31

12:00 A.M.

NIGHT WATCH

"They're still out there, in the distance."

"Cowering, you mean." Rex leaned back on the hood of Melissa's car, propping his head on his hands.

She tasted the air. "No, something else."

It was two midnights after the flame-bringer had come to Rustle's Bottom, and the blue-lit desert looked as if nothing had ever walked on its hard earth. The vast emptiness of the place covered Melissa's tongue with a dry, lonely taste like powdered chalk and sand. But she could still sense the darklings and their allies hidden among the low mountains on the other side of the Bottom.

"Waiting," she said.

"For what?"

Melissa shrugged. It was a taste, nothing more specific.

"For the next thing to happen, I guess."

"They must still be in shock," Rex said. "I know I am."

She shook her head again. "No, they were expecting her."

"Are you kidding?"

Melissa opened her eyes and turned to her old friend.

"You've never tasted the darklings, Rex. Maybe you have to be a mindcaster to understand them, but they aren't like us."

She lay back next to him, looking up at the moon.

"They're so old, so frightened."

"Until last week they never struck me as the frightened type," Rex said. "More in the frightening category, actually."

Melissa smiled. She had felt Rex's fear of the spiders two nights before, a terror as deep and mindless as any kid's nightmare.

"They've been chased to the edge of the world, Rex, squeezed into one hour of the day. Pursued by the daylight, by fire and math, by an age of new technologies. Scared into hiding by a species they used to eat for breakfast. Literally."

"I guess so."

"I know so. I can feel it from them. We're their nightmare, Rex. Clever humans with our tools and numbers and fire. Little monkeys that started hunting them one day and have never given up. Ever since they ran away into the secret hour, they always feared, even knew somewhere deep inside, that one day we'd come after them here in the blue time. Just like you always know that somewhere under your house there's a spider crawling, coming for you."

She felt the shiver crawl up Rex's spine and giggled.

"Hey, cut that out," he complained. "I don't eavesdrop on your nightmares, Cowgirl."

"Lucky you," she said with a snort, then continued. "So they always knew in the pits of their darkling souls that Jessica would come. A flame-bringer, invading their last refuge."

"That's why they were so anxious to kill her."

"Were?" she said softly, and smiled.

Melissa could feel it from across the desert, the hatred out there, cold and unyielding. It was as focused and bitter as the tip of a lead pencil resting on the end of her tongue. Not helpless at all, or stupid, the intelligence that waited in those hills was patient and well prepared. Its animal side had attacked blindly at first, as darklings always did, but it wasn't beaten yet. They had made plans for this situation, backup plans for every contingency. Every dark and ancient mind out there waited in constant, paranoid readiness.

They had been planning for this day for ten thousand years.

They would come again for Jessica Day.

They stayed at the edge of the Bottom for the whole secret hour, waiting to see if the darklings would dare to venture back.

Melissa yawned. This guard duty was Rex's useless caution at work, but after the last week she was happy for any midnight that turned out boring.

She could taste Dess out at the snake pit, measuring the cracks in the stone that Jessica had made, trying to work out the mathematics of its new asymmetry. Dess was also on some new navigation trip, doing star sightings with a homemade sextant, excited about some new numerological secret she was keeping from the rest of them, her mind wrapped up in the pure world of angles and ratios.

She could feel Jonathan and Jessica back in Bixby, flying together for a while, then perching on some high spot to look down on the world. Happy, as simple as that, and Jessica thrilled with her new power. So different from the fearful, alien minds who hated her.

She could feel Rex next to her, his mind spinning with questions, with the need to read more and know more. And underneath it all, the quiet, joyful realization that Rex Greene would be the seer who wrote the lore for these strange and exciting days.

Everybody happy, blissfully ignorant that this battle had hardly begun.

Midnight ended.

Dess returned right on time, just as the car rumbled to life beneath Rex and Melissa. She had kept the old Ford running - an engine frozen at midnight didn't use up any gas.

They jumped off the hood and got in, Dess opening a rear door with a dazed expression on her face. When her head was really in the numbers, she didn't talk much, so Rex and Melissa maintained a respectful silence.

Melissa drove them home through back roads, avoiding police cars by feel. At midnight on Sunday there were very few humans awake in Bixby, so the cops were easy to taste. But every once in a while Melissa did catch a snatch of thought here or there, a sleepless worry, a late night argument, an eruption of a dream or nightmare.

There's no way I can pay this bill....

How was I supposed to know she was allergic to peanuts?

I can't believe it's Monday again tomorrow....

We must have Jessica Day.

Melissa started, her hands gripping the wheel tightly at the last intense burst of thought. She searched for the source, tried to distill it from the noise of worries and night terrors and dream stuff, but it had disappeared back into the chaos of Bixby's mental terrain as quickly as it had surfaced, a stone dropping into a churning ocean.

She took a deep breath, realizing that it was 12:17 A.M.., not midnight. That thought had been human.

"What was that?" Rex asked.

"What was what?"

"You tasted something. Back there. You practically pulled the steering wheel off."

Melissa glanced at Rex, bit her lip, and shrugged, turning her eyes back to the road.

"It was nothing, Rex. Probably just some kid's nightmare."