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. 0 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.

“Dess?” Rex called. “What is it?”

“We might be able to save more people than you think, Rex. Or at least delay the darklings long enough to get Bixby organized.”

He walked over, his violet eyes flashing, a smile on his face. Suddenly Dess knew he’d planned the whole thing to work this way—Dess too tired from getting up so early to resist Melissa touching her.