As the words passed the mindcaster’s lips, a tremor rolled across the room, the shudder of the spinning earth halting in its tracks. The roar of the cafeteria was sucked away all at once, leaving the five of them surrounded by almost two hundred stiffs, faces blue and cold and waxen, caught throwing food and picking their noses and chewing with their mouths open.

“What time is it, Rex?” Dess’s own voice sounded small in the awesome, sudden silence.

Rex looked at his watch. “Twelve twenty-one and fifteen seconds.”

Dess wrote the number down and stared at it, wondering how long this one was going to last.

Jonathan bobbed weightlessly up from his chair. “Cool, this again.”

“What are we supposed to do?” Jessica said softly.

“We just sit here,” Rex said. “We wait it out. And get down, Jonathan!”

“Why?” Jonathan said. “I can fall from here, no problem.”

“There are people all around, Jonathan. If you fly off someplace and the blue time ends, they’ll see you disappear.”

“Come on, Jonathan.” Jessica reached up and took his hand. “Plenty of time to fly when the world ends.”

“All right, whatever.” Jonathan sighed, settling back onto his chair like a deflating balloon.

No one said anything for a moment. Dess’s eyes were drawn to the tray in front of Rex, whose cafeteria lunch had already been left to congeal during the discussion. Its waxy layer of interrupted time made it look even more unappetizing, his Jell-O glowing blue, its wobble arrested.

Melissa held her head tipped back, tasting the air to her heart’s content, and for once Dess was glad that the mindcaster was around. At least they’d know if an army of darklings was on its way.

Of course, this wasn’t the end of the world, not yet. You could tell just by looking. If the secret hour had snapped completely, all the stiffs around them would still be moving, having been sucked into the blue time along with everything else within a few hundred miles.

Dess didn’t have to do any math to know what the result of that would be. All those predators suddenly escaping from their midnight prison, unleashed on their prey—maybe millions of people, if the blue time really expanded across the whole state. No phones, no cars, not even fire, and only the five midnighters knew how to defend themselves.

Dess fixed her gaze on a constellation of french fries hovering over a motionless food fight across the lunchroom. She wondered if what she’d told Jessica yesterday after school was really true. Could you make it to the border of the blue time, freezing yourself at the edge until the long midnight ended?

Not too many people would be lucky enough to make it that far. Not with all those hungry darklings pouring in from the desert. And what if the blue time never ended? What if everyone on the outside was permanently frozen and everyone in the inside was lunch meat—most of humanity gone with a whimper, the rest with a bang?

“So, Dess?” Jessica said, finally breaking the silence.

She pulled her gaze from the hovering french fries. “Yeah?”

“In study hall, what were you scribbling on those papers? You said Halloween was safe. What’s wrong with the next day?”

“Oh, yeah.” Dess looked down at the papers before her, tinged blue by the eclipse. “Well, the weird thing is what happens at midnight, Halloween, if you switch from the old system to the new. October 31 was an antidarkling fiesta back when October was the eighth month. But now November’s the eleventh month. Right?” Dess spread her hands. “Man, you guys are hopeless. So it’s November 1. And eleven plus one is twelve, as in midnight. As in darklings.”

They were all silent for a moment.

Finally Jonathan asked, “How long is that from now?”

“Twenty-three days, eleven hours, and thirty-nine minutes,” Dess said. “Minus fifteen seconds.”

“Three weeks.” Jessica looked at Rex. “So what should we do?”

Dess was glad to see him scratch his brow, at least pretending like he was coming up with a plan. However messed up Rex’s head was, the coming end of the world might screw it on a little bit tighter.

“I’m not convinced yet, Dess,” he said after a minute. “But I guess we have to find out more about what the Grayfoots are up to.”

“How are we supposed to do that?” Jonathan said. “Just drive over to Broken Arrow and ask them?”

He smiled. “Maybe it’s better if we get them over to Bixby.”

Everyone stared at him, but Rex didn’t blink.

Dess leaned back into her chair, wondering what Rex was smoking. When the last bunch of midnighters had gotten in Grandpa Grayfoot’s way, he’d made a hundred prominent citizens disappear overnight. Less than two weeks ago the Grayfoots had kidnapped Rex right out of his own house, then left him in the desert to have his humanity stripped away.

But for some reason he wasn’t scared of them. Dess might not be a mindcaster, but she could see that. What the hell was happening to him?

It was funny, but ever since the bitch goddess had gotten under control, Rex had gone six kinds of crazy. It was like the five of them only had so much sanity to go around.

“Rex, be serious,” Jessica said softly.

“I am serious.” He reached into his jacket and threw a piece of paper on the table. It was covered with scrawled lore signs. “This is a message from Angie.”

“That psycho who kidnapped you?” Jonathan asked.

“That’s the one.”

“Um, Rex.” Dess shook her head. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“Sorry. It only showed up yesterday morning, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it—until now.”

“Burn it, maybe?” suggested Dess.

Rex ignored her. “From what Angie says, the family is closing ranks, leaving outsiders like her in the dark. She’s just as freaked out as we are.” His fingers drummed the table. “Which means that Dess might be right.”

“About burning it?” Dess said.

“No, about what’s going to happen in three weeks and that the Grayfoots know more about it than we do. So I guess I should meet with her.”

Jonathan stared at the piece of paper with a horrified expression, like a live rattlesnake had flopped onto the table. “What the hell, Rex? You’re actually going to trust her?”

“I don’t trust her at all. But I’ve been wondering about this message and figuring out a way to get Angie over to Bixby, whether she wants to come or not. We’ll all have to work together, though.” He looked around at them, a seer-knows-best expression on his face.

Dess sighed, wondering if anyone else had noticed how every time all five of them did anything together, things went totally haywire.

“Hang on, guys!” Melissa said suddenly. “It’s ending.”

Rex snatched the scrawled paper from the table. “Get ready.”

Jonathan pulled himself firmly down onto his seat. Melissa put her fingers back on her temples, the way she’d been when the eclipse had hit. Dess tried to remember what she’d been doing—probably looking at Melissa and wondering what the hell she was yelling about.

She turned toward the mindcaster and gave her a suitable look of contempt.

A few seconds later the world shuddered again. The cold blue light was swept from the cafeteria, which exploded around them into a mass of motion and sound and sunlight. The seventeen french fries sailed on their various trajectories, two hundred mouths resumed their chewing, and Rex’s Jell-O began to wobble once more.

Dess pulled at Rex’s arm and looked at his watch, comparing it with the time on her GPS device. This eclipse had been shorter than the first one, lasting only seven minutes and twelve seconds. But it had followed a similar pattern: three times 144 seconds.

Now that it was over, Dess allowed herself a long sigh. However certain she’d been that the big event was three weeks away, it was a relief to know the end hadn’t come.

Not this time, anyway.