said. She pointed.

  The other darkling was swooping toward the three of them, skimming across the desert.

  Jonathan pulled the still smoldering Purposelessly Hyperinflated Individuality from his hand, hoping its triple-decker name had one more jolt left in it. He crooked the trash can lid in his arm like a giant Frisbee and hurled it at the beast.

  He didn’t pause to see the result, grabbing Rex. He held out his other hand.

  Melissa shrank from him. “I’d rather die.”

  “That’s crap,” Rex said, shoving her forward. Her hands came up instinctively and Jonathan grabbed one.

  A wave of nausea hit him, and he almost blacked out. He could feel Melissa’s mind rushing into his, belligerent and angry but at the same time feverishly hungry, consuming his thoughts and memories, pushing into every corner of his mind. Her emotions swept through him: terror of the spiders, surprise at being suddenly weightless, and, overwhelming everything, horror at the intimacy of being touched.

  For a moment he was paralyzed, but then an irresistible command surged into his mind.

  Jump, idiot, Melissa thought at him.

  “One, two…” he started.

  Rex hadn’t flown with him for more than a year, but the reflexes were still there. They knelt and jumped together, soaring over the spiders. Together they were strong enough to drag Melissa along.

  Jonathan heard the second darkling collide with the projectile, and another feline screech echoed across the desert. But there were other winged shapes coming at them—slithers, at least.

  Melissa’s fingers dug into his, but she managed to fight, snapping off necklace after necklace with her free hand, casting them into the air around the trio as they flew, knocking screaming slithers to the ground. Rex flailed about with his free hand, the metal rings he wore sparking to life.

  The first jump carried them to within yards of the snake pit. Jonathan had to hold Rex back or their next leap would have carried them all the way through and out the other side.

  They skidded to a stop inside the arc’s safety seconds later, and Jonathan let go, letting them drop into the soft sand. Melissa landed badly, an ankle twisting and eyes flashing in the lightning. The venom and agony from her mind drained out of Jonathan, leaving a taste like rotten meat on his tongue.

  Melissa doubled over, convulsing once with a pitiful moan, the fingers of the hand he’d touched clawing the hard sand. Still coughing, she managed to stand and face him, and Jonathan braced himself.

  Her face held an expression he’d never seen before or perhaps had never been able to see. She was so sad, so hopeless. Then the familiar mask of annoyance descended over her features.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Jonathan realized that they’d actually made it back to the snake pit. “You’re welcome.”

 
Melissa turned to Dess. “And you.”

  Dess lowered her gaze, shrugged.

  Melissa turned away from them all. “Thanks, I mean, Dess.”

  Jonathan looked at Jessica, who frowned. Rex put his hand on Melissa’s shoulder, but she pulled away.

  Rex sighed and tenderly pulled off his rings. The fingers looked burned underneath. He glanced up at the moon, almost at its peak.

  “We’d better get started,” Rex said. “Ready, Jessica?”

  Jessica shivered in her jacket. “I guess.”

  Jonathan took her hand. He felt the muscles relax as midnight gravity flowed through her.

  “Jonathan, you help Dess,” Rex said.

  He bristled for a moment, remembering how Rex always assumed he was in command. But he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Help Dess what?”

  Dess cleared her throat. “Help me fix the defenses to keep the snake pit from being overrun by darklings and about a million slithers.”

  “I thought you said—”

  “The defenses are weakening,” she explained. “Something big must have been caught in the lightning arc.”

  “Like a darkling?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jonathan and Jess looked at each other.

  “I did that,” Jessica said.

  A few yards away Melissa snorted, completely back to her old self.

  Dess frowned. “Wow. That’s a trick you’ll have to show me.”

  “Just an accident. Like everything I do.”

  “Later,” Rex said. “Buy us some time, Dess.” He turned to Jessica. “Jess, are you…?”

  “Yes?”

  Rex paused. “Are you wearing makeup?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Come on. It’s Friday night!”

  “No, you look great. Really. Let’s go do this.”

  Jessica squeezed Jonathan’s hand, then turned away. Rex and Melissa led her down toward the dark center of the pit.

  Jonathan took another deep breath, pulling his eyes away from Jessica.

  “Okay, Dess, what do we do?”

  “First, we need the clean metal I brought, which is…” Dess groaned, slapping a hand to her forehead. “In my duffel bag.”

  Jonathan looked around. “Where?”

  Dess pointed out of the snake pit and across the sand, to where spiders still poured from the darkling she had speared, spreading over the desert to form a black, seething sea of legs and teeth.

  “Not a chance,” Jonathan said.

  Dess sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to improvise.”

  28

  12:00 A.M.

  CEREMONY

  Jessica followed Rex down into the center of the snake pit.

  The ground was damp down here. This morning in the library Dess had explained to her how sinkholes formed. Somewhere below them was an underground pocket of water trapped between layers of stone, which had collected back when the Bottom had been a lake. The crust of sand beneath her feet was thinner here than across the rest of the Bottom and had partly collapsed into the pocket of water a few decades ago.

  Jessica walked carefully, wondering if the snake pit was planning on collapsing the rest of the way anytime soon. With her luck, it would probably pick tonight.

  At the center, the lowest and dampest part of the pit, a shaft of stone thrust up from the ground. Dess had said it had been buried for a long time, maybe thousands of years, before the formation of the sinkhole had exposed it to the sun again. The stone had been important to the people who’d fought the darklings in the old days, before the creatures had retreated to the secret hour.

