Sacrifices (28 page)

None of the students were particularly sympathetic.

Spirit wanted to think her classmates were preparing to rise up and throw off the chains of their oppressors (or at least stop letting Breakthrough push them around), but she knew better than to really hope. Oakhurst would load them all down with sugar tomorrow night, there’d be a dance, and by Monday they’d probably all go back to being good little sheep. (Most of them, anyway.)

Still, the thought of a rebellion was nice while it lasted.

*   *   *

Spirit stared at her prom dress in disgust. It was gorgeous.

The blue satin was the exact color of her eyes. The boned bodice had a spray of tiny rhinestones swooping across the neckline and then down to her left hip. It fit tightly to the waist, then it ballooned out into a short tulip-shaped skirt over a huge silver crinoline. The dress was strapless, but it came with a short-sleeved shrug in glittery white swansdown. There were even accessories to go with it: a pair of silver sandals, silver pantyhose, and a headband with an enormous blue-and-silver flower at one side.

She’d look like a fairy princess.

She’d feel like a …

Spirit shuddered. She’d rather wear the dress Muirin had made for her first dance, even though everyone had already seen it. She’d rather wear a
garbage bag.

She didn’t think that would go over well.

She sighed and hung the dress in her closet, resisting the urge to just toss it on the floor at the back. And slam the door. And never leave her room again.

It was weird. So many things about Oakhurst Academy should have been, well,
nice.
(In another universe, one where her family wasn’t dead.) But everything—the riding lessons, the dances, the laptop and all the fancy toys, the luxurious dorm room—was somehow … empty. It had been, even before she’d known the truth about Oakhurst. Everything here was like the Sunday Services: it looked good on the surface, but it just left you feeling empty and dissatisfied.

Goblin Fruit
, Spirit thought, thinking about the Rossetti poem Dad had loved to quote.
“Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.” Oakhurst gives us all the things that ought to satisfy us. And they don’t, because none of them is really what it looks like. So they want us to want … what?

She didn’t want to think about the answer to that question, even though she was pretty sure she knew it. What Oakhurst—what Doctor Ambrosius—what
Mordred
—really wanted was for them to want
other
things. Not friends, but flatterers. Not knowledge, but control. Not wisdom, but supremacy.

And anybody who bought what Oakhurst was selling would find out that all those things left them as empty as the fake “good” things had. And then what was left?

I don’t want to be able to think about things like this,
she thought despairingly.
I don’t want to
have
to think about things like this.

She’d wondered how Oakhurst had changed her.

This was how.

She drew a long shuddering breath. There was nothing to do but go on. “In the midst of life, we have our homework,” she said aloud. It was supposed to be a joke, even if a lame one, but her voice was rough and wavery. She closed her eyes tightly for a moment.
They want me to give up. They want me to think there’s nothing I can do but give in. So I won’t.

It was cold comfort, but it was all she had.

Aside from—of course—the usual fun-sucking assignment.

Because tomorrow’s
Systema
had been canceled (although today they were told it was being replaced with a one-hour Yoga Class, on the theory yoga didn’t leave bruises), they’d all gotten extra “homework” today. The new, improved History of Magic Class (which Spirit thought of since Madison Lane-Rider had started teaching it as the “All The History of Magic Breakthrough Wants You To Know Class”) had been given an extra research paper to do, on Arthurian survivals in contemporary culture. Madison had urged them to make it a personal document, drawing on their own experience—as if that made an eight page paper due
the day of the dance
any less of a grind. It was just another way for her to try to get into their heads, Spirit guessed. Still, she had to turn in something. Something that didn’t talk about Fee, or her family, or her past, because she was damned if she was going to hand over everything she loved to Madison Lane-Rider for her to gloat over.

She sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. She thought longingly of plugging in the Ironkey and pouring her heart out to QUERCUS, but … she didn’t quite dare. Their secret chatroom and the portal to the real Internet had been safe up until now, but that was before Breakthrough had done all those “upgrades” to the school intraweb. Maybe they’d done it because they suspected someone was getting through the firewall. Maybe they
knew
. Clairvoyance and precognition were Gifts of the School of Air: it only made sense to assume Breakthrough’s magicians had any Gift she knew about.
Too bad I don’t actually
have
either of those Gifts, because then I’d know what their limitations are. And I don’t know anybody who does, either. Not well enough to ask.

