SIX
This was her third year at Oakhurst, and like her Dad always used to call Wednesday “Hump Day”—because you were halfway through the week and over the hump and it was all downhill from there and the weekend was on its way—Camilla thought of the Halloween Dance as the “Hump Dance,” because it meant they were almost all the way through the year. Halloween meant there’d be the cold weather that she loved after growing up in Florida, and it would start snowing soon so they couldn’t do most of the outdoor sports, and there’d be a whole week of no classes at Christmas, and for Christmas they all got something from their Wish Lists in addition to some candy.
Yeah, okay, maybe it was lame. But it was also better than home. The one time she’d called the Halloween Dance the “Hump Dance” out loud, though, she’d gotten laughed at, so she’d never done it again. Sometimes she just wasn’t as good at making the words come out right as everyone else was—Camilla knew what she meant, but between her brain and her mouth, it just ended up sounding stupid. Sometimes she thought that when she got her powers working all the way right and could take on her animal shape, she’d just turn into something—a wolf, maybe, or an eagle—and just never turn back.
Having Transformation was a really cool Mage Gift, and she’d been excited when Mr. Bowman explained to her that someday she’d be able to turn into any animal she wanted to. But it was also dangerous, because if you got stuck halfway you could die, so she still had a lot of practicing to do before she did it for the first time. Right now she had what he called “the perks”—sharper senses, faster reflexes, being just a little stronger than somebody else her age.
And one of the advantages of that was it made it easier to sneak around.
The gym had started to fill up right around eight. The dance was going to run from eight to midnight, and the Dance Committee had been fighting in their chatroom for weeks over the playlist (which they did every dance), but they’d finally locked it down, and now the songs they’d picked were blasting out through the monster speakers in the corners of the ceiling.
There were tables along the walls with soda, and candy apples, and cupcakes, and enough sweets and junk food—chips and pretzels and soda and candy—to send everybody in the entire school into a white-sugar-coma. Everybody always rushed the snack tables during the first hour of a dance, but Camilla didn’t bother; she knew better. When Oakhurst relaxed the junk food ban, it didn’t do it by halves. The only rule was that you couldn’t take anything back to your room for later, but the tables would be full all evening.
She slipped out the side door of the gym, flicking a glance at her watch. Eight-thirty. Perfect. Nick would wait ten minutes and follow her out so nobody saw them sneak out together, and they could probably have at least twenty minutes out here together before somebody came looking. She knew the teachers practically patrolled the grounds during the dances.
But this was too good a chance to pass up.
She ducked around the corner of the gym, into the shadows, and dug into her vest pocket. The vest was patchwork velvet, the pieces stitched together in metallic thread, and it was the prettiest thing she owned. She’d added the inside pocket herself. She’d always been handy with a needle and thread.
She pulled out the half-empty pack of cigarettes and the lighter, fumbled a cigarette into her mouth, and lit it. She took a cautious drag, and coughed slightly. She wasn’t used to smoking anymore. She wasn’t supposed to be smoking at all (Hello? Sixteen?) but she’d always used to back home. When she’d come here she’d had to go cold turkey until she’d hooked up with Seth Morris and started swapping her weekly soda ration for cigarettes. She didn’t really crave them by that point, but they were kind of a link with home. The good parts. Now that Seth was gone, it looked like she’d be giving up smoking again—for good this time. This was her last pack.
She took another drag on her cigarette—and then nearly strangled as she heard a noise coming from the direction of the Sunken Garden. For a few seconds she was scrambling to figure out whether to throw the cigarette away, swallow it, or just try not to cough herself to death. Then she blew out a mouthful of smoke on a shaky silent laugh. She could hear them, but whoever was making the noise was too far away to even see her.
Camilla frowned as the sounds continued. But what was it? It sounded like leaves rustling, and it couldn’t be—the only things that were still green this time of year were the pine trees, and they didn’t make sounds like that. Plus, it was a little early for any of the make-out artists to have snuck away from the gym—and if they did, they’d pick someplace warmer. Like the Greenhouse, or the swimming pool, or even the train station.
And those noises didn’t sound . . . right. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. They just didn’t.
She carefully ground her cigarette out and picked up the remains, tucking it into her pack and tucking her pack into her vest. Best not to leave any evidence. Then she trotted off to investigate. She had a good five minutes before Nick showed up. He’d wait for her.
Every time Camilla stopped to listen, the noises stopped just a beat later. Scuffling. Giggling. It didn’t sound like any of the kids from here, and she wondered if some of the townies from Radial had decided to play a Halloween prank on the school. She passed the Sunken Garden. The noises weren’t coming from there. Maybe the train station?
