Blue Noon

Of course, Melissa did have some catching up to do. Growing up as a lone mindcaster, she’d never learned the old tricks that should have been taught to her by the previous generation. A trove had awaited her inside Madeleine’s brain—the thousands of years of memories, techniques, and gossip accumulated since the first mindcasters had learned how to pass knowledge from hand to hand.

Dess wondered how that math worked. If every generation of mindcasters took all their memories and forwarded them onto the next bunch, who then passed theirs onto the next, who added their memories, and so on… wouldn’t the pile get too big at some point? Wouldn’t all that knowledge become less and less stable, like building blocks stacked higher and higher, until the whole thing collapsed at once?

Maybe the memories got fuzzier as you went back in time, a blurry aggregate of thoughts and feelings, like the symbols that meteorologists used to represent weather. Dess imagined a big H hovering over Madeleine’s house, warning of a high-pressure center of bitchiness.

“Don’t rattle the cup when you stir, Jonathan!”

Speaking of which, Dess thought as Jonathan exchanged an eye roll with her. He kept stirring his tea, adopting a sarcastic little spoon twirl that Madeleine didn’t seem to notice.

At least they didn’t have to edit their thoughts here. Madeleine’s house was built on a whopping big crepuscular contortion, a wrinkle in the blue time that made it almost impossible to plunder anyone’s mind without physical contact. It was like living next to a power line that screwed up your TV reception.

This contortion was the only thing that had protected Madeleine for the last five decades. She was invisible to the darklings here, hidden along with her antiques and books, all the leftovers from the days when midnighters had ruled Bixby instead of skulking in the shadows.

Dess looked at the junk piled in the corners of the room, her mind automatically dissecting the angles of tridecagrams in rusted steel, all the patterns of thirteens and thirty-nines that had once guarded the town’s key citizens. Some of the junk was pretty interesting, engraved with old-timey tridecalogisms like accelerograph and paterfamilias. She had to admit: Rex and Melissa weren’t the only ones who’d found stuff to play with here.

Still, it bugged Dess that those two had gotten anything at all out of her discovery. Especially since the sweaty work of protecting Madeleine had been left to Dess, Jessica, and Jonathan. The three had spent hours making a big pile of the least-rusty darkling defenses. Then Dess had made sure every piece had its own brand-new thirteen-letter name and mounted them all around the house as a last line of protection should the darklings ever find Madeleine’s hiding place.

And what thanks had they gotten? Mostly getting yelled at for making too much noise.

“So, now that we all have tea,” Madeleine pronounced, “perhaps we should discuss the little incident this morning.”

“About time,” Dess muttered. Her fingers traced the deep scratches in the wood of the table. It had been completely covered by big, heavy iron tridecagrams before she’d cleared the room to make it habitable.

Madeleine arched an eyebrow. “Well, then, Desdemona. Since you’re feeling feisty, perhaps you’d like to start.”

“Me? What do I know about it? We were sort of hoping you could tell us something.”

“But surely you have something numerate to contribute?”

Dess sighed. “Well, we checked Rex’s fancy watch after the eclipse was over. He resets it every morning to the time on Geostationary, which is always perfect.” She felt the comforting weight of the GPS device in her pocket. “Turns out it had gained twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds—that was the total length of time the dark moon was up. That’s nine times 144 seconds, which is a very darkling number. Must mean something.”

“But you don’t know what?” Madeleine said.

“Not yet.” Dess sipped at her tea. Maybe the bitter taste of it would focus her mind on the problem.

“There’s nothing like this in the lore,” Rex piped up. “Not that I’ve read. You don’t have any old memories that would help, do you?”

Madeleine took a long while to respond, as if she was filtering out an answer from the centuries of thought echoes in her head. Voices in her head… That didn’t sound particularly sane. Maybe the weight of all those piled-up memories had driven Madeleine madder and madder as she’d hidden in this house, alone. Maybe what mindcasters really passed on was a trick for acting serene and knowing when all of them, including Madeleine and Melissa, were actually as nutty as bat guano.

Dess smiled to herself. Maybe Madeleine could use a new mental nickname.

“No, Rex,” Maddy finally said. “Like the lore, our memories reveal nothing of these events. I’m certain this is all quite unprecedented.”

Dess allowed herself a smirk. Of course history wasn’t going to be any help. This was a job for numbers, maps, and GPS precision.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Rex said glumly.

“Afraid, Rex?” Madeleine snapped. “Chicken-fried baloney! In my day, seers didn’t speak of being afraid. They spoke of action!”

It was Rex’s turn to roll his eyes. He covered the expression by raising his own teacup and wincing at the acid taste.

Some mind reader, Dess thought. Maddy didn’t even know that everyone hated her tea.

“Well,” Jonathan said. “You must have sensed something while the eclipse was happening. Melissa said the darklings were celebrating. You think they were expecting this to happen?”

“Ah, now you’re headed in the right direction,” Maddy said.

Rex shot Jonathan an a

Very clever, Dess thought. The old mindcaster was good at playing the boys against each other. Dess had found a few old photographs of a youthful Madeleine around the house, and she’d been quite the 1940s cutie.

Of course, it was worth remembering that Maddy had been the one to spill the beans back then, coughing up the secrets of the blue time to a daylighter, Grandpa Grayfoot (probably one of her boyfriends). So in theory she could be blamed for the whole mess since: the creation of the halfling, the extermination of the previous generation of midnighters, and the fact that the five of them had been left orphaned and clueless.

“So what did you taste?” Rex asked.

Maddy paused dramatically, then looked across the table at her pupil.

Melissa stopped chewing her lip and said, “We aren’t sure yet. We haven’t had a chance to”—she glanced at Rex—“compare notes.”

“But there were some ruptures,” Maddy said. “Places where the false midnight felt very thin.”

“Places?” Dess asked, her ears perking up. Places could be expressed as longitude and latitude—sweet numbers. “You mean like this crepuscular contortion?”

Maddy nodded. “Yes, but not hiding places. Spots where the barrier between the blue world and ours seemed almost to disappear.”

“Oh.” One hand inside her jacket pocket, Dess gripped Geostationary harder. “You mean like Sheriff Michaels?”

“Sheriff Michaels?” Jonathan asked. “That guy who disappeared?”

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

Some time ago—before Jessica, or even Jonathan, had moved to Bixby—the town sheriff had vanished out in the desert. Only his gun and badge had been found, along with his teeth and all their fillings—the darkling-proof, high-tech alloys of dentistry.

The rumor was he’d been killed by drug dealers, but between Rex’s lore and her careful mapping of the blue time, Dess understood what had really happened.

She cleared her throat. “Well, you know that darklings have to eat, right? Even if they only live one hour in twenty-five, predators still need prey to stay alive. Normal animals can step through into the blue time if they’re in the wrong spot at exactly midnight. So darklings mostly eat unlucky rabbits and cows, but every once in a while a human being slips through.”