“Well you’re—”
Well you’re gloomy tonight,
she’d been about to say, but she stopped short when she heard the shots. Gunfire, somewhere outside—and the only people who were outside at this time of night were the Breakthrough drones.

This wasn’t the first time she’d heard shots after dark. The story going around the school was that the security people were still hunting that “escaped tiger”—and maybe they really
were
hunting the Palug Cat. (That was what the thing she’d seen was—it had to have been. Mordred had mentioned it specifically:
“Have not the Palug Cat and the Boar of Triath returned to the world? Did not the Green Knight himself come to our court?”
) Or maybe they were hunting the Boar of Triath, whatever that was. Or maybe they were just practicing for taking over the world.

If they were shooting at anything else, she didn’t want to think about it.

TWELVE

She worked on her History paper until late—it was a lot harder to come up with eight pages of something if you were trying not to give anything personal away—and then logged into Chat. She signed off again a few minutes later—the girls were all going on about their dresses, and it turned out all the boys had gotten custom tuxedos. Nobody was talking about the testing, or about having had all their rooms reshuffled. It would be nice to think everybody’d suddenly developed a sense of caution, but she’d seen too much stupidity in Chat to believe that.

“Bread and circuses.”
It was Mom’s voice in her head (Mom’d had a saying for every occasion), reminding Spirit once again of things she didn’t want to know. Reminding her that a lot of people,
most
people, would rather think about bread and circuses (toys and games and music and dancing) than confront a reality they were afraid they couldn’t change (just ignore the fact everyone you know is vanishing one by one).

But we’re kids!
she cried silently.
This shouldn’t be our job! We shouldn’t have to face this!

But it was, because there wasn’t anyone else. Mom had loved Westerns.
High Noon
was one of her favorites. Spirit had never understood why—she knew why Gary Cooper faced the bad guys, but she’d never really understood why nobody joined him.

Now she did.

You’d better get some sleep,
she told herself.
Everything will look worse in the morning.

She made herself a cup of chamomile tea, and left it to steep while she went and took a long hot shower. By the time she came out, it was strong enough to have some taste. She squirted a little agave nectar into it and took the cup to bed with her. She curled up against the headboard, and concentrated on the warmth of the cup in her hands.

The bedroom door opened.

Spirit jolted upright with a startled squeak, but before she could do more than that, she recognized Muirin. Muirin closed the door quickly and quietly behind her, and strode across the room.

“You’ve got mail!” Muirin sang out cheerfully, tossing an envelope down on the bed. “Which is, I have to admit, kind of weird because you’re an orphan and who’d know to write you at the drop box in town?”

“How’d you get in here?” Spirit asked, setting aside the mug and picking up the envelope. It was a plain 9x12 envelope, with her name and the P.O. Box typed onto an address label. No return address, and the postmark was too blurry to make out.

“Through the door,” Muirin said, smirking. “Funny thing, but your watchdogs have taken a vacation. Somebody spiked the coffee urn in the Faculty Lounge. You know, the one all the security guys hit up all night?” Muirin sat down on the bed, reached for Spirit’s mug, sipped, and made a face.

“I hope they
poisoned
it,” Spirit said savagely.

Muirin grinned at her. “Better. A big dose of laxative. Nobody’s paying a lot of attention to being guards tonight.”

Despite herself, Spirit laughed. The despairing anger she’d felt all evening evaporated as if she’d never felt it, and she began working the flap of the envelope open.

“So, since nobody was paying any attention to enforcing curfew, I went down to town to mail my letters,” Muirin continued. “I did one to the IRS, too, telling them all about how Mark Rider hasn’t been paying his taxes and I hope he’s audited until the heat death of the universe—and anyway, while I was there I checked the old drop box, kind of on a whim because hey, it’s not like any of the dead kids is going to be writing to their friends at school, and—”

Muirin broke off as Spirit got the envelope open and shook it. There wasn’t a letter—just several sheets of MapQuest printouts. And an oak leaf, as fresh and green as if this were June and not March.