If they’d just keep making noise when she stopped to listen, she’d know where they were. And then they’d see who gave who the fright of their life!
Camilla was standing on the railroad tracks, wondering how she’d come so far without realizing it, when she heard the sound of engines. Car motors, but bigger, like a truck or an SUV—a bunch of them—but the school only had two SUVs, and they were locked up in the garage. And the motor noises weren’t coming from the direction of the road, and she didn’t see any headlights.
This is wrong. This is all wrong.
She didn’t know what was going on out here, and she didn’t want to know. The only thing Camilla wanted was to be back in the gym, back where there was noise and light and people.
The engines got louder.
She turned around and began to run as fast as she could. She could see the lights of the gym in the distance.
She didn’t get far.
Spirit hadn’t been sure whether the dance was going to be fun or awful. It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d used to do in her old life. She couldn’t keep from thinking of it that way, because going and standing around some sweaty gym somewhere waiting for a guy you probably didn’t even really like that much to ask you to dance had never been her idea of a good time. But at Oakhurst, at least it was something different to do.
The whole day had been a little strange. She wasn’t really used to seeing her friends and classmates out of their school uniforms. Everyone looked so different. Of course, Muirin had taken shameless advantage of the “No Dress Code” day to show up in all of her classes looking like a vampire version of Hello Kitty, but most of the students just wore band t-shirts, or sweatshirts, or jeans and some color that wasn’t gold or brown. Addie had come to class wearing a powder blue turtleneck, and she’d loaned Spirit a green sweater so at least Spirit had something nonregulation to wear with her jeans. For a change.
She didn’t know if her friends would have paired off more if Seth were still here, but since he wasn’t, they’d all sort of decided without talking about it to go as a group. It meant Spirit didn’t know if Loch would have asked her to “go” with him—but on the other hand, it meant she didn’t have to find out that he wouldn’t have.
The gym had been decorated for the dance, but they hadn’t tried to make it look as if it wasn’t the gym. The Theater Department and the Art Students had gotten together and designed some scenery flats that were painted up to look like old graveyards, and the inside of Dracula’s castle, and spooky forests, which was kind of babyish, but it was traditional, too. There were black and orange crepe streamers hung from the walls, and one set of bleachers had been opened out so everyone would have a place to sit, and there were tables full of food and drinks.
Everything might have been awkward, except that Addie announced that she was going to dance with Burke and Spirit was going to dance with Nicholas and Loch was going to dance with Muirin and Camilla was going to dance with Brendan and then they’d all go get cupcakes and punch. Spirit was too busy keeping Brendan from dying of shyness to think about how she felt, and after that, everything didn’t seem as weird. Addie was on the Dance Committee—there was a dance roughly every other month—and they’d picked some good music. No matter what you liked to dance to or listen to, it wouldn’t be too long before something you liked came up. She was a little surprised, though, when Burke asked her to dance during one of the slow ones.
“It’s like this,” he said, smiling at her and holding out his hand. “Addie won’t let me hear the end of it if I don’t dance with everybody we came with—I mean, all the girls—and I’m kind of the world’s worst dancer. I figure a slow dance gives you a better chance of getting out of my way.”
“Doesn’t your—?” Spirit asked, trying to take his hand and gesture inarticulately at the same time.
He shook his head, still smiling. “Combat Mage,” he said. “Dancing isn’t fighting. Unless, of course, you’re dancing with the Murr-cat.”
Spirit laughed, because Muirin had been showing off, dancing the last fast dance with herself, an illusion that had mirrored her moves exactly. She’d been in a strange kind of mood ever since Seth had . . . done whatever he’d done, withdrawing more from the rest of them all the time and not hanging out in the lounge as much in the evening. Spirit knew that Addie felt hurt by it, because she and Muirin had been best friends, but there wasn’t a lot anyone could say to Muirin without setting her off, which no one, least of all Addie, wanted to do. Spirit just hoped that Muirin wouldn’t do something stupid. Really stupid, like running away.
Meanwhile, even if it was a school dance, there were a lot of things about it that made it different from any other school dance ever. A lot of the kids were showing off: the Ice Mages freezing cups of soda into slushies, the Jaunting Mages apporting food across the room, the Air Mages conjuring up little wind-devils that picked up dust and twisted the streamers around themselves and whirled across the floor like the baby sisters of Dorothy’s tornado. And Muirin wasn’t the only Illusion Mage here.
“You shouldn’t let it get to you,” Burke said, under cover of the music. “Everybody’s magic doesn’t show up at the same time. Muirin got hers when she was twelve. Some kids come here and they’re older than either of us, and they don’t know they’re magicians yet.”
