Touching Darkness

They sailed down Division Street, jumping low and hard, leaving sneaker prints on the long, flat roof of a north-bound eighteen-wheeler. A wrenching turn toward her neighborhood sent them thrashing through the canopy of a huge oak, scattering leaves and twigs to the frozen winds. Even though Jessica’s arms were covered with scratches, she laughed aloud, happy to be flying at speed again, just barreling along with the ground a blur below them. She felt her worries fall away for a few moments, stalkers and Grayfoots and half-darklings lost in their wake.

They just made it, careening to a stop on her front lawn with five minutes of midnight left, barely enough time for Jonathan to make it home before the freezing wind leapt up again.

Jessica spun him to face her, feeling better than she had since the stalker had entered her life. She lifted Acariciandote, which gave off a faint tinkling sound, the charms still spi

“Thanks for this, Jonathan.” She kissed him hard, pulling his feet up off the ground.

He smiled and looked away, shrugging.

“Now get home safe and fast. No walking!” She pointed him back toward town, giving him a push. “See you tomorrow in Flatland.”

He laughed and started ru

Jessica watched after him and gri

She took deep breaths, letting the thundering of her heart gradually slow while she knocked leaves and grass from her hair and clothes.

With thirty seconds to go, she climbed in through the window, remembering to kick off her shoes as she crossed the room.

“Okay, Beth. Do your worst.” She took another deep breath, placing one hand on the knob of the closet door.

Midnight ended as it had begun, late by Jessica’s watch, tarrying those same nine seconds before normal time rumbled up through the soles of her feet, blue light and silence draining from the world together.

“—ree, four…” came a muffled voice from the closet.

Jessica pulled it open, revealing Beth with red face and clenched fists.

“Okay, you win,” Jessica said, raising her palms in surrender. “Don’t scream.”

“I’m going to do more than scream, Jess!” she spat, pushing past Jessica and into the room. “When I tell Mom that you tried to lock me…”

Her voice trailed away, the look of anger fading into one of confusion.

“What the hell, Jess?”

“What?”

“You look… You’re not…” Sharp eyes sca

“That’s a leaf, genius.”

“It wasn’t there. You look different. What did you do?”

Jessica swallowed. She realized that she was still out of breath from the dash home. Her face was probably as red as Beth’s. Her hands were scratched from the trip through the oak tree, and her hair had to be a mess.

And Beth was staring at the bracelet…

“Oh, this,” she said, hoping an explanation would reach her lips in time. “Yeah, this is what I wanted to show you. But I didn’t want you to see where I hide it because it’s a such a… big secret. Pretty, huh?”

Beth’s eyes swept to the open window, and Jessica groaned inside. It had been closed and locked a few seconds before.

“You hide that bracelet… outside?”

“Uh, yeah, okay. You got me there.”

Beth’s eyes squinted even further. “You shoved me in a closet so you could jump out the window to where you keep your bracelet? Are you totally cracking?”

“No. But you said something about Jonathan…” Jessica struggled to remember. That conversation had been an hour ago for her, but only a minute had passed for Beth.

“Yeah, that he’s been in trouble with the police.”

“Right! That’s it.” She held up the bracelet to the light. “But I wanted you to see this. He gave it to me.” The smile on her face was huge, idiotic, and beaming. “Isn’t it great?”

“Yeah, sure,” Beth said, her eyes still locked on Jessica’s. “It’s wonderful. And I’m glad that you hide it… outside. In the bushes.”

Jessica sighed. “Its name means ‘touching you.’ ”

“It has a name?”

“Sure.” Jessica shrugged. “Anyway, thanks for coming by. I’m glad I got to show it to you.” She hugged Beth hard. “See you tomorrow.”

Jessica opened her bedroom door, and her little sister walked out, casting wary glances back, totally at a loss as to how she’d wound up so confused.

“I’ll make sure you get to meet him soon,” Jessica whispered.

Beth nodded once and bolted for her own bedroom on scurrying, silent feet.

15

2:42 p.m.

DEAD ZONE

The house didn’t look like much. It squatted in darkness, out of repair and covered with twisting vines, shaded from the afternoon sun by the mushroom cloud of willow tree that dominated the front yard.

Dess looked at Geostationary again. This was the place. In fact, the equations that had led her here should have been obvious all along. Once she’d realized it was a base-sixty thing, the math had been easy.

Back in advanced algebra the year before, Mr. Sanchez had taught them how to convert into base two (turning regular numbers into ones and zeros), all the while claiming that this knowledge was going to get them computer jobs one day. Yeah, right. A few more machines in the Bixby High computer lab might’ve helped more.

But Dess always humored Sanchez, and practicing new bases was a pleasant distraction. It had kept her brain busy back in the days before Jessica Day had come along to keep everyone busy all the time.

After mastering binary (which had taken about 256 seconds), Dess had tackled base sixty because there were sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. So Dess had it down cold that, for example, 2:31 A.M. was 9,060 seconds after midnight.

Of course, what would you do with that bit of trivia?

The answer had come when she’d started playing with her father’s oil-drilling maps two Fridays ago. All of the secret hour lay within a single degree of longitude and latitude, the twelve-riddled 36 north by 96 west. But degrees, it turned out, were sort of like hours. They were divided into sixty minutes, and each of those minutes was divided into sixty seconds. That had been the big revelation: if coordinates used the same math as time, then the place where the secret hour happened could be sliced up into minutes and seconds, just like the hour itself.

Looking back, Dess knew she should have realized this before now.

From the mountains beyond Rustle’s Bottom, she had often watched midnight roll in. Like dawn, it swept from east to west, carried by the rotation of the earth. And like dawn, it didn’t hit in a perfectly straight line. There were bumps and ripples in midnight’s arrival.

But the shadows that convoluted the secret hour weren’t cast by mountain peaks or water towers. They were actually cast by numbers. All you had to do was start seeing the minutes and seconds that lay in a grid across the streets of Bixby, and it was obvious where the turbulence would arise.

Dess put Geostationary in the pocket of her coat, got off her bike, and pulled off her sunglasses. She was breathing hard. The moment her brain had finished the calculations, she’d practically run out of the school building, skipping last period and riding her bike here at about fifty miles an hour.

Now, though, Dess found herself in no hurry to approach the house. What sort of person would live in a spot like this? Just some random Bixbyite who couldn’t afford anything better? Or something worse, like a coven of darkling groupies?