Sacrifices by Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill

she’d held back before, still uncertain of whether he was the friend he seemed to be or a trap set by Oakhurst and Breakthrough. Sometime in the last week she’d stopped caring, she realized. If he wasn’t a friend … then at least this would be over. She was so tired, tired of it all, exhausted by what Oakhurst was putting them all through, tired of living a lie, of weighing every word out of her mouth, of thinking everyone around her was a potential enemy. She just wanted to be able to talk to someone without having to imagine the possible consequences!
    At last she worked her way back around to Muirin and her new car.  —and Addie was horrified about it, but that didn’t stop her from asking Murr to do some research for her. You know, when I got the Dance Committee gig, we figured I could poke around in Radial a little bit, but now I wonder if Teddy didn’t have an even better reason for bringing all of us to The Fortress that day than I thought.
    There was a pause, then QUERCUS replied, the letters coming up on the screen as if he was typing very slowly. You don’t need to go to Radial to do research, QUERCUS typed. You can use the Internet.
    Spirit began to scoff, but he was right: when this chatroom window was open, she could get out onto the “real” Internet. She hadn’t even thought of it—partly because what she wanted to know about was right in Radial, and partly because the first time she’d taken advantage of the freedom the Ironkey drive gave her, she’d slipped up and accidentally let Muirin know she’d had Internet access, and she’d been afraid of repeating that mistake.
    And Oakhurst is really good at teaching you not to think about things, she thought sourly.
    Thank you. I will, she typed.
    Her hands shook as she opened her browser window. She typed an address at random— ain’t it cool news —and today’s page came up. She let out a deep breath. It still worked. She chewed her lip, wondering where to start. Typing biker gang survivors of magical gang war at the old Tyniger mansion probably wouldn’t get her very far.
    She was right about that. It took her an hour of Googling before she hit pay dirt. To her surprise (she ended up stumbling over it by pure accident), the Radial Echo —Radial’s dinky little hometown newspaper—hadn’t just been microfilmed, it had been digitized. And the digital copy was available in a public online archive. The town had been incorporated in 1885, and all 125-plus years of the paper were archived. Searchably .
    Muirin should be doing this, Spirit thought wearily, rubbing her tired eyes. Muirin was surprisingly awesome at research, as she’d proved time and again. But Muirin had already refused to help—and besides, Spirit would have to have let her in on the secret of the Ironkey if she was to do any online research. And she didn’t dare. She heaved a sigh and got back to work.
    Oakhurst had been founded in 1973, Spirit remembered, so what she was looking for was earlier than that. She remembered Juliette Weber saying the place had been a gang hideout in the seventies, but just to make sure she didn’t miss anything she started with January 1960. By the time the sky outside her window began to lighten with dawn, she’d found what she wanted to know.
    The gang everyone kept mentioning had been called The Hellriders. The first item—about them taking over Oakhurst—was from 1968. The last was from three years later—1971—and that was a big enough story that the Echo ran coverage for an entire month, and the story was picked up by several out-of-town papers.
    It started the night of July 31, when a member of the Hellriders—Stephen “Wolfman” Wolferman—tore through Radial on his motorcycle doing over a hundred miles an hour. His joyride triggered a three-county chase that went on until he ran out of gas. The Echo just said he was “taken into custody,” but the Billings Gazette included the information that Wolferman, a Vietnam vet,