Well, it had worked.

“How do we do it?” he said.

“We need to build two big bonfires—or better yet, fireworks displays. The one out here will bottle them up for as long as we can.”

“Bottle them up?”

“Yeah. The rip will open up long and narrow, Rex, like a road. It leads right through here, straight from the mountains to downtown. If we stop them in Jenks for a while, make them go around us, we may have time to organize people back in Bixby.”

As Rex’s eyes followed the path of the tracks back toward the mountains, a thoughtful look crossed his face, as if he was accessing the numberless darkling math stored in his mind. “Yeah. You could be right.”

The world shuddered then—the dark moon falling like a rock, the red-tinged blue time fading—and the cold wrapped itself around Dess, driving its way into her bones. She shivered with excitement.

They had a way to stop the darklings…for a while, at least. Maybe they could give the people of Bixby time to understand what was going on and a fighting chance to survive their night in hell. Maybe thousands didn’t have to die.

Above Dess’s head the bottle rocket was suddenly released from frozen time. It shot farther into the sky, where it exploded with a tiny bang.

23

12:00 A.M.

SLUMBER PARTY

Noises came from inside the hardware store, the clattering of falling metal and a million small things spilling.

“Jesus, Flyboy,” Dess yelled in through the window. “It’s good you’re not a real burglar.”

“Never said I was,” he shouted back. Another crash erupted.

Even though it was the blue time, Jessica flinched a little at all the ruckus. It felt like they should at least try to be quiet, given that they were breaking and entering.

Again.

“Found them!” Jonathan’s voice came.

She and Dess walked around the corner to the front of the store. Through the glass doors she saw Jonathan trying the keys from a big ring, one by one.

“Should have just climbed through the window,” Dess muttered as the process stretched out.

“Some of the stuff on your list is too heavy,” Jessica said, stifling a yawn and happy to be going in through the door. She could hardly keep her eyes open, and she still had to get back to Constanza’s tonight.

Since Rex’s demonstration out in Jenks, the five of them had spent every midnight gathering the materials they needed to bring the darkling invasion to a halt. Mostly that meant breaking into every store in town that sold fireworks and making off with the stock. The nightly burglaries in the blue time were getting tiring. And obvious too—the Bixby Register had run a story about the unknown vandals collecting a dangerous cache of fireworks. According to the article, the sheriff’s office had actually figured out it was a bunch of kids planning something big for Halloween.