7
11:53 P.M.
PREY
Melissa's eyes rolled back in her head, her nose wrinkling. Rex saw a shudder pass through her body from toes to fingertips.
"What, did they stop already?" Rex asked.
She shook her head. "No, Flyboy's still got his pedal all the way down. They'll get here in time, more or less. But the flame-bringer's not in a very good mood."
Dess glanced up from her GPS device and snorted. Rex shook his head. Great time for a lovers' quarrel.
He swept his eyes across the railroad tracks again. This place was wrapped in Focus, inhuman marks corrupting every piece of gravel in the rail bed, every blade of grass shooting up through the wooden cross-ties. Darklings and slithers had danced here. Even the steel spikes in the iron rails bore the traces of their claws and snouts and slithering bellies.
All this Focus couldn't have been laid down in twenty-one minutes. They must have come here before the eclipse.
Of course, Rex thought, there were always a few midnight places on the outskirts of town. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that this weak spot had been visited before.
He knelt to take a closer look at a slitherprint, a sinuous line that wound down the railroad tracks as far as he could see. It didn't look especially fresh, not like a trail left only fifteen hours ago.
But Rex frowned; his new hunter's nerves were twitching with all the metal around him. Why would a slither travel down a railroad line that reeked of iron rails, steel bolts, and buried telegraph lines? Most darkling places on the city's edges were open fields and empty back lots, places where little patches of the wild still clung - stands of native plants, snake holes, or small creeks not yet erased by buildings and concrete. But this iron path was an artery of the rail system, an old and powerful symbol of human cleverness and dominance. Only a hundred years ago it had represented the highest technology that humanity possessed, yet the darklings had embraced this spot. They must have come here with a purpose.
Rex saw how far the Focus stretched up and down the track, how it trailed off into the brush and extended even to the ramshackle houses backed up against the right-of-way. He wondered how far into the mesquite trees it went. The small town of Jenks was close to the Arkansas River, and the scrub in these parts was impenetrably dense, hiding much of the landscape from his new predator's eyes.
But old darklings had been here, of that Rex was sure. He could see deep, clawed footprints in the soil and a broad tree branch that had almost cracked under the weight of something huge and winged. There were slither burrows scattered throughout the underbrush; darklings young and old hid from the sun out in the deep desert caves, but some of their little minions nested closer to town, buried under the earth.
It took time to layer a place with this much Focus, this many signs. They must have begun months ago, maybe a lot longer than that. Melissa and Madeleine had felt their celebrations out in the desert: the darklings had somehow known that the eclipse was coming and exactly where it would happen. Which meant they'd probably also known what Dess had discovered today, that this first tear in the blue time would spread like a rip along the seam of an old T-shirt.
Maybe it had always been their plan that the blue time would one day come apart. But what would happen then?
Suddenly something caught Rex's eye. One of the railroad track cross-ties stood out, a halo of red surrounding it. He looked closer and smelled the inherent strangeness of the spot. The blue time was paper-thin here.
The old wood of the cross-tie was marked with a sliver of Focus, looking out of place here among the stains of darklings. He drew closer and saw in the half-moon shape the distinctive tread of a sneaker.
That was why it looked different - that other kind of Focus clung to it, the kind Rex had only learned to see over the last couple of weeks.
"Prey," he said softly.
"Five minutes," announced Dess, nervously rocking the long piece of steel pipe that rested on her shoulder. "How's the flame-bringer doing?"
"Close," Melissa said. "But they're slowing down. Wimps."
"Not everyone appreciates the subtle pleasures of flying through a windshield, Melissa," Dess said.
"They've got five whole minutes before midnight, and Flyboy's already parking it!"
"How far are they?" Rex interrupted.
"A few miles."
"Not good." He followed the trail of human Focus with his gaze. The glimmering footprints left the rail bed and headed down into the dense undergrowth. "She went this way. On foot, not being dragged."
"Who? Cassie?" Dess asked.
Rex nodded.
"You can see that?"
"I can see the traces of humans now," he said, pointing at the trail. "And these footprints look like they were made in the blue time. Cassie must have left them during the eclipse."
Dess's face twisted into a skeptical expression. Other than Melissa and Madeleine, none of them yet understood how different he had become.
Rex knelt on the tracks and sniffed. He could smell the uncertainty of the lost girl, could see her fear in the tentative distance between the steps. It made his mouth water, his palms sweat. This was a young one, weak and ready to be cut from the herd.
"Get a grip, Rex," Melissa said softly.
He shook the hunting thoughts from his head. "Okay, I'm going to track her. She might still be close by. You guys stay here. But yell out a countdown for the last thirty seconds, Dess." He slid down the loose gravel bank of the rail bed and plunged into the thick bushes.
"Rex!" Dess shouted. "There's only four minutes left! Get back here."
"Quit showing off, Rex," Melissa called. "Once midnight falls and her brain starts up again, I'll find her right away."
Rex glanced back. The two of them were standing inside Polychronious, a large and complex tridecagram that Dess had laid down on a patch of clearing, using a spool of fiberoptic cable stolen from Oklahoma Telecom a few midnights ago. The cable smelled bright and buzzy to Rex, like cleaning detergent fumes going up his nose, and the thirteen-pointed star Dess had woven with it made his head spin. They would be safe from darklings inside it, even if the flame-bringer was a few minutes late.
"Just give me that countdown," he called back.
"Rex!" Dess wailed.
He noticed that she and Melissa were standing as far apart as they could inside the tridecagram, like two rival cats locked in a small room together.
Whatever. They'd live.
