Jessica looked at the three of them blankly. This dream was getting weirder and weirder.
“You’re welcome,” said Dess.
“Be quiet,” the boy said breathlessly. “Are you okay?”
It took a moment for Jessica to realize that the question was directed at her. She blinked again and nodded dumbly. Her feet hurt and she was out of breath, but she was okay. Physically, anyway.
“Sure, I’m fine. I guess.”
“Don’t worry about psychokitty; it’s gone for the night,” Dess said, looking after the departed panther. She turned to the boy. “What was it, Rex?”
“Some kind of darkling,” he said.
“Well, duh,” Dess said.
Both of them looked at the other girl. She shook her head, rubbing her eyes with one hand. “It tasted very old, maybe even from before the Split.”
Rex whistled. “That’s old, all right. It must be insane by now.”
The girl nodded. “A few fries short of a Happy Meal. But still crafty.”
Dess dropped her bike to the ground and walked over to where the cat had stood. “Whatever it was, it turned out to be no match for the mighty power of Hypochondriac.”
She knelt and plucked a dark disk of metal from the ground.
“Ouch!” Dess passed it from hand to hand, grinning. “Still sparky.”
It looked like an old hubcap, blackened by fire. Was that the dazzling flying saucer of a minute ago?
Jessica shook her head, dazed but slowly calming down. She was breathing evenly now. Everything was moving into more familiar dream territory: total craziness.
Rex rested his bike on the street and walked to the side of the car. Jessica shrank from him a little, and he put up both palms.
“It’s okay,” he said softly, “but you should probably get off the car. It looks like it’s going pretty fast.”
“Come on,” Dess said, looking up at the sky. “It’s like a quarter till.”
“It’s still not a good habit, Dess,” he said. “Especially when you’re new.”
He offered his hand. Jessica looked down suspiciously at the ground, but there were no snakes apparent. She saw the same shiny ankle bracelets that Dess wore looped around Rex’s boots. The other girl had them too, rings of metal piled up around her black sneakers.
She looked at her own bare feet.
“Don’t worry, the slithers are gone.”
“They departed somewhat overzealously,” Dess said, giggling. Her eyes were wide, as if the encounter with the panther had been some exciting fairground ride.
Jessica ignored Rex’s hand and slid off the car hood toward the front. She pushed off from the bumper and took a few quick steps away, peering into the shadows beneath it. But the snakes did seem to have disappeared.
“I wouldn’t stand in front of it either,” Rex suggested mildly. He looked at the tires. “It’s probably going about fifty miles an hour.”
Jessica followed his gaze and saw that the tires weren’t actually round. They were oval, compressed out of shape and tipped slightly forward. They looked how wheels in motion were drawn in cartoons. But the car was absolutely still. The driver still wore the exact same expression, oblivious to the strange events going on around her.
Rex pointed up at the dark moon. “And when that bad boy goes down, it’ll jump back into regular motion. No hurry, like Dess said, but good to keep in mind.”
Something about Rex’s calm voice annoyed Jessica. Possibly the fact that nothing he said made any sense whatsoever.
She looked up at the moon. It was still moving across the sky quickly, almost half set.
A gasp came from the other three. She dropped her gaze to them. They stared back at her.
“What is it?” Jessica asked sharply. She’d had enough of their weirdness.
The girl whose name she didn’t know took a step closer to Jess, peering closely at her face with an appalled expression.
“Your eyes are wrong,” the girl said.
10
12:00 A.M.
MIDNIGHTERS
“My eyes are what?”
“They’re…” The girl took a step closer, peering into Jessica’s eyes. Jessica raised a hand to her own face, and the girl flinched as if afraid of being touched, then looked up at the sky with a puzzled expression.
As her eyes met the moon, Jessica cried out. They flashed a deep indigo, just like the panther’s.
Jessica took a step back from the three of them. Those reflecting eyes belonged to cats or raccoons, owls or foxes—things that hunted in the dark. Not people. The girl’s eyes looked normal now, but after that momentary reflection, she seemed less human.
“Melissa’s right,” Dess said.
Rex quieted the other two with a wave of his hand. He took a step closer, peering into Jessica’s eyes with a calm intensity.
“Jessica,” he said quietly, “look up at the moon, please.”
She did so for a few seconds but dropped her eyes back to Rex suspiciously.
“What color is it?” he asked.
“It’s…” She looked up again, shrugged. “No color. And it gives me a headache.”
“Her eyes are wrong,” repeated the other girl, whom Dess had called Melissa.
Dess piped up. “Today she said the sun doesn’t bother her. I told you she was totally daylight. No dark glasses or anything.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Jessica suddenly cried, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to shout, but the words had launched themselves out of her.
The startled looks on the others’ faces were somehow satisfying.
“I mean—,” she sputtered. “What’s going on? What are you talking about? And what are you doing in my dream?”
Rex stepped back and put up his hands. Dess giggled but half turned away as if embarrassed. Melissa cocked her head.
“Sorry,” Rex said. “I should have told you: this isn’t a dream.”
“But—” Jessica started, but sighed, knowing suddenly that she believed him. The pain, the fear, the feel of her heart pumping in her chest had all been too real. This was not a dream. It was a relief not to pretend to herself anymore.
“What is it, then?”
“This is midnight.”
“Say again?”
“Midnight,” he repeated slowly. “It’s 12 a.m. Since the world changed color, this has all happened in a single moment.”
“A single moment…”
“Time stops for us at midnight.”
Jessica peered through the car windshield at the frozen woman at the wheel. The look of concentration on her face, the hands tight on the wheel… She did look as if she were driving but trapped in a frozen instant.
Dess spoke up next, her voice without its usual nasty edge. “There aren’t really twenty-four hours in the day, Jessica. There are twenty-five. But one of them is rolled up too tight to see. For most people it flashes by in an instant. But we can see it, live in it.”
“And ‘we’ includes ‘me’?” Jessica said quietly.
“When were you born?” Rex asked.
“Huh? You mean this is because I’m a Leo?”
“Not your birthday, what time of day?”
Jessica pondered the question, remembering how many times Mom and Dad had told this story.
“My mom went into labor in the afternoon, but I wasn’t born until thirty-something hours later. Not until late the next night.”
Rex nodded. “Midnight, to be exact.”
“Midnight?”
“Sure. One out of every 43,200 people is born within one second of midnight,” Dess said, smiling happily. “Of course, we’re not exactly sure how close you have to get. And we’re talking real midnight here.”
“Yeah. My birth certificate says 1 a.m.,” Melissa said glumly. “Lousy daylight savings time.”