“But she’s all old and stuff,” Jessica said.

“Yeah, but if anything like this ever happened before, it wasn’t fifty years ago. More like five thousand, if Rex doesn’t know about it.” Dess nodded slowly, rubbing her hands together. “My guess is, this is a job for a polymath.”

“But doesn’t she have all those memories in her head?” Jessica said. “All that stuff passed on from mindcasters in the olden days?”

Dess seemed to shiver a bit, and Jessica cursed herself for bringing up the subject of mindcasters and memories. Madeleine had also messed with Dess’s brain, trying to keep her existence a secret from the darklings.

After an uncomfortable silence, Dess answered. “Anything this big would be in the lore. They wouldn’t just use memory, would they?” She shrugged. “But maybe she did scoop some info from the darklings this morning. I can’t wait to ask her if that blue time was shaped funny.”

“Shaped funny?”

Dess’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, like, did it go all the way to the edge of Bixby County? Or was it smaller than a normal midnight? Like…focused in some particular places.”

“Why would it be?”

Dess shrugged. “That’s just the way the blue time is: it has a shape.”

Not for the first time, Jessica tried to wrap her head around that concept. These days Dess talked about the midnight hour more like it was a place than a time. She was always playing with maps, and even as they sat there, she was fiddling—as usual—with her electronic gadget that spat out coordinates.

To Jessica it seemed weird that the blue time only went so far, then just stopped, like the edge of the world the way people imagined it before they realized it was round.

“So, Dess,” she said. “What would happen if you went all the way to the edge of Bixby at midnight and then went just a little farther?”

“You mean go past the midnight boundary? You wouldn’t…or couldn’t. Time’s frozen out there. So from your perspective, midnight would end as you took that step. But if another midnighter was watching you, they’d see you freeze up for the rest of the hour, just out of reach.”

Jessica’s head spun with that image for a moment. “So midnight’s, like, a bubble around us?”

“You mean a sphere? Well, it’s lumpy and uneven, but yeah.”

“But say you were right on the border when midnight fell. Would, like, half of you keep moving and half of you freeze up?”

“And then you’d slide into two pieces,” Jonathan added. “Like those guys in samurai movies?”

“Um, I guess I don’t know.” Dess laughed. “Why don’t you try it and tell me?”

“Here they come,” Jonathan said.

Rex and Melissa were making their unhurried way through the throng, their fingertips touching lightly, their expressions tranquil. As usual these days, the crowd seemed to have no effect on Melissa. She ignored the stares of the few freshmen who were freaked out by her scarred face, gliding past them as serene as a movie star on a red carpet.