Maybe it would swallow the whole world.

At last midnight came, almost surprising him in his reverie. The earth shuddered, dropping its claims on his body, the chains of gravity finally falling away. He drifted upward, sucking in a deep, rib-cracking breath. Only at midnight did his lungs feel like they filled completely, no longer constrained by the suffocating weight of his own body. The weight of Flatland.

It was crazy to feel guilty about the joy this gave him. It wasn’t his fault the world was ending.

Jonathan launched himself out the window, passing over his father’s car and up onto the neighbor’s roof with one well-practiced bound. There his right foot landed on its usual spot, a circle of cracked shingles marking where so many nightly flights began.

Then he pushed off toward Jessica’s and—as he watched for flying slithers and power lines, calculating the best course down empty roads and across newly harvested fields—his mind kept returning to one thought…

Only two more weeks of gravity, and then I’m free.

“Okay, everyone,” Rex said. “Madeleine went into my mind last night.”

Jonathan frowned. The five of them were meeting in Madeleine’s house, seated around her scuffed dining table surrounded by the clutter of tridecagrams and other tangled shapes. But the old woman hadn’t appeared tonight, and Rex had started talking as if she wasn’t coming down. Wasn’t she home?

Where else could she be at midnight?

“You actually let her touch you?” Dess asked.

“Melissa was there to protect me,” Rex said.

Jonathan glanced at Jessica, and they both flinched, waiting for the nasty response they knew was coming, but Dess just coughed into her fist and rolled her eyes. Eerily, the scar the darkling had left over her eye was shaped just like one of Melissa’s.

Jonathan was glad she kept quiet. Tonight Rex was scary enough without anyone provoking him. His expression seemed vacant somehow, as if there were some other creature inside him, showing off the Rex mask it was going to wear while trick-or-treating.

He looked weird enough in daylight, but in the secret hour the new Rex was almost too much to face.

“The darklings remember Samhain,” Rex said.

“So that goth holiday is the real thing, huh?” Dess asked, shaking her head.

“It isn’t a Gothic holiday,” Rex answered. “The Goths were from Asia. Samhain was Celtic.”

“From Asia?” Dess said, then groaned. “No, Rex, not the guys who conquered Rome. I mean the kids in black.”

“Um, Dess?” Melissa said. “Mirror check.”

“This dress is charcoal,” Dess said.

“Probably the Goths had something like Samhain too,” Rex kept going. “A lot of cultures have festivals at the end of October. The Feast of Souls. Something called Shadowfest. The Death of the Sun.”

Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Shadowfest? That sounds…festive.”

Dess let out a long sigh. “Why are we even talking about this? All that pagan stuff is from the Old World, but here in Oklahoma, Halloween is just an excuse to sell a bunch of candy and costumes to little kids. Like Angie said, the darklings hid themselves way before any Europeans got here.”