Rex pushed his way deeper into the underbrush, fighting the bare, brittle branches of mesquite. He could see in the dark better than ever now, and the spaces between leafless trees and scrub seemed to open up before him. He soon realized that his prey's slender marks of Focus followed a narrow path, probably an old animal trail.
As Cassie's footsteps went deeper into the brush, they began to grow more sure and purposeful, as if after the first few minutes of confusion in the blue time, she'd headed for someplace where she felt safe.
A branch caught Rex, bending taut, then whipping backward, leaving a long rip in his shirt. The girl must have grown up around here to move so easily through this overgrowth. He could tell she was much shorter than him - from her footprints, she had walked almost upright underneath branches that he was forced to crouch beneath.
Her footsteps grew farther apart; moving more swiftly now, as if coaxed forward by some goal. Rex swore - he wasn't going to find the girl before midnight fell. She'd had twenty-one minutes to get wherever she'd disappeared to, and he had only...
"Thirty seconds, Rex!" Dess's voice called through the trees.
He paused. To make it back to safety, he should turn around now and start running. Inside Dess's ring of protection, they could wait for the flame-bringer. In the blue time Melissa would be able to taste the lost girl's thoughts even if she were miles away.
Of course, Cassie couldn't have actually gotten that far in twenty minutes unless the darklings had swooped down and carried her off. And if that had happened, she probably wasn't alive and certainly wouldn't survive the long minutes it would take Jonathan and Jessica to reach her.
Rex sniffed the trail before him. An electric trickle of fear still lingered in the human scent, mixed with excitement and wonder. It made something within him grow hungry. This was the smell of those young, adventurous humans who tended to stray too far from their villages - the call of easy meat.
Part of Rex knew that he should do the sensible thing. He should head back to safety and get everyone organized: keep Dess and Melissa from fighting with each other, tell Jonathan and Jessica what to do when they arrived, maybe fly along with them to the rescue. No one but he could be the leader that the group needed.
But the smell of the lone girl drew him forward, calling his entire body down the narrow path. Cassie Flinders felt so close. His hands tingled with how near she was, and a raw imperative filled him...
Reach her before the others do. She's yours.
Rex took an unsteady step forward. He had to get there first.
"Fifteen!" Dess's distant cry reached him. "Where the hell are you, Rex? Ten. You're-an-idiot-nine, get-back-here-eight, you-dimwit-seven...."
Rex plunged deeper into the undergrowth.
Seconds later the earth shuddered under his feet. Blue light swept through the brush and across the sky, dulling the stars and bringing every branch and blade of grass into sharp relief, his vision suddenly seer-perfect.
He breathed in the hungry essence of the blue time, the mental clarity of midnight.
Ahead of him in the distance Rex's sharp ears caught a small cry of surprise and fear... Cassie waking up in the blue time.
It made him hungrier.
Only a minute after midnight's fall, things were beginning to stir in every direction. Slithers were worming their way up out of the deep burrows that protected them from the sun, signaling one another with their strange, chirping calls. It was like first light on some weird spring morning, the birds waking up and making a ruckus.
There were lots of slithers out here. Suddenly the steel hoops around his boots didn't feel like enough protection. He swept his eyes back and forth nervously across the dense brush, searching for the sharp Focus of their burrows, imagining the icy sting of a slither strike catching him on the leg. Rex had once worked on his grandfather's farm in Texas during harvest season; every step through these burrows reminded him of the anxious moment of lifting a hay bale and not knowing if an angry rattler lay underneath.
Another cry reached his ears, and Rex tore his eyes from the forest floor. Through the trees he saw a wedge of stone jutting up from the earth, cut in two by a narrow fissure. It was a tight fit even for a little kid but enough cover to hide Cassie from the sun.
Why had she gone in there? It seemed like incredibly bad luck to have wandered into a cave hidden from the sun's rays.
Unless she had somehow been coaxed into coming here...
Rex pulled his gloves on. These days the touch of stainless steel made his bare flesh itch during the secret hour, but leather gloves allowed him a solid grip on his new weapon. Dess had decorated the hunting knife's blade with a superfine guitar string wound in patterns that made his eyes burn and water. The knife had the clever human smell of a finely tooled bicycle part - all modern alloys and precise proportions - buzzing with a thousand ingenious angles.
It make his head hurt to look at it, even to think its name, which meant that the weapon could fend off any darkling, at least for the short time it would take for Jessica and Jonathan to get here. The secret hour had begun almost three minutes ago - they had to be on their way.
From just outside the mouth of the fissure, he stared into the gloom. A blue glow emanated from the rocks, revealing layers of slither Focus in the cave, plus one slender trail of human footsteps. The crevice went deeper than he'd thought, the Oklahoma shale crumpled into zigzags by some ancient earthquake.
He paused to listen. The short, raspy breaths of a panicking thirteen-year-old reached his ears.
"Cassie?" he called.
The breathing caught, then a voice answered softly, "Help me."
The girl sounded much younger than thirteen; probably she was frightened out of her wits. "Are you okay?"
"My grandma froze."
"She's better now, Cassie," he said calmly. "But she's worried about you. Are you all right?"
"It hurts."
"What hurts, Cassie?"
"My foot. Where the kitty bit me."
A cat. Rex remembered the slither that Jessica had followed on the first night the darklings had tried to kill her. It had disguised itself as a black cat and scratched on her window, then led her out onto Bixby's empty streets to where a darkling awaited. They must have used the same trick on Cassie Flinders. With the whole world transformed into a frozen, empty place around her, she had innocently followed the only other living creature she could see.