“No. Didn’t get that far.”
Jonathan laughed. “About what happens when you flip a coin? Give three reasons why it never stops, even right at the top?”
Jessica just looked at him and sighed.
“No answer at Melissa’s. And Rex’s dad picked up. Couldn’t get anything out of him; Rex must have doubled his meds.” Dess didn’t sit down, just folded her arms and stared down at them. “Waste of a good quarter.”
“What’s the deal with Rex’s dad, anyway?” Jessica said. “It’s so sad, the way he is.”
Jonathan cleared his throat.
“Him, sad?” Dess snorted. “It was sadder before the accident.”
“What do you mean?”
An unpleasant look crossed Dess’s face. “Well, all of it happened before I met Rex, but I know he wasn’t the world’s greatest dad.”
“Oh. Still.” Jessica remembered the drool on the old man’s chin, the lost expression in his eyes.
Dess shook her head. “No, really. Save your pity. Ask Rex about the spiders under the house sometime.” She turned to Jonathan. “You got your father’s car today?”
“Yeah.”
“Anything important happening this afternoon?”
Jonathan paused for a moment, then shook his head.
“Let’s go, then.”
Jonathan sighed, shoved his remaining sandwich into his lunch bag, and pushed his chair back.
“What? Now?” Jessica asked, wrenching her mind away from thoughts of Rex’s dad. “But there’s no way we’ll get back before fifth period.”
“Deeply tragic,” Dess said. “But if you don’t want to come, give Mr. Sanchez my heartfelt apologies. His little eyes get so sad when I skip trig.”
Jonathan rested his hand on Jessica’s shoulder, finally touching her. “You don’t want to come?”
“Um…” She did, but Jessica couldn’t ignore the trickle of fear in her stomach. Trumping the image of bloodstained knives was a vision of her parents’ faces, grim and in a grounding mood. “I can’t.”
“It’s okay, Jess. We’ll let you know.” He squeezed her shoulder softly. “See you tonight.”
They turned and walked away, leaving her alone.
10
12:14 p.m.
DESSOMETRICS
Dess stole glances at her new toy as they drove. The shifting numbers soothed her nerves, reminding her that every problem had a solution, every missing person a location, and every spot on earth a set of delicious coordinates.
Her mind was still buzzing from the weekend. Whatever the others had managed to get mixed up in, Dess had enjoyed herself. She’d spent all Sunday biking around town, watching Geostationary effortlessly reeling off coordinates, turning Bixby into numbers. What could be better?
She’d lived here all her life, but for the first time, Dess felt that she really knew the town, could see its patterns, could map its streets and buildings in her mind. The world she’d grown up in was finally inventoried and enumerated; Dess had done the math at last.
Meanwhile the rest of them had spent the weekend being stalked, trying to stalk the stalkers, and getting themselves cornered by darklings. That was what always seemed to happen when she let them out of her sight.
“What’s that thing?” Jonathan said, glancing down at the GPS receiver in her hands.
She jerked it out of his sight. “Nothing.”
He just chuckled, biting into his third sandwich. “Okay.”
They turned onto Rex’s street, which ran almost due east, and Dess snuck a peek at the north-south numbers stabilizing, the east-west value dropping slowly. After this visit she’d have exact coordinates for both her own house and Rex’s. Maybe there was some pattern in the location of midnighters’ homes.
The car halted, and Dess forced herself to shove the receiver into her coat pocket. She would let Rex in on her discoveries soon enough, but she wanted the math firmly in her head before he cluttered it with his messy lore. Math was pure, but history was always full of weird little gaps and contradictions.
The sagging porch was empty, the creepy old dad nowhere in sight. Maybe Rex was keeping him inside these days.
Halfway across the threadbare lawn, a croaking voice erupted from the house. “Don’t you damn kids know it’s a school day?”
She flinched, then spotted Rex’s face through the front screen door. Not a bad imitation of his father, she had to admit. It was good enough to have sent chills down her spine.
He came through the door, laughing at the scare he’d given them. Melissa followed, and Dess peeled her hand off the GPS receiver in her pocket, resolving not to think about it. Amid the clamor of Bixby High, Melissa’s mind reading was almost as useless as a cell phone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But here in thinly populated suburbia, Dess would have to watch her thoughts.
“So what brings you two to my humble abode?”
Dess frowned. Rex seemed weirdly upbeat, especially if they’d had a messy rumble last night. And Melissa’s hair was wet, as if she’d just showered. She wasn’t in headphones and was even managing to smile behind her sunglasses. If it were any other two people… Dess shivered and reminded herself that Melissa might be listening. Plus there was no way—as in literally No Possible Way anything like that had happened.
Jonathan wasn’t saying much, of course, so she answered, “We heard you had some trouble last night.”
Rex chuckled and nodded. “It’s already in the rumor mill? Man, I love this town.”
Dess allowed herself to smile back at him. They really were okay. The worry she’d been fighting not to feel, that two of her friends might at last have run out of luck in the secret hour, finally evaporated into relief.
“What the hell were you doing out there, anyway? Dumbasses. Weren’t you supposed to be in town?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan added bravely. “We looked for you all hour.”
Rex smiled and waved them over to a quartet of rusting lawn chairs. They sat there together, like a bunch of old farts on a porch.
“I tasted something on the way,” Melissa said, “and we wound up chasing it.”
“Sounds like it wound up chasing you,” Dess observed.
Melissa nodded, drawing her jacket around her, though it wasn’t that cold out here in the sun. “Yeah, I guess it did.”
“I hope you had some decent metal with you,” Dess said.
Rex shrugged. “Well, they kind of caught us by surprise. But we improvised. And Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation scared off the last of the bad guys.”
Dess smiled, delighted to hear it. She’d always thought the old hubcap was one of her best. It had fallen off a 1989 (which was 153 x 13) Mercedes-Benz (which was a tridecalogism, if you counted the hyphen) on 1264 Farm Road (1+2 + 6 + 4 = duh, 13). Obviously destined to kick ass.
“Hang on, Las Colonias aren’t on the way to Jessica’s,” Jonathan said, like he’d just realized that Rex and Melissa weren’t telling them everything. Dess could see that much from their faces. The two were grinning like shoplifters who’d made it out the door and around the corner, pockets bulging.
“No. But I smelled this guy from miles away,” Melissa said. “Turned out to be your stalker, Jonathan.”
“Not only that,” Rex added, “but he apparently works for the darklings.”
Dess’s relief beginning to unravel. “He works for them? How?”
Rex took a deep breath, then launched into the whole story—the thoughts about Jessica that Melissa had overheard, Darkling Manor and the dominoes, the stalker and his girlfriend, the retreat across the street (Rex showing off the dinky cut that had produced the famous blood), then the appearance of the gruesome half-thing, and finally the rumble. Melissa added her own commentary and contradictions for the first half, then mostly just sat and shivered, eyeballs twitching beneath closed lids.