((Disclaimer)) The Midnighters series belongs to Scott Westerfeld; not me.

Co-operations

Tick. Tick. Tick. Ti-

A shudder passed through the rickety house as all the color bled away from the walls, the floors, the furniture.

Dess sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes wearily as they flashed purple in the light of the dark moon. The blue time was always an effective wake-up call, alerting her that the world was now her own personal playground.

Clambering out of bed, she yanked a thick black sweater over her head while simultaneously stuffing her sock feet into a pair of worn tennis shoes, covered with black electrical tape. Dess paused to pop Ada Lovelace off of her tiny rotating platform, slipping the doll into her (black) flannel pajama pocket. Even Ada was better company than no one, and she wouldn't complain about spending the night rifling through the local junkyard like a real person would.

Dess didn't know why, but she loved poking around the junkyard. There were always interesting scraps of metal, twisted into mathematically perfect shapes. The best ones Dess would bring home and arrange on her shelves into different patterns and shapes. She was particularly fond of the thirteen-pointed sun she made the other night out of some metal paperclips and a Mickey Mouse key chain.

Grabbing her Scooby-Doo backpack from second grade, she was ready to go.

As she silently padded down the hall and out of the house, Dess carefully peered into every nook and cranny out of the corner of her eye. She had never seen slithers worm their way into her house, but it was a thought that constantly puzzled her. But then, the probability equation was currently too stuffed full of variables to calculate accurately - how many slithers could be in Bixby, anyway?.

Soon, though, she was out of the house and in the dusty yard, where a prairie dog stood - frozen with its head in its burrow and its tail in the air.

Her old bike leaned, sagging, against the side of the house, its green paint peeling and the stubble of long cut-off streamers poking out of the handle bars. Dess swung a leg over and – patting her pocket to make sure Ada was still safely in place – pushed off, pumping hard with her legs to get the rusty pedals moving.

As she pedaled, her many necklaces and beads clicked gently around her neck, blending pleasantly with the creak of the bike and the jingling of her wrists full of bracelets. Dess loved wearing small, intricately simple jewelry, and lots of it.

And sunglasses. Just thinking about the bright, glaring florescent lights of the local elementary school made her head ache.

It took about ten minutes to reach the junkyard, and Dess hadn't even worked up a sweat as she screeched to a halt outside the wire mesh gate. Completely ignoring the large DO NOT TRESPASS: GOVERNMENT PROPERTY sign, she stacked two old gallon paint cans one on top of another and stepped on top of them. It gave her enough of a boost to grab the top of the fence with her fingertips and – with a jump and a little upper body strength – she hauled herself up and on top of the fence with long-practiced ease.

She could be a 5th grade gymnastics star, if she had any interest in gymnastics whatsoever, Dess noted to herself as she dropped to the gravel inside the junkyard.

Finally, Dess had reached her element (other than a mathematics textbook).

Moving to the freshest-looking pile of garbage, she carefully inspected the angles and arrangement of the trash before delving in. One ill-fated tug on the wrong object could sent the whole thing down around her ears, and Dess did not much like the idea of someone's leftovers in her hair.

Finally satisfied with her collection of data, she carefully began extracting her first find – the dirty and chipped lid to a cooking pot.

--xXxXxXx--

Dess peered up at the dark moon, suspended a little past the middle of the sky. It was about time to head home with her finds.

She carefully placed the random, unwanted bits of metal into her backpack after first making sure they wouldn't leave smelly mud inside it. Poking an arm through one strap, she flung the bag over her shoulder and turned back toward the gate where she had climbed over.

The only thing moving was a lone flying slither, giving her a wide berth.

"Aw, you're leaving already?"

Dess froze, the knuckles of her clenched fists turning white with pressure.

Slowly, she turned around to face the source of the voice.

It was a boy and a girl, about her age, standing side by side next to one of the less smelly piles in the junkyard. The girl regarded her with bored indifference, as if she was looking at merely one more ant out of the infinite colony. The boy, on the other hand, seemed excited to see another human during the blue time.

Dess couldn't blame him. She could already tell being stuck with that girl for any amount of time would be torture.