Spirit looked up at him, startled. And relieved, too, because she didn’t think she actually wanted to be a magician, but everyone else was, and it was hard to be left out. “I don’t—” she began.
“Don’t sweat it,” he said. Despite his claims of clumsiness, Burke wasn’t that bad a dancer. Just careful and a little nervous. “Give it a few months and you can—”
He broke off in the middle of a sentence, taking a half-step away from Spirit and looking toward the back of the gym. The dance floor was pretty crowded, but Spirit could see that the door was open, and Nicholas was in the doorway talking to Kelly. He looked really upset.
“C’mon,” Burke said.
“—gone! I was supposed to meet her outside and I waited for ten minutes then I went looking for her,” Nicholas was saying. “She wouldn’t have just gone wandering off!”
“It’s not that warm outside,” Kelly pointed out reasonably. “Maybe she came back in here and you missed her.”
But Nicholas was shaking his head frantically, and Spirit was looking around and couldn’t see Camilla anywhere.
Within ten minutes, everyone knew Camilla wasn’t in the gym and wasn’t in her room. The five of them knew something Nicholas hadn’t wanted to mention around the proctors or the teachers, too: the reason he was sure that Camilla was in trouble was that he’d found her cigarette lighter outside on the ground. It had belonged to her father—a brass Zippo with the Navy world-and-anchor and the initials “CMP” engraved on the lid—and it wasn’t something she’d just drop and not notice. It proved she’d been outside, and it proved—at least to Nicholas—that she was in trouble.
“Let me have it,” Loch said quietly, holding out his hand. “One of my Gifts is Kenning,” he said, when Nicholas just stared at him. “I might be able to learn something.” Loch closed his hand around it, and for a second or two nothing happened. Then he winced, gasping, and forced his fingers open with an effort. He shook his head. “I’m not very good yet,” he said apologetically. “All I got from it was cold and darkness. You don’t need Kenning to know it’s cold and dark out there.”
“I’m going to look for her,” Nicholas said determinedly.
“Not by yourself,” Burke said firmly. “We’ll all go.”
“Coats,” Addie said. “I’ll get ours. Brendan, you get the guys’. Come on.”
“Before the teachers say we can’t,” Muirin muttered under her breath.
But the teachers were out searching, too—at least some of them were. It was a storybook kind of Halloween night—clouds, a full moon, the wind whistling through whatever wind whistled through. There weren’t any fallen leaves to kick through—Burke said the Air Mages got together in the fall and swirled them all up into a cyclone and dumped them twenty or thirty miles away—but aside from that it could have been a Halloween in a movie.
Right down to the missing coed.
Don’t think like that! Spirit told herself fiercely. Camilla was here somewhere, she was fine, they’d find her and everything would be okay. She hadn’t run away. Camilla was one of the few kids Spirit had talked to who actually liked being at Oakhurst better than she’d liked being at home.
But Spirit couldn’t help but think about what Brendan had told her. About how a couple kids went missing every year. And when you put that together with what Doctor Ambrosius said about them having enemies somewhere out here—
Well, maybe the school isn’t that safe a place after all.
And it wasn’t like the teachers or Doctor Ambrosius would actually tell you that kids were being grabbed by the Bad Guys right off the campus! That would just start a panic, which wasn’t what the faculty would want. She stopped where she was and looked around. She could see the beams of flashlights flickering off in the distance, and could hear people calling Camilla’s name.
No, no, that was stupid. Really, that was stupid, Spirit insisted to herself. Camilla was just—maybe she heard something and fell in a hole and twisted an ankle. Maybe someone else was trying to play a prank on them all. She shook her head and kept walking. Maybe—
Maybe it’s the townies. Spirit didn’t know much about Radial, but once in a while some of the kids that had been at Oakhurst for a while got to go there, and from what they said, there was a lot of resentment from the town about the kids here. The townies seemed to think that everyone here was living some kind of Rich and Famous lifestyle, where they all lounged around in mink bathrobes, didn’t actually ever do any work, and got handed top grades just for showing up for class. Which was stupid, of course, but even if Doctor Ambrosius let people from Radial on the campus, they’d probably still believe stupid stories like that, just because the place did look like a resort. And if Radial was anything like the rural towns where Spirit came from, the schools were getting by on shoestrings, and what Oakhurst spent in one year just on computers would probably equal the entire district budget.
She was almost to the Chapel, and the five of them had agreed to meet there when they’d finished checking their search areas. Burke was already there, standing on the steps; she didn’t need to ask him if Camilla had been found, because she could still hear other people searching.
