Touching Darkness m-2

by Scott Westerfeld

  Jonathan tried to blink away the spots before his eyes “Warn me next time?”

  “Sorry.” She squeezed his hand. Through the streaks burned onto his vision, he saw that her eyes were wild, her expression electrified from the surge of power that had coursed through her. His hand tingled where their palms were pressed together.

  He blinked again: Acariciandote was glowing on her wrist, the little charms as bright as diamonds.

  They settled on the lawn of the big house. Dead slithers lay around them amid the sparkle of metal. Jonathan knelt and picked up a power drill, the steel bit blackened by fire.

  “They put up a fight, at least.”

  “Rex!” Jessica called. “Melissa?”

  A hissing noise answered them, a wet and shuddering sound that carried a foul stench across the lawn. A massive shape lurched from between Constanza’s house and the next one over, a welter of legs thrusting out in all directions as the thing struggled to keep itself upright.

  Jonathan gagged at the smell, his eyes watering as they beheld the creature.

  It had been a tarantula not long before, most of its mass gathered in a bulbous body. But it was trying desperately to transform, the legs receding into the beast, its body stretching, writhing like a giant hairy earthworm. A wet, flailing wing emerged from its back, half formed and sickly. The darkling hissed at them again, and a stream of viscous liquid shot from its mouth onto the ground a few feet short of Jessica.

  It was dying.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  The scream deafened him at first; then Jonathan heard the burst of flame, felt its heat drying his exposed flesh like a bonfire out in the desert. He didn’t breathe for an endless time, then finally was forced to fill his lungs with the smell of the ancient, dying darkling.

  When he opened his eyes, coughing as he struggled to inhale, there was nothing left of it, just a blackened patch of lawn and a glimmer of metal. Jonathan squinted through the tears in his eyes.

  A hubcap lay in the grass where the darkling had been.

  “That’s what wounded it,” he said.

  “Wounded it?” a voice called. “I think Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation gets the kill.”

  Melissa and Rex stumbled around the side of the house, their faces and hands blackened where improvised weapons had burst into blue flame.

  “Just because you showed up in time to hose down the remains, don’t go taking credit, Jess.” Melissa’s eyes were bright, her voice on the edge of laughter. The sweat on her face glistened like a knife.

  Rex looked sick to his stomach. “Never again,” he said softly, slumping on the front porch. He looked up wearily. “So you did get my message.”

  Jessica nodded. “Barely. Next time, leave directions.”

  Rex thought for a second, then said, “Oh.”

  “We wouldn’t have made it at all, except at the last moment Jonathan remembered where Constanza lived.”

  “I had no idea,” Jonathan said.

  Melissa was staring at him, her eyes narrowing, tempering the crazed look on her face. “But then suddenly you did,” she said softly.

  He returned her gaze and nodded. She knew something about what had happened in his head.

  “What were you guys doing out here, anyway?” Jonathan said.

  “We spent all day following Constanza,” Rex answered, “trying to find out what we could about Ernesto. It was a bust, so we figured we’d try the secret hour.”

  Jonathan frowned and looked at Melissa. “You can do that? Read people’s minds when they’re frozen?”

  “Best time for it,” she said softly, her smile sending a chill down his spine. “Turns out Ernesto’s her cousin. That’s about all I got before things got hairy. And scaly.”

  “Speaking of scales, do we have to clean this up?” Jessica asked. Dead slithers and the remains of the darkling were scattered in dark blotches all around them. The smell had been mostly burned away by Demonstration, but the lawn was still faintly sticky underfoot.

  Rex let out a dry laugh. “It’ll vaporize once normal time starts up again. That porch light should get the job mostly done. Sunrise will finish it off.”

  Jonathan looked up at the moon. “Oh, yeah, normal time. Maybe we should discuss this tomorrow. I’ve got about fifteen minutes to get back to Jessica’s and then to my house.”

  Rex nodded. “At lunch, then. Except I’ve got a history test the period after.”

