[Midnighters 03] - Blue Noon

by Scott Westerfeld - (ebook by Undead)

  “Because you have to remember what we’re capable of,” she said. “Mindcasting doesn’t just affect normal people. It can be used against other midnighters too.”

  “I know.” His eyes narrowed. “But what does that have to do with Bixby’s history?”

  She looked up at him. “Before us five orphans came along, every midnighter grew up surrounded by mindcasters, all of them sharing thoughts every time they shook hands. But what if it wasn’t just news and memories they were passing on? What if they were passing on beliefs? And what if at some point they all decided to believe that midnighters never did anything bad?”

  “Decided to believe?”

  Melissa leaned closer, speaking softer now, imagining the old woman upstairs listening from just around the corner. Melissa had chosen Madeleine’s house to have this conversation with Rex for one simple reason: inside its crepuscular contortion, their minds couldn’t be overheard.

  “Over the centuries,” she said, “midnighters started to believe whatever they did was okay, just like people who owned slaves used to think they were being ‘good masters’ or whatever. Except unlike slavery, nobody from the outside ever questioned what the midnighters were up to in Bixby. It was all secret, and anytime doubts cropped up, there were mindcasters around to squash them. It was like some clique of cheerleaders going through high school together, all thinking the same way, talking the same way, believing they’re at the center of the universe… but for thousands of years.”

  She looked into his eyes, hoping that he would get it.

  “Until we came along,” Rex said.

  “Exactly. We’re more different from our predecessors than we thought, Rex. Maybe they really did all that evil stuff, but they didn’t know they were being evil. They couldn’t know.”

  “You haven’t asked Madeleine about this yet?”

  Melissa shook her head. “No way. I haven’t let her touch me since Angie gave her little speech.”

  Rex smiled softly. “So you’re an Angie fan now, are you?”

  “Not really, but she has the same good point that most scumbags have: she makes me feel a lot better about myself.”

  “Because you never kidnapped anyone?”

  “Oh, much better than that.” She placed her palms together, hoping that the realization would still make sense once she’d said it aloud. “Madeleine always says I’ll never be a real mindcaster—I started too late. Those memories are just figments to me; to her they’re like real people.” Melissa shook her head. “But what if it’s a good thing that I never got indoctrinated? What if I’m not the first crazy mindcaster in history, Rex? What if I’m the first sane one?”

  “Sane…” he said, not quite understanding yet.

  Melissa pressed on. “Because no matter how screwed up I happen to be, no matter what I did to your dad, at least I can see that ripping the minds of a whole town for a hundred generations is not cool.”

  He took her hand, and all of Melissa’s thoughts, which had tumbled out in clumsy words, seemed to order themselves at his touch. They flowed into him, along with the thing she hadn’t said aloud.

  I’m sorry about your father, Rex.

  “You saved me from him, the best you knew how,” he answered.

  Melissa looked away, her emotions churning. Her shame at her own past, her worries that she’d already lost Rex to the darklings, her fear of what Madeleine might do to his mind—all of it squeezed into a single tear. It traveled down her cheek like a drop of acid.

  Rex sat there thinking, then finally said, “I think you’re right. Madeleine’s going to find my new view of history… challenging.”

  “Then let me go up there with you, Rex. I don’t care what a badass darkling you are these days. You need my protection.”

  He smiled again, and she saw a violet spark in the depths of his eyes. “You have no idea what I am.”

  She let out a short, choked laugh. “Whatever, Rex. Even if you are a monster, I don’t want to lose you to her. And don’t think all those creepy old midnighters in her brain won’t give you a run for your money.”

  Unexpectedly he leaned forward and kissed her—the first time their lips had met since last Wednesday night. His taste hovered on the edge between bitter and sweet, like chocolate that was almost too dark.

  But what scared her most was that she tasted no fear in him at all.

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. “Come on, Cowgirl. She’s waiting.”

  Madeleine sat in her usual spot in the corner of the attic, tea things arranged around her. “Both of you, is it?”

