“Sure, Rex,” Dess said. “But wouldn’t a full set be better?”
He shrugged, not taking the bait.
“Collect ’em all,” Melissa added.
“Listen,” Rex said sharply, “there’s lots more talents than the four we’ve seen, okay? I’ve read about all kinds of stuff, going back as far as the Split. She could be anything.”
“She could be nothing,” Melissa said.
Rex shrugged again and didn’t say another word until they reached the museum.
The Clovis Period Excavation Museum was a long, low building. Most of the museum was underground, sunk into the cool, dark shelter of the red Oklahoma clay. With its single row of tiny windows it looked to Rex like one of those bunkers that rocket scientists cowered in while they tested some new missile that might explode on the launchpad.
This was the first weekend of the school year, so the parking lot was almost empty. Later in the day there might be a trickle of tourists, and in a month or so the school trips would start. Every student within a hundred miles of Bixby made the visit at least three times during their school career. It had been on a fifth-grade trip that Melissa and Rex had first come here and begun the process of discovering who and what they were.
Anita wasn’t at the ticket and info desk. The woman sitting there was new and looked up suspiciously as the three of them walked through the door.
“Can I help you?”
Rex fumbled in his pocket, hoping he’d remembered to bring his membership card. He found it after a few anxious moments. “Three, please.”
The woman took the crumpled card from him and eyed it closely, one eyebrow raised. There was the usual wait as she looked them over, her eyes tracing his black coat and the girls’ clothes, trying to think of a reason to keep them out.
“Anytime this year,” Dess said.
“Pardon me?”
“She said that the membership should be good throughout this year, ma’am,” Rex offered.
The woman nodded, lips pursed as if all her suspicions had been confirmed, and said, “Well, then, I see.”
She punched a key, and three tickets emerged from a slot in the desk. “But you-all watch yourselves, y’hear?”
Dess snatched the tickets and was about to say something, but an older man in a tweed suit came through the staff door behind the desk, interrupting her just in time.
“Ah, it’s the Arrowheads,” Dr. Anton Sherwood said with a chuckle.
Rex felt the tension leave him. He grinned at the museum’s director. “Good to see you, Dr. Sherwood.”
“Got anything for me today, Rex?”
Rex shook his head, taking a moment to enjoy the confusion on the ticket woman’s face. “Sorry, we’re just here for a quick visit. Anything new to look at?”
“Mmm. We got a new biface point in from Cactus Hill, Virginia. Looks like a good candidate for a Solutrean link. It’s in the pre-Clovis case on this floor. Let me know what you think.”
“I’d be happy to,” Rex said. He smiled politely at the baffled woman behind the ticket desk and led Dess and Melissa into the museum.
“Psych-out,” Dess said softly. Even Melissa was smiling. Rex allowed himself a few moments of pride. At least his two friends weren’t ragging him about acrobats anymore.
The museum’s low lighting settled around them, relief from the blinding noonday sun. Rex breathed in the cool, comforting smell of exposed red clay. One wall of the museum was open to the original Bixby excavation, the walkways suspended a few feet from the raw earth. Set into the hard clay, as if never fully excavated, were tools made of bone, fossilized wooden implements, obsidian flakes in the shape of arrowheads, and the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger. (Saber-Toothed Tiger was what the label said, anyway. Rex was certain that his own theories and Dr. Sherwood’s differed on exactly what the beast had been.)
As they headed for the sloping ramp that led down to the basement floors, Rex checked his watch. It was a few minutes past noon; Jessica might already be waiting. But on the way he paused for a quick glance into a glass case of pre-Clovis finds.
The case was full of crude arrowheads ranging from a half inch to five inches in length. Some were long and thin, others wide and barely pointed, like the end of a shovel. Most were spear points rather than true arrowheads. The makers had attached throwing shafts to them, but the wood had rotted away twelve thousand years ago. The newly arrived point was easy to spot. It was almost eight inches long, wafer thin and proportioned like a narrow leaf. It bore the telltale marks of a hammer made of soft stone and all the signs of a skilled workman. He propped up his glasses.
It dissolved into a blur; no Focus clung to it at all. Rex’s face twisted with disappointment, and he continued down the ramp. So far he hadn’t seen anything from outside Bixby that showed signs of the blue time.
In the whole world, were he and his friends really alone?
Jessica Day was already there, waiting on the lowest level, her gaze lost in a model of a mastodon hunt. Tiny Stone Age figures surrounded the elephantine animal, hurling spears into its thick hide from every direction. One of the little guys was about to be impaled on a long, twisted tusk.
“Pretty brave, huh?” Rex said.
Jessica started, as if she hadn’t heard them approach. She recovered, then shrugged.
“Actually, I was thinking twenty against one.”
“Nineteen,” said Dess. Jessica raised an eyebrow.
This is going well already, Rex thought. He’d had a whole speech planned, a regular show-and-tell. He had rehearsed it in his mind again and again before going to sleep the night before. But Jessica looked exhausted. Even with his glasses making her a bit fuzzy, her green eyes bore the marks of a sleepless night. He decided to throw out the speech.
“You must have a lot of questions,” he said.
“Yeah, I do.”
“This way.” They led Jessica to a small cluster of tables against one wall. This was where school groups ate their bag lunches. The four of them sat, Melissa pulling out her headphones, Dess leaning back precariously in her plastic chair.
“Ask away,” Rex said, folding his hands on the table.
Jessica took a deep breath, as if about to speak, but then a helpless expression came across her face. Rex could read it even with his glasses on. It was the look of someone with too many questions to know where to start. Rex forced himself to be patient as Jessica collected her thoughts.
“A hubcap?” she finally blurted out.
Rex smiled.
“Not just any hubcap,” Dess said. “That was from a 1967 Mercury.”
“Is 1967 a multiple of thirteen?” Rex asked.
“Not hardly,” Dess scoffed. “But they made hubcaps out of real steel back then. None of this aluminum crap.”
“Time-out,” Jessica called.
“Oh, sorry,” Rex said sheepishly. “Explain, Dess, but keep it simple.”
Dess pulled her necklace out of her shirtfront. A thirteen-pointed star dangled from its chain. In the dim light of the museum it caught the spotlights on the exhibits, twinkling as if with its own light.
“Remember this?”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed those all over Bixby since you told me about them.”
“Well,” Dess said, “this necklace is Darkling Protection 101. There are three things the darklings don’t like. One is steel.” She pinged the star with one fingernail. “The newer a type of metal is, the more it freaks darklings out.”
“Steel,” Jessica said quietly to herself, as if this made sense to her.
“Basically, darklings are really old,” Dess explained. “And like a lot of old people, they don’t like stuff that’s changed since they were born.”
“They used to be afraid of cut stone,” Rex said. “Then forged metals: bronze and iron. But gradually they got used to them. Steel is newer.”