Scott Westerfeld

by The Secret Hour

“She didn’t look fine, Jonathan.”

  “That was an accident, like she told you.”

  “Well, if she says any different, or her parents do, you are going to be one unhappy hombre, Martinez.”

  Jonathan turned away and stared out the window. The first time he’d taken Jessica flying, and they’d wound up going home in police cars. He couldn’t imagine being unhappier than he already was.

  His usual postmidnight hunger descended on him. Jonathan checked his jacket pockets, but the apples were gone. They must have fallen out during the chase. He decided to eat a whole jar of peanut butter when he got home.

  The fence around Aerospace Oklahoma was traveling past the police car window, the coiled razor wire pulsing in the passing streetlights. If they’d only jumped a little farther or come down quicker, they would have landed on some other street. The police car would never have seen them.

  He saw a street sign and started.

  “Hey, which way are we going?”

  St. Claire chuckled. “Glad you noticed, Jonathan. See, I already had my little chat with your father, and he and I have come to an agreement.”

  A sickening feeling began to come over Jonathan. Breathing became harder, as if the pull of gravity were steadily increasing.

  “You see, in the state of Oklahoma, if a parent feels unable to take charge of their delinquent child, they can request that the child remain in police custody.”

  “What?” Jonathan cried. “But my dad—”

  “Can’t seem to make it down here tonight. Previous engagement, I think.”

  “For how long?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just until a judicial hearing officer listens to the particulars of the case. Your dad has to show up for that, and I’m sure he’ll take you home as soon as you’ve met the JHO and promised to be good.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  The man laughed sharply, the sound as loud as a dog’s bark in the cramped backseat. “Martinez, I never kid. It’s time you learned a little lesson about the perils of breaking curfew.”

  The claustrophobic feeling began to overwhelm Jonathan. The car felt tiny and overheated, the barred partition between the front and back seats turning it into a cage. His stomach churned with nerves and hunger. “You mean I’m spending the night in jail?” he asked softly.

  “The night? Not just one, Jonathan. You see, unlike your friendly sheriff’s department, judicial hearing officers don’t work on the weekend.”

  “What?”

  “Your butt is mine until Monday morning.”

  16

  1:16 A.M.

  GROUNDED

  The strange thing was, Jessica’s dad was a lot more upset than her mom.

  Mom had answered the door in her unpacking clothes—she must have still been working on the kitchen. She had talked to the police quietly and thanked them for bringing her daughter home. Never raising her voice, she’d told Jessica to wait in the kitchen while she woke Dad up.

  Dad had flipped.

  He was still wide-eyed, his hair standing on end from frantically running his hands through it. Mom had repeatedly told him not to wake Beth up, but Jessica couldn’t imagine her little sister sleeping through his yelling. What freaked him out the most was the bruise on her face, which she could feel was just starting to show.

  There were times, though, when it was good to have an engineer for a mother. Mom had quickly noticed that every bang and bump on Jessica was accompanied by a grass stain. Even the skinned patch on her bare elbow was marked by a circle of green. There was still grass in her hair. She looked like a ten-year-old after a long summer day.

  “So, you really did fall, didn’t you, sweetheart?”

  Jessica nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak yet. She’d already been such a wimp when the police had come, bawling her eyes out in the back of the car. Jonathan had been totally calm.

  She’d messed everything up. Being the world’s worst darkling magnet, not hanging on to Jonathan’s hand and falling from their jump, looking like this when the cops showed up.

  “You look like you rolled down a hill, Jessica.”

  “Yeah,” she managed. “Just playing.”

  “Just playing!” Dad repeated loudly. He started up again every time she said anything, as if he couldn’t bear to hear her voice.

  “Don.” Mom’s voice sometimes had an edge with Dad that she never used on Jessica or Beth. He didn’t say another word but sat there pulling on his hair.

  Jessica took a breath, looking down at her knees. They hurt. The overall ache of her body was dividing up now into individual pains. One of the bumps would hurt for a while, then take a rest while another took over, like a bunch of smaller tag-team wrestlers whaling away on one of the big guys. Right now the bruise on her cheek was throbbing with her heartbeat, making her face feel lopsided and grotesque. She touched it gently.

  Mom sprayed some ouchy stuff on a washcloth and rubbed it again.

  “Jessica, tell me what happened. When did you leave?”

  Jessica swallowed. The last time she’d seen her parents was right after dinner. “Jonathan came by about ten. I thought we were just going for a short walk.”

  “But the police said you were over by Aerospace around midnight. People can’t walk more than a couple of miles an hour.”

  Jessica sighed. There were other times when having an engineer for a mom could be a pain. Bixby wasn’t that big, but Mom worked on the other side of town. Jessica didn’t know exactly how many miles away.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, it was right after I went to bed.”

  “That was way before ten, Jessica. Right after dinner,” her father said. “I thought it was weird how early you went to bed. Did you know he was coming over?”

  “No. He just came by.”

  “And you just went for a walk with him?”

  “He’s in my physics class.”

  “The police said he’s a year older than you,” Mom said.

  “My advanced physics class.”

  That shut her up. But Dad was going again.

