He bristled for a moment, remembering how Rex always assumed he was in command. But he took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Help Dess what?”

Dess cleared her throat. “Help me fix the defenses to keep the snake pit from being overrun by darklings and about a million slithers.”

“I thought you said—”

“The defenses are weakening,” she explained. “Something big must have been caught in the lightning arc.”

“Like a darkling?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah.”

Jonathan and Jess looked at each other.

“I did that,” Jessica said.

A few yards away Melissa snorted, completely back to her old self.

Dess frowned. “Wow. That’s a trick you’ll have to show me.”

“Just an accident. Like everything I do.”

“Later,” Rex said. “Buy us some time, Dess.” He turned to Jessica. “Jess, are you…?”

“Yes?”

Rex paused. “Are you wearing makeup?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on. It’s Friday night!”

“No, you look great. Really. Let’s go do this.”

Jessica squeezed Jonathan’s hand, then turned away. Rex and Melissa led her down toward the dark center of the pit.

Jonathan took another deep breath, pulling his eyes away from Jessica.

“Okay, Dess, what do we do?”

“First, we need the clean metal I brought, which is…” Dess groaned, slapping a hand to her forehead. “In my duffel bag.”

Jonathan looked around. “Where?”

Dess pointed out of the snake pit and across the sand, to where spiders still poured from the darkling she had speared, spreading over the desert to form a black, seething sea of legs and teeth.

“Not a chance,” Jonathan said.

Dess sighed. “Then I guess we’ll have to improvise.”

28

12:00 A.M.

CEREMONY

Jessica followed Rex down into the center of the snake pit.

The ground was damp down here. This morning in the library Dess had explained to her how sinkholes formed. Somewhere below them was an underground pocket of water trapped between layers of stone, which had collected back when the Bottom had been a lake. The crust of sand beneath her feet was thinner here than across the rest of the Bottom and had partly collapsed into the pocket of water a few decades ago.

Jessica walked carefully, wondering if the snake pit was planning on collapsing the rest of the way anytime soon. With her luck, it would probably pick tonight.

At the center, the lowest and dampest part of the pit, a shaft of stone thrust up from the ground. Dess had said it had been buried for a long time, maybe thousands of years, before the formation of the sinkhole had exposed it to the sun again. The stone had been important to the people who’d fought the darklings in the old days, before the creatures had retreated to the secret hour.

It was about as tall as Rex, with a flat shelf jutting out from it about halfway up. A little pile of rocks sat on the shelf. Rex swept them away.

“Kids,” he said.