For a horrible moment she wondered if they had left her behind. Just taken off for the snake pit without her. The old feeling of isolation gripped her.

It was all Melissa the Mindcaster’s fault. She’d tracked Rex down when they were both eight years old. Dess was only a year younger, but it had taken Melissa another four years to find her. Melissa’s excuse was that Dess lived too close to the badlands and that back then all the darklings and slithers had confused her unformed talent.

That sounded like a load of crap to Dess. Melissa could pick Rex up from a mile away even in daylight; in the blue time another midnighter was like a flare on a dark horizon. She’d found Jonathan and Jessica within days after they’d arrived. But for the four years that Rex and Melissa had been alone together, all Dess had known was slithers, the lonely surety of math, and Ada Lovelace.

She reached into Ada’s box and switched the errant gear around, wound her up again. “Dance, my pretty.”

Dess was sure that her isolation in those early years had been purposeful. Melissa had played for time while she and Rex explored midnight together, grew up together. The scheme had worked. By the time Melissa finally “found” Dess, Rex and Melissa were so tight that nothing could ever come between them. And Melissa’s psychic hold on Rex made it impossible for him to even think about what Melissa had done.

Dess swallowed and stared out the window.

They wouldn’t dare leave her behind tonight. Even with the snake pit already set up to repel darklings, they needed her in case something went wrong. When it came to steel, only she could improvise. Without her this whole mission would be impossible.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Jonathan Martinez hadn’t been such a disappointment, flying off to his own little world instead of bringing the group together. Maybe Jessica would bring him around, once the two of them reappeared from the couple zone.

Dess shook her head. She had to stop thinking about this stuff before they got here. She didn’t want to give Melissa the satisfaction of knowing she felt this way.

As she always did to hide her thoughts, Dess let the numbers take over her brain. “Ane, twa, thri, feower…”

Seconds later something pinged in the back of her head: another mathematical mistake. “Two in one night,” she muttered.

Midnight wasn’t coming toward Bixby at 1,036 miles per hour. It would only move that fast at the equator, the one line of latitude that went around the earth’s true circumference, like a tape measure around the widest part of a fat man’s belly.