Rex looked at her like she was crazy. “Time is frozen during broad daylight for the first time in recorded history, and you’re worried about skipping a pep rally?”

“Um, well…”

“Hey, maybe this is like an eclipse!” Dess called across the parking lot.

“How do you mean?” Jonathan said.

Dess stared at Mr. Sanchez as she spoke, as if drawing inspiration from the trig teacher’s harried expression. “You know, an eclipse looks like a little bit of night that happens in the middle of the day. But it’s not really night, it’s just the moon blocking out the sun.”

“And a long time ago,” Rex added, “people used to freak out about eclipses, like it was the end of the world.”

“Exactly. But it’s not a big deal, just a totally random thing—two objects lining up. Doesn’t even last that long.” Dess crossed the lot as she spoke, Jonathan bounding along beside her. “The trick is not to have a heart attack about it.”

“Can’t you go blind from eclipses?” Jonathan said.

“Yeah, true.” Dess glanced up at the dark moon. “If you’re stupid enough to stare at the sun for too long.”

Rex thought about this for a second, then shook his head. “But you can predict eclipses years in advance, right?”

“Centuries, Rex,” Dess said, rolling her eyes, as if eclipse prediction was something she did for fun in study hall. (Of course, Jessica realized, it probably was.) “Thousands of years, even. You just do the math, and they happen right on schedule.”

“So where’s the schedule, then?” Rex said. “I repeat: nothing like this has ever been recorded in the lore.”

“The lore’s not perfect, Rex,” Jonathan said, bouncing a few feet into the air. “You can’t look up everything. I thought by this point you’d have figured that out.”

Jessica waited for an outburst. Those were fighting words as far as Rex was concerned. And a big fight was just what they needed right now.

But Rex only nodded and scratched his chin. “Yeah, you could be right. Maybe it is just an eclipse or something like that. Totally random.” He looked up into the sky, squinting as his eyes flashed purple.

Jessica dared a quick glance at the dark moon, which was giving her a headache as usual. As far as she could tell, it hadn’t moved an inch, or a degree, or whatever. When an eclipse happened, didn’t the regular moon keep going across the sky?

“Well, the darklings must have known this was coming.” Melissa spoke up. “Or at least, they must know something. They’re still rocking out, like it’s darkling Fourth of July.”

“I guess maybe they’ve got the schedule, then,” Dess said quietly.

Jonathan pushed himself softly up into the air ten feet or so, staring out across the desert. “Hey, Rex, could they have made this happen?”

“The darklings? Maybe.”

“But it was daylight when it happened, Rex,” Jessica said. “How could the darklings do anything? Aren’t they, like, frozen during regular time?”