Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld Page B

the tiles to spread them out, she recognized the wooden sound.
    “Didn’t know you liked dominoes so much,” she said dryly.
    “Not dominoes.” Rex was flipping them all faceup. He hadn’t put on his glasses, so they must have been marked with Focus.
    She knelt beside him and squinted at the symbols on the tiles. They were the spindly figures of lore, the secret alphabet used to record midnighter history for ten thousand years.
    “Oh.” The thought that anyone besides Rex would use the ancient signs left her speechless for a moment.
    “But they’re not quite the same,” he muttered. “It’s like a slightly different alphabet…”
    Melissa didn’t respond. She steadied herself with one hand on the floor. The feel of him parsing the symbols was dizzying; his mind battered hers with a frenzy of calculation.
    “Or maybe some of them are signs I don’t know,” he said, picking through them, lifting one for closer inspection. “Symbols for concepts that don’t exist in the lore.”
    Melissa forced her mind to shut out his mental pyrotechnics. “But what are those things for, Rex?”
    The question brought his brain to a spinning halt. “I don’t know.”
    She thought of the stiffs they often found at the snake pit, frozen while staring at the piles of rocks that Bixby legend held would move at midnight. (Of course, sometimes Melissa moved them herself, just for fun—and to terrify the little trespassing morons.)
    “Could someone use them to communicate with the darklings?” she asked.
    “That doesn’t make any sense. Darklings hate symbols and signs, any written language. That’s one of the new ideas that scared them off ten thousand years ago, along with math and fire and metal.”
    “But Rex, you’ve got your glasses off.”
    “I what?” He put one hand to his face. Melissa realized that Rex had momentarily forgotten he wasn’t wearing the thick lenses. The house was so marked with Focus that he could see everything clearly anyway.
    “So darklings have touched these,” he murmured, a few of the dominoes slipping through his fingers. “But how?”
    “Rex…” A familiar taste was penetrating the overwhelming clamor of Rex’s excitement. “What time is it?”
    He checked his watch. “You’re right. We should go soon. Just let me grab a few of these—”
    “Rex!” It wasn’t impending midnight that had her worried; it was something she’d felt before, and it was rushing back toward them. The voice seemed to suddenly crack through the psychic silence of the house.
    We’re just going to make it, no thanks to you, Angie.
    Her head spun, trying to sort Rex’s mental turmoil from the approaching thoughts. They came through grim and determined, angry at some inconvenience, and, most of all, anxious.
    “It’s him…” she whispered.
    “Who?”
    Keep it on the road, idiot. We’re almost there.
    She recognized the exact kind of fear now; it was of a type familiar from a thousand school mornings. There was always at least one mind trailing in after everyone else had settled into their desks, rushing along panicked at the thought of punishment. That was what she tasted: fear of being late.
    “He was in a hurry when he left,” she muttered, “but he was in a hurry to get back by midnight?
    “The guy you heard?”
    “Yes! We have to get out of here now.” She stood, still dizzy. For some reason, mindcasting in this house was like walking through syrup.
    Rex was scraping at the tiles, trying to return them all to the box.
    “There isn’t time!” She tasted the man’s bitter curses as he twisted at the steering wheel, felt his body sway on the quick turns, heard the skidding of tires…
    Rex looked up. He’d heard the tires too.
    Headlights crawled across the ceiling, and a screech came from the driveway.
    “He’s here,” she said, too late.
    “Don’t worry about him,” Rex said, taking her gloved hand softly as he checked his watch. “We only have to stay hidden for four