The Secret Hour

Mom looked unhappy with this for a split second, but she nodded.

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Jessica said.

“Okay, sweetie.”

Mom led her back to her bedroom and kissed her good night.

“I’m just glad you’re okay. It’s dangerous out there, Jessica.”

“I know.”

17

11:59 P.M.

REVELATIONS

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 The ballerina’s pink tutu had long been replaced by dark purple gauze, her blond hair inked black, and tiny metal jewelry added to complete the outfit, which Dess had made out of soldered paper clips.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

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, sca

“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 begi

“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 Cha

“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.