Free Touching Darkness by Scott Westerfeld Page A

lungs. The pegboard full of computer cables came down easily from the wall. Some of the cables were filled with useless copper and gold, Rex knew, but some would also contain advanced alloys, insulating plastics, and hopefully some fiber optics, all of which would bedevil their attackers. They leaned it against the window, and Rex began to empty the duffel bag, naming the pots and pans with the last tridecalogisms from his tattered Scrabble dictionary page.
    “I got it,” Melissa said, pushing him away when his list ran out. She named the last few bits of metal, calling on the memorized emergency words they all kept in their heads.
    “Unintelligent,” she murmured.
    Rex leaned against the wall and shuddered. Every breath was icy from the slither strike. His shoulders were numb and his fingers moved slowly, like after a snowball fight without gloves. A few inches higher and the slither would have gotten him on the neck. The lore said that a few midnighters had actually died that way—suffocating, their windpipes choked with ice.
    He’d been so awestruck by the… thing they’d seen, he’d almost been killed by a mere slither.
    “Irresponsible,” Melissa named a frying pan.
    “What was it?” he croaked.
    She turned to him, shook her head. “It thinks like us.”
    “A human, you mean?”
    “A midnighter. I think she’s… she was one of us.”
    “Mixed with one of them.”
    Melissa stared at the meat thermometer in her hand and whispered, “Indescribable.”
    Something big hurled itself against the pegboard. The coiled computer cables turned into flickering circles, like Christmas lights still in their boxes. A long tendril snaked from behind the flimsy board, wrapping itself around Melissa’s waist. She thrust the point of the meat thermometer into it, and the tendril retreated with a shriek.
    “Just a lower darkling,” she said.
    Rex sank to the floor. Melissa shoved the last of their defenses into place and crouched next to him, holding his hand, protected by her thick woolen glove.
    “I’ll show you what I felt,” she said. “From the thing and that woman. After we get out of here. Tomorrow we’ll touch again.”
    “After we get out of here?” He looked at the door with its thirteen knives, the pegboard full of glowing metal. Maybe it would hold, maybe not. Of course, after what he’d seen, death was relative.
    Better eaten than… changed.
    “Yes, Rex. After we get out of here.”
    A fluttering and shrieking came from the blocked window, a slither beating its wings as it died, the pegboard trembling.
    “They’re unhappy about us seeing that thing, aren’t they?”
    Melissa nodded thoughtfully. “You said it. They aren’t going to give up easily.”
    Another slither launched itself through the window, the smell of its burning flesh making Rex gag. The darklings’ mindless peons were sacrificing themselves to deplete the room’s defenses. Rex smiled grimly; it would take more than slithers to get through that pile of space-age metal and tridecalogisms.
    Noises came from inside the house now, the beating of frantic wings filling the hallway outside. The thirteen knives began to glow.
    A black snake head squeezed under the door, then another—crawling slithers testing them. The first few burned up in the clutter of silverware and fallen nails, but more came. Melissa stomped on their writhing forms, the anklets around her boots glowing blue, then white. Rex wielded Arachnophobia, crushing slithers with the hammer until his arm ached.
    After long minutes the slither attacks subsided. The fluttering of wings died away, the metal scattered around the room losing its wild glow.
    Rex sank to the floor, wiping sweat from his eyes. His lungs were full of the reek of burned slither flesh, his muscles completely exhausted.
    “They’re giving up?” he croaked.
    Melissa stood unmoving, eyes shut.
    Then Rex heard it. Something coming up the stairs. He couldn’t imagine the half-human thing moving