Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,49

knew Nick was here at Oakhurst right now. Everyone thought that he’d been found in Radial—that much was true—and was still in the hospital there.

The rumor about his accident and Camilla’s disappearance having something to do with “drugs” was making the rounds, too. Sarah Ellis and Cadence Morgan were both sticking up for Camilla, but Spirit doubted it would matter much. If she didn’t go to Oakhurst and know how impossible it was to get even an unapproved aspirin here—if she hadn’t known everyone involved and known that Nick would rather die than touch anything harder than caffeine—it would probably seem like a plausible explanation.

Only Brendan, Troy, and Eric—and Jillian Marshall and Kristi Fuller—did go to Oakhurst, and they sounded as if they believed it. That just was such a WTF moment it almost made Spirit’s eyes cross.

And then she realized something else; never mind why the other kids believed the bogus story. That didn’t matter. The real question was, how did the rumor get started in the first place?

Loch didn’t say anything at all about Nicholas during dinner, even though Muirin kept giving him Meaningful Looks. Loch pretended not to notice, insisting on talking to Cadence about tonight’s basketball game, and Burke about tomorrow’s football game. Addie said that the football team played their last game the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and after that, a lot of the other Oakhurst sports took over Saturday afternoons—the swim team, and the fencing team, the gymnastics teams, and (of course) the martial arts club.

“You should take up tennis in the spring,” Addie said to Spirit. “And there’s a golf course, too.”

“Golf?” Loch asked, looking interested.

“Just nine holes,” Addie said. “But”—she dropped her voice conspiratorially—“at least we don’t have to compete at it.”

Loch smiled at her, understanding her perfectly. They want us to compete at everything here, Spirit thought—not for the first time. And against each other. It’s almost as if somebody’s trying to make sure that only a few of us survive to graduate, and that none of us make good friends.

“Hey, at least the skeet range is open for a few more weeks,” Burke said. “You might like that, Loch. You need to do something besides swimming and chess. And shooting’s fun.”

“I don’t like guns,” Loch said, his smile fading as he looked away. “I don’t think they’re fun at all.”

“I didn’t—” Burke began, looking hurt.

“Archery,” Spirit said quickly. “That’s outdoors, right? Or—I don’t know—just pick something that’s going to get snowed under six weeks from now. Then they’ll be happy, and you won’t have to think about it again until March.”

“April, actually,” Addie said drily. “There’s soccer. Or field hockey—we’d love to have you on our team, Loch.”

Loch snorted rudely. Field hockey was one of the few sports at Oakhurst—football was another—that didn’t have both a boys and a girls team.

“Croquet,” Muirin said instantly.

“Shuffleboard,” Spirit said. It was the most ridiculous thing she could think of.

“Hopscotch,” Loch said, capping both of them, and the somber mood was broken.

The five of them had gone to the Friday night basketball game as a group every week—at least since Spirit and Loch had arrived at Oakhurst—and by unspoken agreement, they went tonight as well. If you were forming a secret cabal (even if you didn’t know what your secret cabal was for just yet) the first thing you had to remember was to keep behaving exactly the way you had before you’d formed your secret cabal.

But at least they could all sit together at the top of the bleachers without doing anything unusual. And not everyone came to the Friday games—or to the basketball games at all (not like the football games that practically the whole school attended). So they could hide in plain sight—and talk.

Loch sat in the middle, with Spirit on one side of him and Muirin on the other. Addie and Burke sat on the ends. Most of the other kids either didn’t want to climb up that high, or wanted to sit at the ends near one or the other of the baskets. All the Oakhurst teams played full-court, and the court was regulation size—94 by 50—so that left plenty of room in the middle for them to have privacy.

“Well?” Muirin demanded, as soon as Mr. Gail had blown the whistle to start the game and the ball was in play. The sound system was blasting a techno mix version of “Oakhurst We Shall Not Forget Thee” (Spirit had nearly died laughing the first time she’d heard it, but she