Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld

“What?”
    “Take me there, right now.” She pulled the GPS receiver from her pocket, waved it in front of them. “I knew there had to be places like that in Bixby—hiding places. I’ve been having these dreams…”
    She came to a halt. They were all staring at her as if her mouth had started to foam.
    Dess groaned. “Listen, this little gadget turns places into numbers, coordinates. I’ve been trying to crack the patterns—the way the secret hour is shaped. It’s like topology…” Okay, blank faces on that one. “But better. Oh, screw it. Just take me there and I can figure out how it all works.” She hissed through her teeth at their empty expressions. I just need a paradigm!”
    Rex was the first to utter a sound, a low, soft sigh. “Well, you’ve been busy.”
    She rolled her eyes. Time for a seer-knows-best lecture.
    “But you may not have to go there, Dess.”
    I managed to cast around a little bit in the woman’s mind before the”—Melissa’s lower lip trembled—“thing got too close.”
    “She’s shared some of what she saw with me,” Rex said. “We may have the numbers you need.”
    “Eh?” Dess felt her throat constrict at the expressions on Rex and Melissa’s faces. Shared? Something was weirder about the two than just a little post-rumble hysteria.
    No possible way, Dess reminded herself.
    “We’ll try to write some of it down for you.” Rex shrugged. “It looks like plans for something being built, something that has to do with the halfling. But it’s mostly a bunch of numbers, so it’s all Greek to me.”
    “Arabic,” Dess said absently. Melissa was giving her this look.
    “What?” Rex asked.
    “Numbers are Arabic, moron.” She tore her gaze away from Melissa. “All the old math is. Al Gebra—as in algebra—was this Arab guy a thousand years ago.” Trying not to think any more about what had passed between the two of them, Dess imagined having a whole branch of mathematics named after her. Dessology? Desstochastics?
    “Dessometrics?” Melissa said aloud, a smile playing on her lips.
    Dess shivered. Busted.
    She waved Geostationary. “I don’t care what you got from her.” Or how you shared it. “This will give me everything I need. Just take me there.”
    Rex and Melissa looked at each other, and Dess allowed herself to feel a little burst of triumph as their expressions revealed absolute horror. They really were still terrified, all the way down to the marrow.
    Rex shook his head. “Someone might have noticed the Ford. It kind of sticks out in that neighborhood. And we might have left fingerprints…”
    Dess snickered at the feeble excuses and gave Jonathan’s thigh a slap. “Come on, Flyboy. We’re going to Darkling Manor.”
    He stood, ready to leave, and gave her and Melissa a clueless look. “What’s Dessometrics?”
    She smiled. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

 
11

1:45 p.m.
MORE FLATLAND
 
    “The art of reading Melissa’s mind,” Dess said out of the blue.
    “Huh?” Jonathan was passing an eighteen-wheeler, trying to coax his father’s car into doing more than sixty-five on level ground. He was also watching for the turnoff, fairly certain that the directions suffered from mindcaster vagueness. Not that he could blame her, but Melissa had a pretty thin grasp on reality at times.
    “Dessometrics. You asked me what it was.”
    Jonathan looked at her biting her thumbnail as she stared out the front windshield. She and Melissa had gotten into something back there—a staring contest, it had looked like. “Yeah, right. And you can do that? Read her mind?”
    “Well, it helps if Rex is around. He’s the one who gave it away.”
    The semi finally gave up drag racing him and slipped behind with an amicable wave from the driver. Jonathan relaxed. “Gave what away?”
    Dess squirmed in the seat next to him. “You didn’t notice a certain… smarminess between those two?”
    “Hmm.” He decided against passing the next truck up ahead.