"W-who…?" Dess let her question trail off. She had never seen hints of other living creatures except for slithers during the blue time. Could the loneliness have finally made her crack? Was she so desperate for human interaction her mind has resorted to creating illusions?

Was she going crazy?

Dess quickly dismissed the last theory. 2 times 4 was still eight, 55 times 123 was still 6765. Crazy people couldn't remember their times tables like that, she was pretty sure.

"I'm Rex, and this is Melissa," the boy said, moving to push up glasses that weren't there before letting his hand drop. Melissa just inclined her head before returning her attention to a cockroach crawling across a Chinese take-out box.

Dess blinked. "I'm Dess."

"So, what's your talent? Do you fly? Or mindcast? Or –"

Dess heard nothing after 'mindcast'. It figures that the only other people to share the blue time are bratty and weird. Her mind whirls through a quick calculation of exactly how bad her chances of winding up with nutcases were.

"Don't bother, Rex. She's just some human calculator. Let's get what we need and leave," Melissa said, moving to the nearest junk pile and reaching out to grab a coffee maker.

"I wouldn't –"

Suddenly Melissa's head snapped around, and her eyes lock with Dess's. They were cynical and harsh, flickering with distrust. The eyes of someone who's seen more than they were ever meant to.

"I don't need you to tell me stuff like that. I'm perfectly capable of figuring out what will and will not cause an avalanche on my own. Now let's just go, Rex."

Dess stared at Melissa, long and hard. "How did you know I was going to tell you it would cause an avalanche?"

Rex quickly stepped in, once more moving to adjust glasses that weren't there. "Melissa is a mindcaster. She can taste people's thoughts and emotions. I'm a seer. I can see the marks of darklings and mini-darklings, and read the lore."

"…Lore? Mini-darklings? You mean the slithers, right?"

Rex and Melissa looked at Dess blankly. "Slithers?"

Dess nodded, fingering a fraying string on her sweater. "You know, the little snake-things that crawl around during the blue time. And sometimes fly."

"Slithers…" Rex said, testing the word on his tongue.

Dess glanced back up at the dark moon, steadily sinking over their heads. "I need to get going soon," she stated.

The sentence is hardly out of her mouth before Rex pounced, his words spilling out from his mouth in a hurried flood. "Meet us at Clovis Period Excavation Museum, at noon tomorrow, OK? We can explain more there. Just trust us, OK?"

Dess hesitated, considering. She really didn't want to spend her valuable Saturday at some dusty old museum with these wackjobs.

Melissa's growl of irritation as Dess thought this was enough to make up her mind.

"Sure, why not? Museum at noon it is."

Rex nodded, Melissa glared, and Dess turned her back to them, heading for the fence again.

--xXxXxXx--

As she pedals home, Dess considers the intelligence of agreeing to meet two total strangers at the secluded, empty museum (after all, who goes there on a Saturday?).

But for as long as she could remember, the blue time had been hers alone, with no whisper of other humans walking in her world. It was just Dess. Dess and Ada. Dess and Ada and the infallible, unchanging Math.

It was math that slowly turned the nightmare into a dream, then the dream into another fact of life, like global warming and world hunger. And eventually even that lost its luster, becoming just one more little bump in the road.

Maybe meeting Melissa and Rex was a good thing. It's one bump that leads to a triple-fork in the road, and it all depends on which direction Dess chooses to go.

By the time she gets home, all Dess's fears have evaporated. No matter what this leads to, she'll always have the constant, comforting presence of numbers with her, hanging on for the ride.

((A/N)) Dess's times tables probably extend much higher than 55 and 123, but mine, unfortunately, don't even reach 15.

The title is supposed to have twelve letters (the hyphen doesn't count). I didn't think a thirteen-letter word was really appropriate, considering Dess doesn't really know their power yet. And I couldn't think of any good ones…

((EDIT)) I think I've fixed most of the present-tense slip-ups I made (whoops), except for the last bit. I like how that turned out, so I'm leaving it alone. If I missed anything else, though, I'd love to know so I can go back and fix it. I'm also playing around with a possible Chapter Two/Three but... well, we'll just have to see how it goes. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed!

-- decemberWriter (and yes, I've changed my penname, too)