Touching Darkness

“They got into a rumble last night, stuck thirteen knives in a door, and one fell out.”

“Fell out? What do you mean?”

“Well, that would mean”—Dess chewed her lip—“that they won’t be coming to school today.”

When the noon bell rang, Dess and Jessica headed for the cafeteria, making record time. Jonathan was waiting for them at Rex’s usual table. Alone.

“Martinez?” Dess said, obviously surprised to see him there. Jonathan hardly ever ate with the other midnighters. He must have heard the rumors too.

“Hi, Dess,” Jonathan said through a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich on banana bread. He pulled out a chair for Jessica but didn’t say hi, just smiled tiredly and kept on eating. His concern for Rex and Melissa evidently hadn’t affected his acrobat’s appetite.

Jonathan’s voice was still scratchy from walking home two nights before. Jessica had begun to realize that he never wore a coat, no matter how cold it got. He didn’t like anything (or anyone) that restricted his movement.

“You guys heard?” he said between bites.

“Yeah.” Dess’s eyes swept the cafeteria, which was begi

Jessica fished in her pocket and found a single coin, the quarter she’d flipped two nights before. She’d been carrying it around, hoping its luck would change. So far, it had brought only trouble.

Dess swept it from her hand and stomped off, not bothering to say thanks.

Jessica watched the angry sway of her long black dress until it was swallowed by the crowd. “What’s she so grumpy about?”

Jonathan shrugged, as if it were obvious. “Me and you. Rex and Melissa. And then there’s Dess.” He bit into an apple.

“Yeah, I guess.” Jessica couldn’t disagree, although at the moment she was wondering whether Jonathan and she were worth being jealous over. She’d bombed her physics test, a stalker was trailing her, and Rex and Melissa were missing amid rumors of midnight blood and destruction. Yet Jonathan was sitting there, eating like a demon and, as always in normal time, not touching her.

In the secret hour it was always automatic—fingers brushing, the light pressure of shoulder against shoulder, or arms intertwined. But in daylight Jonathan didn’t seem to see the point of physical contact. As if he didn’t realize there was more to life than flying.

Still, Jessica told herself, it wasn’t like she couldn’t hold his hand, right now. Just reach over and take it. How lame was this? Waiting for him to do everything and hating him for not reading her mind?

Of course, if she did reach out and he pulled away, no matter how slightly, it would really, really suck.

She sighed, feeling selfish to be worrying about this with Rex and Melissa missing. Something awful had happened last night, and not too far from the badlands. She couldn’t get the image out of her head of twelve bloody knives stuck into a door. According to the rumors, no bodies had been found, but did darklings leave bodies behind when they… did whatever they did?

“So, you still think you blew it?”

“What? Oh.” Jessica groaned, remembering now what the demonic rumors had allowed her to forget. “Physics. I know I blew it. I drew a total blank on the formulas part. And the laws part. On the physics part, basically.”

Jonathan was still smiling; he was breezing through the class, as confident with the laws of motion as Dess was with numbers.

“Still, you must have gotten the extra credit.”

“No. Didn’t get that far.”

Jonathan laughed. “About what happens when you flip a coin? Give three reasons why it never stops, even right at the top?”

Jessica just looked at him and sighed.

“No answer at Melissa’s. And Rex’s dad picked up. Couldn’t get anything out of him; Rex must have doubled his meds.” Dess didn’t sit down, just folded her arms and stared down at them. “Waste of a good quarter.”

“What’s the deal with Rex’s dad, anyway?” Jessica said. “It’s so sad, the way he is.”

Jonathan cleared his throat.

“Him, sad?” Dess snorted. “It was sadder before the accident.”

“What do you mean?”

An unpleasant look crossed Dess’s face. “Well, all of it happened before I met Rex, but I know he wasn’t the world’s greatest dad.”

“Oh. Still.” Jessica remembered the drool on the old man’s chin, the lost expression in his eyes.

Dess shook her head. “No, really. Save your pity. Ask Rex about the spiders under the house sometime.” She turned to Jonathan. “You got your father’s car today?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything important happening this afternoon?”

Jonathan paused for a moment, then shook his head.

“Let’s go, then.”

Jonathan sighed, shoved his remaining sandwich into his lunch bag, and pushed his chair back.

“What? Now?” Jessica asked, wrenching her mind away from thoughts of Rex’s dad. “But there’s no way we’ll get back before fifth period.”

“Deeply tragic,” Dess said. “But if you don’t want to come, give Mr. Sanchez my heartfelt apologies. His little eyes get so sad when I skip trig.”

Jonathan rested his hand on Jessica’s shoulder, finally touching her. “You don’t want to come?”

“Um…” She did, but Jessica couldn’t ignore the trickle of fear in her stomach. Trumping the image of bloodstained knives was a vision of her parents’ faces, grim and in a grounding mood. “I can’t.”

“It’s okay, Jess. We’ll let you know.” He squeezed her shoulder softly. “See you tonight.”

They turned and walked away, leaving her alone.

10

12:14 p.m.

DESSOMETRICS

Dess stole glances at her new toy as they drove. The shifting numbers soothed her nerves, reminding her that every problem had a solution, every missing person a location, and every spot on earth a set of delicious coordinates.

Her mind was still buzzing from the weekend. Whatever the others had managed to get mixed up in, Dess had enjoyed herself. She’d spent all Sunday biking around town, watching Geostationary effortlessly reeling off coordinates, turning Bixby into numbers. What could be better?

She’d lived here all her life, but for the first time, Dess felt that she really knew the town, could see its patterns, could map its streets and buildings in her mind. The world she’d grown up in was finally inventoried and enumerated; Dess had done the math at last.

Meanwhile the rest of them had spent the weekend being stalked, trying to stalk the stalkers, and getting themselves cornered by darklings. That was what always seemed to happen when she let them out of her sight.

“What’s that thing?” Jonathan said, glancing down at the GPS receiver in her hands.

She jerked it out of his sight. “Nothing.”

He just chuckled, biting into his third sandwich. “Okay.”

They turned onto Rex’s street, which ran almost due east, and Dess snuck a peek at the north-south numbers stabilizing, the east-west value dropping slowly. After this visit she’d have exact coordinates for both her own house and Rex’s. Maybe there was some pattern in the location of midnighters’ homes.

The car halted, and Dess forced herself to shove the receiver into her coat pocket. She would let Rex in on her discoveries soon enough, but she wanted the math firmly in her head before he cluttered it with his messy lore. Math was pure, but history was always full of weird little gaps and contradictions.

The sagging porch was empty, the creepy old dad nowhere in sight. Maybe Rex was keeping him inside these days.

Halfway across the threadbare lawn, a croaking voice erupted from the house. “Don’t you damn kids know it’s a school day?”