Victories (24 page)

“Help!” he shouted. “Somebody help! There’s been an accident!”

For a moment Spirit couldn’t think what to do. She hadn’t liked Joe, who’d always been trying to get her in trouble, and he was one of Mordred’s people besides.

“Oh, crap,” Loch said. “He’s going to fall.” Loch ran toward the steps, sprinting up them just in time to catch Joe as he collapsed. “He’s fainted!” Loch called down. “And I can see inside! There’s bodies everywhere!”

“Come on!” Spirit called to the others, and followed Loch up the steps.

*   *   *

She remembered the first time she’d seen the walls of The Fortress, and Dylan had been babbling about all the things The Fortress contained. Spirit had never figured out where he’d gotten his information, but it turned out to be right. The Fortress held dormitories, armories, gymnasiums, libraries, swimming pools—even a greenhouse. That was in addition to offices and workrooms—but there weren’t as many of those as you’d expect, because The Fortress had been built as, well, a
fortress.
The main wing, where the offices were, was decorated in Early Evil Overlord—a lot of glass, a lot of black granite—and the Breakthrough logo everywhere.

I’m never going to want to play another computer game as long as I live,
Spirit thought fervently.

And Loch was right. There were bodies everywhere.

“Looks like some kind of a seizure,” Blake Watson said, kneeling beside a woman in Shadow Knight armor. “She’s breathing, and her vital signs look good. She’s just … unconscious.”

“They’re all like that,” Burke said, coming in. “Well, most of them. A few of them are conscious, but disoriented. Most of them think they’re in California, for some reason.”

“That was where Breakthrough was headquartered until it moved here,” Loch said.

“There must be hundreds of them,” Spirit said.

“Hey!” Dylan came running in, skidding a little on the smooth floor. “I found the hospital. I don’t think it’s big enough, though,” he added, looking around.

“What are we going to do?” Spirit asked dazedly. It was bad enough that every one of the Breakthrough people had apparently been struck by some kind of backlash from Mordred’s death. But the townspeople had all gotten their real memories back—and the town was still gone.

“Where’s the nearest working phone?” Addie demanded.

*   *   *

It was early evening. The high walls of The Fortress cut off the last of the daylight, but in the center of the courtyard a roaring bonfire gave both heat and light. It was surrounded, whimsically, by chairs and couches looted from the offices and living quarters, and at the opposite side of the courtyard steps, there were several barbeque grills set up, with buffet tables flanking them. They held as lavish a spread as Breakthrough had ever put on back in the days when Mark had been trying to overawe Radial with his wealth and power, but Spirit thought the food tasted a lot better now.

Over the noise of the fire they could hear the roar of generators outside the walls. The Red Cross and the National Guard would probably be here by morning, but right now, the materials Breakthrough had stockpiled for the end of the world were being used to make sure everyone in Macalister County had heat, light, and a place to sleep. A tent city had been set up so nobody would have to sleep in peasant huts, and Mark had told Spirit that Breakthrough would be giving back to the town—for real, this time.

“As soon as my lawyers find out if I’ve got any money left,” he’d added, laughing.

Mark had been one of the first Shadow Knights to recover in the aftermath of Mordred’s death. Spirit’s first guess had been right—with Mordred gone, so were everyone’s Reincarnate selves. The new improved Mark Rider was working as hard as anyone else not only to take care of the sick and injured, but to get rid of all the evidence of Mordred’s plans before the authorities showed up to ask what the hell had happened here in Macalister County. The fire in the computer center had helped, but Mark and everyone who wasn’t lying in a hospital bed had spent most of the afternoon dragging out paper files and documentation to make a bonfire.

As for the few who’d died during the battle—about a dozen Breakthrough people, including Mark’s wife and brother—the plan was to blame as much of that as they could on Anastus Ovcharenko. The Russian
Mafya
hitman had fled in the confusion.

And now it was time to celebrate. To give thanks for not just their victory, but for the fact they were all alive. Almost everyone was here—townspeople, Breakthrough people, and Oakhurst students. There were still a lot of missing kids (who would probably be missing forever, since Mordred had probably sacrificed them to his necromancy), but at least practically everyone Mordred had recruited to the Shadow Knights was still alive.