“What if someone from Radial decided to play a prank on us?” she blurted out as soon as she reached him.
Burke shook his head. “They might want to. But if you don’t belong here—or aren’t wanted here—you run into a bunch of big-time protection spells. The teachers call them ‘wards.’ Mr. Wallis told me they just lead anybody who doesn’t belong here straight to the front door, no matter where they think they’re going.”
“Mr. Wallis?” Spirit said in surprise.
“Well, yeah,” Burke said. “He’s my magic coach. Doesn’t make sense for a Combat Mage to have a magic coach who can’t do martial arts.”
By now the other three had arrived—Addie and Muirin together, Loch by himself. “We checked the whole Sunken Garden,” Addie said. “Nothing.”
The Oakhurst campus was what Loch called “extensively landscaped.” But at this time of year, what the campus mostly had was bare-limbed trees and bushes and flowerbeds already in their winter protection. The Sunken Garden was a couple of acres where the ground had been dug out to a couple of feet below ground level, then shored up along the edge with a brick wall. Ms. Holland, who taught the art classes, said it was partly for beauty and partly for warmth for the more delicate plants. There was a fountain in the middle (drained for the winter), and trees planted along the walls, and flower beds covered in burlap for the winter so that they looked like giant pincushions. Even so, it was one of the best places on the campus to hide—or to be hidden.
“I took the main path all the way down to the train station. I even looked inside,” Loch said. He shrugged, not needing to say he hadn’t had any better luck than Addie and Muirin had. “Maybe she’s in the stables. Or the greenhouse.”
“Maybe she’s just disappeared,” Muirin said angrily. “Like Seth. Like all the other kids who’ve just vanished.”
“How many kids?” Spirit asked, looking at Burke, Addie, and Muirin. None of them said anything. “Which of you’ve been here the longest?” she asked.
“Me,” Burke said quietly.
“And?” Spirit demanded. “How many?” she repeated, when Burke didn’t answer.
“Not many,” he said at last. “Three or four or . . . six . . . or so a year. But sometimes, uh, kids just leave early, like if Oakhurst sends them off to a regular college or something.”
But that doesn’t make sense! Spirit thought. Not if we’re all here to be trained as magicians! And the prospectus said we were all going to stay here until we were twenty-one . . .
But as she glanced at the others, none of them looked really suspicious. Even Loch only looked puzzled.
“Whoops,” Muirin said bitterly. “Here come Mulder and Scully.”
Spirit glanced over her shoulder. A sheriff’s car was coming around the side of the Main Building. Its blue and red crash-bar was flashing, and the searchlight on its door was lit. Suddenly there was a click and a grating squeal as its bullhorn woke to life.
“Attention Oakhurst students! Please return to the Gymnasium immediately! This is an order! Return to the Gymnasium at once! Attention Oakhurst students—”
“Ow, my ears,” Addie said. “I guess we’d better go.”
“Yeah,” Burke said. He forced a smile. “If Camilla’s out here anywhere, she’s sure to hear that.”
None of them answered him. They didn’t think—any more than Burke did—that Camilla Patterson was anywhere on the Oakhurst campus.
When they got back to the gym, somebody had already shut down the music and everybody was standing around talking at once. The sound was deafening. There were two McBride County sheriff’s deputies standing next to a man and a woman who weren’t part of the faculty by the other door to the gym, the one that led in through the classrooms. Two of the teachers—Ms. Holland and Mr. Bridges—were with them, and so was Ms. Corby. Spirit could see a couple of the other teachers and several of the proctors moving among the students, separating them out into groups.
As the five of them walked in, Kelly Langley came over to them.
“Doctor Ambrosius called the Sheriff’s Office as soon as Nick said Camilla was missing. They sent some detectives over to talk to us and a K-9 unit to search the grounds. They want to start with everyone who knew her best,” she said. Her expression was solemn. “That would be you.”
“It won’t—” Muirin began angrily. It won’t do any good.
“We have to try,” Addie said quietly.
“Go on,” Kelly said. “I see Nick and Brendan. I’d better go round them up.”
They walked toward the waiting adults. Ms. Corby was holding a clipboard and talking to the two detectives—probably telling them there wasn’t anything to detect, Spirit thought ungenerously. “These are some of Ms. Patterson’s friends,” she said, when they got there. “Ms. Carson has opened two of the classrooms for you to use. Right this way.”
