Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) (15 page)

The cool thing was that Ambrosius College wasn’t actually in Oxford; there was a Nexus Gate there, but the College itself was Underhill. Ria Llewellyn was negotiating to put another Nexus Gate here—well, actually, to move the Everforest Gate here, since with one thing and another, it couldn’t be left where it was—and she was confident that by the time the first lot of M-track students graduated here, the Gate and the “exchange program” would be in place, so VeeVee could continue to live at St. Rhia’s and still attend the College, which her folks thought was the best of all possible worlds. VeeVee had to admit she was pretty attached to the idea. Not that she didn’t like the UK, but Oxford was a long way from home: all right to visit, but to live there for four years, or even more? No. There were just too many things she would miss. American food, for one. While there were things in the UK that were to die for, you just couldn’t get a chili-dog—or pizza that tasted right—there.

The book she was currently taking notes on was huge, and just a bit over four hundred years old, which put it just on the edge of decipherable by modern standards. It was printed, rather than handwritten, but it looked rather like a Shakespeare folio. It had no title, and no title page; it just launched straight into the first chapter without even a Foreword. VeeVee wasn’t sure how many copies of this thing had ever been printed, but she was pretty sure there couldn’t be more than two or three still in existence. It had been a dangerous book to print, back in the day, since it detailed the meddlings of the Sidhe Courts, both Seleighe and Unseleighe, in the politics of Scotland, England, and France. The challenge to reading it was that all this was couched in very coy language, a kind of “code” that required you to understand the history of both Underhill and the World Above to decipher it. A surprising number of agents of that period had served masters both Underhill and in the World Above…

A hand came down on her shoulder at the same time as a very-familiar voice said in her ear, “Yo, VeeVee.”

She jumped. The Special Collection librarian scowled, but did not—yet—scold. Probably she was mostly concerned about the precious book in the vicinity of the careless-looking street kid.

VeeVee’s heart was pounding, and not just because she was startled. “Yo, yourself,” she whispered, and pulled the chair next to her out with her foot, by way of invitation to sit. “I was working, what do you need? Don’t touch the book.”

Tomas had in fact been reaching for it out of curiosity. He pulled back, starting to frown. “What? I’m not good enough to look at—”

“It’s about a zillion years old, it’s rare, and you aren’t wearing these—” she held up her hands in the white cotton gloves the librarian had supplied. “The ink and the paper are fragile. If you want to look at it, get some gloves.”

“Naw, I don’t wanna look at it that bad.” Tomas lost the frown, and leaned back in the chair.

“So, I’m guessing you’ve heard about the field trip?” VeeVee asked. She’d known that he’d been tapped for it, and that Ms. Smith was going to be talking to him about it this morning.

“You going?” Tomas asked in return, trying not to sound too hopeful.

VeeVee shook her head, smiling. “Not really a lot of point. This trip is for kids who’ve never been.”

It took Tomas a moment to process that. “You’ve been… there?” he asked.

VeeVee shrugged. “A couple of times.”

“What’s it like?” Tomas asked.

It was an honest question, and VeeVee smiled inside. Tomas might not see it himself, but he’d changed a lot over the last two months. The suspicious, defensive street kid was changing into somebody else. Someone she really liked.

“It’s a little different every time, actually. The Elves like to change things around. Still, you’ll have some pretty experienced guides with you, and it’s just a day-trip. You’ll be back in plenty of time to catch the bus to Poughkeepsie on Saturday.”

Every other month the older students of St. Rhia’s were given the opportunity to go “off campus” for the day, to shop, see a movie, or just hang out. Tomas had missed the last trip—and wouldn’t have been let to go, anyway, as he’d only just arrived—but the next one was coming up this weekend, and she knew he had permission to go.

“This trip to Poughkeepsie—” Tomas made a face. “Can’t believe there’s really a town with that name—”

“What about it?” VeeVee asked indifferently. Frankly she wasn’t that jazzed about the trip to the “big city.” It wasn’t as if it was all that big a deal for her. OK, the focal point of the trip was a mall, but two or three circuits of the place was about enough for her. There was a multiplex cinema, but there wasn’t anything playing she was particularly jonesing to see. Maybe for the others this was their big chance to get off campus, and have dates that let them get some time away from all the other students, but she’d skipped the last two trips and hadn’t planned on making this one either—

“So they really take us to a city? On our own? Even me?” There was something poignant, or maybe pathetic, about the way he said that. Dammit, he still expected to be treated like a criminal. Okay, so he actually was a criminal, but still…

“Yeah, but if you miss the bus back, you might as well kiss your Student Union privileges goodbye for a month, even if you have a good excuse,” she said wryly. She thought about adding, and don’t even think about doing a runner, but decided better of it. “They have to send out the van special, and it’s a two hour drive. Each way. And you’d better have more than just a good excuse for why you missed the bus in the first place. You’d better have been saving three orphan kids from drowning or something.”