“I don’t blame anyone,” Spirit said to Burke. Both of them, like nearly everyone here, was dressed out of Breakthrough’s closets, especially since none of the townspeople had really wanted to go on looking like refugees from the nearest RenFaire, and the Oakhurst kids had been wearing bloody rags. The two of them were sitting together on one of the couches. A few of the braver souls were up close to the fire trying to toast marshmallows, but it was a huge blaze. Nobody was having much luck.

“Neither do I,” Burke said. “We were lucky. Back when we were all still at Oakhurst you broke Mordred’s spell over us, so we knew what the stakes were. A lot of people weren’t that lucky.”

Spirit nodded silently. In one way, none of the Shadow Knights, or the Gatekeepers, or even the rank and file of Breakthrough, had gotten a real choice about what they’d done. Mordred had dazzled them with wealth and power—and dazzled them in another way, with magic.

I guess that’s a thing of the past, too,
Spirit thought. She remembered the moment when she’d struck at the Gallows Oak. Perhaps all of them had given their power to that blow. Or perhaps it was a byproduct of Mordred’s death. All she knew was that the magic of the student Mages of Oakhurst seemed to have faded away to only a shadow of its former strength. She didn’t miss her own magic—she’d only had it a short time, and never really understood it—but some of the kids were really upset at losing what they’d had. The Weather Witches could predict the weather now, but not summon storms. The Fire Witches could still light a candle or a pile of tinder—but the days when they could have set the entire Fortress burning with just a single thought were over. Even the Illusion Mages could only summon up faint shadowy ghost-images now.

The Scrying Mages seemed to be the happiest of all of them about losing their Gifts.

“I guess we were all victims of Mordred,” Spirit said. “And if some of us were happier than others as the minions of an Evil Overlord, well, nobody remembers much now.”

“By next year, it will probably all seem like a bad dream,” Burke said.

“Oh my god, I hope so,” Spirit said feelingly. But Burke’s comment made her wonder—where would she be in a year? She was still an orphan. So was everyone else from Oakhurst. And now, none of them had anywhere to go.

“Another one for the fire.” Mark Rider walked by them, a cardboard box filled with files in his arms. He flung it high and hard, and it landed on the fire with a shower of sparks.

“What was in that?” Kelly Langley asked idly.

“Who cares?” Mark answered. “Whatever it was, it’s better gone.”

“How much more stuff is there to go?” Burke asked, as Mark turned away from the blaze.

“Not much,” Mark answered, smiling. “Most of it’s going into the furnace in the basement, then the ashes are being flushed into the new sewer system Breakthrough put in, where I defy any forensic analyst to reassemble them. But I thought you guys deserved a celebratory bonfire.”

“
We
deserved,” Spirit said firmly, including Mark in her words. “We all won today.”

Mark bowed—an oddly courtly gesture from someone who no longer had medieval memories to draw on—and wandered off to speak to someone else.

I just hope none of the Townies completely flips out when they’ve had a few days to recover,
Spirit thought. In the chaotic first hours after the victory, it had been Loch who came up with their cover story: a freak tornado had wiped out the entire town. It had holes in it you could drive a truck through (a really big truck), but it made a lot more sense than the truth did.
Say something enough times, and even you’ll start to believe it,
she told herself.

“I finally got through to my lawyers,” Loch said as he arrived to join them. “Between Spears Venture Partners Limited and Prester-Lake BioCo, we’ll have enough clout to cover up everything here.”

Loch was wearing a button-down shirt a few sizes too big for him under a green sweater. He sat down on the arm of the couch, and Burke put an arm around him in a quick hug.

“Oh, but there’s nothing to cover up,” Addie said, sitting down beside Spirit. She was holding a platter heaped with burgers in buns, and everybody took one. “It was a freak tornado. I even heard Sheriff Copeland telling Mrs. Weber that.” Addie favored all of them with her best wide-eyed idiot expression.

“Oh, well, in that case.…” Loch said archly. Addie snickered.

“So … what do you suppose happens now?” Spirit asked. It was the question she hadn’t wanted to know the answer to, but if she couldn’t ask her friends, who could she ask?