  “Maybe I can help,” Melissa said.

  The old mindcaster gave a little snort but didn’t send her away. Like Rex, Madeleine had no fear.

  “Well, sit down then, both of you. Tea’s getting cold. In my day, young people didn’t keep their elders waiting.”

  The more I hear about your day, Melissa thought, the more I’m glad the Grayfoots came along.

  She and Rex sat down in the corner, the three of them forming a triangle around the tea service. Melissa had never done this before—held two midnighters’ hands at once—but she knew from her store of memories that mindcasting circles were an ancient practice.

  No wonder they all thought the same way. All those minds tuned together and reinforcing one another’s beliefs—add a few pom-poms and they’d be just like the pep rallies of Bixby High, except without anyone sneaking out the back to smoke.

  Melissa took a sip of tea. It had indeed grown cold, bringing out its bitter taste even more than usual.

  “What you did last week was very dangerous, Rex,” Madeleine scolded. “I watched from this very spot. No one has ever survived anything like that before.”

  “We didn’t have anywhere else to turn,” he said.

  “I’ve worked hard the last sixteen years to keep you alive, Rex. You could have thrown away all that effort in a matter of minutes.”

  Melissa took a slow breath. In their training sessions Madeleine never tired of reminding her why she and Dess had been made—to help Rex, the only natural midnighter in Bixby’s recent history. The old mindcaster had subtly manipulated hundreds of mothers during their labor, trying to create babies born at the stroke of midnight. And all to make sure Rex had a posse to lead, like a proper seer should.

  Melissa understood all too well now what the five of them really were: Madeleine’s attempt to re-create the Bixby she had grown up with, a paradise for midnighters… at the expense of everyone else.

  “I’m still alive,” Rex said in a flat voice. The human softness he’d allowed himself to reveal on the stairs had disappeared again.

  “They could have eaten you,” Madeleine said.

  “The things I was talking to don’t eat meat,” he said. “They eat nightmares.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “But they wouldn’t have eaten me anyway. I carry their smell.” Rex gave the old mindcaster a cruel smile. He must know how much it offended her, Melissa thought, to have her little seer infected with the darkness.

  Madeleine’s face twitched. “You taste more like them every day. But do you really think they would tell you something useful? Why should they?”

  “The darklings didn’t tell me anything,” he said. “They share their thoughts naturally, like animals crying out when they’ve spotted a kill. You know that, Madeleine. You hear them thinking all the time.”

  “If you can call it thinking.” She made a face, as if fifty years of her own bitter tea was finally hitting her taste buds. “Well, let’s see if your little experiment accomplished anything other than almost giving me a heart attack.”

  She held out both her hands, palms up.

  Melissa caught Rex’s eye, and they joined hands first with each other, waiting for a moment until their connection was complete. Her heart was pounding, and even though she was certain that the memory was all part of a big lie—propaganda, like Angie had said—Melissa recalled that long-ago mindcaster gathering, lett
ing her wonder at those ancient images shared around the fire calm her.

  As her mind stilled, she felt herself drawing strength from Rex’s dark confidence. Whatever the horde of old mindcasters inside Madeleine had in store for the two of them, at least they were facing it together.

  “Come now. Don’t lollygag,” Madeleine snapped.

  As one, they raised their other hands and let her grasp them, completing the circle.

  As Madeleine stilled herself, she changed, becoming a congress of minds.

  Melissa was always awestruck at the vastness of it: memories stretching back to shadowy recollections of the ice age, when glaciers could be reached in a month’s walk to the north. Ten thousand years of history, hundreds of generations, thousands of mindcasters.

  She squeezed Rex’s hand. Facing that accumulated mass of minds, she was glad for his dark presence beside her.

  “What have they done to you?” Madeleine murmured. She was probing the black sphere of Rex’s darkling half, searching its smooth surface for purchase. As the fingers of her mind settled in and began to pry, Rex’s hand flinched in Melissa’s.