Spirit had thought it would be done like it was on television, with the cops interviewing them one by one in private, but it wasn’t like that at all. The police brought all five of them into the same room—one of the English classrooms—and dragged chairs around and told them they could sit anywhere they wanted. While they were doing that, Kelly arrived with Brendan, Nicholas, and Cadence Morgan and Sarah Ellis. Sarah was on the boxing team with Camilla, and Cadence was another member of “their” group.
Ms. Corby hadn’t stayed, and Kelly left once she’d brought the other four in. Spirit wondered if the detectives were going to talk to anyone else—Camilla had been here for two years; she knew most of the students.
“I’m Detective Beth Mitchell and this is my partner Tom Carter,” the woman said, perching on the edge of the desk. “We’re with the McBride County Sheriff’s Department. We understand that you think that a friend of yours has gone missing tonight. We’d like to ask each of you a few questions to help us find her. Who wants to go first?”
There was a moment where they all stared at each other in stunned disbelief. Burke beat Nick and Muirin to volunteering to be first by half a second, and walked up to the front of the room.
Neither Mitchell or Carter bothered to keep their voices down, so the eight of them could hear every question they asked. Had Camilla been happy? Had she been doing well in school? Had she ever talked about leaving? Had she been corresponding with anyone outside the school? Did she have a boyfriend? Had she broken up with him recently? Did she do drugs?
Spirit thought that Burke really had an awful lot of patience, because he answered all their questions as if they were actually serious. Nicholas was sitting behind her, and Addie was holding his hand and Brendan was kicking him in order to keep him quiet. As soon as Burke got to his feet, though, Nicholas jumped up.
“Camilla didn’t do drugs!” Nicholas said furiously. “I mean, look around—this is Oakhurst! It’s not like she could get any even if she wanted to do drugs—and she didn’t!”
“Mr. Bilderback?” Detective Carter asked. “Would you like to go next?”
By the time they’d worked their way through Nick, Sarah, Brendan, and Muirin, the questions the two detectives asked had started to change. Now they seemed to think that somebody might have abducted Camilla from the school grounds, maybe somebody she’d met in some Internet chatroom somewhere and arranged to go off with, or at least to meet.
And the horrible thing was, none of them could explain the real reason why that was impossible, even though Addie and Spirit both explained that none of them were just allowed to hang out in random Internet chatrooms. Access to the actual Internet—as opposed to the Oakhurst intraweb—was closely monitored and net-nannied, and all of the social media and chat sites were blocked.
And if Burke was right, the only stranger who could have gotten onto the campus without permission was another magician.
But they couldn’t say that.
“She wouldn’t have run away—and she wouldn’t have made arrangements to leave,” Loch said. “She’s an orphan. This is an orphanage. And she’s happy here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spears,” Detective Mitchell said, getting to her feet. “You’ve all been very helpful. We have a few more people to talk to. We’d appreciate it if you don’t talk to anyone else, okay?”
Even if they’d wanted to, they didn’t have the chance. Gareth Stevenson—another of the proctors—was waiting for them outside the door. “C’mon guys. I’m supposed to take you back to your rooms. There’s a consolation prize, though.”
He led them through the Refectory on the way back to their rooms. Laid out on one of the tables were bowls of candy, trays of cupcakes, and cases of soda. The same treats they’d been supposed to get at the dance.
“I know it doesn’t make up for Camilla being gone,” he said, looking at them. “I’m not saying it does. But it would really suck for you to miss out on the goodies, too.”
Muirin was the first one to move toward the table. “Hey,” she said. “If we get cake every time somebody disappears around here, this place is going to start being livable!”
It was eleven-thirty by the time Spirit got back to her room. Oakhurst locked the students out of e-mail and IM at eleven sharp—lights out—though you could still get into the virtual libraries if you wanted to flout curfew and pull an all-night study session. She tried it tonight on the chance the Administration might have something else on its tiny minds, and she was right: IM and e-mail were still live—and best of all, none of the proctors were anywhere near a computer.
I wonder why they’ve never figured out what we do with this? Spirit thought in disbelief, as she flipped back and forth between half a dozen different chatrooms. About two-thirds of the students had just been held in the gym for an hour and then sent back to their rooms without being questioned. The cops were only talking to about thirty of them, and from what Spirit had seen when they questioned her, they’d already pretty much made up their minds. They were going to go chasing off after a mythical kidnapper, and ignore whatever had really happened to Camilla.
Despite the warning he’d gotten from the two detectives to not talk to anyone, Nicholas was telling everybody on IM everything that had happened when they’d been interviewed, and there was nobody online stopping him. Considering the draconian way Oakhurst ran things, it was hard to believe they let the students get around the rules this easily. Then Spirit remembered what Muirin had said when Seth vanished: Big Brother is watching you. How easy would it be for somebody with superuser privileges—that would probably be most of the faculty—to just pull the chat-logs off the servers and use them to figure out who their malcontents and troublemakers were? You didn’t need a network of spies among the student body. They were spying on themselves.
