Sacrifices

by Mercedes Lackey

  The more the Townies talked about Breakthrough’s development plans, the twitchier Spirit got. Dylan knew the truth, and if he came out with it, the news would be all over town by dinnertime.

  I should probably be hoping for that, Spirit thought. Nobody will believe it, but everyone will talk about it. Wouldn’t that stop them?

  She didn’t know. And what it would do would be to lead Breakthrough back to the only possible source of the leak: Muirin.

  “But look,” Kennedy said urgently. “You gotta tell us. Those … things. You told Brenda you’d explain. I saw … What I saw…”

  “Not here,” Spirit said quickly. “Not now. I will. I promise.”

  “But you know, don’t you?” Brenda said. “And it’s got something to do with why we can’t cancel the dance. And why we all have to come.”

  “You can’t!” Zoey spoke while Spirit was still trying to think of an answer. She’d been sitting so quietly for so long the others had almost forgotten she was here. “You can’t—that’s what they want—that’s their plan! But you can’t! Stay away! Stay away from Oakhurst—no matter what you have to do—no matter what you’re told—tell all your friends—tell everyone! Because if you don’t— If you don’t—”

  “Now, Zoey, we don’t want to upset everyone.”

  It was Mandy Poole, the Breakthrough technician who’d tried to recruit Spirit when Breakthrough had first showed up. She’d showed up at Zoey’s side practically out of nowhere—even though Spirit had been watching the doors to see if someone else was going to come in. Her Gift must be Shadewalking—like Loch’s. Or invisibility, Spirit thought inanely. Mandy took Zoey by the arm and lifted her to her feet.

  “She’s just tired,” Mandy said fixing the others with a professional smile. “Aren’t you, Zoey?”

  Zoey stared at Mandy, clearly terrified. The Radial kids were looking shocked and confused, obviously without any idea of how to react. The Oakhurst kids were sitting very still, trying not to attract Mandy’s attention. Spirit was as frozen as the rest. Her hands were clenched into fists, her nails digging into her palms. She hated herself for not doing something to help Zoey, even as she knew there wasn’t anything she could do. She could protest—and be taken to wherever Zoey was being taken.

  The place nobody came back from.

  “New medication,” Mandy said meaninglessly. “Just come along with me. We’ll be right back,” she added over her shoulder as she led Zoey from the gym.

  After that, there was no point in even pretending to have a meeting. The Radial kids couldn’t wait to get out of there. They’d driven up in their own cars, so Chris offered to walk them back to the parking area. Spirit and Kylee went along too, but they didn’t get very far. There were two Breakthrough security guards standing right outside the door. Their name tags said LARSEN and MASSEY. Larsen said they’d escort the committee members back to their cars. Chris stepped back.

  “See you guys Friday,” he said.

  The doors shut behind the Townies, and Chris turned away. He looked … blank. They’d all known kids were disappearing more and more often now, but this was the first time any of them had seen someone taken away right before their eyes. He walked back to the table; Spirit and Kylee trailed after him. Dylan and Maddie were still sitting there. Chris picked up a can of Coke and rolled it back and forth between his palms.

  There was a long frozen silence.

  “Guess who isn’t coming to dinner,” Dylan said at last.

  Nobody laughed.

  ELEVEN

  With the Dance Committee meeting ending so early, none of the Oakhurst kids had any good excuse for not showing up at their afternoon classes. For Spirit, that meant King Arthur 101 with Madison Lane-Rider (Zoey was in the same class, but she wasn’t here). There were thick stacks of Xeroxes waiting on everyone’s desk—Madison said there hadn’t been time to order appropriate textbooks, so they’d have to make do with material from her personal collection. (Madison Lane-Rider was an Arthurian geek. Surprise.) Fortunately this was only the second session and they were still on the introductory material, since Spirit had never felt less like paying attention in her life. At least she could just paste an attentive expression on her face and zone out as Madison lectured—she was showing slides (mostly of Victorian paintings) and the room was dark.

  Spirit had figured they’d get to the magic by today, or at least to the “secret history” where Madison talked about how what really happened had been distorted by everyone having to explain away the magic, but (just like last time), all that Madison talked about was the “social purpose” of the “myth cycle.” Despite the fact that all of this was new material, it all seemed oddly familiar—and finally Spirit figured out why.

