While cleaning out the dining room, Dess had discovered a cache of Maddy’s maps, yellowing rolls of heavy paper that practically crumbled in your hands. The oldest were annotated in Spanish, which gave Flyboy some translating to do, though he found the spindly, old-time handwriting hard going. Of course, what Dess was after wasn’t really the words. The secret hour was centered at exactly 36 degrees north latitude and 96 west longitude, and all the weirdness of Bixby flowed from those coordinates. This was all about the numbers.

Dess’s most interesting discovery was how the early midnighters’ maps compared with more recent efforts. For one thing, in the old days they hadn’t invented GPS or decent clocks yet and had to rely on star readings and guesswork to plug the numbers in. So as you went further back, everything looked more and more warped and distorted, as if they’d been looking at the world through a Coke bottle. And of course, as time had passed, the early midnighters had explored more of the secret hour. Every century the maps of midnight’s domain grew to cover a greater part of southeastern Oklahoma, or Indian Territory, or Mexico—depending on who’d stolen what last.

She’d been happily sitting at the dining table for an hour, absorbed in the slow progress of midnighter cartography, when a voice, joined by a cool hand on her shoulder, almost made her jump out of her skin.

“Desdemona?”

“Jeez! Scare me, why don’t you?” Dess stared at Maddy’s hand accusingly. At least the mindcaster hadn’t touched her bare flesh.

“Pardon me, then.” The wrinkled hand withdrew. “I just thought you might want to see this.”

Madeleine placed a roll of paper on the table. It was a map from the 1930s, the first map Maddy had ever shared with Dess, back when it had just been the two of them. But it was covered now with a layer of colored swirls, as if some kid had stuck red and blue pencils to a Ouija board pointer and let it roam freely.

“You guys drew on this?” Dess said angrily, but after a few seconds of staring, the map’s new eddies and whorls began to engage her brain. The mindcasters’ marks seemed to flesh out the usual contortions of midnight, adding another dimension to the map. It was like seeing the latest version of a familiar video game, the same old characters suddenly rendered in high resolution. “Oh,” Dess added.

“You were right, you know,” Maddy said softly.

Dess didn’t take her eyes from the map. “About what?”

“I don’t think the lore or memories will help us much. As you suspected, this is a riddle best solved by a polymath.”

Dess swallowed. Had the old woman sneaked a quick peek into her brain when she’d touched Dess’s leather jacket? “Gee, Maddy, I don’t remember saying anything about that.”

Madeleine only smirked at the nickname. “Sometimes, Dessy, it doesn’t require mind reading to know what someone is thinking.”

Dessy? Jeez. Maddy’s revenge hadn’t taken very long.