Scott Westerfeld

by The Secret Hour

  Dess was mumbling again. “A handsome rendering of the gorgeous Mr. Sanchez, page 214.” She was doodling on one corner of a page, marking up the book and then recording the damage.

  Jessica rolled her eyes.

  “You know, Jess,” Dess said, “Bixby water isn’t just tasty. It gives you funny dreams.”

  “What?”

  Dess repeated herself slowly and clearly, as if talking to some textbook-answer-checking moron. “The water in Bixby—it gives you funny dreams. Haven’t you noticed?” She looked at Jessica intensely, as if awaiting the answer to the most important question in the world.

  Jessica blinked, trying to think of something witty to say. She was tired of Dess’s games, though, and shook her head. “Not really. With moving and everything, I’ve been too tired to dream.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Dess shrugged and didn’t say another word to her the whole class.

  Jessica was grateful for the silence. She struggled to follow Mr. Sanchez as he zoomed through the first chapter like it was old news and assigned the first night’s homework from the second. Every year, by law, there was at least one class in her schedule designed to make sure that school didn’t accidentally become fun. Jess was pretty sure that beginning trigonometry was this year’s running nightmare.

  And to make things worse, she could feel Dess’s eyes on her the whole period. Jessica shivered when the last bell rang and headed into the crush of the loud and boisterous hallway with relief.

  Maybe not everybody in Oklahoma was that nice.

  3

  12:00 A.M.

  THE SILENT STORM

  Jessica woke up because the sound of the rain just…stopped.

  It changed all at once. The sound didn’t fade away, trickling down into nothingness like rain was supposed to. One moment the whole world was chattering with the downpour, lulling her to sleep. The next, silence fell hard, as if someone had pushed mute on a TV remote control.

  Jessica’s eyes opened, the sudden quiet echoing around her like a door slam.

  She sat up, looking around the bedroom in confusion. She didn’t know what had woken her—it took a few seconds just to remember where she was. The dark room was a jumble of familiar and unfamiliar things. Her old writing desk was in the wrong corner, and someone had added a skylight to the ceiling. There were too many windows, and they were bigger than they should have been.

  But then the shapes of boxes piled everywhere, clothing and books spilling out of their half-open maws, brought it all back. Jessica Day and her belongings were strangers here, barely settled, like pioneers on a bare plain. This was her new room, her family’s new house. She lived in Bixby, Oklahoma, now.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said sadly.

  Jessica took a deep breath. It smelled like rain. That was right—it had been raining hard all night…but now it was suddenly quiet.

  Moonlight filled the room. Jessica lay awake, transfixed by how strange everything looked. It wasn’t just the unfamiliar house; the Oklahoma night itself felt somehow wrong. The windows and skylight glowed, but the light seemed to come from everywhere, blue and cold. There were no shadows, and the room looked flat, like an old and faded photograph.

  Jessica still wondered what had awakened her. Her heart beat quickly, as if something surprising had happened a moment ago. But she couldn’t remember what.

  She shook her head and lay back down, closing her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her old bed seemed uncomfortable, somehow wrong, as if it didn’t like being here in Bixby.

  “Great,” Jessica muttered. Just what she needed: a sleepless night to go with her exhausting days of unpacking, fighting with her little sister, Beth, and trying to find her way around the Bixby High maze. At least her first week at school was almost over. It would finally be Friday tomorrow.

  She looked at the clock. It said 12:07, but it was set fast, to Jessica time. It was probably just about midnight. Friday at last.

  A blue radiance filled the room, almost as bright as when the light was on. When had the moon come out? High, dark clouds had rolled over Bixby all day, obscuring the sun. Even under the roof of clouds the sky was huge here in Oklahoma, the whole state as flat as a piece of paper. That afternoon her dad had said that the lightning flashes on the horizon were striking all the way down in Texas. (Being unemployed in Bixby had started him watching the Weather Channel.)

  The cold, blue moonlight seemed brighter every minute.

  Jessica slid out of bed. The rough timbers of the floor felt warm under her feet. She stepped carefully over the clutter, the moonlight picking out every half-unpacked box clearly. The window glowed like a neon sign.

  When she looked outside, Jessica’s fingers clenched and she uttered a soft cry.

  The air outside sparkled, shimmering like a snow globe full of glitter.

  Jessica blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the galaxy of hovering diamonds didn’t go away.

  There were thousands of them, each suspended in the air as if by its own little invisible string. They seemed to glow, filling the street and her room with the blue light. Some were just inches from the window, perfect spheres no bigger than the smallest pearl, translucent as beads of glass.

  Jessica took a few steps backward and sat down on her bed.

  “Weird dream,” she said aloud, and then wished she hadn’t. It didn’t seem right saying that. Wondering if she were dreaming made her feel more…awake somehow. And this was already too real: no unexplained panic, no watching herself from above, no feeling as if she were in a play and didn’t know her lines—just Jessica Day sitting on her bed and being confused.

  And the air outside full of diamonds.

  Jessica slipped under her covers and tried to go back to sleep. Unconscious sleep. But behind closed eyelids she felt even more awake. The feel of the sheets, the sound of her breathing, the slowly building body warmth inside the covers were all exactly right. The realness of everything gnawed at her.

