“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.