But the surrounding grass had recovered from the rip’s strange light, Jonathan noticed, a healthy green again. Maybe the dark moon wasn’t so tough after all.

There wasn’t much left of the rip anymore, just a sliver. A few more nights and it would fade into the lore completely. When they reached it, Dess pulled out Geostationary and began to make a small, precise circle of stones.

Beth stood close to him, watching her. “What’s that thing?” she said softly.

“A GPS device,” he answered. “It’s not magic or anything.”

“What’s it supposed to do?”

“It’s for finding places. You have to be in exactly the right spot for this to work.”

Beth looked at him, her stare suddenly fierce. “I’ve got my mom’s cell phone, you know.”

He blinked. “That’s…good.”

“So you guys better not try anything weird.”

Jonathan sighed. What they were about to try was, pretty much by definition, weird. “Don’t worry, okay? We’re all friends here. You said you wanted to do this.”

Beth only swallowed and for a moment looked like she was about to cry.

“She wants this too,” Jonathan added, wishing he were somewhere else. He’d been the one to break the news to Beth, to argue against her suspicions, her angry disbelief. After the hours spent convincing her to come out here, Jonathan was all out of words. He reached out and put his arm around her, drew her closer.

“Really?” she said, her voice breaking. “And this is for real?”

He smiled. “Well, I ain’t dreaming.” She felt unbelievably small and fragile, shivering in the cold.

“Come on,” Dess said. “Stand right here.”

Jonathan guided Beth up onto the tracks and into the circle of stones. The frightened expression on her face made something loosen in his throat, and his voice grew hoarse. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”

He stepped back, waiting, hoping that this would work.

Midnight fell a few moments later, the moan of the cold wind switching off like a light, the blue time sucking the color from their faces. Jonathan felt the awful weight of Flatland lift up from him.

Same old midnight—damaged, unleashed from its proper boundaries, but not destroyed.

For a moment Jonathan wondered if they’d waited too long to try this and the rip had faded out. Beth just stood there in her circle of rocks, as motionless as any stiff.

But then her eyes blinked. “That was weird.”

“No kidding,” Jessica said from behind her little sister. She’d asked them to face the kid toward Bixby and had wisely chosen not to be standing in Beth’s view. She kept her right hand in her jacket pocket as well.

It still freaked Jonathan out how Jessica always folded out of the air as midnight fell. Even darklings and slithers had to escape from the sun, hiding in caves or burying themselves. But the flame-bringer had become something altogether different, a whole new kind of midnight creature.

She wasn’t frozen during daylight…she simply wasn’t.

Rex called it “temporal dependence.” Jonathan didn’t know what to call it. During the day it felt like Jessica was gone, like that first night when he thought he’d lost her to the lightning. He’d searched the roof for hours before trudging down the twenty-six flights of stairs to the ground floor, exhausted by Flatland, crushed by grief. It had been a whole terrible day before midnight had fallen again and he’d flown back up to Pegasus, hoping to find some kind of sign.