She shuddered at the thought. Just what were the penalties for being an online discipline problem—and how much of a problem did you have to be before you were punished?
Suddenly flouting this particular rule didn’t seem like so much fun anymore. She logged out of IM and e-mail. Now the only notifications of incoming messages she’d get would be from “Staff.”
She turned off the overhead lights and walked over to her window. She turned off the light beside her bed and opened the curtains. As her eyes adjusted she could see clearly. Her windows didn’t overlook any of Oakhurst’s outbuildings. All there was outside her window was earth and sky and darkness and stars . . . a vast dark emptiness that made Spirit feel very alone.
She stood staring out the window for a long time, wondering where Camilla was, and what had happened to her, before drawing her curtains again, and switching on her light, and getting ready for bed.
In the morning, Spirit checked her e-mail before she did anything else. She was hoping for an announcement that Camilla had been found, and half-expecting an announcement from “Staff” that they were under house arrest today. There was neither one.
She dressed in her uniform, as usual, giving her lacy blouse a wistful glance. She hadn’t gotten much chance to show it off last night, and not a lot of time to enjoy wearing it, either. She made a mental note to remember to return Addie’s sweater to her sometime today, and headed off to breakfast.
The mood in the Refectory wasn’t much different than usual. Of course it isn’t, Spirit thought. This is Oakhurst Academy. Kids disappear here all the time. She didn’t like thinking that way, but it was hard to stop.
She slid into her usual place at their table—in between Burke and Loch—and reached for her juice. She wondered what time the others had finally gotten to sleep last night, because Muirin looked completely wrecked—she wasn’t even up for her usual morning rant against healthy breakfasts—and Addie looked positively grim. Spirit exchanged subdued “good mornings” with the others as the clock over the door ticked over to seven o’clock and the servers began setting out bowls of hot cereal.
Nicholas wasn’t here.
“Hey, guys? . . .” Spirit said hesitantly, her voice almost a whisper.
“You might as well tell everyone, Murr,” Addie said darkly.
“Is it something about Camilla?” Loch asked, his voice as low as theirs.
“Nick,” Muirin said. She was so distracted this morning she was actually eating her oatmeal plain. “He PM’d me last night to meet him, and I figured it was something he didn’t want to say on the intraweb, so I did. He said he knew the cops weren’t going to really look for Camilla, so he would.”
“And she didn’t tell me until this morning,” Addie said, sounding disgusted.
“You’d just have tried to talk him out of it, Ads,” Muirin said, and Addie made a face at the hated nickname.
“You should have stopped him,” Burke said fiercely. “You know damned well it’s dangerous out there. And Nick only has a minor Air Gift. Being able to predict the weather isn’t going to do much to save him if he gets into trouble.”
“Nobody else is going to look for Camilla!” Muirin whispered back, just as fiercely. “You were there last night—the cops had their minds made up even before they talked to us. They just wanted to know what we knew to make their story sound good.”
“They must know something they aren’t saying,” Addie said slowly. “But what?”
“I’ll tell you something else,” Muirin said. “If Seth really did run away like Oakhurst says, he’d have written to me by now. A long time ago he set up a deal with the kids in town: He brought them stuff from the school and traded it for contraband—and uncensored mail. Where do you think Camilla got her cigs? Or where I get all those Hershey bars? A lot of the kids at Oakhurst showed up with some fancy stuff—clothes and iPods and stuff—and they’re willing to trade it off for candy and soda and magazines. And . . .”
Her eyes shifted a little. “. . . and there’s stuff that you can do. Keep fried memory chips and motherboards and video cards around, wait for a storm, put ’em in and say your computer got hit with an overvolt from a ground strike. Then you’ve got hardware to trade. Report you lost something. Burn MP3 disks. Seth had a drop, partway between here and Radial. I took it over when he left. It’s been a month. He’d have sent a postcard. Something.”
The others did their best to calm her, to offer other explanations for Seth not having written, but Muirin wasn’t hysterical this time, she was coldly angry—and she had facts to back her up. Her explanation was delivered in whispered half-sentences over breakfast, but the picture it painted was a chilling one.
As Burke had told Spirit the night before, a few kids vanished every semester, and (so they were told) a few kids graduated early. But none of the “graduates” were ever heard from again. They didn’t write to any of their friends still at Oakhurst, even though their letters ought to have been let past the school gatekeepers and delivered to their recipients.
