Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld Page A

At this hour the north-south interstate was crowded with Mexican goods coming up through Texas. Even the smallest eighteen-wheeler could crush his father’s car like a cockroach.
    Despite how automobile ads tried to make it look, Jonathan had learned this year that driving was not like flying. In fact, driving pretty much sucked compared to flying. Flatland at sixty miles an hour was still Flatland.
    And his sore throat from the other night hadn’t gone away entirely. He swallowed gingerly before he spoke. “Actually, those two pretty much set off my smarmy meter twenty-four, seven. I tend not to notice the minor fluctuations.”
    Dess chuckled beside him, the low rumble of it bringing a smile to his face. Jonathan hadn’t hung out much with Dess lately, he realized. At least not since Jessica had arrived in town.
    “Weren’t they kind of… chummy?” she continued. And chipper.”
    He glanced at Dess. Her expectant expression annoyed him. Who was supposed to be the mind reader here? He shrugged. “I think they were just freaked out by what they saw last night. Hell, I’d be.”
    The thought that he was driving straight back to where it had all happened wasn’t thrilling Jonathan either. He wondered why he was here instead of getting back to school to tell Jessica what had happened and make sure she was okay.
    Maybe because of all of them, he most trusted Dess to help Jessica when she really needed it. Ten days ago he’d seen who had led the other two across darkling-infested desert when he and Jessica had been trapped in the snake pit.
    “Sure. The trauma thing was part of it.” Dess was nodding to herself. “But there was more.”
    “Like what? What more could there be?”
    “So you know what I mean.”
    A trucker blasted his horn just behind them, looking to keep up the speed his rig had gathered down the slope of an overpass. Jonathan wrenched the car out of his way, earning a respectful middle finger as the truck roared by. This conversation had become dangerously distracting.
    “You’re nuts,” Jonathan said. “No way.”
    “True. No possible way. It’s more complicated than that.”
    He snorted. “I can’t imagine anything more complicated than that.”
    She snickered, then said, “You know they did… once.”
    Jonathan looked at her with alarm. “Did what?”
    “Not that.” She laughed. “But back when they were kids, Rex touched Melissa by accident.”
    “Oh.” Jonathan’s left hand trembled for a moment, a sense memory moving through his body in a wave of dizziness. He gripped the wheel hard, concentrating on the dotted white lines pulsing in front of the car, and managed to keep the vehicle in a straight line until the spell passed.
    “Rex told me all about it,” Dess was saying. “Said it was a total head bang, like she was crowding into his mind and he was getting into hers.”
    Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. That’s what it’s like.”
    “What? How would you know?”
    He paused. He wondered why he’d never told anyone about this, not even Jessica. (Especially not Jessica, come to think of it.) Rex must have realized what was going on as it happened, but neither he nor Jonathan had ever brought it up. And of course, Melissa hadn’t said a thing after that one thank-you in the desert.
    “Well, it was the weekend before last, when we found out Jessica was the flame-bringer. When you guys were trying to get to the snake pit and you did your amazon thing.”
    “That was so cool. Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations kicked that darkling’s ass.”
    “Yeah, well. But you may recall that you left Rex and Melissa surrounded by a zillion spiders. And I had to fly back out and save them.”
    Dess was silent for a moment, then she let out a long breath. “That’s right! You flew Melissa back to the snake pit. So you must have…”
    “Touched her.” Jonathan felt a faint shadow of the dizziness come over him again—the nauseating rush of thoughts and emotions, the despair