  And the diamonds were beautiful. She wanted to see them up close.

  Jessica got up again.

  She pulled on a sweatshirt and rummaged around for shoes, taking a minute to find a matching pair among the moving boxes. She crept out of her room and down the hall. The still unfamiliar house looked uncanny in the blue light. The walls were bare and the living room empty, as if no one lived here.

  The clock in the kitchen read exactly midnight.

  Jessica paused at the front door, anxious for a moment. Then she pushed it open.

  This had to be a dream: millions of diamonds filled the air, floating over the wet, shiny asphalt. Only a few inches apart, they stretched as far as Jessica could see, down the street and up into the sky. Little blue gems no bigger than tears.

  No moon was visible. Thick clouds still hung over Bixby, but now they looked as hard and unmoving as stone. The light seemed to come from the diamonds, as if an invasion of blue fireflies had been frozen in midair.

  Jessica’s eyes widened. It was so beautiful, so still and wondrous, that her anxiety was instantly gone.

  She raised a hand to touch one of the blue gems. The little diamond wobbled, then ran onto her finger, cold and wet. It disappeared, leaving nothing but a bit of water.

  Then Jessica realized what the diamond had been. A raindrop! The floating diamonds were the rain, somehow hanging motionless in the air. Nothing moved on the street or in the sky. Time was frozen around her.

  In a daze, she stepped out into the suspended rain. The drops kissed her face coolly, turning into water as she collided with them. They melted instantly, dotting her sweatshirt as she walked, wetting her hands with water no colder than September rain. She could smell the fresh scent of rain, feel the electricity of recent lightning, the trapped vitality of the storm all around her. Her hairs tingled, laughter bubbling up inside her.

  But her feet were cold, she realized, her shoes soaking. Jessica knelt down to look at the walk. Motionless splashes of water do
tted the concrete, where raindrops had been frozen just as they’d hit the ground. The whole street shimmered with the shapes of splashes, like a garden of ice flowers.

  A raindrop hovered right in front of her nose. Jessica leaned nearer, closing one eye and peering into the little sphere of motionless water. The houses on the street, the arrested sky, the whole world was there inside, upside down and warped into a circle, like looking through a crystal ball. Then she must have gotten too close—the raindrop shivered and jumped into motion, falling onto her cheek and running down it like a cold tear.

  “Oh,” she murmured. Everything was frozen until she touched it, like breaking a spell.

  Jessica smiled as she stood, looking around for more wonders.

  All the houses on the street seemed to be glowing, their windows filled with blue light. She looked back at her own house. The roof was aglitter with splashes, and a motionless spout of water gushed from the meeting of two gutters at one corner. The windows glowed dully, but there hadn’t been any lights on inside. Maybe it wasn’t just the raindrops. The houses, the still clouds above, everything seemed to be incandescent with blue light.

  Where did that cold light come from? she wondered. There was more to this dream than frozen time.

  Then Jessica saw that she had left a trail, a tunnel through the rain where she had released the hovering rain. It was Jessica shaped, like a hole left by a cartoon character rocketing through a wall.

  She laughed and broke into a run, reaching out to grab handfuls of raindrops from the air, all alone in a world of diamonds.

  The next morning Jessica Day woke up smiling.

  The dream had been so beautiful, as perfect as the raindrops hovering in the air. Maybe it meant that Bixby wasn’t such a creepy place after all.

  The sun shone brightly into her room, accompanied by the sound of water dripping from the trees onto the roof. Even piled with boxes, it felt like her room, finally. Jessica lay in bed, luxuriating in a feeling of relief. After months of getting used to the idea of moving, the weeks of saying good-bye, the days of packing and unpacking, she finally felt as if the whirlwind were winding down.

  Jessica’s dreams weren’t usually very profound. When she was nervous about a test, she had test-hell nightmares. When her little sister was driving Jessica crazy, the Beth of her dreams was a twenty-story monster who chased her. But Jessica knew that this dream had a deeper meaning. Time had stopped back in Chicago, her life frozen while she waited to leave all her friends and everything she knew, but now that was over. The world could start again, once she let it.

  Maybe she and her family would be happy here after all.

  And it was Friday.

  The alarm rang. She pulled herself from under the covers and swung herself out of bed.

  The moment her feet touched the floor, a chill ran up her spine. She was standing on her sweatshirt, which lay next to her bed in a crumpled pile.

  It was soaking wet.

  4

  8:02 A.M.

  MELISSA

  As Melissa got closer, the taste of school began to foul her mouth.

  This far away it was acidic and cold, like coffee held under the tongue for a solid minute. She could taste first-week anxiety and inescapable boredom mixed together into a dull blur, along with the sour bile of wasted time that seeped out of the walls of the place. But Melissa knew the taste would change as school grew nearer. In another mile she would be able to distinguish the individual flavors of resentments, petty victories, rejections, and angry little skirmishes for dominance. A couple of miles after that and Bixby High would become almost unbearable, a buzz saw in her mind.

  But for now she just grimaced and turned her music up.

