Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,27
Spirit could figure out.
This time they had something quite simple to dig up. Addie needed pictures, photos, of the tree. They all agreed that it was too risky to try photographing it unless one of them got a class assignment in art that involved photography with an open-ended “photograph what you want.” You couldn’t exactly line everyone up for a candid shot in front of the tree, because—well, why would you want to do that in the first place? As a memento of your friends? You were discouraged from having friends. To send to your family? Even if you had family, you couldn’t e-mail them to your family, because you couldn’t e-mail anyone. So until one of them got that sort of chance, it was better to look for existing photos.
In its ongoing attempt to make things look as normal as possible, Oakhurst had a yearbook—and, sporadically, a school paper. That, Spirit figured, and Loch agreed, would be where there were any free-roaming photos of the Tree.
It meant going through a lot of dusty boxes and leafing through a lot of books and six-page newspapers that pretty quickly started to look alike. But it did yield some pay dirt; occasionally some club or team actually would pose in front of the Tree. It was never quite the same shot, so the marks never looked quite the same, and it appeared that the marks had no particular aversion to being photographed. Interestingly, the best shots were by someone who was actually in the photo, meaning that he or she had set the camera on a timer, then run around to be in the picture—so the aversion communicated itself to the photographer, but not the camera. By the time she and Loch got to the end of the newspapers and yearbooks, they had been at it for two hours.
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.