“Hey, my mom works here,” she said.

“You said she designs planes, right?”

“Just wings.”

“That’s so funny that your mom works and your dad doesn’t.”

Jessica shrugged. “Dad gave up his job in Chicago to come down here. He’s always switching jobs anyway.”

“That was pretty cool of him, though.”

“Yeah, I guess. I think he’s wishing he hadn’t.”

Jess sat up straight. A tall structure was looming ahead of them, alight and unfinished. It was the new building where she and Jonathan had taken refuge from the darklings. The construction was going late tonight, it seemed. The grid of steel was brightly lit, big lamps hanging from every girder, swinging in the autumn wind. It looked almost like it had in the secret hour, when the moon was setting and the whole building had suddenly ignited with white light, driving the slithers and darklings away.

“Hey, any new buildings at work?” she murmured softly.

“What?” Constanza asked.

“Nothing. Just something I forgot to ask my mom about.”

Jonathan and Jessica had talked a couple of times about what had happened that night and about what might have saved them from their pursuers. Jonathan figured the building must be built of some new kind of metal. Jessica had told Rex and Dess the whole story, but they were busy planning the snake pit expedition and hadn’t come up with any answers. Apparently Rex didn’t know everything about the rules of midnight.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to Mom about her new job,” Jessica continued. “But she’s so busy there, I haven’t been able to.”

“Yeah, my dad’s the same way,” Constanza said. “Not that I’d want to talk to him about his job. Oil futures or whatever.” She pointed ahead, her smile brightening. “Congratulations, Jessica, you are now leaving Bixby.”

The town limit flashed by, and Jessica’s stomach tingled. They weren’t just leaving Bixby—they were headed out to the badlands.

“Next stop, the snake pit,” she said to herself.

She checked her watch. Fifty-seven minutes to midnight.

23

11:03 P.M.

COORDINATES

Rex and Melissa were late.

Dess looked at her watch. Only three minutes past, but the timing for getting out to the snake pit was getting tight. Melissa’s rusty old heap could only get them so far. They’d have to walk the last half mile across the Bottom.

The three of them had gone out to the snake pit after school to set up her hardware. Dess wished now that they’d stayed there; coming home and waiting for all the parentals to go to sleep had been a dumb idea. Getting in trouble with Mom and Dad was nothing compared to getting caught by hungry darklings halfway across the Bottom.

But Rex had to make sure his crazy dad was in bed before he left. As if taking care of Melissa weren’t enough.

Dess counted to thirteen, forcing herself to relax. She reached into the guts of Ada Lovelace’s music box and pulled out a few gears, rearranging them and visualizing the resulting choreography. She gave the mechanical ballerina a windup and watched her dance, checking her predictions.

Ada jumped into motion, always ready to dance, but the new steps didn’t come out as expected. The final, stuttering lift of her left arm went forward instead of back. Dess shook her head. She could see it now: she’d turned one of the gears around the wrong way.

It was Rex and Melissa’s fault she was so anxious. If they’d been here on time, Rex would be the one getting all nervous, and she and Melissa could rag on him and be the calm ones. They’d be on their way to the snake pit, where Dess’s masterpiece in metal would draw oohs and aahs from all concerned as slithers burned themselves to cinders.

She looked out the window again. Still no crappy Ford cruising to a stop in front of the house two doors down, the usual spot for premidnight rendezvous.

Dess kicked her duffel bag, and it made a reassuring metal clank. All ready to go, filled with state-of-the-art antidarkling weaponry, backups in case the defenses around the snake pit failed. And she’d left a very special new toy on the roof for Jonathan to pick up on his way out. She’d done her bit.

So where were Rex and Melissa?

Dess itched to call, but that would be totally stupid. Melissa’s parents let her do whatever she wanted, but Rex’s dad was a major psycho. If Rex was creeping out his window this very moment, it would be a bad time for the phone to ring.

Besides, they’d better already be on their way.

Eleven-oh-six. In forty seconds it would be exactly forty thousand seconds after noon. More importantly, it would be a mere thirty-two hundred seconds until midnight. Dess could feel the blue time—full of darklings—rushing toward her at a thousand miles per hour.

Okay, she thought. A bit faster than that, really. The earth’s circumference was 24,860 miles, and a day was twenty-four hours. So midnight would have to move at about 1,036 miles per hour to make it all the way around the earth once per day.

She’d seen it on the Discovery Channel, from cameras on the space shuttle: the terminator line, the edge of darkness that marked dawn or sunset, sweeping across the earth. True midnight must work the same way, an invisible edge cutting across the world, bringing the blue time.

Right now midnight would be about nine hundred miles east of here, in the next time zone. Of course, as far as any of them knew, there weren’t darklings or midnighters or blue time anywhere but Bixby. Rex had never figured that one out. Dess wondered if a little less lore and a little more math might solve the puzzle.

She looked out the window. Still no Rex and Melissa.

For a horrible moment she wondered if they had left her behind. Just taken off for the snake pit without her. The old feeling of isolation gripped her.

It was all Melissa the Mindcaster’s fault. She’d tracked Rex down when they were both eight years old. Dess was only a year younger, but it had taken Melissa another four years to find her. Melissa’s excuse was that Dess lived too close to the badlands and that back then all the darklings and slithers had confused her unformed talent.

That sounded like a load of crap to Dess. Melissa could pick Rex up from a mile away even in daylight; in the blue time another midnighter was like a flare on a dark horizon. She’d found Jonathan and Jessica within days after they’d arrived. But for the four years that Rex and Melissa had been alone together, all Dess had known was slithers, the lonely surety of math, and Ada Lovelace.

She reached into Ada’s box and switched the errant gear around, wound her up again. “Dance, my pretty.”

Dess was sure that her isolation in those early years had been purposeful. Melissa had played for time while she and Rex explored midnight together, grew up together. The scheme had worked. By the time Melissa finally “found” Dess, Rex and Melissa were so tight that nothing could ever come between them. And Melissa’s psychic hold on Rex made it impossible for him to even think about what Melissa had done.

Dess swallowed and stared out the window.

They wouldn’t dare leave her behind tonight. Even with the snake pit already set up to repel darklings, they needed her in case something went wrong. When it came to steel, only she could improvise. Without her this whole mission would be impossible.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Jonathan Martinez hadn’t been such a disappointment, flying off to his own little world instead of bringing the group together. Maybe Jessica would bring him around, once the two of them reappeared from the couple zone.

Dess shook her head. She had to stop thinking about this stuff before they got here. She didn’t want to give Melissa the satisfaction of knowing she felt this way.

As she always did to hide her thoughts, Dess let the numbers take over her brain. “Ane, twa, thri, feower…”