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“I never thought you were.”

It wasn’t long before she reached the bonfire. Walking directly took only five minutes, just like Dess had promised.

Jessica had never seen a frozen fire before. It didn’t look like much. The bluish flames cast no light, were barely visible except as a warping of the air, like ripples of heat in the desert.

She didn’t want to look at the frozen people, especially their faces, which seemed ugly and dead, like a bad photograph. So she peered closely at the fire, reaching out a tentative finger to touch one of the flames.

The heat was still there, but muted and soft, like a sound from the next room. Her touch left a glowing mark suspended in the air, as if the red flame were trying to poke its way through into the blue time. She pulled her finger back. Where she had touched it, the frozen flame was red now. That one spark of light stood out against the blue veil that lay across the desert night.

As the moon set, Jessica slipped back into the shadows.

Midnight ended.

The cold wrapped around her suddenly, and she shivered in the light jacket.

The fire pit jumped into motion—conversation, laughter, and music blurting to life as if Jess had opened a door onto a party. She felt smaller; the world had suddenly grown crowded, pushing her back into the shadows.

“Jessica?”

Constanza was peering out at her from the fireside.

“Hey.”

“I thought you were ‘taking a walk’ with Steve,” Constanza said, smiling. “Didn’t think I’d see you for a while.”

“Yeah, well, he turned out to be kind of a creep, actually.”

Constanza took a few steps nearer, hands disappearing into pockets as she left the fire behind her.

“He what?” Constanza looked closer, her eyes widening as she saw Jessica’s electrified hair, her bloody knuckles, the dirt on the jacket and dress. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Oh, I’m sorry about your clothes. I didn’t—”

“That creep!” Constanza cried. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly his—”

“Come on, Jess, I’m taking you home.”

Jessica paused, then sighed with relief. The last thing she wanted was any more partying tonight. “Yeah, sure. I’d really appreciate that.”

Constanza thrust her arm through Jessica’s and walked her toward the cars.

“These Broken Arrow boys are really too much sometimes.” Constanza sighed. “I don’t know what anyone sees in them. They think they’re so cool, but they’re so out of control.”

“Nice fire, though.”

“You like bonfires?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, good. Maybe sometime we’ll—”

A voice came from the darkness in front of them. “Hey, there you are.”

Jessica’s feet froze in midstride. It was Steve, making his way back from the cars where he’d led Jessica. She felt Constanza’s hand tighten on her arm.

“You totally disappeared there, Jess. Kind of freaked me out.” He took a few steps closer. “Hey, what happened to your—”

He never saw it coming; Jessica hardly saw it herself. In one fluid motion Constanza released her, took a step forward, and punched Steve in the face.

He stumbled backward, tripped on his own feet, and landed on his butt on the hard ground.

“Hey!” Constanza took Jessica’s arm and resumed their march toward the cars, continuing where she had left off.

“We’ll get together with some decent Bixby boys and have a party out on the salt flats.”

Jessica blinked and felt a laugh gurgling up inside her. “Uh, yeah, that’d be fun.”

Steve’s protests faded behind them.

“Nothing like a desert bonfire to keep warm,” Constanza proclaimed.

Jessica smiled and pulled her friend a bit closer for warmth.

“Great idea,” she said. “I’ll bring the matches.”

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.