Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,76

School of Magic. In fact, as she looked around, she realized everyone in the lounge had taken to wearing their rings.

Except her.

It was horrible. There she sat, with the conversation going on around, over, under, and past her. It was as if she wasn’t even there.

Finally she made an excuse and went back to her room.

She lay down on her bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling desperately that something horrible was going to happen, and knowing there was nothing she could do to prevent it. It was like being in a nightmare, where you ran from one person to another, screaming at them that something awful was going on, and they acted as if you were nothing more than an annoying fly. Except this was real.

Was she wrong? Everyone else seemed so sure. The adults were here, the “cavalry,” and it was true, they had resources and abilities the kids could only dream of having. Money, skills, experience—and magic, lots of it. Spirit didn’t even have a spark of magic. Was this just her wanting to hang on to the moment when she’d been important, when she’d been the one figuring things out? Loch had been the first one to say it on Christmas Day. She should have known he wouldn’t be the last.

But …

Ever since the week before Christmas, she’d been the one warning everyone that it wasn’t over, and look, she was right, it not only wasn’t over, here were a bunch of adults saying that stuff was just beginning. She’d been proved right. This was the ultimate “I told you so.” Shouldn’t the arrival of the “cavalry” make her happy? Hadn’t she wished more than once that she could feel safe again? And now, she should be able to feel safe, right? Not only were these people setting up magical defenses, they were setting up physical ones, expensive ones that probably not even Oakhurst could have paid for. The Riders had come flying back to Oakhurst when Doctor Ambrosius called. It wasn’t easy, out there in the big world, to just shut your business down and move it elsewhere. They’d sacrificed a lot. Shouldn’t she just shut up and be grateful?

She should. Her head said she should. But her insides were seething with revolt, telling her there was something so wrong about all of this that there was not one bit of it that could be right.

And no one would believe her.

Not even Burke. Not even Loch.

Her head ached with the effort of not crying; finally she got up and splashed some cold water on her face. She glanced at the clock, and couldn’t believe it was only eight. It felt as if she had been lying there for hours. No way she was going to be able to get to sleep, not this early. She thought, briefly, about trying to see if Doc Mac was available. She still trusted him—and maybe he could tell her if she was just being paranoid, if she was just trying to hang on to her teeny little bit of fame, manage to reassure her—

But it was really too late at night for something that wasn’t an emergency. Besides, he was probably meeting with the new people. It sounded like Mark Rider was the kind of guy who wanted the psychological profiles of everyone around him.…

Might as well fire up the computer. She still had class work to do, even if the classes she was doing it for were going to be canceled in the next couple days and replaced with—what? More martial arts? Magic classes she could do nothing in?

Maybe I can learn to shoot a gun and be cannon fodder.

She plopped down in her seat, successfully kept herself from opening up the school chatroom, and got her after-class assignments. Math problems and an essay, oh joy. Resolutely she did her assignments, and reached into the drawer for a thumb drive to save them until she could get time on a printer. For all she knew, there would be an EMP or a power outage or an undervolt, and she’d lose everything she’d just done.

Her hand fell on something smooth and cooler than the thumb drive she was looking for. She pulled it out.

It was the mysterious “Ironkey” drive she’d found in her bag.

She hesitated a moment, then shrugged, and plugged it into the USB port. The worst that would happen would be that it would infect her computer and the school net. Bitterly, she decided that wouldn’t be