  She’s doing to King Arthur what Doctor Ambrosius does to religion every Sunday. She’s making it seem stupid.

  Not all of it, of course. Just the parts about chivalry and honor and “might for right.” Madison talked a lot about Art as a tool for social control, and said the Arthurian Cycle was basically State-sponsored propaganda, just like totalitarian regimes used today.

  Spirit thought it was the creepiest thing she’d heard lately. Especially since she knew what the totalitarian regime teaching the class was planning. She’d never been so grateful in her entire life to hear the bell ring.

  Now she just had to get through dinner without having a nervous breakdown.

  But that wasn’t easy. If the mood at lunch had been tense, the atmosphere at dinner was worse. Most of the Proctors were missing. Only Joe, Angie, and Mary Morris—Angie and Mary had been in the morning test group; Joe was a Gatekeeper—were there, and all of them (even Joe) looked like they had really bad headaches.

  Muirin wasn’t at dinner. (Zoey wasn’t there either.)

  When dinner was over, Spirit waited in the hallway outside the Refectory to catch up with Addie, Loch, and Burke. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point now for them to pretend not to know each other (not with two of them marked for death, Burke going kamikaze, and Muirin playing double agent), and Spirit really wanted to be with her friends tonight. More, she wanted to warn them, because she and Loch were at the bottom of the test list, and Muirin might be able to get out of it completely, but that left Burke and Addie.

  If anything happens to either of them—to any of us—I don’t think I could stand it.

  Loch was the first to join her. He looked … The only word Spirit could think of was “dangerous,” and she knew it wasn’t quite the right one. But before they’d found out about Mordred, Loch had been giving up, certain he couldn’t escape the fate Oakhurst and Breakthrough had planned for him. And now …

  Bad as things were, Loch wasn’t afraid anymore.

  Burke and Addie exited the Refectory together. Burke looked grim, but that wasn’t unusual for him these days. It had started when Muirin had revealed that Ovcharenko had murdered his foster parents. In the beginning, Spirit had tried to ignore it, to tell herself Burke was feeling normal grief and anger, but his rage had boiled over the day he’d attacked Ovcharenko, and it had been close to the surface ever since. Once she’d thought Burke didn’t have a spark of meanness or anger in him. Now she knew he’d simply kept his temper under rigid control. He wasn’t doing that any longer.

  And Addie …

  She’d always been the one saying they should find outside help, the one who’d refused to believe the truth about Oakhurst, the one who’d been most terrified of it when she could no longer deny what was happening. Now she just looked quietly outraged. As if she’d suddenly discovered she was being patronized and intended to make the people doing it very, very sorry.

  Have they really changed, or am I just going crazy? And if they’ve changed, have I?

  “So,” Addie said, bright and bitter, “who’s up for some mindless vegging in the lounge?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Loch said. “One of the big ones?” he added, and Addie nodded.

  There were six student lounges, three on the fi
rst floor (North, South, and East) and three on the second (ditto). They were only open after dinner and until half an hour before room curfew. A lot of the kids used them to study in, because who wanted to spend all their time either in class or alone in their room? Five of the lounges had sixty-inch flatscreen DVD players and microwaves. The sixth lounge was the tiny one behind the School Library—back when they’d hung out together openly, it was the one they usually went to. Tonight they headed for one of the big ones; Oakhurst had a “permitted” list of movies you could run (nothing too sexy, nothing too violent), and they didn’t get the new releases until a year later, but a lot of the selections didn’t actively suck. Spirit thought she could really go for two hours of watching something where you knew who the bad guys were and the hero was guaranteed to win.

  But when they reached First Floor North, they saw several kids looking at the bulletin board on the wall—the lounge bulletin boards were supposed to be used only for official notices, but everyone used them to leave the kind of messages you couldn’t use Chat or email for, like lost and found stuff. Two of them shook their heads, muttering, and walked out.

  “Don’t even bother,” Troy Lang said to Burke as he walked past him. “New rule: the lounges are segregated now. This one’s Girls Only.”

