Blue Noon (14 page)

“Shhh!” Constanza hissed. “Could we please all remember about the top secret thing?” Then she turned and called out in a normal voice, “Sorry, Ms. Thomas. We’ll try to be more quiet.” She glared at Jen. “Especially you.”

“Wait a second,” Jessica said. “Why is this all a big secret?”

“Well, believe it or not,” Constanza said. “I haven’t mentioned the weirdest part of this yet.” She paused, waiting until all eyes were on her again. “It’s like this whole moving-to-LA thing just appeared out of nowhere. Grandpa hasn’t even talked to my parents about it yet. But in the meantime he says that there’s this agent who needs somebody like me right away, for some new TV show or something. So first I’m going to go ‘visit’ Grandpa out there, supposedly just for a week or so. I can audition then, and if I get the part, I’m not coming back!”

Everyone was quiet for a moment as Constanza’s words gradually sank in. Jessica felt her own pulse pounding in her fingertips and saw Dess lower her book slowly so that she could see the other girls. Even Ms. Thomas shot them a glance, intrigued by their sudden silence.

Liz spoke first. “Right away?”

“Like… when?” Maria asked.

Constanza shook her head, her mouth slightly open, as if she still couldn’t believe it herself. “Well, they’re holding auditions in a couple of weeks, right about when Grandpa and my cousins are all moving out there. So he said I have to be there before the end of this month or the whole thing’s off. So in a couple of weeks or so, it’s goodbye, Bixby!”

“You’re kidding!” said Jen.

“You are so psychotically
lucky
!” said Maria.

“I repeat: I
hate
you!” said Liz. “And you’ve
got
to have a going-away party!”

Jessica didn’t say anything. Suddenly the library’s fluorescent lights were buzzing too loud for her to think clearly. The old man and his family moving, this agent for Con-stanza—all of it was happening way too fast for any innocent explanation to be believed.

Constanza’s last words rang in her ears:
Goodbye, Bixby…

Jessica glanced over at Dess and saw the polymath drop her trig book onto her lap and pull out a few pieces of paper. She hunched over them, scribbling furiously, filling page after page with grids drawn in blue ink. One of the pages fell to the floor….

Jessica squinted and saw that it was divided into seven squares across and five down, like a wall calendar. Each of the squares was filled with cryptic formulas in tiny, manic handwriting.

She closed her eyes and did a few simple calculations herself.

It was the eighth of October today and she knew from her father’s annoying little rhyme that October had thirty-one days.

The end of the month was just over three weeks away.

“Okay, guys,” Dess said. “There’s some good news and some bad news.”

The others looked at her tiredly, already shell-shocked from the weirdness of the last fifty-three hours. Dess was glad she’d waited until all five of them were here; no sense explaining this twice.

Dess found it oddly comforting to be sitting here at the old corner table, the one farthest from the windows, where she and Rex and the Vile One had always eaten together, back before Melissa had revealed her totally evil side. The lunchroom rumbled along around them in its familiar state of chaos, daylighters jockeying for prime table space, unaware of the major trouble that was on its way.

Rex, of course, spoke up first. “Okay. What’s the bad news?”

Dess shook her head. “Sorry, Rex. But it’s one of those things where the good news has to come first. Otherwise there’s no punch line.”

“Come on, Dess,” Jessica said. “This is serious. Don’t you think this is serious?”

“Good question.” Dess stared down at her pile of extremely rough calculations. On the one hand, all their information had come from Constanza Grayfoot, which made it inherently suspect. Her instant TV-star status had sounded more like a psycho-cheerleader wet dream than a prophecy of the end times. Dess often wondered how the same family that had managed to undo thousands of years of midnighter rule in Bixby had also produced Constanza.

But as the girl’s revelations in study hall had gotten weirder and weirder, Dess had stopped smirking and done her own calculations. The numbers were grim.

The four of them stared at her expectantly, but she just waited. That was the good thing about being the one who actually did the math. Other people had to play by your rules.

Finally Jessica sighed. “Okay, Dess. What’s the
good
news?”

Dess allowed herself a victorious smile. “Well, it doesn’t look like the
whole
world is going to end.”

