Just as he rounded the corner, his boot skidded on the rain-slick roof, sending him sprawling painfully to the tar. He crawled the last few feet and huddled beside Dess against the side of the shed, eyes closed and ears still covered.

“Rex, you moron!” Dess shouted. “You almost gave me a heart atta—”

The bomb exploded with a vast noise—a physical blow more than a sound, like a sack of potatoes hitting Rex in the chest. Even his closed eyelids felt the concussion, and a single, awesome flash of light shot through them.

For a moment all other noises disappeared, as if the bomb’s roar had sucked sound itself from the rest of the world. But slowly the murmur of the rain returned, and Rex dared to open his eyes.

He glanced at his watch: twenty seconds to midnight.

Rising to their feet, he and Dess peered around the corner. Nothing was left of the paint can, of course, and the cell phone antenna was a blackened wreckage, bent and twisted metal sticking out in all directions.

“Whoa, cool!” Dess said.

Rex limped after her to the edge of the roof, training his darkling hearing on the city below….

The sweet sound of car alarms rang out across Bixby, a hundred whoops and screams and buzzes all mingled in a great, untidy chorus. Rex imagined people turning over in their sleep, glaring accusingly at their alarm clocks and wondering what all the noise was about. Even the sleepiest would still be awake in ten seconds when midnight fell. Perfect timing.

Here in town they wouldn’t feel the blue time strike right away, of course: the rip still had to travel to downtown from Jenks. But for those the bomb had awakened—and all the others already up watching late-night TV or reading in bed—that delay would only seem like an instant. Suddenly at midnight the world would turn blue, everything flickering with the red tinge of the rip, TVs, radios, and car alarms all silenced at once.

Those who went out to investigate would find the dark moon risen overhead, the last few seconds of rain settling to earth. And soon they would see the fireworks display downtown, the only movement visible on the frozen horizon.

Hopefully many of them would start to make their way downtown then, searching for some kind of explanation. By that time Jonathan would be flying among them, telling everyone to get to this building as fast as possible. And as long as the midnighters’ defenses at Jenks had held off the main darkling force long enough, they’d have time to get here.

As he and Dess waited for the last few seconds of normal time to elapse, Rex took a deep breath. For the next twenty-five hours humanity would be a hunted species, dispossessed of all its clever toys and machines, toppled from the summit of the food chain. Those who understood that quickly enough would run and would live; those who refused to believe would perish.

In the darkling part of his mind, Rex thought for a moment that perhaps this wasn’t such a bad thing. Without predators to cull the herd, humanity had spread across the earth unchecked, crowding the planet beyond its resources, prideful and arrogant.

Maybe one night a year of being hunted would do them good.

He shook his head then, shivering in the cold rain. Darkling notions had teased his mind all week, but he knew he couldn’t let himself think that way—he had a job to do. The people of Bixby didn’t deserve to be slaughtered just because the world was overpopulated. No one did.

He listened to the car alarms and forced himself to hope that everyone down there was listening too.

Just before midnight fell, a peal of thunder started to roll, sounding directly over their heads. And then the earth shuddered, the blue time descending over everything, freezing the rain into a million hovering diamonds around him, cutting off the thunder, the car alarms, everything.

“Can you see it from here?” Dess asked.

Rex looked toward Jenks, and his seer’s vision picked out the slim red glimmer of the rip. It was starting to swell.

“Yep. The red time is on its way.”

“Good going on that fuse.” Dess breathed out a slow sigh. “Guess now we just sit back until the fireworks start.”

As per the plan, the other three midnighters were out in Jenks. Soon they would light the first fireworks display to forestall the main force of darklings. Once that was going strong and before the darklings started to flow around them and into town, Jonathan would fly Jessica and Melissa back here, where the five of them would make their stand.

At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.

“Whoa, Rex! Look at that!”

Dess was pointing back toward downtown. Rex turned, following her gaze to the Mobil Building, the tallest in Bixby. The neon winged horse at its summit hunkered just under the low ceiling of heavy clouds, strangely illuminated against their dark bulk.

Rex’s heart began to pound. “Oh my God.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“No, but I’ve always wanted to. Melissa and I have been looking for one of those since… forever.”

A frozen bolt of lightning reached down from the cloud, its motionless fire forking into a hundred tendrils that caressed the metal framework of the neon horse. In Rex’s midnight vision the arrested lightning was mind-bogglingly complex, every inch of it divided into a million burning zigzags.

He remembered all the times he and Melissa had set off on their bicycles as kids, tunneling through the rain toward some frozen flicker of light on the horizon. They’d never made it before the secret hour finished, always having to plow back through the resumed storm empty-handed.

But they’d kept trying; one of the first fragments of lore Rex had discovered was all about frozen lightning, though it had never explained what you were supposed to do when you found it.

Still, there was something in his mind….

He felt the fissures that Madeleine had made, the still-tender wounds of her attack, begin to throb. He saw it now, thrown whole into his mind by the sight of the frozen lightning. This was the last remnant of what the darklings had hidden from him.

Rex blinked. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

He couldn’t answer, a shudder passing through him. Suddenly he knew what tonight was really all about and what had to happen before the rip reached downtown and set the lightning free again. He knew the instructions that the Grayfoots had never received before their halfling had died.

And finally he understood the real reason why the darklings were so afraid of Jessica—why they had always wanted her dead.

He looked out at Jenks; the glowing red of the rip was still moving toward them. “We can stop this.”

“What, Rex?”

“We need Jessica here.”

“But they haven’t even lit the—”

“Shhh.” Rex dropped to his knees and let his head fall into his hands. In planning tonight he’d put Melissa on the front line for two reasons. She could guide Jessica and Jonathan safely there and back, through cops or darkling invasions as needed. And Rex had also known that if anything went wrong, she could taste his thoughts for miles across the secret hour, just as she had when they were eight years old, when she’d made her way across Bixby wearing only pajamas covered in pictures of cowgirls.

Now he needed her to hear him again.

“Rex?” Dess said softly.

He waved her silent and focused himself, setting all of his will to the task of summoning his oldest friend.

Cowgirl… he thought. I need you now.