Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,41
follow Doctor Ambrosius’s orders—and had started to chase the students out of the gym, stopping only to help the ones still sitting shakily on the floor. “We’d better go,” said Addie. Spirit nodded.
“So much for a festive New Year,” Loch said, dryly.
She cradled her soda bottle in her arms and followed Addie to the girls’ section, Muirin beside her. It was a very surreal sight, all of these girls in their formal gowns, shuffling along like a bunch of shell-shocked disaster victims. Most of them still looked terminally confused.
“Net” mouthed Muirin, as she ducked into her room to stash her loot—or drink it all, there was no telling with Murr-cat. Having the dining room open with a brunch until mid-afternoon was pretty much license for her to go on a caffeine and sugar jag and sleep it off. Addie and Spirit nodded.
Whether or not caffeine and sugar were good for shock, Spirit’s mouth was dry and she felt parched, and she was awfully glad Burke had snagged all that soda. Water just wasn’t going to do it, and she did not want to go out into the empty halls to the communal fridge to replenish her depleted supply of bottled water and juice.
She put the bottle down, stood there a moment, exhaustion making her indecisive, then finally squirmed around until she could reach her zipper. She carefully peeled herself out of the dress and hung it up in the closet. Night of terror or no night of terror, she still wanted it; weird, but she did. Under all the fuzziness of exhaustion and the ever-present paranoia and the reaction to what had just happened was this little voice reminding her urgently that it was easily the most gorgeous thing she had ever worn, and she needed to put it away safe. Since that ridiculous little voice was the only thing giving her a direction at the moment, she obeyed it.
Net. Murr-cat said to get on the ’net. Right. She pulled on fuzzy Oakhurst-brown, polar-fleece jammies, poured herself a huge glass of Burke’s bounty, and logged on.
The intranet, as she fully expected, was humming. As soon as she was on, she got an invite to a private chatroom—or at least as private as you could be with Big Brother probably keystroke-logging everything you typed. She sipped her soda, feeling the cold, acidic cola cutting through the layer of parched “desert” down her throat, and opened a second window to the school-wide chat.
It was scrolling almost too fast to follow. Everyone had a theory, some of them pretty out-there, even for someone as paranoid as Spirit. She only caught a handful of them; someone thought it was aliens (of course), citing the “paralyzing fear” that was supposed to overcome you when you were about to be abducted. Dylan’s theory was that the government had finally figured out what Oakhurst really taught and was using some sort of top-secret mind ray on them as a prelude to rounding them all up and incarcerating them in a death camp. He was hysterically telling them all that they had to barricade their rooms, block up the windows, hide in the closet, and get ready for the commandos who were going to come over the horizon in black helicopters at any moment.
Huh, that’s not as crazy as it sounds, except for the top-secret mind ray part. I bet if the government really did know what was going on here, they really would round us all up. Of course, it wouldn’t be to go to a death camp. We’d be too useful.
Probably they’d all be recruited for stuff. Espionage, intelligence-gathering, assassination. Somewhere, she thought, the ghost of her hippie father nodded with approval at her reasoning.
The flaw in Dylan’s reasoning was that this place had Money, and if she had learned anything from her folks, it was that the government never, ever bothered anyone with Money. Wacky cultists had “compounds” that could be raided. When people with Money built the same sort of places, and stockpiled an equal amount of weaponry, the places were called “estates” and the weapons were a “collection” or a “private security arsenal.”
She checked the private chat window.
Never seen or heard of any magic that would do that, Addie was typing. It took everyone I saw by surprise, unless there are people that are better actors than I think they are.
What was the point? Loch asked. Whatever happened, the question is, why did it happen in the first place? I could see it