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This was easy: a latitude and a longitude line crossed right where Bixby would have been if anyone had bothered to put it on the rees north and ninety-six west

"Oh boy," she said softly as the nuht&039;s speed disappeared This was serious

Thirty-six was a multiple of twelve Ninety-six was a multiple of twelve The numerals all added up (three plus six plus nine plus six) to twenty-four, another multiple of twelve

She closed the book and whacked herself on the head with it Dess had played with the zip code, the population, the angles of the architecture, but it had never occurred to her to look up Bixby&039;s coordinates before

Maybe it wasn&039;t just the mystical stones and untouched desert that lobe itself Just like the thirteen-pointed stars everywhere, the clue had been hidden right out in the open, on every map in the world

Dess&039;s heart beat faster as the nuht also answer the other trillion-dollar question: Were there other blue tilobe in her ational lines re wire-frame sphere When you switched around the directions, there would be seven more places with the same numbers as Bixby: thirty-six south by ninety-six west, thirty-six west by ninety-six north, etc And probably hty-four followed the same pattern, as did twenty-four by twenty-four Of course, most of these places would be in the middle of an ocean, but soht be another dozen Bixbys out there

Or the whole thing ht be a coincidence

Dess bit her lip There ht be a way to check the theory

She opened the social studies book again and stared at theher eyes to become microscopes, to expand thebadlands Where exactly did the two lines intersect?

Her dad could find out As a rig fore town, including the badlands

Dess looked out theNothing Sitting here waiting was driving her insane She had to find out where the center of ood idea of where the lines would intersect

She stood up and crept to her door, opening it a crack The usual flicker of TV light was absent down the hall, the house silent and still Dad orking tomorrow, like he did most weekends, so her parents were already in bed Dess stepped out into the hall, careful not to put any weight on the long- slowly toward the living roo with one ear for the sound of i on her

This was really stupid, she realized It could wait until toh without a parental confrontation

But she had to know for sure

Dad kept his maps in the wide flat file that doubled as a coffee table in the living room Dess knelt before it and pulled out the top drawer, a yard across Just folders, pens, and crap in this one The next one down opened onto maps on thin paper that tried to curl up as she pulled out the drawer, bearing black fingerprints and giving off the familiar smell of Oklahoma crude

She heard a sound outside and froze, holding her breath

The car passed by, rattling on the unpaved road and off into the distance

Dess rifled through the ling through the frontTheindividual houses and oil rigs She realized that all of Bixby was contained within a single degree of latitude and longitude, which was subdivided into sers raced to find the exact point of intersection

The maps weren&039;t in any particular order "Thanks, Dad," she whispered to herself

A sound came from her parents&039; bedroo Dad hated anyone touching his stuff But no light went on, and silence slowly settled across the house again

Finally she found it

Dess pulled theit curl up into a scroll, and carried it with quick, silent steps back to her roolance out theat the still e its corners doith four pieces of steel Her shaking fingers followed the dotted lines to their intersection

"I knew it," she said

Thirty-six north by ninety-six as right in the middle of Rustle&039;s Bottom

It couldn&039;t be a coincidence The snake pit really was darkling central And if a certain longitude and latitude was all it took, there were probably other places in the world where the blue tiht

A horn sounded outside her

"Don&039;t honk at

Morons Dess was keeping this to herself for theelse, she&039;d make Rex wish he listened to her more

Before Dess pulled herself out the , she glanced at the clock: 11:24

They weren&039;t going to make it in time