Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [30]
Once the door was closed—and it had quite the seal on it, almost airtight—Loch flicked on the light switch; there were no windows this far belowground to betray them. The bare bulbs lighting up the cement stairs down and the room beyond were painful after the darkness of the basement proper.
“Right,” Loch said out loud, his voice making her jump. “We might be living in the digital future, but when Oakhurst was founded, it was all paper. We know there are paper records on former students here as well as the Tithed ones. At some point, probably early, they had to start sending the students that didn’t have magic to the—well, call it the ‘Shadow Oakhurst.’ So we should start finding records of students transferred if such a thing exists.”
“And if it does?” Spirit asked. “What then?”
“Well, then we’ll know that every Legacy kid ends up somewhere. So if you had a brother or sister that didn’t have magic, they’d go there.”
“And?” Spirit prompted. “I mean, what then?”
This was where Loch fumbled to a halt. “I don’t know. Except that it means Doctor A. isn’t telling us everything.”
We already know that, Loch, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.
“If there is such a thing, I suppose we ought to find out just what they’re telling those kids.” She stepped carefully down the wooden stairs and headed for the storage rooms, averting her eyes nervously from those other rooms.
She headed straight for a stack of dusty boxes that didn’t look as if they had been touched in decades, while Loch dove into the filing cabinets where they had found the records of the “Tithed.”
She leafed through cartons of what looked like old tourist brochures and real estate magazines for a while, then glanced over at Loch, who was studying something in a folder.
He’s really sweet, she thought, out of nowhere. And cute. Really cute. She remembered how nice he’d been to her in the limousine, and then in the plane on the way here. Of all of them, he was the one that seemed closest to her in a lot of ways. Addie was always distant, Muirin had a slightly sadistic side, and Burke—Burke was nice, but she couldn’t tell what it was he really wanted from her, and he never, ever seemed vulnerable, not even when they were all in deadly danger. Burke was fearless; confessing her fears to him made her feel awkward and useless. Loch, on the other hand, was someone she could probably talk to about anything. He never seemed to have a problem with admitting he didn’t know something, or asking for help. She couldn’t even begin to imagine Burke doing that.
And like her, he didn’t have anyone out there, either. Burke still had his foster family. The existence of that family was almost like a wall between them, because she envied him that more than she could ever admit.
“Ugh,” Loch said suddenly, in a voice full of distaste. “They used to have a hunting club here.”
“Like horses and chasing foxes?” she hazarded.
“Like guns and shooting down anything that moved,” he replied. “I’m glad that stopped anyway.”
“Why don’t you like guns?” she asked, hesitating a moment before she asked the question. “I thought it was a guy thing.”
“Not this guy.” Silence fell between them for a moment, and Spirit figured that was the end of the subject until he coughed. She looked back up again. He was staring bleakly down at the files.
“I was at Carnarvon Academy,” he said, as if he thought she would recognize the name. Then he added, “It’s a prep school in Massachusetts. This was before I learned parkour and how to get away from the bullies. There was another guy, David, he was kind of my friend, because we both got bullied about the same amount. It got to him more than it got to me, I guess. I wish I’d known at the time how much it was getting to him.”
He fell silent for a very long time. “One day … one day he dragged me into his room and said he was going to make it stop. For good. He’d got hold of a handgun somehow,