[Midnighters 03] - Blue Noon

by Scott Westerfeld - (ebook by Undead)

  “Okay,” Constanza began once the ritual was complete. “Remember when my house got trashed by those weirdos?”

  Everyone nodded, eyes wide. Jessica tried to put on her not-guilty face. She’d witnessed the aftermath of Rex and Melissa burgling Constanza’s house, back when they’d first been looking for evidence about the Grayfoot-darkling conspiracy. Not that the damage had all been their fault; there was nothing like a horde of midnight monsters showing up to leave a mess.

  “Well, you probably remember how that totally freaked out my grandfather. He’s always had this thing about not living in Bixby.”

  “You guys stayed with him in Broken Arrow after that happened, right?” Liz asked.

  “We did. And let me tell you, I was totally sick of commuting to school. So…” Constanza leaned closer, indicating that the top secret part was coming up, and Jessica dared a glance at Dess, sitting in her usual corner. Dess held her trig book up to cover her face, which meant she was listening to every word. She needed to study trigonometry about as hard as a darkling needed to study scary.

  “Well, Grandpa must have had a slow leak about me coming back to Bixby,” Constanza continued. “You know, he cut my dad out of the family oil business when he and Mom moved here, ages ago. He still hardly talks to them, even when we were staying out there. So anyway, he called me last night, trying to convince me to leave town.”

  “What’s his problem with Bixby, anyway?” Maria asked.

  Constanza shrugged. “He never tells anyone what happened. He grew up here, but something weird went down when he was a teenager. I think the Anglos chased the family out of town during the oil boom because we’re Native American and everything. He hasn’t set foot in Bixby in, like, fifty-something years.”

  Except for slipping across the edge of the midnight border to leave his little messages, Jessica thought. Then a horrible notion occurred to her.

  “He wants you to go live in Broken Arrow?” Jessica asked. She’d always wondered if the old man knew that Constanza and she were friends. Maybe he planned to finally bring his granddaughter into the real family business—working for the darklings.

  “Excuse me, Jess? Me, living in puny little Broken Arrow?” Constanza shook her head and snorted. “No way.”

  “So where, then?” Liz asked. “Tulsa?”

  “No.” Constanza lowered her voice still further, and Jessica saw Ms. Thomas, the librarian, straining to hear. “You know how I’m going to be an actress?”

  Everyone nodded, a few of them exchanging glances. You only had to know Constanza for about ten minutes to hear about that aspiration.

  “Well, my grandfather said that if I wanted to start right now, I could come stay with him. Because in a couple of weeks he and a whole bunch of my cousins are moving to… now get this… LA!”

  “Los Angeles?” Maria cried.

  “No, Maria,” Liz said with a sneer. “Lower Argentina. That’s the new LA. Haven’t you heard?” She turned to Constanza. “Los Angeles? I hate you. You are so lucky.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Jessica said. Her mouth had gone dry.

  “Grandpa’s got it all worked out,” Constanza said. “He’s already found a school for me there, and this movie agent who’s a business friend of his wants to meet me. And he says I can have an awesome allowance to pay for acting lessons and stuff.”

  “I can’t believe you!” Liz said. “I’m going to kill you. After I come visit, of course. I can come visit, right?”

  “So why exactly is he going to LA?” Jessica asked.

  Constanza shrugged. “I don’t know. There must be oil wells there. Right?”

  “In Los Angeles?” That didn’t seem likely. Nor did it seem very likely that the old man was concentrating on his oil business anymore. He seemed more focused on getting himself and his family as far away from Bixby as possible.

  “Who cares why he’s going there, Jess? As long as the result is”—Constanza pointed both her index fingers toward herself—“movie star!”

  “Girls!” Ms. Thomas called from her desk. “Could you please keep it down to a dull roar?”

  Jen turned to the librarian. “But Constanza’s going to—”

  “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 Constanza—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.

  12

  12:07 P.M.

  LUNCH MEAT

  “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 seri
ous?”

  “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?” The
y 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 antidarkling 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.