The Secret Hour (12 page)

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 The ballerina’s pink tutu had long been replaced by dark purple gauze, her blond hair inked black, and tiny metal jewelry added to complete the outfit, which Dess had made out of soldered paper clips.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.

She hefted the stand. In the blue light it looked like a fine weapon.

If tonight’s secret hour was anything like last night’s, she was going to need it.

Only one more step: Dess wanted to give the spear a thirty-nine-letter name, but one that worked. A single word wasn’t going to cut it. She’d only ever found a few chemical names that length, words used only by scientists, and they didn’t seem to have much kick in the blue time. Not even slithers were afraid of names like benzohydroxypentalaminatriconihexadrene, possibly because they were generally found among the ingredients of Twinkies. But maybe a phrase made up of three thirteen-letter words would do the trick. Dess sat gazing into the tiny pictures along the microphone stand’s length for a few minutes, letting words roll through her mind.

The other midnighters had to use dictionaries, but for a polymath it was automatic. For her, thirteen-letter words had their own smell, their own color, and stood out like ALL CAPITALS in her head. It was only a few moments before the perfect trio of tridecalogisms came into her mind.

She held the weapon close and whispered to it, “Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations.”

As agreed, Dess rode to meet Rex at his house. He lived closer to Jess, and if one of them was going to be caught alone, she could handle it best. Melissa was staying home tonight, scanning the psychic landscape to try to get a feel for what was happening out in the badlands.

“You okay?” Rex said as Dess pulled up onto his threadbare lawn. He’d been waiting outside in a small circle of thirteen-rock piles.

“Yeah. Tonight’s not as bad as last. At least, not here in town.”

The lore site they’d been to the night before was very old, far out in the badlands. The slithers had followed them from the beginning, in the air and on the ground. They’d seemed to grow in number every time Dess looked up. All kinds of flying darklings had made appearances, their hideous and unfamiliar silhouettes crowding the moon. Two darklings had even tried to mess with them, probing the defenses she’d set up around the lore site. Things might have gotten ugly, but about fifteen minutes before moonset they had all left, as if suddenly remembering an appointment. It had all been very strange and unsettling.

“Let’s get going,” she urged Rex. Dess didn’t like the idea of Jessica all alone. Thumbtacks might not cut it tonight.

Of course, she might not be alone, Dess thought with a quiet smile. Wouldn’t
that
be a nice little surprise for Rex.

Rex took a good look around before getting on his bike. “I just hope it stays quiet. I wonder where all those darklings came from. I had no idea there were so many big ones.”

Dess nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that. Want to hear a theory?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. Darklings look like panthers or tigers, right? Except when they get all freaky like they were last night.”

“Yeah. The lore says they’re related to the big cats—lions and tigers—like we are to apes.”

“Okay,” Dess continued. “Well,
my
lore, which would be the Discovery Channel, says that cats spend a big percentage of the day sleeping. Take lions. They sleep twenty-two hours a day, lolling around, tails twitching to keep away flies, maybe yawning out the occasional territorial roar, but basically semiconscious.”

“Twenty-two hours of sleep a day? That sounds like my dad’s cat.”

“So that leaves just two hours awake, right? For one of those hours they do kitty maintenance: lick themselves, play-fight other members of the pride, whatever. They hunt for only one hour out of twenty-four.”

Rex whistled. “That’s the life. A five-hour workweek.”

“Seven,” Dess corrected. “They don’t get weekends.”

“Harsh.”

“So here’s the thing. If darklings are like big cats, then they probably only hunt for one hour a day.”

“Sure,” Rex agreed.

“But what’s a day for a darkling?”

Rex pondered as he rode, recalling his precious lore. “Well, the darklings only live one hour in twenty-five, the secret hour. They’re frozen for the rest, like regular people are frozen during the blue time. So it takes them twenty-five of our days to live a single day in their life. That’s part of why they live so long.”

“Right,” Dess said. “So, a darkling probably sleeps for
twenty-three
of our days in a row.”

Rex’s bike wobbled. She could tell he hadn’t thought this through before. She shook her head. People’s lives would be so much simpler if every once in a while they bothered to do the math.

“And that means,” he said slowly, “that they only hunt about once a month. Like a werewolf in mythology.”

“Exactly. That must be where the whole full-moon thing comes from. Except darklings hunt once every 3.571429 weeks, not every four. But who’s counting? In any case, this means that there’s a lot more darklings than we thought, because most of them are sleeping most of the time. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. For every one hunting, another twenty-three are asleep.”

Dess let Rex soak in this information for a while.

Finally he said, “So the question isn’t, ‘Where did they all come from?’ ”

“Right,” she answered. “The question is, ‘Why did they all wake up?’ ”

When Jessica answered the knock on her window, she looked disappointed to see them.