“And Tabby Johnson and Ryan Miller graduated last year—supposedly—and both of them knew about the thing Seth had. They could have sent a letter through the post office box in Radial and it would have gotten here. They never did,” Muirin added. “If we weren’t a bunch of orphans—if Oakhurst didn’t have so much money—any other school would be investigated if so many kids kept running off and vanishing. I mean, I don’t have any money, and I know Burke doesn’t—and neither do you, Spirit—but Loch isn’t hurting—and Addie, you’re stinking rich. What happens to your inheritances if you just vanish?”
Addie blinked slowly. “I . . . really don’t know. Loch?”
“My father’s estate is set up as a trust that I can draw on once I’m twenty-one. I get full control of it when I’m twenty-five,” Loch said. “I guess if I . . . vanish . . . it goes to some charity.”
“Like Oakhurst. An orphanage that takes in a bunch of poor kids would qualify, right?” Muirin said.
From the stricken look on Loch’s face, Spirit guessed it would. And Muirin wasn’t finished yet. She said that for a week during the summer, Oakhurst held “Alumni Days,” during which a number of former students returned to visit. Most of the students were kept completely out of the way of the visitors and barely saw them at all—but a few of the kids, and even some of the teachers, disappeared from their classes for that whole week, and the kids who were involved in Alumni Days refused to talk about what they’d been doing when they came back.
“But everybody knows about that,” Burke said slowly. “It’s just . . . I always figured . . . Doctor Ambrosius always says we’re going to be important people someday. So I kind of thought . . . it might be kind of like a job interview. You know, they might be going to go to work in their companies after they graduated.”
“You are too good to live, Burke,” Muirin said disgustedly. “Have you forgotten we’re all magicians? And why wouldn’t they talk about it afterward?”
“A secret society,” Loch said. Everybody looked at him. He shrugged slightly. “They have them in colleges. They’re like fraternities, most of them, except one of the rules is that you can’t talk about being a member.”
“So what kind of an exclusive club like that would Oakhurst have?” Spirit asked. “Who’s in it—and what’s it for?”
No one had an answer for her. And the clock had ticked over to eight o’clock and they were out of time to wonder about it.
The four hours of Spirit’s morning classes seemed to drag on forever, and she had difficulty concentrating, even though they were fairly mindless: English, History (regular History, not History of Magic), and Art. Everyone was restless, but most of Spirit’s fellow students seemed to be more pissed-off at Camilla picking the night of the dance to run off—and ruining it for them—than worried about her. She was surprised, after what had happened when Seth disappeared, that the school hadn’t even seemed to notice that Nicholas was gone at all.
Had Muirin’s love of gossip and drama made her blow up a collection of unrelated incidents into a huge conspiracy? Was this Muirin’s way of grieving for Seth—making his disappearance into part of an enormous persecution of the Oakhurst student body?
Or was Muirin right? When you looked at the cold, hard facts of it . . . how could she not be right?
Spirit was on her way to the Refectory at the end of Third Period when Loch showed up in the hallway. They didn’t have any morning classes together—he was in a different “module” for History and English, and he had Science while she had Art—so she was a little surprised to see him. She was even more surprised when he put a hand on her arm and drew her toward the wall.
“Skip lunch,” he said. “Come on. We’re taking a meeting.”
She’d thought Loch would be one of the last people to flout the Code of Conduct, so if he was willing to do it, it had to be important. She slipped out the side door with him and hurried down the brick walkway, wrapping her arms around herself against the bite of the wind. November in Montana was a lot colder than November in Indiana.
“Yeah,” Loch said, seeing her shiver. “Sorry. This is important.”
Their destination was the little railway station. When she and Loch arrived, Spirit saw that Addie and Muirin were already there, and Burke arrived a couple of minutes later. Spirit could practically have kissed him when she saw he had two blankets with him—big heavy wool ones, the kind they used down in the stables.
The five of them huddled together under the platform with the blankets wrapped around them. Loch had brought bottles of juice, and granola bars, and apples, and Muirin had several Hershey bars and a Coke, and Burke had some PowerBars and bottled water, and Addie and Spirit both had granola bars tucked down into the bottom of their book bags; they shared out the food as Loch explained why they were all here breaking the rules and missing lunch.
“Nicholas is back,” he said, looking grim. “The police brought him into the Infirmary today. They found him down in Radial this morning—wandering down the street like a zombie.”
“What?” Burke said, stunned.
“How do you know?” Muirin asked suspiciously.
