It takes only a week after midnight hits Iowa before their crew finds the newborn midnighters, only weeks after midnight started spreading so fast that their crew had quickly realized that they all needed to be in it- together. There aren't many new midnighters, but their crew is committed to following midnight wherever it goes and finding the newborns waking up in a terrifying blue world for the first time in their lives.
Dess always takes the colleges and universities as midnight passes through them, swallowing students and teachers alike into their world. Melissa rolls her eyes at Dess when she explains that she hopes she'll find someone or something there- maybe a person with the desire to fight midnight, maybe just some answers.
That day in Iowa, Dess finds a mathematician who refuses to leave his classroom full of students, to leave the frozen and vacant faces, to leave his life's work frozen still. He pleads with her every way he knows how. Some part of his mind knows that it isn't enough and that it'll never be enough.
"I just want to go back. I don't want this world! I don't want to die."
"You wont die, Anthony." Dess says. "Not yet, anyways. We can fight midnight, we can fight the Darklings."
"But you can't fight the silence! You can't fight the fact that my entire life's work will go to waste, that I will never accomplish anything. Don't you get it, you stupid girl? We have already lost. As far as we're concerned, the entire rest of the world has died. When the world ends, we die. Without the world we are dead! You have to fix this, you have to take me back, I need to work. I need to work." Anthony paces around the classroom, ranting and trying to figure out a way out of this mess that doesn't involve a gun to his head.
Dess pushes him up to the chalkboard, and he startles at the hard look on her face and in her eyes. Utterly washed of emotion, she keeps pushing until the chalk holder is slicing into his back and he wants to tell her to let go. Dess keeps pushing until it hurts, until he cries. Dess digs her fingernails into his shoulders, and there will be dirty wounds to worry about later but for now this has to be right.
Dess watches as Anthony relaxes, smirking at the fact that in just this realm, she can read people even better than Melissa. "I can't make everything better. But I can help you silence the numbers in your head, and hope that'll be enough."
Anthony nods and Dess pushes as Anthony pleads with everything he has left. "Please."
Dess points to his chair, in front of a classroom full of students that will never wake up for them. "Sit."
And he does- and Dess thinks she's found an an answer. "Ask me clearly, Anthony. What do you want me to do? What are you willing to beg for me to do?"