As Dess listened, fascinated and faintly sickened, she began to realize why the two of them seemed so giggly today. They were actually still scared, piss-in-your-pants scared, right down to their bones. What they’d seen out in Las Colonias must have kept them up all night—basically too terrified to go to sleep—and finally, after a few fitful hours of unconsciousness, they were as she saw them now: dog tired and still pretty much hysterical.
No wonder they hadn’t showed up at school. Rex was in no shape for the real world, and Melissa… At Bixby High her brain would have melted like the wicked witch in a car wash.
When the story was over, Dess sat back and let her mind wander, stroking Geostationary. Horrifying as it all was, this little tale promised new data for her coordinates project. Maybe these darkling groupies, whoever they were, already knew the shape of the secret hour. They’d been hiding themselves somewhere for the last fifty years…
“We’ve got to tell Jessica,” Jonathan said, car keys already in his hand. “Those two could have orders to go after her today.”
“Relax. It’s not very likely.” Rex had his smug smile on. After a dramatic pause he reached into his pocket, pulled out something, and opened his hand. Resting on his palm was a small rectangle of yellow ivory—it looked like an old domino, just as he’d said, except instead of the dots…
“Huh,” said Dess. It was Jessica’s tag, the lore symbol for flame-bringer.
“I took the liberty of stealing this and a few others. Like a set of dominoes for spelling out human names, which must have been used to tell the groupies who Jessica was.” Rex’s smile got even smugger. “There are hundreds of symbols. It should take the groupies a while to notice that a few are missing. In the meantime the darklings are going to be mighty frustrated if they try to communicate anything about Jessica.”
Melissa rubbed one finger across the domino (perilously close to touching Rex’s bare skin, Dess noticed). “Tastes like darklings and feels old. Maybe fifty years. There’s probably only one set of these, passed down through the generations.”
“Wait a second. If the halfling’s a human, like you said, why doesn’t she just write down what the darklings want to say?” Dess said, the image of the creature that passed through her mind giving her a shudder.
Rex shook his head. “Even through her, the darklings couldn’t think in anything as new as English. The lore symbols are ten thousand years old, older than any language spoken today,” His voice grew soft. “That’s why they had to use a seer.”
Jonathan spoke up, still clutching the rusty arms of his chair. “But who are these guys? Where did they come from?”
Rex shrugged. “That’s what we have to find out. But I think we can assume they’re the same people who did away with our predecessors. I didn’t find any of our symbols besides Jessica’s, so the rest of us should be careful too.”
“But where have they been hiding?” Dess asked. She turned to Melissa. “Why haven’t you tasted this half-thingie before?”
Melissa answered slowly. “There’s something weird about that house. I can’t mindcast in there for crap. The only times I could hear the guy were after he’d left and just before he got back. It’s some kind of psychic dead zone. It’s like the walls eat thought.”
“Location, location, location,” Rex murmured.
At those magic words another shudder passed through Dess, one of excitement. “Take me there.”
Together all three of them said, “What?”
“Take me there, right now.” She pulled the GPS receiver from her pocket, waved it in front of them. “I knew there had to be places like that in Bixby—hiding places. I’ve been having these dreams…”
She came to a halt. They were all staring at her as if her mouth had started to foam.
Dess groaned. “Listen, this little gadget turns places into numbers, coordinates. I’ve been trying to crack the patterns—the way the secret hour is shaped. It’s like topology…” Okay, blank faces on that one. “But better. Oh, screw it. Just take me there and I can figure out how it all works.” She hissed through her teeth at their empty expressions. I just need a paradigm!”
Rex was the first to utter a sound, a low, soft sigh. “Well, you’ve been busy.”
She rolled her eyes. Time for a seer-knows-best lecture.
“But you may not have to go there, Dess.”
I managed to cast around a little bit in the woman’s mind before the”—Melissa’s lower lip trembled—“thing got too close.”
“She’s shared some of what she saw with me,” Rex said. “We may have the numbers you need.”
“Eh?” Dess felt her throat constrict at the expressions on Rex and Melissa’s faces. Shared? Something was weirder about the two than just a little post-rumble hysteria.
No possible way, Dess reminded herself.
“We’ll try to write some of it down for you.” Rex shrugged. “It looks like plans for something being built, something that has to do with the halfling. But it’s mostly a bunch of numbers, so it’s all Greek to me.”
“Arabic,” Dess said absently. Melissa was giving her this look.
“What?” Rex asked.
“Numbers are Arabic, moron.” She tore her gaze away from Melissa. “All the old math is. Al Gebra—as in algebra—was this Arab guy a thousand years ago.” Trying not to think any more about what had passed between the two of them, Dess imagined having a whole branch of mathematics named after her. Dessology? Desstochastics?
“Dessometrics?” Melissa said aloud, a smile playing on her lips.
Dess shivered. Busted.
She waved Geostationary. “I don’t care what you got from her.” Or how you shared it. “This will give me everything I need. Just take me there.”
Rex and Melissa looked at each other, and Dess allowed herself to feel a little burst of triumph as their expressions revealed absolute horror. They really were still terrified, all the way down to the marrow.
Rex shook his head. “Someone might have noticed the Ford. It kind of sticks out in that neighborhood. And we might have left fingerprints…”
Dess snickered at the feeble excuses and gave Jonathan’s thigh a slap. “Come on, Flyboy. We’re going to Darkling Manor.”
He stood, ready to leave, and gave her and Melissa a clueless look. “What’s Dessometrics?”
She smiled. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
11
1:45 p.m.
MORE FLATLAND
“The art of reading Melissa’s mind,” Dess said out of the blue.
“Huh?” Jonathan was passing an eighteen-wheeler, trying to coax his father’s car into doing more than sixty-five on level ground. He was also watching for the turnoff, fairly certain that the directions suffered from mindcaster vagueness. Not that he could blame her, but Melissa had a pretty thin grasp on reality at times.
“Dessometrics. You asked me what it was.”
Jonathan looked at her biting her thumbnail as she stared out the front windshield. She and Melissa had gotten into something back there—a staring contest, it had looked like. “Yeah, right. And you can do that? Read her mind?”
“Well, it helps if Rex is around. He’s the one who gave it away.”
The semi finally gave up drag racing him and slipped behind with an amicable wave from the driver. Jonathan relaxed. “Gave what away?”
Dess squirmed in the seat next to him. “You didn’t notice a certain… smarminess between those two?”
“Hmm.” He decided against passing the next truck up ahead. At this hour the north-south interstate was crowded with Mexican goods coming up through Texas. Even the smallest eighteen-wheeler could crush his father’s car like a cockroach.
Despite how automobile ads tried to make it look, Jonathan had learned this year that driving was not like flying. In fact, driving pretty much sucked compared to flying. Flatland at sixty miles an hour was still Flatland.