  “Like you need to study for that.” Melissa laughed.

  Jonathan stared at her again. Unlike Rex, she seemed full of energy, as if she had enjoyed the rumble. Even the death throes of the darkling hadn’t left Melissa with her usual migraine-addled expression. She seemed to be changing day by day. Was she somehow growing more powerful?

  He took a step toward her, lowering his voice. “Something came into my head on the way here. Directions. We wouldn’t have found you in time without them.”

  “I know,” she said simply.

  “You put them there…” Jonathan swallowed dryly. They’d been miles away. “You cast something into my mind, didn’t you?”

  Melissa shook her head slowly, the look on her face softening, as if she were lost in thought. “That’s the crazy thing, Flyboy,” she said quietly. “I tasted it, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.”

  20

  12:16 a.m.

  MEMORY LANE

  Dess strained to push her bike faster, hoping that the batteries in her headlight didn’t totally croak before she made it home. The shuddering little pool of light that traveled just ahead of her had started out pretty dim, and it was fading out like Tinkerbell full of poisoned cake. She should have started home ages ago; the parentals were going to freak that she was out past midnight.

  Good work had been done today, though. Dess patted the lump of Geostationary through her coat. Her mind felt clear for the first time in a week, finally purged of the maelstrom of her dreams. At last the equations had done what they always did, resolving into rules and patterns and meaning. Once again her mind had given her the answers.

  A frown flickered across Dess’s face. The answers… They seemed fuzzy now. She remembered a pattern of some kind that stretched across Bixby. A base-sixty thing, having to do with minutes and seconds. But why had she been out here riding her bike until after midnight?

  Her smile returned. Not to worry. That special Dess-triumphs-again glow was sitting pretty right in the middle of her chest. She couldn’t remember all that clearly what she’d done since leaving school, but that figured. She’d been abstracted, lost in the world of pure math. And the answers were fuzzy because sometimes the really complicated solutions took a few run-throughs before your brain had them down cold.

  What was the trick to it again? That’s right, there it was…

  “Lovelace,” she said aloud.

  A door opened in her mind, and the bitter taste of milky tea flooded into her mouth. She remembered…

  “Damn.” The headlight wavered for a few seconds.

  The ramshackle house squatting in the center of the dead zone, the old woman, the secret history of Bixby pouring out of her as the sun went down. But like any good secret, Dess had to hide it from the rest of them, especially Melissa.

  Then she shivered in the growing cold, remembering what had been bugging her, the reason she’d switched the memories off ten minutes ago, why she wanted to hide them even from herself.

  Madeleine had started out crotchety and maybe a bit spaced-out but had gradually become much scarier, even… Melissa-like.

  But that wasn’t fair. Even if her story had scared the bejesus out of Dess, the woman wasn’t anything like Melissa. For one thing, growing up in Bixby hadn’t left Madeleine a mental cripple. Somehow she had borne the gift of mind-casting without going nuts. She was definitely sane.

  Well, maybe not sane sane. There was the little matter of air-conditioning. Television, Dess could deal with—Madeleine wasn�
�t the first old person to rag on TV to a slightly nutty extent. (The thought made Dess frown as she wondered if the house had cable or not. Another shiver passed through her—stuck inside for forty-nine years without the Discovery Channel.)

  Still, crazy or not, you couldn’t deny that Madeleine spoke from experience. She’d actually been there when the darklings had eliminated a whole generation of midnighters. If she wanted to blame air-conditioning… whatever.

  Car headlights were approaching, and Dess pedaled harder. She was keeping to back roads, trying to avoid being seen. It wasn’t curfew that had her nervous but the final part of Madeleine’s story.

  When the car passed out of sight, Dess let out a sigh of relief. Her headlight was fading badly now; maybe she should just turn it off. Invisibility might be safer.