  It was about as tall as Rex, with a flat shelf jutting out from it about halfway up. A little pile of rocks sat on the shelf. Rex swept them away.

  “Kids,” he said.

  “Lucky there’s no stiffs tonight,” Melissa said. She turned to Jessica. “Some nights you have to crawl over them to get anything done.”

  “Yeah, I heard about people coming here at midnight.”

  “They do,” Melissa said. “We like to give them a scare, just to keep them out of the way next time, you know?”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Melissa smiled. “It’s for their own good.”

  Rex was tracing his fingers across the stone, staring intently at it.

  “This is one of the places where the lore changes,” he said to Jessica. “I try to come here pretty often.”

  “Changes? You mean, the lore’s different on different nights?”

  Jessica took a step closer, trying to see the signs that Rex was reading. All she saw was rock, divided into separate layers of different hues. In the blue light they were all shades of gray.

  He nodded. “Yeah. Every time I read the signs here, there are new stories.” He thumped the rock with one knuckle. “There are a lot of tales stored in here, and only so many show up at once.”

  “So it’s like the screen of a computer,” she said.

  Melissa snorted, but Rex nodded again. “Sure. Except you can’t make it tell you what you need to know. It tells you what it wants.”

  “Unless you ask it really nicely,” Melissa said.

  She pulled a black velvet bag from her jacket and drew a knife from it.

  Jessica swallowed. “How does this work, anyway?”

  “The rock just needs a little taste of you,” Melissa said.

  “A taste,” Jessica asked. “As in it’s going to lick my hand?”

  Melissa smiled again. “More of a bite than a lick.”

  Rex turned to Melissa and took the knife from her hand. “Stop it, Melissa. It’s not that big a deal.”

  He turned toward Jessica.

  “A few drops of blood will do.”

  She drew a step away. “Nobody said anything about blood!”

  “Just from your fingertip. It won’t hurt that much.”

  Jessica clenched her fist.

  “Come on, Jess,” Melissa said. “Haven’t you ever become a blood sister with someone? Or made a blood oath?”

  “Uh, not really. More of a cross-my-heart kind of girl.”

  Rex nodded. “Actually, the crossing of the heart was originally a blood oath. They used a knife in the old days.”

  “The hope-to-die part was a lot more literal back then,” Melissa said.

  “These are not the old days,” Jessica said. “And I don’t particularly hope to die.”

  “What, are you too wimpy to cut your finger?” Melissa asked.

  Jessica scowled. After everything she’d been through that night, no one was calling her a wimp. Certainly not Melissa, anyway.

  “Okay. Give me the knife,” she said with a sigh.

  “Let the blood collect right here,” Rex said. He pointed at a small depression in the shelf of rock, no bigger than a quarter.

  Jessica inspected the knife. “Is this thing clean?”

  “Absolutely. Nothing inhuman has ever—”

  “Not that kind of clean,” Jessica interrupted, trying not to roll her eyes. “Disinfected clean.”

  Rex smiled. “Smell it.”

  Jessica sniffed the knife and caught a whiff of rubbing alcohol.

  “Just go easy, okay?” Rex said. “We only need a few drops.”

  “No problem.” She looked at her hand and curled it into a fist except for the ring finger. The knife glistened in the dark moonlight, and she could read the tiny words stainless steel on its shaft.

  “Okay,” she said, preparing herself.

  “Do you want me to do it for—”

  “No!” Jessica interrupted him.

  She swallowed, gritted her teeth, and pulled the edge across her fingertip. Pain shot up her arm.

  As she watched, blood welled up along the cut. Even in the blue light of midnight it was a fresh, bright red.

  “Don’t waste it,” Melissa said.

  “Plenty to go around,” Jessica muttered. She held her hand over the shelf of rock and watched as a drop gradually formed on th
e fingertip, wobbled tenuously for a moment, then fell into the little bowl of stone.

  A hissing sound came from deep inside the rock. Jessica jerked her hand away.

  “More,” Rex said.

  She reached out carefully, letting another drop fall into the bowl. The hissing grew louder as the blood ran. She felt a tremor build under her feet.

  “Okay,” Rex said. “Maybe that’s enough.”

  The shaft of stone in front of Jessica was trembling. Sand was slipping down into the center of the pit from all sides, and she had to pull one foot free, then the other.

  “Is this what’s supposed to happen?”

  “Um, I don’t know,” Rex said.

  “We never actually did this before,” Melissa admitted.

  “Great.”

  “I mean, it’s usually pretty obvious who has what talent,” Rex said, backing away from the stone. It was shaking harder now. Dust rose up from the ground around them, and Jessica heard a huge gulping sound from beneath her feet.

  She imagined the water below, cold and dark and waiting for centuries.

  “So when should we start running?” she called over the rumble.

  With a sharp boom the shaft of stone cracked before them, a fissure splitting it from top to bottom.

  “I guess about right now!” Rex yelled.

  Jessica turned, scrambling upward. The sand slid under her, carrying her back down the slope.

  Suddenly the rumbling stopped.

  The three of them came to a halt, looked at each other, then turned toward the stone.

  “Nice going,” Melissa said. “You broke it, Jessica.”

  The stone had actually cracked in two, a thin fracture running its entire length, but the trembling had stopped completely. Dust swirled around them, and lightning still flashed from the perimeter of the pit, but it seemed almost silent after the earthquake.

  Jonathan landed softly next to Jessica, and she heard Dess running down the slope behind her.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Jessica held up her finger. “I cut myself. Then things got earthquakey.”

  Rex ran back down to the stone. He peered closely at the shelf.