But finally they began to come into focus….

After five long minutes she leaned back exhausted, pointing. “This is where it’s broken.”

“Where what’s broken?”

“The blue time. It’s starting to snap, Jonathan, probably to break down completely. But some coordinates will go quicker than others. And anyone who’s standing around in the wrong place when they do…”

Jonathan sat down next to her, staring at the map with its chaos of scribbled numbers and mindcaster swirls. “So what happened to that girl?”

“Midnight happened to her, Jonathan. It opened up and swallowed her.”

“So she’s where now?”

“Well, she should have come out of it when time started again, when the sun hit her. Unless she was taken somewhere.”

“Melissa said the darklings were headed that way.”

Dess blinked. “They only had twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds.”

“So she might still be okay?”

“Yeah, probably. Unless…”

Part of Dess’s brain wanted to explain the whole thing to Jonathan: about snow on TV screens, the big bang, and the shapes of galaxies and tea leaves. About how you could know how something was going to happen in the future by looking into the dregs of the past, so maybe the darklings had predicted exactly where it would happen, exactly where their young prey would fall between the cracks of time. They could have lured her away to someplace dark and underground….

She didn’t have a chance to say a word before another set of images rushed into her mind—also straight from the Discovery Channel—and Dess found herself silent and shivering in her chair.

She wasn’t thinking about the big bang anymore.

She was thinking about the food chain.

6

11:36 P.M.

SPEED BUMP

Jonathan sat in his father’s car, drumming on the steering wheel. Jessica was late. Halfway down the block, he could see her window still glowing. She hadn’t even turned her lights off yet.

What was she waiting for? Tonight every second counted.

On the phone with Jessica this afternoon, the five of them had planned everything to the minute: Jonathan had driven here instead of flying during the secret hour. Jessica was supposed to sneak out at eleven-thirty, leaving time to get within a mile of the spot where Cassie Flinders had disappeared. Then when midnight fell, they’d be at most a few jumps away.

Dess, Rex, and Melissa were already there, which made it doubly important to stay on schedule. Jenks wasn’t exactly the badlands, and the three were well armed with clean steel, but the spot was too far from the city’s center for them to survive forever without the flame-bringer’s protection.

He looked at his watch—11:38. “Where are you, Jessica?”

The words echoed in his mind, and Jonathan remembered what they’d kept saying on the evening news: Where is Cassie Flinders?

If Dess was right, the lost girl had slipped into the blue time.

Jonathan let out a breath through his teeth—a daylighter walking around in their private world. Just when he thought he understood the secret hour, it threw another curveball.