He heaved a huge sigh, and put his hands behind his neck. “VeeVee… this maybe sounds dumb, que? But I gotta see someplace that ain’t here.” Then he did something so unexpected her heart turned over. He turned his head to look at her with an expression she’d never seen before on his face. “I heard some of the guys talkin’. Seems like some of ‘em are goin’ with someone, comprende?”

“Well, of course they are, they’re going with the whole sch—” Then she did a second mental pass over the words. “Oh, you mean with someone. Like, a date—”

“Yeah, like a date.” Tomas brought his hands down and studied his fingernails. “So I was thinkin’ you’d want to go with me.” He continued to study his fingernails. “‘Cause I wanna go with you.”

Her mouth went dry, and her heart did a kind of double back-beat before it settled again.

“Yeah,” she heard herself saying, and her voice was echoing back up at her as if from the bottom of a deep, deep well. “Yeah. I’d like that too.”

“Cool.” He stopped studying his nails and flashed her a grin.

She couldn’t help grinning back at him, as he pushed the chair back and gave her a wink before sauntering out of the library again.

After that it was kind of hard to keep her mind on the books she was supposed to be reading.

Tomas spent the rest of the week in a kind of happy daze. Not over the upcoming trip to Underhill—though by now all the kids who were going had been tapped and they were all pretty excited about it—or about the upcoming picnic. No, he was thinking about the Mall trip. An actual date. With VeeVee.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t had dates before. More than dates. Back in the barrio in El Paso, there’d been… But this one was special. She was special, in a way he really couldn’t put into words. She made him want to be… well, he wasn’t sure what.

But he knew this was going to be the best Saturday of his life.

That Friday morning they left on the field trip.

There didn’t seem to be any particular rhyme nor reason to the people picked to go, as far as Tomas could tell. On the last field trip, VeeVee had said it would be kids with what she’d called “combat specialties’ who’d be going. This time it was him, Kenny Chandler, Johnny Devlin, and Destiny Campbell, Chloe Howard, and Megan Bennett.

He knew Destiny really well, since she was in Auto Shop with him. She’d told him she was an Artificer, which was a kind of magician who could build things really, really well. She said that Merlin had been a Bard, an Artificer, and a Healer, but that most people these days only got one of the three Gifts, and that Bard and Healer were much more common. She was hoping to go to Fairegrove to work on race cars when she left St. Rhia’s and she was trying to get Tomas interested in that, but Tomas just couldn’t see it. Sure, speed was fine. But what was the point of just driving in circles on a track when you could build a street machine that would have eyes popping wherever you drove it?

Chloe and Megan he didn’t know as well, though he knew they were both M-track; that Megan and Brian were dating (off and on); and that Chloe played keyboard in what Tomas considered the best of the school bands.

For this field trip, they’d all been encouraged to dress well, but not too fancy, and wear shoes that they’d be able to a certain amount of walking in. Tomas had decided to go with the hiking boots—they weren’t all that stylin’, but he knew they could cover the ground in comfort. To make up for it, he’d worn one of his nicest shirts—dark green, with pearl snaps—and, after only a little hesitation, changed out his usual do-rag for a bright red bandanna that. No need to worry about stepping on gang toes by showing the wrong colors around here, after all.

When he reached the van parked in front of the Main Building, several of the others were already there and he was relieved to see he wasn’t the only one making a special effort. Kenny was wearing a crisp, brand new t-shirt for some band nobody had ever heard of, and Destiny was wearing a long denim skirt.

“Where’s Johnny?” Destiny asked.

“Last, but certainly not least,” a familiar voice said behind Tomas. He turned around.

“We’re going Underhill, not to a disco,” Kenny said, rolling his eyes.

“Satin? In this weather?” Megan said in disbelief.

