Dess sets up protection beforehand and the Midnighters plan to be inside it before the Secret Hour arrives. Unfortunately, the badlands are also the home to the darklings. Rex decides to take Jessica out to the Snake Pit, a place in the badlands, where she will be able to discover her power. Meanwhile, the Midnighters are becoming suspicious of why the darklings, who normally avoid Midnighters, are so intent on killing Jessica. Jessica is grounded for the rest of the month. After flying for most of the hour the pair are chased by a darkling and narrowly escape - only to be arrested by policemen enforcing Bixby's eleven o'clock curfew.

He and Rex don't get along, and the other Midnighters avoid talking about him. The next midnight, Jonathan, a boy from Jessica's school, arrives outside her house, and takes her flying with him - he is an Acrobat, and in the Secret Hour gravity does not have a strong hold on him.

They don't know what Jessica's power is, except that it isn't the same as any of theirs. They also explain that each Midnighter has a special power - Dess is a polymath, Rex is a Seer (someone who can read the lore - the ancient history of the midnighters) and Melissa is a mindcaster (meaning she has a variety of telepathic abilities). It was the darklings who took one hour of each 25-hour-day and hid inside it so that people couldn't get to them. Darklings hate people and fear new inventions, complex concepts and the number 13. Creatures known as darklings live in this secret hour where they can hide from advances in human technology. The next day, they explain that in Bixby time freezes for an hour every midnight and that only Midnighters - people born at the moment of midnight - can enter it. Jessica is rescued by the 'Midnighters': Dess, Rex and Melissa, who chase away the animals using thirteen letter words and steel. It, along with other slithers and a darkling in the form of a large cat, attacks her. Once outside, the cat transforms into a snake, revealing that it is actually a slither. Leaving her room, she finds that her family is frozen and the only other living thing is a cat, which leads her out of her house. Although she thinks it is a dream, she is suspicious when she wakes to find her clothes wet. Soon after the move, Jessica awakens to find time frozen and rain stopped in mid air. It is the first book of The Midnighters Trilogy.ġ5-year-old Jessica Day moves with her family to Bixby, Oklahoma after her mother is employed at a high-tech aerospace company. It was published by EOS Books, a now defunct branch of HarperCollins, in 2008. The Secret Hour is a science-fiction fantasy novel written by Scott Westerfeld.

The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld