With a whoosh it shot into the sky, rising twenty feet or so before its flaming trail choked off suddenly.
“Was that a dud?” Jonathan asked.
“No.” Dess shook her head. “The rip is three-dimensional. It extends only so far up.” She could see the rocket frozen at the edge of the rip above them, waiting for the eclipse to end before resuming its flight.
Rex started talking about airliners again, how they would be too high to be caught by the rip on Samhain.
Dess had heard enough about airplane crashes. She turned away and walked to the edge of the rip, wondering if it was still growing.
What she really wanted Rex to do was get over his darkling number phobia and write down the exact dates and times of all the coming eclipses. If he could glimpse a pattern with his math-impaired brain, Dess knew she could analyze what was happening. Then maybe the five of them could do something more useful for Bixby than setting off bottle rockets.
Like finding a way to stop this thing.
Suddenly Dess heard the scrape of gravel behind her. She whirled around—it was Melissa.
“Don’t touch me,” she spat.
Melissa held up her hands. “Relax. I’m not going to force you.”
“Force me? You’re not going to anything me.”
“Listen, Dess, I was there when Madeleine opened up Rex’s mind. I saw what he knows. I can give it to you.”
Dess shook her head.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you, all right, Dess? But we need you now. I know you see how serious this is.”
Dess looked away. Of course, the mindcaster had tasted her nausea.
“There might be a way to stop this, Dess. But only you can find it.”
The image of darklings rampaging through Bixby came into Dess’s mind, and she wondered for a moment if Melissa had placed it there. Of course, even if the mindcaster was manipulating her, the awful picture would become a reality in thirteen days unless they found a solution.
“The answer might be waiting for you right here, all around us,” Melissa said. “But this eclipse is ending soon.”
Dess took a slow breath, realizing that she had the choice of facing the mindcaster’s touch or of going along with Rex’s dire calculations. She could either open her mind now or watch the slaughter.
It wasn’t fair, having to save thousands of people. Not fair at all.
“Make it quick,” she said through gritted teeth, and held out her hand.
Melissa closed her eyes.
At the first contact of their fingers something massive and dark came into Dess. Images swept through her, a wire frame of the earth, red fire spreading along its lines of longitude and latitude. She saw the days between now and Samhain midnight, a steady beat of eclipses until the blue time shattered, the rip streaking across the earth for thousands of miles. She saw how long it would last, twenty-five hours of frozen time—humans within struggling to survive while everyone outside stood frozen and unaware.
Then she saw the rip’s true shape… and the beginnings of a solution.
Dess pulled her hand away from Melissa’s touch, realizing that she was hearing a sound in the distance. It was a soft spattering noise, like a light rain on a steel roof.
She turned away without a word and walked down the tracks to where the Cadillac had roared up onto the embankment. At the glowing-red edge of the rip, a dark curtain of something was falling lightly through the air.
Dess held out an open palm….
Dust gradually collected on her skin. Then a hard ping came from the metal rail next to her—the fallen piece of gravel skittered across the tracks.
She stepped back a few yards and looked up, her eyes making out a smudge against the dark moon. Like the arrested bottle rocket, the dirt and gravel churned up by the huge pink car still hung overhead, suspended in frozen time. But carved into the dust cloud was a long, oval shape….
Dess nodded; suddenly it all made perfect sense. The Cadillac’s tires had put a lot of debris into the air just as the eclipse had arrived, flash-freezing it up there until normal time started again. But the dust inside the rip had swirled down to the ground, falling in regular gravity. So now Dess could see the whole thing in three dimensions. Its blimplike shape had been cut into the cloud, like a long, oval space carved into a mountain.
But why was the dust still raining down?
Dess walked back to the edge, put her palm out again, and found that now the dirt was falling a bit farther along the tracks.
Of course… The rip was growing, tearing the blue time in half. And as its edges traveled outward, more of the suspended dust fell to earth.
Dess looked up, her heart beating harder. She was actually watching the rip expand. She peered into the vague blur of suspended dust, trying to see its exact dimensions and cursing the dim blue light. If Rex was going to perform dramatic experiments, why hadn’t he released a cloud of Ping-Pong balls right before the eclipse so they could see what was really going on? Then Dess could calculate how fast the tear in the blue time was spreading and in exactly what direction.
She scrambled down the embankment to the longer edge of the rip and put out her hand. Hardly any dust was falling here.
“Dess?” Rex called.
“Hang on.” She climbed back up to the tracks. Yes, the rip was spreading much faster at the oval’s narrow end.
She ran by the four of them, all the way past the Cadillac to the other end of the rip. Glancing up, she got an eyeful of dirt. The dust fall was harder here too. But why would it follow the direction of the railroad tracks?
She closed her eyes, letting the knowledge that Melissa had given her take shape.
“Of course,” she said aloud.
“Of course what?” Rex called.
Dess waved him silent. She could see it now—so obvious that she wanted to thump herself on the head for not realizing it before. Until now she had imagined the rip expanding like the universe—a great big bubble, a sphere. But what if it were long and narrow instead?
The rip was heading in two directions, stretching along a single axis, just like a real tear in a piece of fabric. But what was at either end?
Dess visualized the map of the county she carried in her head and instantly knew exactly what was going on and why this godforsaken spot lay right in the middle of the rip. Jenks was halfway to nowhere, precisely poised between the center of town and the deepest desert.
The blue time was opening up long and straight, like some sort of darkling highway, a conduit between predators and prey. It was reaching west out into the mountains, where the oldest minds lived, the ones who hadn’t had a decent meal in thousands of years. And at the same moment the rip was traveling east, directly toward the populated center of downtown Bixby.
“Dess?” Rex said, frustration creeping into his voice.
She still didn’t answer. If he wanted to get all scary, let him.
Her eyes closed, Dess let her mind follow the direction of the tracks, recalling the images of wire frame globes that Melissa had given her.
What if the rip just kept growing year after year, shooting across the country like a lit fuse every Halloween?
It was tearing along Bixby’s ill-fated latitude: 36 degrees. That line led east through Broken Arrow, which was why the Grayfoots were evacuating. Then it whipped through a lot of small and medium towns after that… until eventually reaching Nashville, which sat at exactly 36.10 degrees. From there, it would go on to swallow Charlotte, North Carolina, at 35.14. Westward, the rip would cruise straight through downtown Las Vegas, which was centered at exactly 36.11. And it would pass a hundred miles north of Grandpa Grayfoot’s new digs in LA.