“Expecting someone else?” Dess asked.

“Kind of,” Jessica said quietly.

Rex didn’t notice or thought she and Jess were kidding. Dess wondered exactly what had happened last night.

She had called Jonathan’s house today to see if he’d followed through on his threat to visit Jess during the blue time. But no one had answered the phone all day. She wasn’t worried—Jonathan could take care of himself better than any of them—but Dess wanted to hear the scoop.

“Well, we’ve got big news for you,” she said.

“Come on in,” Jessica said, sliding the window open. Dess jumped through and reached back to give Rex a hand up. It occurred to her that they could just use the front door, but something about the blue time made everyone want to whisper, plot, and sneak.

Jessica sat slumped on her bed. She looked tired and bummed. Apparently it hadn’t been the best first date ever. Maybe darklings had crashed the party.

Dess noticed that Jess was rubbing her right hand, as if it was a bit sore. She knew from experience what
that
meant: things couldn’t have gone completely wrong.

Dess put her questions aside. She could ask Jess in study period tomorrow, when Rex wasn’t around to go ballistic.

“We went to a lore site last night,” he said.

“It was a pretty hairy trip,” Dess said. “Darkling city out there.”

“But we may have found out what’s going on.”

Jessica looked up. “It’s all my fault, isn’t it?”

Rex look surprised for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s not your
fault,
exactly.”

“But it’s
because of me.
Those things didn’t used to bother you guys. Since I showed up, they’re everywhere. Right?”

“That’s true,” Rex admitted. “The heavy darkling action could be related to you coming to Bixby. But only maybe.”

“Maybe definitely,” Jessica said. “You had a private world, a secret time all your own, and I messed it all up.”

“You didn’t mess it up. The darklings were already there, and we’ve tangled with them before,” Rex said. “But it’s possible you’ve got them scared.”

“Scared?”

Dess sat down next to Jessica. “Every midnighter has his or her own talent, Jessica.”

“So I noticed. Everyone but me, that is.”

Rex paced the room. “The lore says that darklings can taste it when new midnighters arrive in their territory, like Melissa can. They can feel our talents, and they know when someone new is a danger to them.”

“Me, a danger to
them
?” Jessica laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. So far, my major talent seems to be disaster magnet. A walking bad-luck charm.”

“That’s because they’re scared,” Dess said. “They’re still animals, in a way—wild cats.”

“And you’re stirring up their nest.”

Dess rolled her eyes. “Cats don’t have nests, Rex.”

“Well, you’re stirring up their… cathouse. But whatever your talent turns out to be, Jessica, it must be important. For us.”

She looked up at him. “Are you sure?”

“If they want you, we need you,” Dess said.

“But they want me
dead.”

“That’s why we have to find out exactly what you are,” Rex said. “Will you help us do that?”

Jessica looked at them both, then stared glumly out the window at the blue time. Dess saw the careful rows of thumbtacks lining each window and wondered what it would be like to be trapped in your room for the secret hour, with the whole world waiting empty for you outside.

Jessica’s room had a crazed neatness to it, as if she’d been cleaning all day. As Dess had figured, her parents weren’t poor. Jessica had a real stereo and a ton of CDs. But the room hardly looked lived in at all. It felt like a lonely room.

Jessica sighed before she answered. “Sure. What do I have to do?”

Rex smiled. “We have to take you to a certain lore site during the secret hour. There are ways of reading your talent there, testing you to find out what you are.”

“Okay, except what happens when the darklings butt in?”

“They’ll try,” Dess said. “But I can set up defenses in advance, get everything ready in daylight. It’ll be totally safe by the time midnight rolls around. Safer than this room, at least.”

Jessica looked around, clearly unhappy with the idea that her room wasn’t totally secure. “So the only problem is getting there,” she said.

“We’ve got that covered too,” Rex said. “You can tell your parents that you’re spending the night with Dess. She lives out closer to the badlands. You can slip out and get there before—”

“Forget it.”

“Why?” Rex asked.

“I can’t spend the night with anyone, not for the next month, anyway. I’m grounded. Very.”

“Oh.” Rex looked as if he hadn’t expected anything so mundane to mess up his plans. “Well, if you slip out on your own, Melissa can pick you up and drive—”

“No.” Jessica said the word without hesitation. “I’ve lied to my parents enough. I’ve snuck around enough. Forget it.”

Rex opened his mouth, then closed it.

Dess was dying to talk to Jessica away from Rex. What had happened last night? She wondered if Jess’s grounding had anything to do with Jonathan.

“I mean,” Jessica continued, “I don’t mind going out in the secret hour, but I’m not leaving this house during regular time. If my parents found out, they’d be really upset. I don’t want to do that to them again.”