Blue Noon

Scott Westerfeld

Contents ( 72)

Blue Noon

Midnighters

Scott Westerfeld

To John and Jan, and
Niki, for making me
part of the family

Predator

Pep Rally

Blue Monday

Majorette

Dregs

Speed Bump

Prey

Nightmare Interrupted

Miss Trust

Memory Fix

Goodbye, Bixby

Lunch Meat

Brilliant Plan

Change of Plan

Out of Gas

Flying Lesson

The Old Ones

Monster

Spaghetti Situation

Mindcasters

Samhain

Fireworks

Slumber Party

Trick or Treat

Rain

The Bomb

In the Rip

Flyboy, Fly

Beth

Bonfire

Lightning

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Credits

About the Publisher

1

8:20 A.M.

PREDATOR

Bixby High’s late bell shrieked in the distance, like something wounded and ready to be cut from the herd.

Rex Greene was always late these days, stumbling in confusion from one class to another, late with his father’s pills or forgetting them altogether. But the worst was getting up for school. It didn’t help that he’d unplugged his clock a few nights ago, unable to sleep with the soft buzzing sound it made all night, like a mosquito hovering just out of arm’s reach. His newly acute hearing had turned every electronic contraption into something whiny and annoying.

But it was more than just the clock’s noise; it was what it meant, with its false day of twenty-four hours. Since what had happened to him in the desert, Rex had started to feel time as something marked out in the sky—the rise and fall of the sun, the spinning stars, the interlocking ratios of the light moon and the dark.

The rest of the world still had their clocks, though, so Melissa had banged on his window again this morning, dragging him rudely out of his strange new dreams.

“Smells like…assembly,” she said as they pulled into the school parking lot, her head tipping back a bit, nostrils flaring.

All Rex could smell was crumbling vinyl—the upholstery of Melissa’s crappy Ford broken down by thirty-odd Oklahoma summers—and gasoline fumes leaking up through the floorboard from the car’s rumbling engine. Humans loved their oil, a flash of darkling memory informed him. They scoured the desert for it, used it to make clever things like plastic and gasoline….

Rex shook his head to clear it. On mornings like these, when he’d dreamed of Stone Age hunts all night, he had more trouble concentrating than usual. The old knowledge inside him seemed more real than his sixteen years of human memories. Sometimes Rex wondered if he would ever recover from what the darklings had done, the half change they’d effected before Jessica had rescued him.

Was he gradually healing from the experience? Or was the darkness they’d left inside him like a virus, slowly growing stronger?

As Melissa maneuvered the Ford into a parking place, Rex spotted a few stragglers making their way into the gymnasium entrance. The sound of an amplified voice echoed out from the propped-open double doors.