Sacrifices by Mercedes Lackey, Rosemary Edghill Page B

Muirin sounded cheerful. And why not? No matter what bizarre new rules Oakhurst—and Breakthrough—come up with, it isn’t as if she was going to be affected, Spirit thought.
    “It doesn’t make sense,” Spirit said, trying to keep from sounding (too much) as if she was whining. “First they declare Radial in-bounds. Then they set a campus curfew for dusk.” The newest rule had been announced Saturday morning: after curfew, all students had to be either in the Main Building, or have a security escort to wherever they were going. And that meant pretty much from four o’clock on. “I wish they’d make up their minds.”
    Muirin just laughed. “Why should they, when they can drive you guys crazy by changing the rules every other day?”
    “Mr. Green said the curfew’s only until they can hunt down that whatever-it-was that attacked you guys on your ride Friday,” Burke said.
    “Whatever it is,” Spirit muttered under her breath. You’d have to be an idiot (or not going to Oakhurst) to think it was anything that belonged on this planet.
    “Hope they catch it soon—this is cattle country, and something like that could do a lot of damage,” Burke added.
    “Burke the Selfless!” Muirin said mockingly. “Honestly—if you want to break the rules like this, why aren’t you at least doing something fun? There’s still time, you know—I could drop you guys at a No Tell Motel for a couple of hours.…”
    “No thanks,” Burke said. He looked wildly embarrassed. “This is a research trip. Spirit found someone who was actually there when Mordred got let out of the tree. If we’re lucky, he can give us a lead on where Mordred is now.”
    “Yeah,” Muirin said, detouring around another pothole. “You guys did a pretty good job of finding him. You didn’t even have to leave the campus.” Her tone was suspicious, and Spirit winced.
    “I got lucky,” Spirit said, hoping she sounded more convincing than she felt. She knew Burke thought it was suspicious, too—she wished she could tell him at least that she had a way through the school firewall, but right now none of her friends seemed any more reliable than Muirin. Burke was acting like Beckett Green was his new BFF, Addie was well and truly pissed off and might do anything out of spite, and Loch … well, Loch was convinced he was about to die and might want to use the information to make a grand fatal gesture.
    Or make a deal for a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it wouldn’t matter if he was including all of them in the deal. It would still be a disaster.
    “You remember the other time, right?” she asked, hoping she could turn her previous mistake to her advantage. “Well, I was poking around to see if there was anything on the school intraweb, and the firewall was down again. You know Breakthrough’s been putting in a lot of new security. It was a lucky glitch.”
    “‘Lucky,’” Muirin said dubiously.
    “What else could it be?” Spirit said, mentally holding her breath. She had to get Muirin off the subject somehow. “But without you to help, it wouldn’t matter what I found.”
    “Yeah, I am pretty fabulous,” Muirin said mockingly. “But I still think you could’ve shared the love.”
    “Oh, like you have to worry about being stuck behind a firewall these days,” Spirit said.
    “True,” Murin agreed smugly. “Hey, you sure you don’t want me to drop you any closer than this?”
    Spirit blinked. They were here already. She looked around as Muirin stopped in the town library parking lot—by unspoken agreement, she and Burke had been rather vague about Wolferman’s address. It was Sunday evening, so the library was closed, and there weren’t a lot of lights around.
    “This is Radial, Murr-cat—how far away can anything be?” Burke said, making a joke of it. He pushed the passenger seat forward and clambered out of the backseat, reaching back a hand to pull Spirit after him. “We won’t be long. Meet you at the pizza