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.