Words tumbled through her head, some of which she didn’t even know the meanings of, scraps of language that had stuck in her mind because of the number or arrangement of their letters. Words weren’t really her thing, except when they collided with numbers and patterns, like stretching across a Scrabble board to grab a triple-word score.

What she wanted tonight was pretty straightforward: thirteen-letter words to boost the power of these pieces of steel.

“Fossilization,” she named a long, thin screw, the thread of which wound exactly thirty-nine times around its shaft.

The crunch of Rex’s boots came from right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach, lost as she was in the pleasures of steel.

“If you were a slither, you’d’ve bit me,” she murmured. The foul little things didn’t exactly bite, of course, but close enough.

“Melissa’s found her,” Rex said.

Dess lifted an old hubcap up to the light. Trapped blue fire coursed around its rim.

“About time.”

“But she says we have to hurry. There’s trouble. Something big out there, or just nasty. Whatever it is, it’s giving Melissa a serious headache.”

Dess brought the hubcap close to her lips.

“Hypochondriac,” she whispered to it.

“You ready?” Rex asked.

“Yeah. This stuff’s all weaponized.”

“Let’s go, then.”

She stood up, clutching the hubcap in one hand and dropping the smaller bits of metal into her pockets. Rex turned and jogged to the edge of the junkyard where their bikes were stashed. He jumped on his and rode after Melissa, who was already headed down the road toward downtown. Of course, Dess thought. Jessica Day was a city girl. Her parents could afford to live close in, away from the badlands and the smells of oil rigs and roadkill.

Dess walked over calmly and pulled up her bike, mounted it, and began to pedal after the two. She didn’t rush. Melissa could only move so fast without losing her way as she cautiously felt for the trembling threads in the tenuous psychic spiderweb of midnight. And even with her crappy one-speed, Dess could beat either of them in a race. It would be no problem to catch up before the fireworks started.

She just hoped this wasn’t a wild-goose chase, a symptom of Rex’s beginning-of-the-school-year paranoia. Sure, there was a new midnighter in town, but that had happened once before, and the consequences hadn’t exactly been earth-shattering.

Rex had sounded pretty scared on the phone, though. So Dess had worn her sensible shoes. Running shoes.

The hubcap rattled happily in the basket on Dess’s bike. She smiled. Whatever was out there, she wouldn’t have to run right away. The comforting weight of metal clinked heavily in her pockets, and Dess knew without counting how many weapons she had made tonight.

“Lucky thirteen,” she said.