Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [29]
They looked at each other, then Loch divided up the stacks into two piles, and shoved one half of each over to her. When she looked at him, he just shrugged and didn’t comment. So neither did she. Instead she took her stack, got herself up off the floor, and headed back to her room as quickly and silently as possible.
She dropped her stuff off at Addie’s room on the way to breakfast, leaving earlier than she usually did to do so. While she and Addie nattered about the dance, Addie carefully stored the stuff with her art supplies.
“I think you’ll like your dress,” Addie said, as they closed the door to her room and headed for the dining room.
Spirit shrugged. “As long as it’s not as ugly as it was, that’s all I hope for,” she said. “I just wish I didn’t have to go in the first place.”
“Well the only way you can get out of it is to be sick,” Addie said warningly. “And I mean, really sick. And the way we’re isolated out here, it’s not likely you’re going to get exposed to anything between then and now.”
Spirit weighed the advantages and disadvantages of puking up her toenails versus going to the dance, and reluctantly concluded that the dance would be less miserable.
And caught herself again. Why was she even thinking about the dance? The dance was inconsequential—
But nothing has happened since we took on the Hunt, came the insidious little voice in her head.
Yet, came the reply.
* * *
The next night, she and Loch needed Muirin’s keys.
Muirin had a ring of skeleton keys—she said they had been her father’s because he was in the construction business, though she wouldn’t say how she had gotten hold of them. Knowing Murr-cat, Spirit would not have been at all surprised to learn that she’d gone through her dead father’s things the first chance she had gotten.
It was funny how you could still like someone even though the things they said and did sometimes seemed somewhat immoral, callous, and even cruel. Maybe because, in Muirin’s case at least, she would then turn around and do something unselfish—like volunteering to make the dress—or brave—or both, the way she’d been right there taking the Hunt down.
Once again, Spirit armed herself with a flashlight, an LED one that wouldn’t deplete batteries, and stuck Muirin’s keys in her pocket before turning off her room lights and slipping out into the hall. Spirit hadn’t expected any interference—but hey, paranoia. So when she went slinking down the hallway that led to the basement, she didn’t get caught by Ms. Corby prowling the hall.
It was a near thing though. La Corby moved as quietly as Loch, and she only used her flashlight intermittently, which was how Spirit spotted her. She was still about fifty feet away, so Spirit was able to backtrack to the kitchen and duck inside. She hid by squeezing into the utility closet with the smelly mops and brooms, and waited breathlessly while Ms. Corby played the light around the kitchen. Looking for late-night snackers, no doubt. Maybe.
Or maybe she was actually on the alert for real trouble. Maybe Doctor A. was taking the Hunt seriously.
Maybe she’s just prowling around trying to get people in trouble. It seemed the most likely.
When Ms. Corby was gone from the kitchen, Spirit counted twice to sixty, then slipped out of the closet, padded quietly to the door, listened, then cracked the door open. Ms. Corby’s flashlight stabbed through the darkness back down the opposite way Spirit wanted to go, and with a sigh of relief, Spirit scooted out the door and headed for the rendezvous with Loch.
He was waiting outside the Furnace Room door; without speaking, they both went inside and headed for the furnace itself. The thing was going full-bore to keep up with the arctic temperatures outside, but it was so well insulated it was barely warm to the touch at the back where they knew the round cast-metal door to the secret rooms lay. By the light of Spirit’s flashlight, Loch picked out the right skeleton key, which Muirin had marked