Blue Noon by Scott Westerfeld

weight of all those piled-up memories had driven Madeleine madder and madder as she’d hidden in this house, alone. Maybe what mindcasters really passed on was a trick for acting serene and knowing when all of them, including Madeleine and Melissa, were actually as nutty as bat guano.
    Dess smiled to herself. Maybe Madeleine could use a new mental nickname.
    “No, Rex,” Maddy finally said. “Like the lore, our memories reveal nothing of these events. I’m certain this is all quite unprecedented.”
    Dess allowed herself a smirk. Of course history wasn’t going to be any help. This was a job for numbers, maps, and GPS precision.
    “That’s what I was afraid of,” Rex said glumly.
    “Afraid, Rex?” Madeleine snapped. “Chicken-fried baloney! In my day, seers didn’t speak of being afraid. They spoke of action!”
    It was Rex’s turn to roll his eyes. He covered the expression by raising his own teacup and wincing at the acid taste.
    Some mind reader, Dess thought. Maddy didn’t even know that everyone hated her tea.
    “Well,” Jonathan said. “You must have sensed something while the eclipse was happening. Melissa said the darklings were celebrating. You think they were expecting this to happen?”
    “Ah, now you’re headed in the right direction,” Maddy said.
    Rex shot Jonathan an annoyed look for asking the obvious next question and scoring extra Maddy credit for it.
    Very clever, Dess thought. The old mindcaster was good at playing the boys against each other. Dess had found a few old photographs of a youthful Madeleine around the house, and she’d been quite the 1940s cutie.
    Of course, it was worth remembering that Maddy had been the one to spill the beans back then, coughing up the secrets of the blue time to a daylighter, Grandpa Grayfoot (probably one of her boyfriends). So in theory she could be blamed for the whole mess since: the creation of the halfling, the extermination of the previous generation of midnighters, and the fact that the five of them had been left orphaned and clueless.
    “So what did you taste?” Rex asked.
    Maddy paused dramatically, then looked across the table at her pupil.
    Melissa stopped chewing her lip and said, “We aren’t sure yet. We haven’t had a chance to”—she glanced at Rex—“compare notes.”
    “But there were some ruptures,” Maddy said. “Places where the false midnight felt very thin.”
    “Places?” Dess asked, her ears perking up. Places could be expressed as longitude and latitude—sweet numbers. “You mean like this crepuscular contortion?”
    Maddy nodded. “Yes, but not hiding places. Spots where the barrier between the blue world and ours seemed almost to disappear.”
    “Oh.” One hand inside her jacket pocket, Dess gripped Geostationary harder. “You mean like Sheriff Michaels?”
    “Sheriff Michaels?” Jonathan asked. “That guy who disappeared?”
    Everyone was quiet for a moment.
    Some time ago—before Jessica, or even Jonathan, had moved to Bixby—the town sheriff had vanished out in the desert. Only his gun and badge had been found, along with his teeth and all their fillings—the darkling-proof, high-tech alloys of dentistry.
    The rumor was he’d been killed by drug dealers, but between Rex’s lore and her careful mapping of the blue time, Dess understood what had really happened.
    She cleared her throat. “Well, you know that darklings have to eat, right? Even if they only live one hour in twenty-five, predators still need prey to stay alive. Normal animals can step through into the blue time if they’re in the wrong spot at exactly midnight. So darklings mostly eat unlucky rabbits and cows, but every once in a while a human being slips through.”
    “Hmmph,” Madeleine said. “In my day, people knew where not to be at midnight.”
    “Yeah, well, your day got canceled,” Dess said.
    “Wait a second,” Jonathan said. “I thought darklings couldn’t hurt normal people.”
    Dess shook her head. “Once you poke