That got a reaction. Rex raised both eyebrows, and Jonathan managed to stop eating for five whole seconds. Jessica was already freaking out, of course, but her expression angsted up a notch. And Melissa… Well, the bitch goddess looked like she always did at lunch: a bit pained by all the mind chaos of the cafeteria, even though she was supposedly in control these days.

“Of course, the math isn’t 100 percent sure at this point,” Dess admitted.

“So wait,” Rex said. “What’s the
bad
news, then?”

“The bad news is that Bixby County, including the whole area of the blue time as we know it, plus definitely a big chunk of Broken Arrow and probably Tulsa, and possibly the top half of Oklahoma City—and hell, let’s just throw in everything from Wichita to Dallas to Little Rock while we’re at it—might very well get sucked into the blue time. In about three weeks.”

Dess took a deep breath, feeling a rush of relief now that the proclamation had been made. It was sort of like being the first astronomer to spot one of those big dinosaur-extermination-sized asteroids on its way toward Earth. Sure, this was majorly unpleasant news for everyone, including Dess personally, but at least
she
got to announce it. Doing the calculations always gave Dess a feeling of control. After all, it was better to be one of the astronomers headed for the hills than, say, one of the dinosaurs.

“And you just found this out,” Rex said slowly, “in
study hall?”

“The library is a wonderful place to learn new things, Rex.”

“It was Constanza,” Jessica said.

“You got this from that cheerleader?” Jonathan snorted. “Well, that makes me feel a
lot
better.”

Jessica gave him a nasty look. “This isn’t about Constanza. Her grandfather—who’s definitely
not
a cheerleader—knows something. He’s evacuating his whole family.”

“Evacuating?” Rex said. “But they don’t even live in Bixby.”

“That’s the point, Rex.” Dess spread her hands. “Remember when I said the blue time might be expanding? Well, it looks like Broken Arrow isn’t far enough away from the darklings anymore. So the Grayfoots are bailing out, running away, heading for the hills. Got it?”

Rex paused for a moment before saying, “That’s… interesting.”

“And how far away is the old guy going?” Dess continued. “Tulsa? Nope. Oklahoma City? Sorry, too close. What about Houston, oilman’s paradise? Five hundred miles away but still not far enough, apparently. Because he’s taking himself and his whole extended family, including his annoying granddaughter, all the way
to California.”

“Yeah,” Jessica added. “And there’s not much oil business in LA.”

Dess leaned back and crossed her arms, waiting for their tiny little brains to catch up. She wished she had a map to show them. When astronomers in movies had to explain that the world was getting clobbered, they always had those fancy computer simulations to make the disaster come to life, or at least a whiteboard.

“But how does he know anything?” Flyboy asked, his jaws still working on a peanut butter sandwich. “Anathea’s dead. There’s no other halfling to translate for them. So the Grayfoots are cut off from the darklings, aren’t they?”

“Exactly,” Rex said. “And probably
that’s
why Grandpa’s freaking out. Maybe since the darklings have stopped answering his messages, he believes those words we left for him: YOU’RE NEXT.”

Jessica shot Dess a puzzled look. Apparently she hadn’t thought of that one.

Dess had, though. “I admit he’s afraid of the darklings, Rex. You made sure of that. But he’s not just nervous; he’s working on a schedule.”

“A schedule?” Rex leaned forward. “How do you mean?”

“Okay: history lesson.” She leaned forward, addressing Rex directly. “Grandpa Grayfoot kicked Constanza’s parents out of the clan when they moved to Bixby, right?”

“Because he knew about mindcasters,” Melissa said. “He didn’t want anyone in the family business here, where we could rip their memories.”

A shudder went through Dess. “Lovely choice of words, Melissa. But basically, yeah. So maybe he doesn’t care what happens to her parents because they disobeyed the no-Bixby rule.”

“But Constanza’s still his favorite granddaughter,” Jessica said.

“Mystifyingly,” Dess muttered.

“She’s really nice,” Jessica said defensively. “And it’s true, he really likes her. He buys her tons of clothes.”

Melissa nodded. “We’ve seen the closets.”

“Lucky you,” Dess said. “But closets full of tacky clothes are nothing compared to what the old guy’s bribing her with now. He’s invited her to come live in Los Angeles and
promised
that she’s going to be a TV star. But there are two catches. One: she can’t tell her parents about it.”

A guilty look crossed Jessica’s face. “Actually, she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at all.”

