“I don’t think the lore or memories will help us much. As you suspected, this is a riddle best solved by a polymath.”
Dess swallowed. Had the old woman sneaked a quick peek into her brain when she’d touched Dess’s leather jacket? “Gee, Maddy, I don’t remember saying anything about that.”
Madeleine only smirked at the nickname. “Sometimes, Dessy, it doesn’t require mind reading to know what someone is thinking.”
Dessy? Jeez. Maddy’s revenge hadn’t taken very long.
“Well, thanks. I’ll take a closer look at this when I get a chance.” Like, the moment Madeleine was out of sight.
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….