Conspiracies - Mercedes Lackey [67]
And still the field trip was on. It made no sense.
Unless—maybe all this was to convince the students that no matter what happened, Oakhurst was still safe. If that was the intention … well, so far as Spirit was concerned, it wasn’t working. And yet, as days passed, it seemed she was in the minority.
“Oh, I could really hate you this morning, Blondie,” Muirin said, before Spirit even got a chance to sit down at the table. “So unfair. What did you do to get your seat on the train, anyway? And why didn’t you tell me what it was so I could have, too?”
Spirit stared at her, brain blank. She’d spent the night fighting off nightmares of those mounted figures charging down on them; she’d clawed her way out of sleep as the alarm went off for the third time and had barely made it in time for breakfast before her first class. “What?” she replied. “Train?” She couldn’t for a minute imagine what Muirin was talking about.
“Didn’t you read your e-mail this morning?” Muirin asked, her green eyes dark with nameless emotion. “You get to go on the field trip. You, Burke, and Loch. So unfair!”
“I don’t even want to go!” Spirit blurted, shocked. “Why should I go? Look, you can take my place, right?”
“No can do, Spirit,” Burke said, sitting down with a huge bowl of oatmeal. “Designated field trippers only.” He offered Muirin a smile of commiseration. “Look at it this way, are you really that interested in an exhibit of someone’s modern horse sculptures? Not even you could convince me of that.”
“It wasn’t the museum,” Muirin grumbled. “You know that. It was getting out of here. It was the shopping.”
“Shopping?” asked Addie, with a raised eyebrow. “In Billings, Montana? After what you’ve been used to? You cannot seriously make me believe that you could be shopping for couture in Billings, Montana.”
“Even Billings has mega-bookstores and mega-bookstores have magazine racks with things other than National Geographic and Smithsonian on them.” Muirin poked at her eggs with her fork. “Stepmother won’t forward my subscriptions, and there are always new magazines coming out that only last for a few issues. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had real Internet, but I need my magazines without it!”
“Oh please, as if you’ve ever let that stop you from getting something,” Addie replied with a sniff. “The only reason you haven’t gotten past the firewall is because you haven’t tried hard enough to find someone or some way to do it.”
Muirin just gave her a sullen glare and went back to poking at her eggs.
“Well, I hate art museums, and I don’t have any money,” Spirit said, trying to look as irritated as Muirin was. “So I’m going to be bored with the museum and I can’t do any shopping. And Billings is, what, three hours away by train? Which means that I’ll have to be up way before dawn, and it’s going to be awful. I promise you, if I could trade places with you, I would. The only good thing about this is getting out of classes for a day.”
Well, except for getting Burke and Loch all to myself.…
“Oh, I bet they’ll have work assignments waiting for you on the train,” Addie said cheerfully. “After all, you’ll have three hours there and three hours back, that’s six whole hours you could be using to achieve. The only way you get out of class around here is if you’re unconscious. Then they expect you to make it up when you revive.”
Burke nodded, and for a moment Spirit wondered how they could all be so callous about the students who’d “gotten out of class” by virtue of being dead or insane, when a little movement of Burke’s eyes alerted her to the fact that someone at one of the other tables behind her was listening.
Right. Everyone else seems to forget that people go crazy and die and vanish. I need to pretend that I’ve forgotten, too.
“There you go. I’ll be stuck in a train for six hours with nothing to do but class work, then stuck at a museum. No reason for envy.” Spirit shrugged. “I’ll ask if we can switch anyway. Maybe they’ll let you go instead.”
But she already knew they wouldn’t. This was