  “It’s for your own good,” the old woman muttered. Her concentration deepened, her raspy breathing slowing in Melissa’s ears.

  After a long moment the darkness inside Rex began to swell, like something viscous and heavy coming slowly to a boil. The muscles in his fingers twitched again in her hand, a dry taste stirring among the patterns of his mind.

  Eyes closed, Melissa watched the changes shifting through him and wondered if Madeleine really knew what she was doing. Melissa could taste arrogance in the mass of memories, their certainty that they could control anything and anyone. But they’d never faced something like Rex.

  Then bitter metal filled her mouth, like old pennies on her tongue.

  A seam had begun to open in Rex’s mind, his darkling inner core shivering, its surface cracking. Melissa tasted Madeleine’s satisfaction.

  Rex made a pained sound.

  Melissa sent calming thoughts toward him, but Madeleine pushed her back. You don’t know what you’re doing, girl. Stay clear.

  The old mindcaster turned her attention back to Rex, pressing harder, and the darkness inside him began to split—a black and radiant shaft spilled across the mental landscape, bleeding color from it like the dark moon’s light. Images of an ancient Samhain flowed from his mind: masked humans piling up the bones of cattle and setting them alight, fires dotting the landscape for miles, raising up a slaughterhouse smell. Melissa felt a twitch of hunger at the scent and realized that the reaction was a darkling’s. Soon she was ravenous, feeling the call to hunt, to kill.

  Abomination, whispered the mass of memories.

  They meant Rex—seer and darkling mixed; he horrified them.

  Madeleine grew bolder, her mind prizing into the cracks of Rex’s darkling half. He let out a short cry, and his fingernails dug into Melissa’s hand.

  “Stop!” Melissa whispered hoarsely. “You’re hurting him.”

  Abomination, a thousand voices hissed. The mindcasters’ memories had known nothing like him before; he had to be constrained, controlled.

  But the darkness inside Rex only grew, swelling into a huge black storm cloud in Melissa’s mind, spilling more visions: Bixby as the old ones had seen it fifty years ago, a psychic spiderweb of midnight glittering across the desert. In the darklings’ eyes the town was an infected organism, the tendrils of a parasite extended into every fiber of its host—mindcasters quietly toiling, spreading obedience across the city, certain that it was only natural for them to rule.

  Even the darklings knew what you were, Melissa thought.

  Madeleine made a choking noise, the mass of memories inside her roiling as it beheld its own reflection in Rex’s mind. He was an abomination, and his thoughts were an insult to ten thousand years of history.

  He had to be destroyed.

  A shudder of horror passed through Madeleine at the thought, but she couldn’t pull her mind back. She couldn’t go against the mass.

  “No,” Melissa whispered. Egotistical morons!

  They ignored her. She tried to wrench her eyes open, to reach over and separate Madeleine’s hand from Rex’s, but her muscles were locked rigid.

  Melissa felt hatred rising up in her, disgust at the conceited, clueless pride of her predecessors. She focused all of her loathing—everything Angie had said about the reign of the midnighters, their greed and child-stealing and brain-ripping—and hurled it at Madeleine as hard as she could.

  The mass of memories reared at the insult and turned on her in a flood of contempt and arrogance. They had borne the secrets of midnight for thousands of years; Melissa was an upstart, an orphan, a nothing.

  That which sticks up must be pounded down.

  But before the mass could do any pounding, Melissa’s mouth filled again with the taste of darkling. She’d distracted them just long enough.

  The thing in Rex was really boiling now….

  Like a predatory cat, it sliced straight through the mass, down into Madeleine’s own memories, her deepest secrets. With a hunter’s instinct it found her fears… and ransacked them.

  “No, Rex!” Madeleine gasped, but he was a wounded animal now, pitiless and rabid. Melissa watched aghast as fifty years of terror erupted from the depths of the old woman’s mind, every nervous minute of hiding since the Grayfoots’ revolution.

  You gave them Anathea, he hissed, and decades of guilt surged up in Madeleine. The mass of memories spun in a tempest, unable to order themselves in her churning mind, like rats in a house on fire.

