Free Victories by Mercedes Lackey Page A

understanding of the choice they’d be making: join Mordred as his favored sorcerous henchmen in a post-Apocalyptic wilderness, or …
    … or do exactly what they were doing now, and fight back any way they could.
    No matter the cost.
    Since none of them had really destructive Gifts—not like Van Cartwright or some of the other Fire Witches or Weather Witches they all knew—by unspoken agreement they designated the rec room next to the bedroom as a sort of practice room. There, one by one, they sat trying to figure out how to use—or even just activate —the magical weapons they’d been given.
    Burke, of course, went first.
    *   *   *
    With nothing else to do while the others were practicing—Spirit had asked to go last—and with the prospect of Vivian deserting them looming on the horizon, Spirit decided to ask Vivian to show her how the computer console worked. It was the only way for her to talk to Merlin, and she wanted to be sure she’d be able to.
    Vivian walked Spirit through the procedure for powering up the huge old computer. It ran on tubes, not chips, Vivian told her, so she couldn’t just flip a switch and expect it to start immediately. And once the system had power, there would be another long wait while the system—a modem dialing out over telephone lines—could make its connection to the Internet.
    “Can I ask you a question?” Spirit asked, waiting for the amber lights on the console to go green.
    “You can ask, ” Vivian said cautiously.
    “It’s about my— My Gift,” Spirit said hesitantly. “You were at Oakhurst a long time ago, right?”
    “Don’t make it sound like it was sometime in the last century,” Vivian said. “Oh … wait.…”
    Spirit smiled faintly at the tiny joke. “I just wondered … did they teach the Fifth School when you were there? Doc—One of the staff there had heard of it, but.…”
    Vivian looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Spirit. Ms. Groves talked about it a little, but she said Spirit Mages were so rare, there was no point in teaching that School.”
    “That doesn’t sound … like her,” Spirit said, swallowing against the lump in her throat.
    “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Vivian asked quietly.
    Spirit nodded, unable to speak.
    “I’m sorry. She was a holy terror, but she never played the games a lot of the staff did. And you’re right. It doesn’t make sense. They taught all of us about all the Schools, no matter what our Gift was. Why not that one?”
    “I don’t know,” Spirit said, scrubbing at her eyes angrily. She was tired of crying. And she was tired of people dying, too. “It’s like they all just … forgot, or something.”
    Vivian nodded soberly. “There was a lot of that going around, and not just the students. Stuff like some of the teachers just forgetting about the kids who disappeared, not even trying to track them down, even when the kid had been someone they were trying to give extra attention to.”
    Yeah. And three guesses who did that.
    Spirit wondered why Mordred had been trying to cover up the existence of the Fifth School. It would have been so much easier to deny it even existed. How would the students know?
    And that meant … the School of Spirit was important.
    Important enough to bring Mordred down?
    That would sure have been a good reason to keep anyone from finding out about it.
    Her thoughts were interrupted by the hiss of static over the speakers—an indication of an open phone line—followed by the “bong bong” sound that Vivian called a “handshake.” It meant their system had made a connection.
    “That’s it,” Vivian said. “You’re live. I’ve still got some stuff to do before I leave, so I’ll leave you two to chat. Be sure to shut the system down when you’re done using it. If anything breaks, you’ll need to build a time machine before you can order parts.”
    “I won’t forget,” Spirit said.
    Vivian left the control bunker, and Spirit took a deep breath,