28
12:00 A.M.
CEREMONY
Jessica followed Rex down into the center of the snake pit.
The ground was damp down here. This morning in the library Dess had explained to her how sinkholes formed. Somewhere below them was an underground pocket of water trapped between layers of stone, which had collected back when the Bottom had been a lake. The crust of sand beneath her feet was thinner here than across the rest of the Bottom and had partly collapsed into the pocket of water a few decades ago.
Jessica walked carefully, wondering if the snake pit was planning on collapsing the rest of the way anytime soon. With her luck, it would probably pick tonight.
At the center, the lowest and dampest part of the pit, a shaft of stone thrust up from the ground. Dess had said it had been buried for a long time, maybe thousands of years, before the formation of the sinkhole had exposed it to the sun again. The stone had been important to the people who'd fought the darklings in the old days, before the creatures had retreated to the secret hour.
It was about as tall as Rex, with a flat shelf jutting out from it about halfway up. A little pile of rocks sat on the shelf. Rex swept them away.
"Kids," he said.
"Lucky there's no stiffs tonight," Melissa said. She turned to Jessica. "Some nights you have to crawl over them to get anything done."
"Yeah, I heard about people coming here at midnight."
"They do," Melissa said. "We like to give them a scare, just to keep them out of the way next time, you know?"
"I'm sure you do."
Melissa smiled. "It's for their own good."
Rex was tracing his fingers across the stone, staring intently at it.
"This is one of the places where the lore changes," he said to Jessica. "I try to come here pretty often."
"Changes? You mean, the lore's different on different nights?"
Jessica took a step closer, trying to see the signs that Rex was reading. All she saw was rock, divided into separate layers of different hues. In the blue light they were all shades of gray.
He nodded. "Yeah. Every time I read the signs here, there are new stories." He thumped the rock with one knuckle. "There are a lot of tales stored in here, and only so many show up at once."
"So it's like the screen of a computer," she said.
Melissa snorted, but Rex nodded again. "Sure. Except you can't make it tell you what you need to know. It tells you what it wants."
"Unless you ask it really nicely," Melissa said.
She pulled a black velvet bag from her jacket and drew a knife from it.
Jessica swallowed. "How does this work, anyway?"
"The rock just needs a little taste of you," Melissa said.
"A taste," Jessica asked. "As in it's going to lick my hand?"
Melissa smiled again. "More of a bite than a lick."
Rex turned to Melissa and took the knife from her hand. "Stop it, Melissa. It's not that big a deal."
He turned toward Jessica.
"A few drops of blood will do."
She drew a step away. "Nobody said anything about blood!"
"Just from your fingertip. It won't hurt that much."
Jessica clenched her fist.
"Come on, Jess," Melissa said. "Haven't you ever become a blood sister with someone? Or made a blood oath?"
"Uh, not really. More of a cross-my-heart kind of girl."
Rex nodded. "Actually, the crossing of the heart was originally a blood oath. They used a knife in the old days."
"The hope-to-die part was a lot more literal back then," Melissa said.
"These are not the old days," Jessica said. "And I don't particularly hope to die."
"What, are you too wimpy to cut your finger?" Melissa asked.
Jessica scowled. After everything she'd been through that night, no one was calling her a wimp. Certainly not Melissa, anyway.
"Okay. Give me the knife," she said with a sigh.
"Let the blood collect right here," Rex said. He pointed at a small depression in the shelf of rock, no bigger than a quarter.
Jessica inspected the knife. "Is this thing clean?"
"Absolutely. Nothing inhuman has ever - "