Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [112]
“We have to look insignificant,” Spirit said quietly. “Like we’re not worth bothering about. Us taking out the Hunt could have been a fluke—”
Burke nodded. “We didn’t really go into any detail when we told Doctor A., it’s true. We could have just gotten lucky. I don’t think any of us have done anything particularly wonderful since.…”
“We have to keep our heads down,” Loch said. “But how?”
“I know how,” Spirit said. “There’s more than one way to spread possible attention around. We need to get to some of the others, give them some idea of what to do when this happens again, and make them think it’s their idea.”
“You think this is going to happen again?” Addie began, then shook her head. “No, I’m being stupid. Of course it is, the only question is, when and why?”
“The Dance. It has to be the Dance,” Spirit said firmly. “We’re all together. Like Halloween. And New Year’s. I just don’t know how significant the date is.”
Addie’s brow wrinkled, but it was Loch who spoke up. “The dance is February Second. That’s Imbolc,” he said. “The Return of the Light. Except what if it doesn’t? What if the power goes out and there’s nothing but dark and cold and fear?”
Spirit snapped her fingers; “That’s why the fear-thing has hit us twice so far!” she said “They’ve been practicing!”
The others nodded. It all made perfect sense. “We have to figure out how we can fight off that fear.…”
“It can’t be a direct confrontation, not like the Hunt,” Burke pointed out.
“Well, both times that the Shadow Knights have shown up in person, we’ve been pretty nonconfrontational,” Muirin said sourly. “We just milled around like anyone else.”
“So we look like we’re milling around, but we do stuff.” Spirit looked down at the candle. “You know, the candle didn’t go out.”
“You know what’s better than anything…” Muirin began to smile, slowly. “A prank. We can get a lot of the kids in on a prank. All this military-school crap is starting to bite, and I’m not the only one that feels that way.”
“So, against cold and dark … fire and light. Maybe some other stuff…” Spirit nodded. “And we probably have all night to figure out what we need to put together.”
Addie got up and pulled some hoarded soda out of her refrigerator. “I’ve got the caffeine,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
SIXTEEN
When the searches were finally called off, three teachers and twenty kids were still missing. The day after that, e-mails went out that claimed they’d been found in Radial, and were electing to leave Oakhurst under the protection of Breakthrough. When Spirit counted it up, that was four teachers and almost forty kids that she knew of who had “left” Oakhurst, including the kids who had been Tithed or driven crazy in the last two years. It was a staggering total of dead and just-as-good-as. She knew the kids who were left wanted desperately to believe the missing ones had really gone off somewhere; there was no point in trying to tell them otherwise.
More Breakthrough people came to replace the missing (dead) teachers. The new teachers meant a new round of discipline-tightening, more classes, even less free time, and more of Mark Rider’s security goons prowling the campus, giving people the hairy eyeball, trying to chase them back to their rooms when they weren’t in class. And that was where Mr. Rider made his big mistake.
Maybe he figured that kids would do what they were told. Maybe he figured they were so scared by now they’d agree to anything as long as they were safe. Spirit remembered her parents having long debates about that with their friends—how some people would put up with just about any restrictions as long as they thought they’d be safe.
The thing was … even if she didn’t like a lot of them, Spirit knew that none of the kids at Oakhurst were stupid. Smart people tended to ask questions, and tended to resent it when they had to give up privileges and freedoms. She remembered her mom saying, “Stupid people are satisfied with stuff. Smart people can make themselves stupid by being willing