Beth made a choked little sound, wiping at her face, then said softly, “I trust you.”

Jonathan stepped forward, holding out both his hands. “You saw us do this, right? On Halloween?”

Beth nodded, taking his hand carefully. As her smaller fingers closed around his, a look of surprise crossed her face.

“It’s… dizzy.”

“It’s a lot better than dizzy,” Jessica said, smiling. She pulled her right hand from her pocket; white sparks fluttered upward from it. The bracelet she wore glowed, its tiny charms aglitter. Dess squinted at the light.

Beth stared at it openmouthed. “What is that?”

“Don’t you remember? It’s a present from Jonathan… plus some lightning.” Jessica took Flyboy’s hand.

At first they took a weenie, ten-foot hop. Then a longer one took them to the middle of the field. Finally they opened up big time, heading for the motionless Arkansas River. Jessica’s right hand sparkled in the distance, its trail of white light coruscating across the blue horizon.

Dess felt a smile spread across her face, and she was suddenly much less depressed. Beth had seen the blue time again; she’d gotten to fly.

“Yeah, I know,” Melissa said.

Dess let out a sigh. Alone with the bitch goddess one more time.

“I’m still sorry, you know. For what I did to you.”

Typical mindcaster trick, catching her off guard and getting all sentimental. Dess heard herself saying, “Whatever. It’s probably not your fault, the way you are.”

“We saved Rex that night.”

Not so sorry after all? Dess thought. But she couldn’t argue with Melissa’s logic. “You’ll miss him, won’t you?”

Melissa nodded. “I already do.”

Dess sighed again. Maybe there was one darkling left in Bixby.

They stood there in silence for a while, waiting for the others to come back.

“So how many more of us are out there?” the mindcaster finally asked.

Dess took a breath, glad to be talking about math instead of all this emotional crap. “Well, let’s say you have to be born within a half second of midnight, right? That would be one out of every eighty-six thousand four hundred people.”

“In a big city that’s a lot, isn’t it?”

“In New York about a hundred. In the world… a hundred thousand.”

“Crap,” Melissa said softly, like she hadn’t thought through the scale of their little road trip yet.

Amazement radiated from the mindcaster, a tingle that shot down Dess’s arms into her fingers, bringing back her smile. Even being stuck here in Bixby with crazy Rex and crazier Maddy, even with no darklings left to slay, even living in a major curfew zone for the next two and a half years, Dess couldn’t complain about the cards she’d drawn.

Once the midnighters had gone their separate ways, Dess would no longer be stuck between the two couples, hemmed in by the constant clash of egos. And eventually she would be free of Bixby itself. No longer a fifth wheel.

After high school, Dess knew, she could get a job anywhere. Computers, spacecraft, all kinds of cool stuff that hadn’t even been invented yet—all of it needed math. And with midnight spreading across the globe, thousands of polymaths would be waking up. Finally she’d have people to talk to with minds like hers, math geniuses in a frozen time where math kicked ass. Together they could map the expanded secret hour, have whole conversations in tridecalogisms, try to figure out how time itself worked. Change the world, maybe.

Screw the lore, with all its propaganda and lies and bitter history. Dess was going to be the one to write the axioms of midnight, the first principles of Dessometrics.

Inexhaustible. Unsmotherable. Extraordinary. That was her.

It was way cool, being the one who did the math.