Devlin was wearing a black satin shirt—half-unbuttoned over his skinny chest—and black jeans with a studded belt that made him look like a cut-rate motorcycle outlaw. “Hey, I figure we’re gonna meet some cute girl Elves,” he said, grinning.

“All of whom are going to be older than your grandmother,” Chloe said, shaking her head in disgust. “Which part of “Elves live a thousand years” did you miss in the Orientation Lecture?”

Devlin just shrugged, and Tomas figured it would serve him right if he did meet some “cute girl Elves.” From what VeeVee had told him about the Elves this week, they’d probably run him around in circles.

Just then, Ms. Smith and Mr. Moonlight came walking down the front steps, so it was too late to tell Devlin to go back and change, even if Tomas had wanted to make the effort.

You couldn’t just click your heels together to get to Underhill. You had to go through things called “Gates”, and the nearest Gate to Underhill was several hours drive south of here, almost all the way to New Jersey.

“So… how come it’s so far away?” Tomas asked, once they were on the road. It was the first time he’d been down the drive and back out into what he was actually kind of starting to think of as the “real world” since he’d arrived, and it was kind of an odd feeling. Although he’d be going out again tomorrow, with VeeVee. On an actual date…

Megan giggled. “Everforest is the close one. Thundersmouth is about a day’s drive north of here, up near the Canadian border. Then there’s Fairegrove, down in Savannah. Not really a lot of Gates on the East Coast.”

Tomas wondered just why that was. He glanced around, and was relieved to see that Johnny, Kenny, and Destiny looked as puzzled as he was. At least everybody didn’t seem to know all about Elves.

“Soon the Everforest Nexus will have to be moved,” Inigo Moonlight said from the front seat of the van. Tomas had been sure he’d want to do the driving, but he’d left that to Ms. Smith, and simply stared out the window with a faintly disapproving expression. “The habitations of Men encroach too closely upon it, and that is a perilous thing.”

“It’s near where the Sterling Forest RennFair is now,” Megan said. “It’s on State land, but there’s a lot of traffic in that area. To move a Gate, you need a Bard and a Node Grove—to anchor it in its new location.”

“Points to you,” Ms. Smith said, not taking her eyes from the road. “Lucky for us, we’ve got Bards coming out of our… ears.”

Chloe smirked, but didn’t say anything.

The Interstate was really boring, but Tomas and Destiny played games on her GameBoy, Kenny zoned out with his iPod, and Chloe and Megan read. Only Johnny sat, fidgeting and bugging the others, until Ms. Smith threatened to do something (unspecified) to him that he wouldn’t like. After that, he rummaged in his backpack (they’d all been told to bring them, in order to carry their lunches once they got there) and pulled out a DVD player. The ride went more quietly after that.

It was almost lunch time when they got close to where they were going. They’d turned off the highway onto a side road, then onto a one-lane road, which turned into a dirt road that the van bumped carefully along for a mile or so before Ms. Smith pulled off to the side and parked.

“We hoof it from here, boys and girls,” she announced. “And the management strongly suggests leaving all electronic toys and wristwatches here. Underhill’s just gonna fry ‘em.” thatKenny sighed reluctantly—Tomas almost never saw him without his music, except in class or at the dances—but tucked the player under the car-seat. All of them took off their watches. Megan and Chloe looked smug, and stuffed their paperbacks into their backpacks to take with them. They all climbed out of the van, and Ms. Smith distributed large brown paper sacks from a box in the back—their lunches. All of them were labeled, since Megan didn’t eat meat, Kenny was allergic to eggs, and Destiny hated everything but peanut butter sandwiches. Tomas pretty much figured that if it was food, he’d eat it, no matter how weird it looked. Some of that sushi stuff had been pretty good. Once they were all set, they started off, with Mr. Moonlight in the lead.

For the first time, Tomas wondered why the Headmaster was coming along on this field trip, especially since it was supposed to involve a certain amount of hiking. The guy had to be about a hundred and seven, and he looked pretty frail. Now that Tomas wasn’t busy worrying about a bunch of other things the way he had been on his first day at St. Rhia’s, he was taking a good look at the vato, and Inigo Moonlight looked like he was ready for the undertaker. He was, like, maybe six-four, and pale like somebody who’d done serious time in El Jugado, and he didn’t look like he weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. But he still set a pace—first up the rocky dirt road, and then off it, right across an open meadow—that had the rest of them struggling to keep up.