The Secret Hour

She looked at her own bare feet.

“Don’t worry, the slithers are gone.”

“They departed somewhat overzealously,” Dess said, giggling. Her eyes were wide, as if the encounter with the panther had been some exciting fairground ride.

Jessica ignored Rex’s hand and slid off the car hood toward the front. She pushed off from the bumper and took a few quick steps away, peering into the shadows beneath it. But the snakes did seem to have disappeared.

“I wouldn’t stand in front of it either,” Rex suggested mildly. He looked at the tires. “It’s probably going about fifty miles an hour.”

Jessica followed his gaze and saw that the tires weren’t actually round. They were oval, compressed out of shape and tipped slightly forward. They looked how wheels in motion were drawn in cartoons. But the car was absolutely still. The driver still wore the exact same expression, oblivious to the strange events going on around her.

Rex pointed up at the dark moon. “And when that bad boy goes down, it’ll jump back into regular motion. No hurry, like Dess said, but good to keep in mind.”

Something about Rex’s calm voice a

She looked up at the moon. It was still moving across the sky quickly, almost half set.

A gasp came from the other three. She dropped her gaze to them. They stared back at her.

“What is it?” Jessica asked sharply. She’d had enough of their weirdness.

The girl whose name she didn’t know took a step closer to Jess, peering closely at her face with an appalled expression.

“Your eyes are wrong,” the girl said.

10

12:00 A.M.

MIDNIGHTERS

“My eyes are what?”

“They’re…” The girl took a step closer, peering into Jessica’s eyes. Jessica raised a hand to her own face, and the girl flinched as if afraid of being touched, then looked up at the sky with a puzzled expression.

As her eyes met the moon, Jessica cried out. They flashed a deep indigo, just like the panther’s.

Jessica took a step back from the three of them. Those reflecting eyes belonged to cats or raccoons, owls or foxes—things that hunted in the dark. Not people. The girl’s eyes looked normal now, but after that momentary reflection, she seemed less human.

“Melissa’s right,” Dess said.

Rex quieted the other two with a wave of his hand. He took a step closer, peering into Jessica’s eyes with a calm intensity.

“Jessica,” he said quietly, “look up at the moon, please.”

She did so for a few seconds but dropped her eyes back to Rex suspiciously.

“What color is it?” he asked.

“It’s…” She looked up again, shrugged. “No color. And it gives me a headache.”

“Her eyes are wrong,” repeated the other girl, whom Dess had called Melissa.

Dess piped up. “Today she said the sun doesn’t bother her. I told you she was totally daylight. No dark glasses or anything.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Jessica suddenly cried, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to shout, but the words had launched themselves out of her.

The startled looks on the others’ faces were somehow satisfying.

“I mean—,” she sputtered. “What’s going on? What are you talking about? And what are you doing in my dream?”

Rex stepped back and put up his hands. Dess giggled but half turned away as if embarrassed. Melissa cocked her head.

“Sorry,” Rex said. “I should have told you: this isn’t a dream.”

“But—” Jessica started, but sighed, knowing suddenly that she believed him. The pain, the fear, the feel of her heart pumping in her chest had all been too real. This was not a dream. It was a relief not to pretend to herself anymore.

“What is it, then?”

“This is midnight.”

“Say again?”

“Midnight,” he repeated slowly. “It’s 12 a.m. Since the world changed color, this has all happened in a single moment.”

“A single moment…”

“Time stops for us at midnight.”

Jessica peered through the car windshield at the frozen woman at the wheel. The look of concentration on her face, the hands tight on the wheel… She did look as if she were driving but trapped in a frozen instant.

Dess spoke up next, her voice without its usual nasty edge. “There aren’t really twenty-four hours in the day, Jessica. There are twenty-five. But one of them is rolled up too tight to see. For most people it flashes by in an instant. But we can see it, live in it.”

“And ‘we’ includes ‘me’?” Jessica said quietly.

“When were you born?” Rex asked.

“Huh? You mean this is because I’m a Leo?”

“Not your birthday, what time of day?”

Jessica pondered the question, remembering how many times Mom and Dad had told this story.

“My mom went into labor in the afternoon, but I wasn’t born until thirty-something hours later. Not until late the next night.”

Rex nodded. “Midnight, to be exact.”

“Midnight?”

“Sure. One out of every 43,200 people is born within one second of midnight,” Dess said, smiling happily. “Of course, we’re not exactly sure how close you have to get. And we’re talking real midnight here.”

“Yeah. My birth certificate says 1 a.m.,” Melissa said glumly. “Lousy daylight savings time.”

Rex looked up at the moon, his eyes catching its nonlight with that inhuman flicker. “In a lot of cultures people believe that those born at the stroke of midnight can see ghosts.”

Jessica nodded. That actually sounded familiar. One of those pirate books she’d read for English last year—Kidnapped? or Treasure Island? — had been about that. Some kid was supposed to find treasure by seeing the ghosts of dead men buried with the gold.

“The real story is a bit more complicated,” Rex continued.

“I’ll say,” Jessica said. “If that panther was a ghost, we seriously need new Halloween decorations.”

“Midnighters don’t see ghosts, Jessica,” Rex continued. “What we see is a whole secret hour, the blue time, that zooms right past everyone else.”

“Midnighters,” Jessica repeated.

“That’s the word for us. Midnight is ours alone. We can walk around while everything else in the whole world is frozen.”

“Not everything,” Jessica said.

“True,” Rex admitted. “The darklings and slithers, and some other stuff, live in the blue time. For them the blue time is like normal daylight and vice versa. They can’t get into the other twenty-four hours, like most humans can’t get into the twenty-fifth.”

“Only us midnighters get to live in both,” Dess said happily.

“Yay,” Jess said. “I’m thrilled.”

“Come on, haven’t you ever wished for an extra hour in the day?” Rex asked.

“Not an extra totally weird hour! Not an extra hour where everything tries to kill me! No, I don’t think I ever wished for that.”

“Wow, you are so daylight,” Melissa said.

“I’ve got to admit, things have been bad for you,” Rex said, using his Mr. Calm voice again. “But it’s usually not like this. Normally the slithers only watch us, and darklings don’t care much about us at all. They’re like wild animals. They can be dangerous if you do something stupid, but they don’t go out of their way to mess with humans. A midnighter being attacked for no reason is new to me.”

“It’s pretty much new to me too!” Jessica said. “And I didn’t do anything stupid, all right? One of those… slithers led me out here on purpose. Then the big cat thing tried to kill me. Twice.”

“Yeah, we should try to figure this out,” Rex said mildly, as if Jessica had been assigned a locker at school that wouldn’t open. She guessed that none of those darklings had ever come after him.

“I knew you were different,” Melissa said, “even before psychokitty tried to eat you.” She closed her eyes, tipping back her head as if smelling the wind. “There’s something fu