Touching Darkness

Of course, Madeleine would know all about facing the secret hour alone…

“So you yanked around the rest of us just for Rex?”

“Mindcasters have always recruited midnighters from far away, Dess,” she said. “It has been done this way for thousands of years. The ancient tribes would send war parties to kidnap young children with the gift. And in the last century there would be telegrams with offers of employment. My own mother was brought here as a schoolteacher when I was an infant. This is a dust bowl, Dess. It has never been a populous place.”

“Oh.” She sipped, her mind still reeling. “I just hadn’t… done the math.”

There was a long silence, in which Dess concentrated on not feeling like a puppet. Bixby was so small—of course they’d have to bring in midnighters from outside. Otherwise you’d never have more than one every few decades, feebly poking around the secret hour alone, unsure if any of it was real or not.

Letting her mind drift, Dess found herself disturbed by the faint but growing possibility that she was starting to like hot tea. She wondered if Madeleine was reaching out with her mind right now, changing the neurons in Dess’s head one by one until her taste buds fit the right configuration.

Or maybe drinking tea was like discovering some horrible new fact, and like bad news: eventually you just got used to it.

“So what should we do to survive?” she said after a while. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to waste your sixteen-year investment.”

“That’s the spirit,” Madeleine said. “And my request is very simple: you have to end the threat of the Grayfoots forever.”

Dess snorted. “Oh, is that all?”

“Easier than you might think, Desdemona. Anathea is wasting away.”

“Why? She only lives one hour a day, so fifty years has only been a couple of years for her, right?”

“They took her too young. The human half of her body is being consumed by its darkling side. When she dies, the darklings will have no way to communicate with their human allies. And with the flame-bringer here in Bixby, the darklings wouldn’t dare move against any of us. I might even be free again.”

Dess’s eyes widened. Maybe this had been Madeleine’s real motivation all along. It wasn’t about saving Rex; it was about raising her own private army to free her from the castle of crepuscular contortions.

“So we just wait for the halfling to die?” she asked.

Madeleine shook her head. “They will try to make another, with my Rex. But you must make sure they never do, Dess.”

She swallowed. “How?”

Madeleine tipped her head back, eyes closing. For a moment she looked like Melissa when she was casting—her expression sensuous and yet inhumanly distant. “Joining a human being with a darkling is a tricky business. The place where Anathea was transformed must be special, as unique as the spot where we sit now. You must take Jessica there and raze it to the ground with the power of the flamebringer. Once white light has burned there, it will be ruined.” She opened her eyes. “They’ll never make another halfling again.”

“Okay,” Dess said. “Tell me where.”

Madeleine shrugged. “I’m afraid it isn’t on the old maps, and it’s as hidden as we are here. You’ll have to find it yourself.”

Dess chewed her lip, remembering the maps and folders that Jessica and Jonathan had brought over the night before, the black bolt of the runway jutting into the desert, its simple geometry mixing with the swirls and eddies of midnight.

And suddenly, without knowing precisely where her target lay, Dess realized what had gotten the darklings in such a panic.

“You know about the runway?” she asked.

Madeleine nodded, smiling slowly and regally, her expression like that of a cat.

“Why, Desdemona. Isn’t it a pleasant feeling when your grasp manages to exceed the obvious?”

On the way home, Dess wondered why she was helping Madeleine.

The woman had yanked her around like a dog on a leash, manipulating her dreams without asking. She’d boarded up a portion of Dess’s memory and nailed it shut to protect herself from the darklings. And she’d messed with Dess’s mother when she was at her most vulnerable, prodding her to give birth at the exact moment of midnight.

And she’d done it to hundreds of others too, a host of 11:59s and 12:01s that hadn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye, all to build her darling Rex a posse.

A car passed, kicking up gravel that pinged through the spokes of Dess’s bike. Her shadow was long in front of her, the last rays of warmth on her back bleeding away. It was going to be another dark, cold ride home.

Thinking of home, Dess wondered for a moment what her life would be like if she’d been one of those 11:59s. Would she know numbers like she did? Maybe polymaths were people who were good at math anyway, who just happened to be born at midnight. But without the secret hour, it wouldn’t be the same. Sure, she could still build bridges, design computer games, or get rockets into space, but in normal time math was just a tool for engineering. And something beautiful on its own, of course, a frozen music of values and ratios and patterns.

But in the blue time math kicked ass.

Being born without that would’ve sucked. She’d be just another kid who lived beside a trailer park. Sure, one who got easy A’s in trig and who knew that one day she was going to leave this crappy town behind and make lots of money in the stock market or something.

But she would never have forged a weapon like Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations and slain a darkling with it. In the daylight world there were no darklings to slay.

Maybe that was why she was helping Madeleine. She might be a manipulative bitch, but Dess couldn’t imagine living in any other reality than the one those manipulations had created. In a way, Dess owed the old mindcaster something.

Like her life, such as it was.

So at the door, when Madeleine had asked Dess if she could touch her again, she’d said yes.

“Just a little piece of knowledge, protection in case Melissa tries to touch you. Something to throw in her face.”

Dess stopped pedaling, her bike wobbling. She let it roll to a stop, concentrating on the ground and breathing hard, trying to keep her stomach under control. But in the end she let the bike fall and ran into the roadside grass, puking up lunch and stomach acid at the memory that Madeleine had given her.

Had they really done that? Back when they were twelve years old?

Dess shook her head, tearing up a handful of dry spear grass and wiping her mouth on it. Her stomach was mostly empty now, but she didn’t want to deal with this all the way home. It was almost dark and the wind was picking up.

“Ada,” she said, and the memory slipped mercifully away. She could feel it just out of reach, however, ready for if she ever needed to burn Rex and Melissa to the ground.