  “What?” Loch said. “All of them? That’s going to put a real crimp in Chess Club.”

  “See for yourself,” Josh Quinn said. “East is closed, South is the Boys’ Club. Same upstairs.” Troy and Josh walked away.

  “That’s really going to put a crimp in Chess Club,” Loch observed to nobody in particular. Second Floor East was the little one behind the Library the Chess Club met in.

  “I don’t believe it,” Addie said. She strode into the lounge and read the notice on the board.

  “‘Failure to observe the new rules will result in the closure of all lounges and demerits for the offending students,’” she quoted when she came back. “This is outrageous—why don’t they just send us all to our rooms and seal our doors shut?”

  “Don’t give them any ideas,” Burke said.

  “What about the Library?” Spirit said. “We can’t watch a movie, but we could still…”

  “Sounds good to me,” Burke said. “Being with you guys is more important anyway.”

  Addie was still fuming as they entered the Library. Her irritation was all out of proportion to the new rules, especially considering everything else. Maybe that was the point, Spirit thought. This was something small enough it was safe to get mad at it.

  When Spirit had arrived at Oakhurst last September, there’d been two librarians who took care of the collection. She wasn’t really sure when Mr. Jackson and Ms. Anderson had vanished. It wasn’t like they’d been here all the time just to begin with. But she hadn’t seen either of them in a couple of weeks, and the books on the shelves were starting to look unloved and faintly unkempt (you didn’t have to check books out, since they were all RFID-chipped and the system always knew where they were, but you were supposed to return them to the front desk for reshelving). But tonight Mary Morris was sitting at the check-in counter, looking as if she’d like to be anywhere else.

  “No mixed seating in the library,” she chanted in a bored voice as they walked through the door.

  “Oh come on!” Loch said. “What do you think we’re going to do in here except study?”

  “Not my problem,” Mary said. “You got a problem, take it up with Doctor A.”

  Burke snorted. “Come on, guys. We can sit at separate tables and pretend we don’t know each other.”

  Most of the kids who needed to do serious studying just grabbed the books they needed from the Library and did it in their rooms, and the ones who were practicing their magic were either in the practice rooms or (in the case of the Water Witches) the pool. But even though it was a Wednesday night, tonight there were almost twenty kids here—and despite the “No Talking” rule, the susurrant hum of conversation filled the room.

  The four of them sat down, finding seats close to each other, although not at the same table. Spirit leaned over to whisper into Addie’s ear. “Dance Committee was fun. I think it was over in about half an hour. Mandy Poole grabbed Zoey.”

  “Ow,” Addie said. She dug in her blazer pocket and withdrew a notepad and a pencil. “Zoey was tested this morning,” she whispered back. As she spoke, she was writing on the notepad—if they couldn’t talk to Burke and Loch, they’d just have to pass notes. Spirit leaned over to see what she was writing, and grinned despite herself. Only Adelaide Lake would think Latin was a suitable language to write your crib notes in.

  In whispers, Spirit filled her in on what she’d found out in the Committee meeting. “Whether the adults know or not, every kid in Radial has all the details about the library attack, and Breakthrough’s pressuring Radial to go forward with the joint dance whether the kids want to or not.” She described as well as she could Zoey’s bizarre behavior before Mandy showed up, but neither of them could really come up with an explanation.

  As Spirit spoke, Addie wrote her notes and passed them to Loch. After he’d read them, Loch stuck them in his mouth and chewed them. Even if somebody was paranoid and suspicious enough to want to investigate the lumps of chewed paper (and this was Oakhurst, so just about everyone was), the penciled marks would be gone.

  “And Angie and Mary weren’t—” Weren’t acting at all the way Zoey was, she began to say, but she never finished that sentence.

  “Hey! Everybody! Security’s searching our rooms!” Troy Lang skidded to a stop in the Library doorway. “Right now!”

  * * *

  By the time Spirit and Addie reached the first floor hallway of the Young Ladies’ Wing, there were already a dozen other girls there. A woman in a Breakthrough Security uniform blocked their way, not letting anyone through, and another one stood in front of the door leading to the second floor. In the hall behind the security guard, Spirit could see two more people in uniforms, a man and a woman, going in and out of the rooms. The woman had a big German Shepherd on a leash. The man had a dowsing rod. Doors stood open all down the hall. Ms. Corby stood in the hall with a clipboard, checking off each room as it was cleared.