  “Why did you go to bed so early?”

  “I was tired from working today.”

  “Were you really at the museum all day? Or with him?”

  “I was at the museum. He wasn’t there.”

  He nodded. “Doing a whole day’s worth of homework in the first week of school? Can we see this homework?”

  She swallowed. There was nothing to show them. She’d taken a few notes but had solemnly promised Rex never to show them to anyone. When had she started lying to her parents? When the world had stopped making sense, maybe.

  “I was doing research.”

  “On what?”

  “On the possible connection between the tool-making techniques of Solutrean Stone Age culture in southern Spain and certain pre-Clovis spear points found in Cactus Hill, Virginia,” she blurted.

  Dad’s mouth dropped open.

  Jessica blinked, surprised at her own words. Apparently some of her crash diet of midnighter lore had managed to stick in her head. She remembered Rex showing her the long case of gradually evolving spear points and the gap in the middle where everything had changed at once.

  “There was a technological leap in New World spear points around twelve thousand years ago,” she said with quiet focus. At least talking about this stuff didn’t make her want to cry. It made her feel in control. “An improved meridian groove and a sharper edge. Some people think that the advanced technique somehow came over from Europe.”

  “It’s okay, honey. We believe you,” Mom said, patting her hand. “You’re sure Jonathan didn’t take you anywhere in a car?”

  “I’m positive. We just wound up walking much farther than I thought we would. Really.”

  “You know this boy’s been in trouble with the police before.”

  Jessica shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, you do now. And you are never going to leave this house again without
telling us, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’re not going anywhere except school for the next month,” Dad added.

  Mom looked unhappy with this for a split second, but she nodded.

  “I’d like to go to bed now,” Jessica said.

  “Okay, sweetie.”

  Mom led her back to her bedroom and kissed her good night.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay. It’s dangerous out there, Jessica.”

  “I know.”

  17

  11:59 P.M.

  REVELATIONS

  The walls were painted a deep purple that turned black during the secret hour. A blackboard hung on one, where Dess did her calculations in red chalk on those rare occasions when she couldn’t do them in her head. On another wall was a self-portrait Dess had made out of Legos by fitting gray, black, and white elements together, like the pixels on a computer screen. She had been meaning to do an updated picture, now that she had dyed her hair and cut it shorter, but the thought of breaking up all those Legos and starting over was too daunting. Besides, unlike a computer image, there was no way to save the original.

  In the center of the room was a music box, on which a motionless ballerina stood. The ballerina’s pink tutu had long been replaced by dark purple gauze, her blond hair inked black, and tiny metal jewelry added to complete the outfit, which Dess had made out of soldered paper clips. The ballerina’s name was Ada Lovelace. The guts of the music box were open so that Dess could change Ada’s movements by switching around the gears. She had also filed off some of the tiny studs on the rotating drum that played the music, making it a little less sweet and predictable. The altered tune had no beginning or end, just a random series of pings to match any choreography.

  Tonight the room smelled of burning metal.

  Dess had been working all day on a weapon. It had started life as a microphone stand, which she’d found at a music store. She had stopped by to get steel guitar strings for tracing out protective patterns on her doors and windows. But when she saw the stand, Dess had decided to blow all her summer-job savings. Buying the metal brand-new guaranteed that it was clean, untouched by inhuman hands, although a lot of thirteen-year-olds had probably played rock star with it. (Dess herself had mimed exactly one song in front of her mirror with it before starting work.)

  The stand could be adjusted for short and tall singers, from six feet long down to three, and it was very light with the heavy round base removed. Dess had never named anything this big before, but its proportions were mathematically perfect. Extended to its full length, it felt more like a real weapon than anything she’d ever made before.

  She wondered if the darklings still had nightmares about spears, the weapons that Stone Age humans had used against them. Melissa always said the darklings had very long memories.

  Dess had spent all Sunday adding small symbols to the shaft of the stand, mathematical glyphs and clusters of carefully patterned dots. She had even copied a few shapes from the local cave scratchings, supposedly created to memorialize a successful hunt ten thousand years ago. She’d worked until she had completed thirty-nine little pictures altogether, the ultimate antidarkling number.

  Her soldering iron still smoldered in one corner, a white sliver of smoke winding up to the ceiling from its tip. As the candlelight in her room faded to midnight blue around her, Dess watched the smoke freeze into place, its snakelike undulations suddenly arrested. In the blue light it glowed against the black walls, as delicate and luminescent as a strand of spiderweb caught by sunlight.

  Dess reached out one finger to touch it. A finger-width segment of the smoke detached itself and traveled upward to the ceiling.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Makes sense.”

  Just like anything caught in the midnight freeze, the smoke particles were released by her touch. But the hot smoke was lighter than air, so it rose instead of falling.

  She hefted the stand. In the blue light it looked like a fine weapon.

  If tonight’s secret hour was anything like last night’s, she was going to need it.

