“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 h
ard 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.
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