Touching Darkness

27

10:19 p.m.

WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION

“What’s base sixty again?”

“It’s like base ten, except the ones place goes up to fifty-nine, and a hundred’s worth thirty-six hundred.”

“Huh?”

“Thirty-six hundred,” Dess repeated. “Sixty squared, silly.”

Jessica looked down at the shield, an elegant spiral snipped from the side of a trash can and shaped to wrap around the wrist. It was for Jonathan, a sort of wing to help him with midair maneuvers. Numbers ringed the edge, but not the normal Arabic kind. They were Phoenician numerals, simple strokes like l’s clustered with sideways V’s, organized into something that Dess kept calling “base sixty.”

Jessica pushed a pencil toward her. “Just write it down; I’ll copy.”

Dess rolled her eyes but put the pencil to paper, the figures spewing from its point as fast as thread from a sewing machine.

Jessica ran her fingers across the wing, anxious to get working again. This afternoon she’d discovered that she enjoyed soldering, loved watching the pinpoint of heat turn wire into drops of molten metal, and didn’t even mind the puffs of smoke that smelled like a cross between new car and old bonfire.

Hanging out with Dess was cool.

On the way here Jessica had been a little nervous about spending the night with the polymath. The only times they’d hung out were in study period or the secret hour. She had no idea what Dess did for fun in normal time. The bus ride had taken forever, and the neighborhood they’d wound up in…

Maybe neighborhood wasn’t really the word for it. It was mostly trailers, like the temps at school, the double-wide kind you saw lumbering down the highway plastered with orange hazard triangles. But resting on cinder blocks as these were, hooked up to pipes and wires like hospital patients, they didn’t look like they would ever move again.

Dess lived in a real house, although something about it didn’t feel completely solid. When the wind blew, which it did pretty constantly out here, the cold penetrated the walls, the whole frame creaking like a ship in rough seas. The floors rang with a hollow sound as they walked.

But Dess’s room was fascinating. Dess made things. Metal constructions cluttered every surface and hung from the ceiling, welded clumps of scrap iron and weightless filigrees of paper clips and thumbtacks. The deep purple walls were covered with watercolor paintings and a big blackboard scrawled with calculations in red chalk.

“That’s you!” Jessica had said when they’d walked in. A self-portrait of Dess with longer hair hung on one wall—black, white, and gray Legos fitted together to form the blocky image.

“Duh.”

On a long bench crowded with incomplete weapons and a soldering iron, Jessica saw a mechanical ballerina clothed in black, its gears spilling out across the wood.

“And that’s Ada Lovelace,” Dess said, then winced, as if saying the name had given her a headache. “She was the first computer programmer, back before they had computers.”

“That must have been tricky.”

Dess shrugged. “Imaginary computers are better, anyway. I’ve messed around with the ones at school. They seem mostly to worry about punctuation.”

Jessica frowned. “Mine doesn’t.”

Dess’s eyes widened. “You’ve got a computer?”

“Yeah. My dad was always bringing them home, back when he had a job.”

“Whoa.” Dess nodded slowly, as if stu

She picked up the soldering iron to escape the awkward moment. “So this is where the magic happens, huh?”

“Yeah.” Dess smiled. “You know, Rex and Melissa blew all their weapons the other night, and I’m supposed to make more. You know how to solder?”

Jessica shook her head. When she’d first fallen into the secret hour, the three of them had given her a crash course on metals and tridecalogisms, mindcasting, and antidarkling numbers. But she didn’t really know how the angles of a thirteen-pointed star warded off slithers, or which alloys the darklings were most scared of, or what made a weapon powerful other than its name.

Maybe it was about time she learned more about how this stuff really worked.

“Not a clue. Show me.”

They had worked all afternoon, absorbed in the smell of solder and tungsten, ignoring the sounds of Dess’s parents coming home. Her mother had finally knocked on the door to call them to di

But as she ate, Jessica began to notice Dess’s touches in the rest of the house. The lights all had dimmer switches, there were extra phone jacks and electrical sockets in every room, and the kitchen windows were colored with stained glass in beautiful antidarkling patterns. After di

He smiled and said, “That’s my girl.”

Dess beamed for a moment, as proud as a kid with straight A’s. And then the parentals had gone to bed incredibly early.

“They work Saturdays,” Dess explained.

“My mom does too.”

Then they’d hit the soldering irons again, the room silent save for the hiss of metal melting. Rex called at about nine to make sure everything was in readiness, but Jessica was so engrossed she hardly listened. The shield for Jonathan was slowly taking shape, its decoration forming a pattern that had seeped into her mind over the slow repetition of tiny marks. Even the base-sixty thing didn’t give her a headache anymore, as long as she didn’t think too hard about it.

She was lost in the numbers when, about an hour later, the phone rang again.

“Jeez, Rex, wake up my parents,” Dess answered, then a puzzled look came over her face. “Melissa…?”

There was a long pause, and Jessica could hear the girl’s voice from the other end, frantic and stumbling as she rushed through some story.

It didn’t sound at all like Melissa.

“Okay, we will. See you soon.” Dess hung up the phone, dumbstruck.

Jessica leaned back from her soldering iron, eyes stinging from the smoke. “Who was that?”

“Melissa. You’ve got to call Jonathan. Tell him to get his ass over here now.” Dess thrust the phone toward her. “Oh, man.”

“What happened?”

Dess shook her head, as if unable to believe her words: “Rex is gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Taken. His house was broken into, and he’s gone. And he left a message for Melissa: they got him.” She shoved the phone firmly into Jessica’s hand. “Call Jonathan. We need him now. Melissa was at a pay phone. She’s already halfway here.”

“But who—?”

“Call Flyboy!”

Jessica looked at the phone, the base-ten numerals on its buttons momentarily mysterious to her. She dialed Jonathan’s number with trembling fingers.

He answered after one ring.

“Come to Dess’s… quick. Rex is gone.”

“Jessica? Gone where?”

“Kidnapped.” She looked up into Dess’s wide eyes for confirmation and found her stu

“Rex was kidnapped? By who?”

“Just come here. Fast. I need you. Please…”

“Okay. I’ll be there as fast as I can.” He hung up.

“Lovelace,” Dess was muttering. “Lovelace. Listen, Jessica? You’ve got to do something for me when Melissa gets here.”

Jessica stared at the silent phone, unable to think. “Do Something?”

Dess took her shoulders and spoke slowly and carefully. “You have to tell her. They took Rex out to the desert, to where the runway’s being built. That’s the only place they can change him. We need to get out there and find him before midnight. Can you tell Melissa that?”