  The old woman had watched Rex and Melissa for the last sixteen years and Dess for fifteen, always wondering why the darklings hadn’t bothered to pick them off. It wasn’t just their wild-animal indifference or the fact that none of them had ever amounted to much of a threat—not until Jessica had showed up, anyway. Midnighters were good to eat, after all.

  But what Madeleine had slowly realized was that the darklings actually wanted a few midnighters around, as long as they were isolated, disorganized, and ignorant of history. Midnighters were useful, in case anything ever happened to the precious halfling. Midnighters could be harvested.

  Another pair of headlights appeared in the distance. It was a van, white and generic, the kind of anonymous piece of crap you’d rent for a kidnapping. As it drove closer, the cold Oklahoma wind grew teeth, biting into Dess’s coat and tearing through goose-pimpled flesh straight into her bones.

  One of the windows was opening…

  The van roared past, an empty beer can clattering on the street behind her.

  “Missed!” she called through gritted teeth. “Assholes.”

  Her pounding heart gradually slowed, and she reached up and flicked off the headlight. Staying dark was safer after all. Now she really remembered why she had been waiting to think about all this until she got home. It was just too damn spooky on the open road at night.

  She murmured the other half of the mind trick: “Ada.”

  The door in her consciousness swung closed again, leaving one last memory fading before her mind’s eye. As she had left Madeleine’s house, the old woman had reached out and touched her on the cheek, asking her to say the name of someone important to her from history, and something huge and powerful had surged across Dess’s mind.

  A door. That was what it had been—a barrier to protect her new knowledge from Melissa’s prying because what Melissa knew, the darklings would know soon enough. They could taste each other across the desert all too well.

  Then the door closed completely, shutting out the terrible thoughts about harvesting and lonely old ladies and air-conditioning, leaving only one imperative: Don’t let Melissa touch you.

  Dess laughed. Sure, like Melissa ever touched anyone if she could help it.

  She struggled along in the dark for a while. Cars passed, but she ignored them, feeling only the happy glow of math well done, equations resolved into rules and patterns and meanings. Her mind felt clear for the first time in a week, finally purged of the maelstrom of her dreams.

  A fallen tree branch snapped under her front wheel, and she cursed. Why exactly was she riding along in the dark?

  She switched on her headlight. Dim, but better than nothing.

  21

  11:16 a.m.

  UNANTICIPATED ILLUMINATIONS

  “So when we got there, there were like a thousand slithers in the air. And this demented old darkling.” Jessica’s stomach turned as she remembered the thing’s death smell. “Melissa had pretty much killed it already with this hubcap, but I finished it off.”

  “Ah, the mighty Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation is finally put to use,” Dess said. She leaned back against the locker next to Jessica’s, a smile lighting up her face.

  “Yeah, the thing was totally in a bad way,” Jessica said. She looked down at her palm, still tingling from holding Demonstration. All morning aftershocks had surged through her, sending shivers up her arm. In the nights after discovering her talent Jessica had experimented with lighters, flash attachments, and highway signal flares, but nothing gave her the buzz of an actual rumble.

  She took a deep breath, and the crowded hallway of Bixby High came back into focus.

  “So, you got another flashlight name for me?” asked. “Something… light?”

  Dess closed one eye, giving the matter a microsecond’s thought. “How about Decaffeinated?”

  Jessica giggled. “Not that kind of light, silly. More like… luminescent. Hey, does that work?”

  “Nope. Only eleven. Coronaphobiac?”

  “Which would mean…?”

  “Someone who’s afraid of eclipses.”

  Jessica raised an eyebrow. “How do you know this stuff?”

  “I listen, read, watch the Discovery Channel, and the tridecalogisms kind of… stand out.”

  “Hmm. Coronaphobiac? Still not quite what I was going for.” Jessica opened her locker and she regarded the pile of books unhappily. “No time for trig today. I promised Rex I’d grill Constanza about her family.” She picked up the social studies textbook. Maybe if she brought it along to the library, Constanza would assume she was writing a report about local history.