  Spirit turned to Addie, intending to make a joke about double jeopardy—because Breakthrough had already searched her room once—but Addie wasn’t standing quietly beside her. She was pushing her way to the front of the crowd.

  “Ms. Corby!” Addie’s voice rang out sharply over the sounds of everyone else talking at once. “Could you tell us, please, what is going on here?”

  Addie’s words might have been polite, but her tone certainly wasn’t. Spirit winced. Wasn’t getting frozen into the pool and practically drowned enough of a heads-up for you?

  The other girls quieted when Addie spoke. Everyone wanted to know the answer, but nobody else had quite dared to ask. Spirit saw Kylee, who looked fiercely irritated, and Maddie, whose tear-filled eyes and stricken expression implied she was watching Breakthrough torture kittens.

  “Ah, our dear Miss Lake,” La Corby said. She smiled; it was an expression of genuine pleasure. “There’s no need to be alarmed. Doctor Ambrosius is worried that one of you might have picked up something dangerous—purely by accident. The inspection will be done shortly.” Her smile widened further. “Ladies! Ladies! May I have your attention, please?” She raised her voice, and the few girls who’d been whispering to each other stopped. “As an additional security precaution, those of you in first floor rooms will be moved to the second floor. Immediately. Room curfew will be extended by ninety minutes so that Housekeeping can relocate everyone. Please do not attempt to enter your current rooms. Once your personal effects have been removed, all first floor rooms will be locked, sealed, and warded.”

  Spirit carefully didn’t touch the Ironkey at her waist. She suspected—no, she knew—it was one of the things Breakthrough was looking for. Whether they knew it or not.

  One of the girls timidly raised her hand. “Ms.
Corby? Will we be able to choose our new rooms ourselves?” It was Emily Davis; Spirit knew she was School of Air, with a strong Scrying Gift—object-linked clairvoyance and precognition. (Spirit wondered what kind of visions Emily was having these days.)

  “I’m afraid not, Emily,” Ms. Corby answered. “For your safety, the occupied rooms will all adjoin one another so that we can seal any remaining empty rooms as an additional precaution. Your new rooms will be ready in just a few hours.”

  “They’re probably going to Jaunt all your crap upstairs, Emmie Lou,” Kylee muttered, just loudly enough for Emily to hear.

  Most of the girls had ground floor rooms, and nobody wanted Breakthrough moving what few personal possessions they’d managed to gather. The noise level rose sharply—for the first time since she could remember, Spirit heard Oakhurst students arguing and complaining about the rules in front of a member of Staff.

  “Hey, stranger, what’s going on?”

  Spirit jumped as Muirin sidled up to her. She was dressed conservatively—for Muirin. Everything was black, but at least she was covered.

  “They’re moving us upstairs,” Spirit said. “I have to talk to Loch,” she added in a whisper. “It’s urgent.”

  Muirin nodded, the barest dip of her chin. “Nobody’s moving me!” she shouted (even though Muirin already had a second floor room). Everyone turned and stared. “I’m going to go talk to Anastus! He’ll fix things!”

  She turned around and stomped off, grabbing Spirit’s wrist as she did. Spirit followed as Muirin stalked down the hall muttering loudly but unintelligibly. It sounded like swearing, but you couldn’t make out any of the words.

  The chaos was just as bad—and louder—on the Young Gentlemen’s Wing. Spirit glanced down that corridor as Muirin dragged her into the Main Hall. She saw a couple of boys shove another one. They’d be fighting in a minute. She was just as glad she was going somewhere else.

  Muirin ducked into First Floor North (completely empty) and through the door at the back. Loch had said once that all of the old “Stately Homes” were really two houses: the owner’s house, and the servants’ areas, interlocking with each other but connected at only a few points. On the other side of the door, the grandeur of Oakhurst became shabby green linoleum and plain white walls. Muirin turned left and hurried down the corridor. It took Spirit a few seconds to orient herself: she was between the Main Hall and the Refectory, so this had to be the kitchen and pantry area.