Oak leaf. Oak tree. QUERCUS.

“So what’s that?” Muirin asked.

“A message,” Spirit answered. “A message from a friend. And maybe a place to hide.”

Muirin got to her feet. She had that
slanty
look on her face, the one Spirit knew meant Muirin was pretending not to care about being shut out. She turned to go. “Okay. Fine. See you at the dance.”

“No—wait.” Spirit leaned forward and grabbed Muirin’s arm. “I’ve got something to tell you—about this. It’s a long story.”

“I guess I’ve got time,” Muirin said neutrally. She sat back down, her face unreadable.

Spirit took a deep breath. She knew Muirin was on their side, not the Shadow Knights’, but she was afraid that Muirin wasn’t as sneaky as Muirin thought she was.
“Three people can keep a secret if two of them don’t know it,”
Mom’s voice said in her head. And even one person couldn’t keep a secret if somebody was using magic to get at it.

But all along QUERCUS had told her to trust, and he’d always been right. And he’d sent his message by way of Muirin. That had to be a sign.

“Okay. You remember that trip we took to Billings, right? And you had me hold the thumb drives you bought? Well—”

Slowly, skipping back and forth in the story to be sure she was telling Muirin everything, Spirit told her about finding the Ironkey drive, thinking it must be one of Muirin’s purchases, tossing it into a drawer and forgetting about it for days, finding it again when she needed a thumb drive to save a class assignment so she could take it to the Media Center and use the printer, plugging it in, and … meeting QUERCUS for the first time.

“—and he warned me against going to Doctor Ambrosius for help—back when we thought Doctor Ambrosius was Merlin—but QUERCUS didn’t tell me why. And then we found out Doctor Ambrosius
wasn’t
Merlin, and that night, when I went back to my room, it’d been ripped apart. They had to have been looking for the Ironkey; that has to be why they searched everybody’s room a couple of days later and moved us all around. Anyway, when I could finally get back online, I told QUERCUS what we’d found out, and … he wasn’t surprised. Like, at all. And he said he’d contact me. And this is it.” She waved the sheets of paper.

A map. Directions. To
where
?

“The guy’s calling himself ‘Oak Tree’ and you trust him?” Muirin asked skeptically.

“I know it’s freaky,” Spirit said. “That’s the real reason I didn’t tell any of you about him. I mean, you’re the first person I’ve told.”

“Really?” Muirin asked. “Not even Burke? I’m the first one?” She seemed to glow, and Spirit realized that Muirin smiled a lot, but she rarely looked really happy. Not the way she looked right now—as if Spirit had given her the most wonderful gift in the world.

“No one else,” Spirit confirmed. “And I think … I think this map will lead us to a place we can be safe.”

“And avert the Apocalypse,” Muirin finished. “Cool.”

“Muirin, would it be okay if we just don’t tell anybody else about QUERCUS?” Spirit said hesitantly. “I’ll tell everybody everything as soon as we’re out of here.”

“Hey, I never want to tell anybody anything,” Muirin said happily. “Fine with me.” She frowned for a moment, thinking. “We’ll need to leave from the Dance.”

“What?” Spirit said. She hadn’t thought as far as how they’d leave, or when. “But—”

“But,”
Muirin interrupted ruthlessly, “the Dance is going to be the only time Breakthrough drops its guard and lets everybody get together in a big mob. There’ll be a bunch of Townies there, too, so they probably can’t do anything majorly magical. I know at least some of the Macalister kids are going to be driving up, so the road between here and Radial will be clear. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll park my car in with theirs and we’ll bail as soon as we can. We’ll all be stuck in our Shadow Knight
haute couture
—at least you guys will be; I have no intention of wearing that froofy piece of garbage Madison thinks will look good on me, thank you so much—but I can sneak spare clothes out and hide them in the back. Just leave what you want to wear on your bed; I’ll pass the word to the other guys.”