Touching Darkness

“But you may not have to go there, Dess.”

I managed to cast around a little bit in the woman’s mind before the”—Melissa’s lower lip trembled—“thing got too close.”

“She’s shared some of what she saw with me,” Rex said. “We may have the numbers you need.”

“Eh?” Dess felt her throat constrict at the expressions on Rex and Melissa’s faces. Shared? Something was weirder about the two than just a little post-rumble hysteria.

No possible way, Dess reminded herself.

“We’ll try to write some of it down for you.” Rex shrugged. “It looks like plans for something being built, something that has to do with the halfling. But it’s mostly a bunch of numbers, so it’s all Greek to me.”

“Arabic,” Dess said absently. Melissa was giving her this look.

“What?” Rex asked.

“Numbers are Arabic, moron.” She tore her gaze away from Melissa. “All the old math is. Al Gebra—as in algebra—was this Arab guy a thousand years ago.” Trying not to think any more about what had passed between the two of them, Dess imagined having a whole branch of mathematics named after her. Dessology? Desstochastics?

“Dessometrics?” Melissa said aloud, a smile playing on her lips.

Dess shivered. Busted.

She waved Geostationary. “I don’t care what you got from her.” Or how you shared it. “This will give me everything I need. Just take me there.”

Rex and Melissa looked at each other, and Dess allowed herself to feel a little burst of triumph as their expressions revealed absolute horror. They really were still terrified, all the way down to the marrow.

Rex shook his head. “Someone might have noticed the Ford. It kind of sticks out in that neighborhood. And we might have left fingerprints…”

Dess snickered at the feeble excuses and gave Jonathan’s thigh a slap. “Come on, Flyboy. We’re going to Darkling Manor.”

He stood, ready to leave, and gave her and Melissa a clueless look. “What’s Dessometrics?”

She smiled. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

11

1:45 p.m.

MORE FLATLAND

“The art of reading Melissa’s mind,” Dess said out of the blue.

“Huh?” Jonathan was passing an eighteen-wheeler, trying to coax his father’s car into doing more than sixty-five on level ground. He was also watching for the turnoff, fairly certain that the directions suffered from mindcaster vagueness. Not that he could blame her, but Melissa had a pretty thin grasp on reality at times.

“Dessometrics. You asked me what it was.”

Jonathan looked at her biting her thumbnail as she stared out the front windshield. She and Melissa had gotten into something back there—a staring contest, it had looked like. “Yeah, right. And you can do that? Read her mind?”

“Well, it helps if Rex is around. He’s the one who gave it away.”

The semi finally gave up drag racing him and slipped behind with an amicable wave from the driver. Jonathan relaxed. “Gave what away?”

Dess squirmed in the seat next to him. “You didn’t notice a certain… smarminess between those two?”

“Hmm.” He decided against passing the next truck up ahead. At this hour the north-south interstate was crowded with Mexican goods coming up through Texas. Even the smallest eighteen-wheeler could crush his father’s car like a cockroach.

Despite how automobile ads tried to make it look, Jonathan had learned this year that driving was not like flying. In fact, driving pretty much sucked compared to flying. Flatland at sixty miles an hour was still Flatland.

And his sore throat from the other night hadn’t gone away entirely. He swallowed gingerly before he spoke. “Actually, those two pretty much set off my smarmy meter twenty-four, seven. I tend not to notice the minor fluctuations.”

Dess chuckled beside him, the low rumble of it bringing a smile to his face. Jonathan hadn’t hung out much with Dess lately, he realized. At least not since Jessica had arrived in town.

“Weren’t they kind of… chummy?” she continued. And chipper.”

He glanced at Dess. Her expectant expression a

The thought that he was driving straight back to where it had all happened wasn’t thrilling Jonathan either. He wondered why he was here instead of getting back to school to tell Jessica what had happened and make sure she was okay.

Maybe because of all of them, he most trusted Dess to help Jessica when she really needed it. Ten days ago he’d seen who had led the other two across darkling-infested desert when he and Jessica had been trapped in the snake pit.

“Sure. The trauma thing was part of it.” Dess was nodding to herself. “But there was more.”

“Like what? What more could there be?”

“So you know what I mean.”

A trucker blasted his horn just behind them, looking to keep up the speed his rig had gathered down the slope of an overpass. Jonathan wrenched the car out of his way, earning a respectful middle finger as the truck roared by. This conversation had become dangerously distracting.

“You’re nuts,” Jonathan said. “No way.”

“True. No possible way. It’s more complicated than that.”

He snorted. “I can’t imagine anything more complicated than that.”

She snickered, then said, “You know they did… once.”

Jonathan looked at her with alarm. “Did what?”

“Not that.” She laughed. “But back when they were kids, Rex touched Melissa by accident.”

“Oh.” Jonathan’s left hand trembled for a moment, a sense memory moving through his body in a wave of dizziness. He gripped the wheel hard, concentrating on the dotted white lines pulsing in front of the car, and managed to keep the vehicle in a straight line until the spell passed.

“Rex told me all about it,” Dess was saying. “Said it was a total head bang, like she was crowding into his mind and he was getting into hers.”

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. That’s what it’s like.”

“What? How would you know?”

He paused. He wondered why he’d never told anyone about this, not even Jessica. (Especially not Jessica, come to think of it.) Rex must have realized what was going on as it happened, but neither he nor Jonathan had ever brought it up. And of course, Melissa hadn’t said a thing after that one thank-you in the desert.

“Well, it was the weekend before last, when we found out Jessica was the flame-bringer. When you guys were trying to get to the snake pit and you did your amazon thing.”

“That was so cool. Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations kicked that darkling’s ass.”

“Yeah, well. But you may recall that you left Rex and Melissa surrounded by a zillion spiders. And I had to fly back out and save them.”

Dess was silent for a moment, then she let out a long breath. “That’s right! You flew Melissa back to the snake pit. So you must have…”

“Touched her.” Jonathan felt a faint shadow of the dizziness come over him again—the nauseating rush of thoughts and emotions, the despair that permeated Melissa, her revulsion at those few seconds of human contact. Since that night he hadn’t seen her the same way. He could detect something behind her scowl other than her hatred for humanity—something fragile.

Jonathan shuddered. Silent treatment or not, he somehow felt closer to her now. It had been much easier when she’d just been a royal bitch.

“Damn,” Dess said softly. “Rex must hate you for that.”

“What? For saving both their lives?” He shook his head, suddenly hoping Dess wouldn’t answer. He wished this whole conversation hadn’t started. Fortunately the turnoff was just ahead. “Forget I mentioned it.”

But Dess didn’t shut up. “Rex says in the old days, mindcasters could control their ability. They could tolerate crowds, even transmit information through a handshake. They were the ones who passed on the news, who bound everyone together.”