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….
She didn’t have a chance to say a word before another set of images rushed into her mind—also straight from the Discovery Channel—and Dess found herself silent and shivering in her chair.
She wasn’t thinking about the big bang anymore.
She was thinking about the food chain.
6
11:36 p.m
SPEED BUMP
Jonathan sat in his father’s car, drumming on the steering wheel. Jessica was late. Halfway down the block, he could see her window still glowing. She hadn’t even turned her lights off yet.
What was she waiting for? Tonight every second counted.
On the phone with Jessica this afternoon, the five of them had planned everything to the minute: Jonathan had driven here instead of flying during the secret hour. Jessica was supposed to sneak out at eleven-thirty, leaving time to get within a mile of the spot where Cassie Flinders had disappeared. Then when midnight fell, they’d be at most a few jumps away.
Dess, Rex, and Melissa were already there, which made it doubly important to stay on schedule. Jenks wasn’t exactly the badlands, and the three were well armed with clean steel, but the spot was too far from the city’s center for them to survive forever without the flame-bringer’s protection.
He looked at his watch—11:38. “Where are you, Jessica?”
The words echoed in his mind, and Jonathan remembered what they’d kept saying on the evening news: Where is Cassie Flinders?
If Dess was right, the lost girl had slipped into the blue time.
Jonathan let out a breath through his teeth—a day-lighter walking around in their private world. Just when he thought he understood the secret hour, it threw another curveball.
Of course, it was nothing like the curveball that reality had thrown Cassie Flinders.
Rex and Madeleine kept talking like she might be okay. Cassie could have wandered off during the eclipse and wound up somewhere out of the sun’s reach, frozen in darkness, like the darklings were during daylight hours. And once midnight fell, she would awake again, and Melissa would find her, no problem. All they had to do was protect her until the secret hour ended, when a blast from Jessica’s flashlight or—if that didn’t work—the eventual arrival of sunrise would push her back into regular time.