  Rex was standing in front of his father’s house, tall and skinny, his black coat wrapped around him, the lawn under his feet dying. Even the tufts of weeds seemed to be battling some malign, invisible force. Every year since the old man’s accident, the house had fallen further into disrepair.

  Served the old guy right.

  Melissa pulled her car up to the curb. Between the brown grass of the yard and Rex’s long coat, she half expected cold winter air to rush into the car when he opened the door. But the hideous sun had already burned away the brief chill of last night’s storm.

  It was still early fall, still the beginning of the school year. Three months to go before winter, nine more months of junior year.

  He jumped in and shut the door, careful not to get too close. When Rex scowled at the music’s volume, Melissa sighed and turned it back down a notch. Human beings had no right to complain about music of any kind. The pandemonium that went on in their heads every waking hour was a hundred times noisier than any thrash-metal band, more chaotic than a bunch of sugar-rushing ten-year-olds with trumpets. If only they could hear themselves.

  But Rex wasn’t that bad. He was different, on a separate channel, free from the commotion of the daylight crowd. His had been the first individual thoughts she’d ever filtered from among the hideous mass, and she could still read him better than anyone.

  Melissa could feel his excitement clearly, his hunger to know. She could taste his impatience, sharp and insistent over his usual calm.

  She decided to keep him waiting. “Nice storm last night.”

  “Yeah. I went looking for lightning for a while.”

  “Me too, kind of. Just got soggy, though.”

  “Some night we’ll get one, Cowgirl.”

  She snorted at the childhood nickname but muttered, “Sure. Some night.”

  Back when they were little kids, when it was just the two of them, they had always tried to find a streak of lightning. A bolt that had struck at exactly the right moment and gone to ground close enough to reach before time ran out. Once, years ago, they’d spent the whole hour biking toward a bright, jagged spur on the horizon. But they hadn’t made it all the way, not even close. It’d been a lot farther away than it had looked. Riding back in the falling rain took much longer, of course, and by the time they’d made it home they were soaking.

  Melissa had never been quite sure what they were supposed to do with a streak once they found one. Rex never said much about that. She could sense he wasn’t totally sure about it himself. But he’d read something somewhere on one of his trips.

  School grew nearer, the early morning collision of struggle and apprehension building from taste to clamor, the bitterness on her tongue expanding to a cacophony that assaulted her entire mind. Melissa knew she’d have to put her headphones on soon just to make it until classes started. She slowed the old Ford. It was always hard to drive this close, especially at the beginning of the year. She hoped her usual spot was free, behind a Dumpster in the vacant lot across the street from Bixby High. Parking anywhere else would take thinking. The school parking lot itself was too close to the maelstrom for her to drive safely.

  “I hate that place,” she managed.

  Rex looked at her. His plain, focused thoughts made things better for a moment, and she was able to take a deep breath.

  “There’s a reason for all this,” he said.

  A reason for the way she was? For the agony she felt every day? “Yeah. To make my life suck.”

  “No. Something really important.”

  “Thanks.” The Ford’s suspension squealed beneath them as she took a turn too sharply. Rex’s mind flinched, but not because of her driving. He hated hurting her, she knew.

  “I didn’t mean that your life wasn’t—”

  “Whatever,” Melissa interrupted. “Don’t worry about it, Rex. I just can’t stand the beginning of the year. Too many melodramas all turned up to max.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  The parking place was empty, and she pulled in, switching off the radio as she slowed. Melissa could tell that they were almost late—the crowd flowing into the building was harried, nervous. A bottle burst under one of her tires as the Ford ground to a halt. People snuc
k over here to drink beer at lunch sometimes.

  Rex started to ask, so she beat him to it.

  “I felt her last night. The new girl.”

  “I knew it,” he said, hitting the dashboard in front of him, his excitement cutting through the school noise with a clean, pure note.

  Melissa smiled. “No, you didn’t.”

  “Okay,” Rex admitted. “But I was 99 percent sure.”

  Melissa nodded, getting out and pulling her bag after her. “You were totally scared that you might be wrong. That’s how I knew how sure you were.” Rex blinked, not understanding her logic. Melissa sighed. After years of listening to his thoughts she understood a few things about Rex that he didn’t know himself. Things, it seemed, that he would never figure out.

  “But yeah, she was out there last night,” she continued. “Awake and…” Something else. She wasn’t sure what else. This new girl was different.

  As they walked toward Bixby High, the late bell rang. The sound always quieted the roar in Melissa’s head, softening it to a low rumble as teachers established control and at least some students tried to concentrate. During classes she could almost think normally.

  She remembered the night before, in the awesome silence of the blue time. Even in the dead of normal night she had to put up with the noise of dreams and night terrors, but the blue hour was absolutely still. That was the only time Melissa felt whole, completely free of daylight’s chaos. For that one slice of each day she actually felt like she possessed a talent, a gift rather than a curse.

  Melissa had known what Rex wanted her to do from the moment he’d come into the cafeteria on the first day of school. Every night this week she had crawled out of her window and up onto the roof. Searching.

  It could take a few days to wake up for the first time. And she didn’t know where the new girl lived. Dess had taken a long time to track down, out on the wild edge of the badlands.