Chapter 1 8:20 A.M. PREDATOR Bixby High's late bell shrieked in the distance, like something wounded and ready to be cut from the herd. Rex Greene was always late these days, stumbling in confusion from one class to another, late with his father's pills or forgetting them altogether. But the worst was getting up for school. It didn't help that he'd unplugged his clock a few nights ago, unable to sleep with the soft buzzing sound it made all night, like a mosquito hovering just out of arm's reach. His newly acute hearing had turned every electronic contraption into something whiny and annoying. But it was more than just the clock's noise; it was what it meant, with its false day of twenty-four hours. Since what had happened to him in the desert, Rex had started to feel time as something marked out in the sky - the rise and fall of the sun, the spinning stars, the interlocking ratios of the light moon and the dark. The rest of the world still had their clocks, though, so Melissa had banged on his window again this morning, dragging him rudely out of his strange new dreams. "Smells like... assembly," she said as they pulled into the school parking lot, her head tipping back a bit, nostrils flaring. All Rex could smell was crumbling vinyl