  Only one more step: Dess wanted to give the spear a thirty-nine-letter name, but one that worked. A single word wasn’t going to cut it. She’d only ever found a few chemical names that length, words used only by scientists, and they didn’t seem to have much kick in the blue time. Not even slithers were afraid of names like benzohydroxypentalaminatriconihexadrene, possibly because they were generally found among the ingredients of Twinkies. But maybe a phrase made up of three thirteen-letter words would do the trick. Dess sat gazing into the tiny pictures along the microphone stand’s length for a few minutes, letting words roll through her mind.

  The other midnighters had to use dictionaries, but for a polymath it was automatic. For her, thirteen-letter words had their own smell, their own color, and stood out like ALL CAPITALS in her head. It was only a few moments before the perfect trio of tridecalogisms came into her mind.

  She held the weapon close and whispered to it, “Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations.”

  As agreed, Dess rode to meet Rex at his house. He lived closer to Jess, and if one of them was going to be caught alone, she could handle it best. Melissa was staying home tonight, scanning the psychic landscape to try to get a feel for what was happening out in the badlands.

  “You okay?” Rex said as Dess pulled up onto his threadbare lawn. He’d been waiting outside in a small circle of thirteen-rock piles.

  “Yeah. Tonight’s not as bad as last. At least, not here in town.”

  The lore site they’d been to the night before was very old, far out in the badlands. The slithers had followed them from the beginning, in the air and on the ground. They’d seemed to grow in number every time Dess looked up. All kinds of flying darklings had made appearances, their hideous and unfamiliar silhouettes crowding the moon. Two darklings had even tried to mess with them, probing the defenses she’d set up around the lore site. Things might have gotten ugly, but about fifteen minutes before moonset they had all left, as if suddenly remembering an appointment. It had all been very strange and unsettling.

  “Let’s get going,” she urged Rex. Dess didn’t like the idea of Jessica all alone. Thumbtacks might not cut it tonight.

  Of course, she might not be alone, Dess thought with a quiet smile. Wouldn’t that be a nice little surprise for Rex.

  Rex took a good look around before getting on his bike. “I just hope it stays quiet. I wonder where all those darklings came from. I had no idea there were so many big ones.”

  Dess nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. Want to hear a theory?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Darklings look like panthers or tigers, right? Except when they get all freaky like they were last night.”

  “Yeah. The lore says they’re related to the big cats—lions and tigers—like we are to apes.”

  “Okay,” Dess continued. “Well, my lore, which would be the Discovery Channel, says that cats spend a big percentage of the day sleeping. Take lions. They sleep twenty-two hours a day, lolling around, tails twitching to keep away flies, maybe yawning out the occasional territorial roar, but basically semiconscious.”

  “Twenty-two hours of sleep a day? That sounds like my dad’s cat.”

  “So that leaves just two hours awake, right? For one of those hours they do kitty maintenance: lick themselves, play-fight other members of the pride, whatever. They hunt for only one hour out of twenty-four.”

  Rex whistled. “That’s the life. A five-hour workweek.”

  “Seven,” Dess corrected. “They don’t get weekends.”

  “Harsh.”

  “So here’s the thing. If darklings are like big cats, then they probably only hunt for one hour a day.”

  “Sure,” Rex agreed.

  “But what’s a day for a darkling?”

  Rex pondered as he rode, recalling his precious lore. “Well, the darklings only live one hour in twenty-five, the secret hour. They’re fr
ozen for the rest, like regular people are frozen during the blue time. So it takes them twenty-five of our days to live a single day in their life. That’s part of why they live so long.”

  “Right,” Dess said. “So, a darkling probably sleeps for twenty-three of our days in a row.”

  Rex’s bike wobbled. She could tell he hadn’t thought this through before. She shook her head. People’s lives would be so much simpler if every once in a while they bothered to do the math.

  “And that means,” he said slowly, “that they only hunt about once a month. Like a werewolf in mythology.”

  “Exactly. That must be where the whole full-moon thing comes from. Except darklings hunt once every 3.571429 weeks, not every four. But who’s counting? In any case, this means that there’s a lot more darklings than we thought, because most of them are sleeping most of the time. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. For every one hunting, another twenty-three are asleep.”

  Dess let Rex soak in this information for a while.

  Finally he said, “So the question isn’t, ‘Where did they all come from?’”

  “Right,” she answered. “The question is, ‘Why did they all wake up?’”

  When Jessica answered the knock on her window, she looked disappointed to see them.

  “Expecting someone else?” Dess asked.

  “Kind of,” Jessica said quietly.

  Rex didn’t notice or thought she and Jess were kidding. Dess wondered exactly what had happened last night.

  She had called Jonathan’s house today to see if he’d followed through on his threat to visit Jess during the blue time. But no one had answered the phone all day. She wasn’t worried—Jonathan could take care of himself better than any of them—but Dess wanted to hear the scoop.

  “Well, we’ve got big news for you,” she said.

  “Come on in,” Jessica said, sliding the window open. Dess jumped through and reached back to give Rex a hand up. It occurred to her that they could just use the front door, but something about the blue time made everyone want to whisper, plot, and sneak.

  Jessica sat slumped on her bed. She looked tired and bummed. Apparently it hadn’t been the best first date ever. Maybe darklings had crashed the party.