Maybe the secret hour had been created by some sort of explosion, or at least something violent and big bangish, with a similar mix of chaos and order, randomness and patterns.

Dess looked down into her cup. Cosmology was like reading tea leaves, figuring out the future by looking at the remnants of the past. Except unlike tea leaves, telescopes actually worked. You could tell where the universe was headed based on the dregs of the big bang.

Maybe she could look at these old maps and figure out what the future of the blue time was.

“Oh, right,” Dess said suddenly. Math happiness wavered in her mind as she remembered something else from that same Discovery Channel show.

The universe hadn’t been created stable. It was still expanding from the bang, all its parts moving gradually away from the center. She looked at her old maps—and saw again how as the centuries passed, the secret hour always seemed to cover a larger area. Maybe it wasn’t just that the old midnighters had explored more…maybe the blue time had actually grown bigger.

Dess swallowed, suddenly remembering one more thing about the universe. One day it would end, scientists said, either by spreading out into mush, a big whimper, or when gravity pulled it all together again into a big crunch.

Nobody knew which way it was going yet, but someday there would definitely come a big Game Over.

“Hey, Dess, check this out.”

Jonathan’s voice cut through her reverie, and Dess snapped from the end of the universe back into late-afternoon light and musty Maddy-house smells. Jonathan was standing beside her, pointing at the TV. A blurry older woman was talking about how her granddaughter had disappeared.

It cut back to the anchor, who started yammering about a police hotline, an ongoing search, state troopers bringing in dogs. Dess hardly listened, but that word kept being repeated in various forms…disappearing girl, strange disappearance, she just disappeared.

“Right in front of her grandma’s eyes,” Jonathan said. “As in, she was there one moment and gone the next.”

“Crap,” Dess said. “When?”

“This morning,” Jonathan whispered. “Around 9 A.M.”

“Where?”

He leaned over the map Maddy had brought down, outstretched hand sliding across to a cluster of whorls in the northwest corner. “They said it was near Jenks, on the railroad tracks.” His fingers found the hatched path of the rail line, old enough to be included on an eighty-year-old map. The tiny town of Jenks was labeled there too.

Dess pushed his hand away, and her pencil moved to the spot, scribbling calculations. Rough and hand-drawn though they were, the new shapes that Maddy and Melissa had scrawled possessed their own logic, were ruled by their own patterns and laws. It was sort of like mapping the stars, seemingly random points of light that added up to show you the big picture—as long as you did the math right.

The whorls and eddies seemed to rise up from the paper and enter Dess, running like sugar-rushing hamsters on all the wheels of her brain. They made her dizzy, made her fingers tremble as they tried to record her intuitive leaps.