“Well, first Breakthrough and Prester-Lake rebuild Radial,” Loch said. “I heard Brenda Copeland say we’d all probably be wards of the County for a while—at least until all that Oakhurst stuff gets sorted out. Some of us probably have relatives we could be going to. I don’t.”

“Me, either,” Addie said. “But I’m pretty sure my trustees will come swooping down and pack me off to some exclusive boarding school.”

“For the rich and boring,” Loch said, and Addie sighed in agreement.

“You know,” Addie said hesitantly, “all the craziness, and the magic, and the making all of us fight with each other, that sucked. A lot. But friends like you guys? That really didn’t.”

“And Muirin,” Spirit said.

“And Muirin,” Addie agreed softly.

They sat in silence for a while, watching the fire. Somebody’d found a guitar somewhere, and Spirit could hear singing and playing, but by now it was too dark to see who was doing it. Spirit tilted her head back against Burke’s arm. The sky was a deep blue, and the first stars had appeared.

“It’s hard to believe that after all that, nothing much has really changed for us,” Burke said quietly.

“Well, yeah,” Loch answered. “Oakhurst may be gone—I think Mark’s planning to sneak over there and pack the sub-basements of the place with dynamite to get rid of all the stuff down there nobody ought to see—but we’re all still teenaged orphans. We’ll have to finish school. Somewhere.”

“And someone’s going to have to train new young magicians,” Addie said firmly. “Weak magic is still more magic than most people have. And how do we know it won’t get stronger later?”

“Do you think more people are going to be born with magic?” Spirit asked, alarmed. “Now that Mordred’s dead, and the Reincarnates are all gone.…”

“Yeah,” Loch said. “But most of the people with magic—on both sides—were just ordinary people.”

“Ordinary magicians,” Addie corrected.

“Ordinary magicians with a future,” Burke said.

“Ah, but for an Oakhurst graduate to be merely ordinary is to
fail!”
Loch quoted pompously, and Spirit found herself laughing along with her friends.

*   *   *

The next three weeks were a mix of boring, annoying, and ridiculous for everyone. The medieval village was dismantled and carted away, surveyors came and laid out a new town plan, Katrina cottages started appearing along the new streets as families recovered and began to rebuild. Every single government agency in existence seemed to descend on Macalister County in the wake of the “tragic disaster.” That it involved about a hundred now-homeless orphans ensured that every news organization on the entire planet would show up to ask incredibly stupid questions.
“How did you feel when your parents died?”
was a real favorite, and after the first twenty or thirty times they were asked, a lot of the kids started giving snarky answers—which were taken as the flat truth, at least by
Fox News.
Fortunately, a PR firm hired by Prester-Lake BioCo showed up to manage things before any of the Oakhurst kids could get an international reputation as future sociopaths. A number of the townsfolk were happy to take in the “Oakhurst orphans”—Burke was living with the Copelands now, and Spirit was living with the Basses, who’d lost their daughter Erika to a Shadow Knight attack earlier that spring.

It was weird, Spirit thought, to get to eat pretty much what she wanted. Weird to watch television. Weird to listen to whatever music she liked. Weird to wear jeans, and wear colors that weren’t cream, gold, and brown. Weird to sleep in a bedroom that wasn’t pink all over.

I guess I’ve got a lot of things to get used to all over again,
Spirit thought.
At least Burke and I aren’t being split up.
But she was going to miss her other friends when they left. Now that she was out of the creepy hothouse atmosphere of Oakhurst, living in a regular house with normal people for the first time since her parents had died, it was as if losing Mom and Dad and Fee was new all over again. She liked the Basses—and Erika’s younger brother, Damien—but their presence only seemed to make her loss fresh and real.

Nearly all of the Breakthrough employees, except Mark Rider, were gone by the end of the first week.

With The Fortress as one of the two buildings left standing within a hundred miles—the other one being Macalister High School, since Oakhurst had suffered a tragic and mysterious explosion the day after the tornado hit town—The Fortress quickly became the command center for all the rebuilding efforts. Mark Rider announced that he was donating the building as the new Macalister County Seat, something that Radial’s Mayor Gonzales called “a humbling act of generosity.”

The Oakhurst kids knew better. Mark wanted to ditch everything related to Doctor Vortigern Ambrosius, “progressive European educator and philanthropist,” as much as
they
wanted to forget being student mages.