In fact, she felt great. She smoothed her hair, which was sticking out in all directions.

“Uh, Jessica…”

“Yeah?”

“Are you wearing makeup?”

She dusted the dirt off herself. “Can’t a girl get dressed up for a party?”

Jonathan raised one eyebrow and looked around. The bowl of the snake pit was ringed with pieces of metal, junkyard shapes that glowed and sputtered. Sheets of lightning flashed up from them into the sky, where screaming slithers wheeled in tight circles around the pit. Burned and twisted shapes lay on the ground, the bodies of fried, smoking slithers that had ventured too close. Through the blue dome of lightning Jessica spotted a few darklings hovering in the distance, their eyes radiant indigo in the glare of the incessant flashes.

Jonathan laughed. “Some party.”

Jessica smiled but then knitted her brows. “Not all the guests are here, though.”

“I spotted Melissa’s car on my way, at the other end of the Bottom. I guess they’re going to be a little late.” He looked at the fireworks show around them. “If they get here at all.”

Jessica looked out through the arcing blue lightning, past the wheeling cloud of slithers. “How did you get through, Jonathan?”

He pointed to an object on the ground next to him. It looked like an old trash can lid, dented and marked all over with strange signs and patterns. “Meet Purposelessly Hyperinflated Individuality. Something Dess made to help me get here.”

“Purposelessly Hyperinflated…?” She laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just a good name.”

“Her new thing is thirty-nine-letter phrases. Packs more of a punch.”

“Looks like you needed it,” Jessica said. The lid was blackened on one side, as if it had been used to ward off a flamethrower.

“I had flying slithers bouncing off me like bugs off a windshield.” Jonathan picked it up. With his fingers through the handle, the trash can lid looked like a battered shield. He looked up at the moon, half risen.

“They should’ve been here by now.”

Jessica could still see part of the Milky Way past the huge moon. “They’d be coming from that way, right?” she asked.

Jonathan nodded and pulled out a candy bar, taking a hurried bite.

They skirted the pit to the other side, the flashes of lightning sending long shadows from them in all directions. The sinkhole was a rounded, irregular crater in the desert, as if a giant shovel had scooped up a load of dirt. Plants clung to its sides, and the earth at its depressed center looked dark and damp. Jessica started at what she thought was a crawling slither underfoot, but it turned out to be a normal snake, frozen by midnight.

“Nice place for a party,” she muttered.

They reached the opposite edge and looked out across the smooth plain of the Bottom.

“There they are,” Jonathan said.

26

12:00 A.M.

GAUNTLET

“Looks pretty impressive, Dess.”