Weather in the secret hour. Just when I thought I’d seen everything.

“Where is she?” Jessica asked.

Melissa closed her eyes, trying to ignore the flame-bringer’s coppery, panicked taste. She sent her mind across the rip, feeling it growing, stretching in the opposite directions toward downtown and the mountains. It was moving slowly now, but she could already feel its speed increasing.

No little sisters in it, though.

“Sorry, Jess. I can’t feel her.”

“Why not?”

“Your sister’s not inside the rip. Not yet, anyway. She must still be frozen, so I can’t taste her mind.”

“But Cassie’s house is right there!” Jessica pointed down at the double-wide at the edge of the tracks. The red-tinged boundary had already swallowed it.

“Yep. And I can taste her grandma in there, still sleeping,” Melissa said. “But nobody else is home.”

Jessica’s face twisted into an expression of fury, her mind all fiery peppers and burned toast.

“That little creep snuck out!” she cried.

Melissa raised an eyebrow, suddenly relieved she didn’t have an older sister of her own. Madeleine’s interfering had included making sure that none of her pet midnighters in Bixby had siblings—and this was why.

“Calm down, Jess,” Jonathan said. “She can’t be too far away. Once the rip reaches her, we’ll deal with it.”

Jessica looked at Melissa. “And you’re sure you’ll recognize her mind?”

“I know Cassie’s taste. They’ll be together, won’t they?”

“What if they aren’t?”

Melissa sighed. “I have an idea what your sister tastes like, okay? I’ve been to your house at midnight.”

Jessica stared back, her fury twisting into new shapes as she realized what Melissa was admitting. “Damn you!” she said, and turned and stalked away.

“I never touched the shrimp,” Melissa said to Flyboy. “Just the parents.”

He offered a shrug, then went to calm the flame-bringer down.

Melissa let out another sigh, feeling weighed down by her long, rain-soaked dress. She and Rex should have admitted what they’d done to Jessica’s parents a long time ago. They always figured that it would come up eventually and at a time like this, when everyone needed to stay calm.

They had the fireworks already in place, rockets stuck into the gravel, flares and sparklers divided into separate boxes, all of it covered with a tarp from Jonathan’s trunk. Melissa decided to make herself useful while the other two were stressing. She flicked the tarp to knock the rainwater off, then pulled it from the fireworks.

The arsenal looked formidable: candles and hurricane lamps so that Jessica didn’t have to light every fuse herself, Roman candles and rockets to bombard the main force of darklings when they arrived, and highway flares that would last for hours, giving the residents of Jenks a fighting chance after the three of them had retreated downtown.

How long now?

Melissa closed her eyes again and swept through the expanding space of the rip. More humans were inside it now, startled by the sudden silence of their TVs and the strange shimmery light that had come over everything.