  Melissa tried to focus her mind. Rex… that’s enough!

  “We’re knocking at your door!” he said aloud, his voice inhuman. “We’ve found you at last. We’ve come for you!”

  A single choked scream of terror came from Madeleine’s lips, darklings from a thousand nightmares shredding her mind; her hand jerked once, then slipped from Melissa’s.

  Suddenly the mass of mindcasters was silenced, Madeleine’s mind gone; Melissa found herself alone with Rex in the blackness behind closed eyes. The darkling thoughts moved through him, still powerful, still hungry. Melissa watched in horror as her oldest friend transformed, the darkness consuming still more of his humanity.

  She wondered if she was next.

  Rex, she pleaded. Come back to me.

  “Unconquerable,” he said softly, his voice dry.

  The storm began to subside, and what remained of Rex’s humanity settled over the boiling darkness. She felt his sanity return.

  With a snap her muscles were her own again. Melissa pulled her hand from his and opened her eyes.

  Madeleine lay on the attic floor unmoving, shards of her shattered teacup strewn about her. Her face was locked in an expression of horror.

  “It worked,” Rex said, his voice calm.

  Melissa stared at the stricken woman on the floor. She was still breathing, but her eyes were glazed over, her fingers twitching.

  Melissa looked up at Rex, and his eyes flashed violet. “You call that working?”

  “I remember now.” His lips curled into a smile. “I know what Samhain really was.”

  Melissa tried to gather her wits and tore her eyes from Madeleine’s twisted face. The darklings were coming, and thousands of lives were at stake. “Can we stop it?”

  Rex shuddered for a second, as if one last memory remained fugitive in his mind. But then he nodded slowly.

  “We can try.”

  21

  11:56 P.M.

  SAMHAIN

  Every night it seemed like the secret hour took longer to come.

  Jonathan drummed his fingers on his windowsill, waiting for the cold wind to be silenced, for colors to blur together into blue, for weightlessness to pour into him. He didn’t look at the clock, which never worked. Knowing how many minutes of Flatland were left only made the torture worse.

  These stretches right before midnight were always the hardest
. Jonathan wanted to be out there now, soaring over the still cars and softly glowing houses, feeling his muscles propel him across town.

  To pass the time—to force the time to get moving—he counted off the coming days on his fingers. It was Thursday night, tomorrow was Friday, exactly two weeks until Halloween. If Dess was right, he would only have to endure this wait fifteen more times, including tonight.

  And then he would be free of gravity altogether.

  His eyes closed. Jonathan realized, of course, that the weakening of the blue time was a disaster; it would give the darklings free rein to hunt down thousands of people, maybe a lot more than that. His father, his classmates, everyone he knew was in terrible danger.

  But he couldn’t keep his mind off one fact: for however long the frozen midnight lasted, Flatland would be erased, and the world would have three dimensions. For a guilty moment Jonathan let himself feel the pleasure the thought gave him—being able to fly for days on end, however far the blue time expanded.

  Maybe it would swallow the whole world.

  At last midnight came, almost surprising him in his reverie. The earth shuddered, dropping its claims on his body, the chains of gravity finally falling away. He drifted upward, sucking in a deep, rib-cracking breath. Only at midnight did his lungs feel like they filled completely, no longer constrained by the suffocating weight of his own body. The weight of Flatland.

  It was crazy to feel guilty about the joy this gave him. It wasn’t his fault the world was ending.

  Jonathan launched himself out the window, passing over his father’s car and up onto the neighbor’s roof with one well-practiced bound. There his right foot landed on its usual spot, a circle of cracked shingles marking where so many nightly flights began.

  Then he pushed off toward Jessica’s and—as he watched for flying slithers and power lines, calculating the best course down empty roads and across newly harvested fields—his mind kept returning to one thought… Only two more weeks of gravity, and then I’m free.

  “Okay, everyone,” Rex said. “Madeleine went into my mind last night.”