Ada jumped into motion, always ready to dance, but the new steps didn’t come out as expected. The final, stuttering lift of her left arm went forward instead of back. Dess shook her head. She could see it now: she’d turned one of the gears around the wrong way.

It was Rex and Melissa’s fault she was so anxious. If they’d been here on time, Rex would be the one getting all nervous, and she and Melissa could rag on him and be the calm ones. They’d be on their way to the snake pit, where Dess’s masterpiece in metal would draw oohs and aahs from all concerned as slithers burned themselves to cinders.

She looked out the window again. Still no crappy Ford cruising to a stop in front of the house two doors down, the usual spot for premidnight rendezvous.

Dess kicked her duffel bag, and it made a reassuring metal clank. All ready to go, filled with state-of-the-art antidarkling weaponry, backups in case the defenses around the snake pit failed. And she’d left a very special new toy on the roof for Jonathan to pick up on his way out. She’d done her bit.

So where were Rex and Melissa?

Dess itched to call, but that would be totally stupid. Melissa’s parents let her do whatever she wanted, but Rex’s dad was a major psycho. If Rex was creeping out his window this very moment, it would be a bad time for the phone to ring.

Besides, they’d better already be on their way.

Eleven-oh-six. In forty seconds it would be exactly forty thousand seconds after noon. More importantly, it would be a mere thirty-two hundred seconds until midnight. Dess could feel the blue time—full of darklings—rushing toward her at a thousand miles per hour.

Okay, she thought. A bit faster than that, really. The earth’s circumference was 24,860 miles, and a day was twenty-four hours. So midnight would have to move at about 1,036 miles per hour to make it all the way around the earth once per day.

She’d seen it on the Discovery Channel, from cameras on the space shuttle: the terminator line, the edge of darkness that marked dawn or sunset, sweeping across the earth. True midnight must work the same way, an invisible edge cutting across the world, bringing the blue time.

Right now midnight would be about nine hundred miles east of here, in the next time zone. Of course, as far as any of them knew, there weren’t darklings or midnighters or blue time anywhere but Bixby. Rex had never figured that one out. Dess wondered if a little less lore and a little more math might solve the puzzle.

She looked out the window. Still no Rex and Melissa.