  “You should ask her if any of them live in Broken Arrow.”

  Jessica looked up. “Why?”

  Dess shrugged. “Just an idea. If Melissa hasn’t heard their thoughts all these years, they probably stay out of town.”

  “But the snake pit’s darkling central, and that’s in Broken Arrow, isn’t it?”

  “Broken Arrow County, yeah. But the town’s farther east, just beyond the limit of the secret hour. The perfect place for darkling groupies to set up shop.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask her.” Jessica smiled. “Hey, all that map stuff you’ve been doing is paying off.”

  Dess returned the smile. “You’d be surprised.” She looked past Jessica, suddenly frowning, and said, “Ada.”

  Jessica turned. “Who?”

  “Melissa and Rex, I mean.”

  The two were coming down the hall, Melissa in head phones but sharper eyed than Jessica had ever seen her in school. Rex looked well rested, about a thousand percent better than he had the night before.

  “Headed up to the library?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Jessica said. “No stone in Constanza’s brain shall remain unturned.”

  “That should take about five minutes,” Melissa muttered.

  Rex rolled his eyes in apology. “By the way, did we forget to say thanks last night? You know, for the lifesaving.”

  Jessica shrugged. “It was implied—by the not being dead. Sorry we got lost on the way.”

  “You made it in time.” He glanced at Melissa. “Somehow.”

  “Oh, right.” Jessica turned to Dess. “That was the weirdest part of the whole night. While we were looking for Constanza’s house, Jonathan and I both suddenly had this brain flash and knew exactly where it was. It was total random.”

  “Random?” A puzzled look came over Dess’s face, as if there was something on the tip of her tongue. Jessica suspected she was about to get a lecture on the deadly sin of using math terms loosely.

  But Dess said, “Unanticipated Illuminations.”

  “Huh?”

  “A new name for your flashlight.” Dess smiled, as if at a private joke, the puzzled expression never quite leaving her face.

  “You would not believe what happened last night.”

  Jessica stared into Constanza’s wide eyes and found that she simply couldn’t resist. “More demonic vandalism?”

  Constanza’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Who told you?”

  Jessica shrugged. “I just guessed. Or maybe I heard something in the hall?”

  Constanza shook
her head. “No way. I haven’t told anyone. Except Liz. And Maria. But, like, no one.”

  “Wait a second.” Jessica forced her own eyes open wider. “It didn’t happen to your house, did it?”

  Constanza looked both ways down the hall, silent for a moment as a few freshmen went by on their way into the library. “Okay, this has to stay a total secret, Jessica.”

  “Not a soul.”

  “So, my dad wakes up last night because he smells something really nasty, and in his study he sees that someone’s gone through his desk. So he’s running around turning all the lights on, and the kitchen’s all messed up, and his tools are lying spread around all over the lawn. And the grass is all burned, like someone built a bonfire on it, but with a totally dead-rat smell.”

  “Eww.” Jessica winced. After all the excitement the night before, she hadn’t thought much about what it would be like to wake up in the aftermath. And she hadn’t realized that Rex and Melissa had been rifling through anyone’s desk. Of course, was that any worse than rifling through someone’s brain?

  “And guess when this all was,” Constanza said.

  Jessica blinked. “No way.”

  “Way. Right at the stroke of midnight.”

  The late bell rang, and Constanza jumped.

  “Girls?” Ms. Thomas’s voice came from inside. “Please cross the threshold or you will be tardy.”

  Constanza sighed, peering in at the long table full of her friends. “I promised my mother not to spread this all over school because it could be a total real-estate-value downer. But I don’t know how I’m going to sit there and not utter a word. I mean, Liz and Maria are sitting right there, just dying to talk about it.”

  “Well,” Jessica said, “you could help me with something instead.” She waved her social studies textbook in the air. “Do you know anything about your family’s history?”

  “So, the Grayfoots were a Bixby family until they got chased out?”