Loch glanced toward Addie. “I’ve been in prep schools all my life, you know? So a lot of the time I’m doing ‘Special Projects’ in my English class, because I’ve pretty much got English Comp covered and they want to keep us busy. So today I started in the Library as a page. It’s pretty cool, actually—”
“Get to the point,” Muirin snapped.
“The point,” Loch said, an edge to his voice, “is that library pages shelve books, and they also run all over the school getting them back from wherever the teachers have left them. All the library books are RFID-chipped, and the school computer can find them. What that means is, A: I have the run of the school during my English class, and B: the library has a great view of the driveway.”
Muirin opened her mouth to say something else, and Addie poked her.
“So I was in the Library when I saw the ambulance from Radial drive up, followed by a sheriff’s car, so I waited about ten minutes, then I snuck down to the Infirmary to see what was going on.”
“But—didn’t you worry about being caught?” Spirit asked.
Loch smiled at her unhappily. “Hey. Shadewalker here, remember? That means invisible and stealthy, and I probably couldn’t fool a magician, but I’m pretty sure Ms. Bradford isn’t a magician, and the cops and the EMTs from Radial sure aren’t. I was able to stand right outside the doorway and hear everything.
“They told Ms. Bradford that they found Nick wandering around the center of town right around dawn. They said he was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, so they took him over to the local hospital for a couple of hours to make sure he was going to be okay. Which he is—physically. The cops are calling it a drug overdose, and now they’re saying that Camilla was involved with drug dealers, and she disappeared because of a drug deal gone wrong.”
“No. No. Absolutely not.” Burke was shaking his head. “Nick’s mom was a junkie. He wouldn’t even touch aspirin. He thought Coca-Cola was the hard stuff.”
“Camilla smoked,” Spirit pointed out.
“Yeah, sure,” Burke said. “And cigarettes will kill you, but they aren’t exactly heroin. Murr, Seth wasn’t bringing anything like that in, was he?”
“Not even pot,” Muirin said, making a face. “He said even beer was too risky, because what if the proctors or the teachers caught someone ’faced? Junk food, mail, some clothes, magazines, software, cigs, condoms—that was it. I’d know.”
“And Seth was the ‘dealer,’ not Camilla, anyway,” Addie pointed out. “Camilla was supposed to meet Nick outside the gym last night. She disappeared off the school grounds. Nick went looking for her—and I don’t care what the police are saying, he would have worn a coat and shoes when he went,” she finished angrily.
“So . . . what are we saying?” Loch asked, looking around at the others.
“That there’s something going on here at Oakhurst,” Spirit said into the silence. “It’s something that makes kids disappear. And either the authorities in Radial are in on it—or they’re being bribed to look the other way—or they’re being . . .” She hesitated. “Bespelled. Bespelled to not notice what’s going on. No matter what it is.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Muirin said instantly.
“Ridiculous?” Spirit shot back in disbelief. “Spells are ridiculous?”
“Mind-control spells,” Addie said, frowning. “Telepathy, or . . .”
“Or glamourie?” Spirit asked. All those mind-numbing lessons with Ms. Groves were finally coming in useful. “How is controlling what somebody thinks and feels any different from controlling what they see? Muirin?”
“I don’t know,” Muirin said thoughtfully. “But it isn’t an Air Gift. Or Water or Earth or Fire. We get taught every Gift that every School can have—you know that, Spirit. It’s in case, you know, we show up with a secondary one later. Right?” she said, looking at the others.
Or any Gift at all, Spirit thought. “But everything we know about magic—real magic—we know because Oakhurst has taught it to us, and told us it’s the truth. If they aren’t telling us the truth about how our classmates are disappearing, what else aren’t they telling us?”
“If you’re right,” Loch said slowly, “then I think we may have a real problem.”
“Just the one?” Burke said, rolling his eyes. “That’s a relief. For a minute there, I was worried.”
“First things first,” Addie said. “We need to find out what happened to Nick. Somebody has to talk to him.”
“Loch, you’re up again,” Muirin said. “Time to work those magic ninja powers.”
“Yeah,” Loch said, glancing at his watch. “But now we have to get back to class. I don’t know what they’d do if they noticed us going off to talk like this, but I don’t want to find out, either. So lets just keep this here. No Cadence, no Brendan. Nobody else—and especially none of the proctors. Just us.”
The five of them exchanged glances, their faces serious as they nodded agreement. Spirit had known this was serious when Loch told all of them about Nick, but making this a secret only the five of them shared seemed to underscore that fact.
“Yeah, and I don’t think I have to remind any of you orphan geniuses to keep this off the intraweb, right?” Muirin said.
Nobody said anything. Even Burke didn’t protest.