“Yeah.” Dess chuckled. “Good move, telling Constanza to keep a secret. It would’ve been smarter to just come by in a van and grab her. Worked on Rex, after all.”

“Like I said, he thinks the darklings are coming after his family,” Rex said. “But that doesn’t prove the world’s ending.”

Dess shook her head. “No, it doesn’t. Which brings us to catch number two: Constanza has to get her butt out to Hollywood by the end of the month or, and I quote, ‘the whole thing’s off.’ And Grandpa’s moving the rest of his clan out there in two weeks—from
Broken Arrow,
Rex, where the darklings can’t reach. Not yet anyway.”

She let that sink in for a moment. The noise of the lunchroom seemed to grow around them, like the rumble of a coming storm.

“But how would he know the blue time’s expanding?” Rex said. “There’s no halfling to tell him.”

“Maybe he already knew,” Melissa said suddenly. She squinted, chewing her lip. “The oldest darklings did.”

Rex shook his head, still unconvinced. Dess realized what the problem was: he refused to believe that the Grayfoots knew something he didn’t.

Jessica spoke up. “It’s so sad. Constanza thinks that she’s going to an audition and that she’ll get an agent and acting lessons and stuff. But she’s leaving her parents behind forever.”

“She’s one of the lucky ones,” Dess said. “At least she’ll be out of town before October 31.”

“Hey,” Flyboy said. “That’s Halloween!”

“Um, yeah.” Dess raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s kind of… interesting, but it’s not numbers.” She frowned at Rex. “Anything about Halloween in the lore?”

“Of course not.” He shrugged. “There was no Halloween in Oklahoma until about a hundred years ago.”

Dess nodded. “Fine, enough with history. Here’s the math: when you boil it into numbers, October 31 seems like no big deal at first. I mean, the sum is forty-one, and you get three hundred-ten when you multiply. No relevant numbers there. But in the old days October wasn’t the tenth month, it was the eighth. You know, October, like an octagon, with eight sides?” They all looked at her blank-faced, and Dess suppressed a groan. Next time she was definitely bringing visual aids. “Come on, guys. Eighth month? Thirty-first day? And eight plus thirty-one is…?”

“Thirty-nine?” Jessica said.

“Give the girl a prize.”

“Wait a second, Dess,” Flyboy said. “I thought thirty-nine was a major
anti
darkling number. Like all those thirty-nine-letter names.”

“Magisterially Supernumerary Mathematician,” Dess supplied. “An instant classic. And yes, the number thirty-nine is totally antidarkling. The real problem is the
next
day.”

“Isn’t that All Saints’ Day or something?” Jonathan said.

Dess let out an exasperated breath. This wasn’t about spooks or ghosts or saints; it was about
numbers.
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

Melissa brought her fingers up to her temples. “Hang on, guys.”

Dess ignored her. “But November 1, here in the modern era, is the
first
day of—”

“Guys!” Melissa cried out.

They were all silent for a moment, and Dess thought she heard the hubbub of the cafeteria fade for a few seconds, as if a chill had spread through the room. Her fingertips were tingling, and a trickle of nerves filtered their way down to the pit of her stomach.

“Something’s
coming
,” Melissa whispered.

As the words passed the mindcaster’s lips, a tremor rolled across the room, the shudder of the spinning earth halting in its tracks. The roar of the cafeteria was sucked away all at once, leaving the five of them surrounded by almost two hundred stiffs, faces blue and cold and waxen, caught throwing food and picking their noses and chewing with their mouths open.

“What time is it, Rex?” Dess’s own voice sounded small in the awesome, sudden silence.

Rex looked at his watch. “Twelve twenty-one and fifteen seconds.”

Dess wrote the number down and stared at it, wondering how long this one was going to last.

Jonathan bobbed weightlessly up from his chair. “Cool, this again.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Jessica said softly.

“We just sit here,” Rex said. “We wait it out. And get down, Jonathan!”

“Why?” Jonathan said. “I can fall from here, no problem.”

“There are people all around, Jonathan. If you fly off someplace and the blue time ends, they’ll see you disappear.”

“Come on, Jonathan.” Jessica reached up and took his hand. “Plenty of time to fly when the world ends.”

“All right, whatever.” Jonathan sighed, settling back onto his chair like a deflating balloon.