The Search for Artemis (The Chronicles of Landon Wicker) (43 page)

“Landon has greatly improved since beginning the Pantheon training regimen, but we have yet to adequately gauge the limits of his anomalous strength.”

“We need to push him harder, Harold. We must understand the full extent of his abilities if we are to replicate them.” Mr. Harper began to pace along the window, sliding the file folder delicately between his fingers.

“And what of his parents?” Dr. Wells asked. “Have we seen any results from them?”

“No. The mother proved to be very uncooperative, so we’ve had to sedate her while the scientists work.”

END OF BOOK ONE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If you asked me two years ago, I could never have dreamed of coming to this place, and looking back I know it would have been impossible were it not for the love and support of my friends and family and the business acumen of my colleagues. I especially have to acknowledge my parents and siblings, who support me no matter what endeavor I decide to pursue; my friend, Katie Benson, who has been my soundboard and confidant; my friend Jeffrey Mulcock, who’s talked me off many a ledge and has supported me wholeheartedly; Maurice Becnel, who I am sure is tired of hearing about this book; Alex Walford, who encouraged my writing; and Bonnie Garcia, who always knows what to say to cheer me up and seems to expect greatness from me even when I don’t. I also have to thank Pam Langsam, author of the Vegas Dazzle series, who has helped me navigate this crazy world of publishing; and Collin Earl and Chris Snelgrove, authors of the Harmonics series, who have been irreplaceable as I worked through the technical and legal aspects of publishing. Finally, a special thanks to Michael Webber, my illustrator; my early readers, Jessica Turon and Liz Wortley; and to everyone else who has supported me in the process.

GETTING IN
THE WAY

“No!” Landon struggled to pry open the thick doors of the Nitranos Industries vault with his bare hands. The alarms deafeningly sounded overhead. “Castor and Atalanta are still inside!” he yelled back to the others.

Landon stepped back and tried to rip the heavy door out of the wall with his telekinetic abilities, desperate to free his trapped Pantheon teammates, but nothing happened. He couldn’t grip the door. Something blocked him.

Every time Landon donned his tactical uniform before a mission he questioned how he got to this place. When he turned fifteen the past August, he had been living the pseudo-normal life of a student entering his sophomore year of high school. How could he have expected to instead discover he was a psychokinetic—a person capable of manipulating the space around him, moving things on reflex like they were muscles, hearing outwardly projected thoughts, and feeling the world around him as if it was his own body? Or that discovering his abilities would have tragic consequences, forcing him to run from home and end up at a secret facility hidden in a secluded mountain valley—the Gymnasium—built for the sole purpose of training psychokinetics like him? That was enough for him to handle, but then he was recruited to the Gymnasium’s ultra-secret, clandestine tactical unit and frequently found himself placed in situations just like the one he was in currently.

This was Landon’s ninth mission in three weeks. It had only been just shy of a month since that fateful retrieval operation at Metis Labs. That mission made his complicated life all the more chaotic, . . . and it only seemed to get increasingly convoluted with each passing day. Because he was so integral in successfully completing the Metis Labs mission, the Pallas Corporation transitioned him out of member-in-training and into full active duty. And as of late, the Pantheon was
active
. A new national emergency seemed to arise every time Landon took a breath.

This time, the team was tasked with breaking into Nitranos Industries, a leading developer of substance deployment technology. It had come to the Pantheon’s attention that the company recently finished development of a special atomizer that would vaporize any solid or liquid into a gas and carried the potential to revolutionize chemical warfare should the technology become weaponized.

Just like with the Metis Labs operation, the Pantheon was tasked with retrieving the device, grabbing all research associated with it, and returning to base, thus ensuring that exact circumstance didn’t happen. Unfortunately, this mission became more like Metis Labs with every passing minute.

There, they were trying to recover research on Project Herakles, but were met with communications breakdowns and an innumerable army of security agents that made their mission difficult to say the least. Here, they were just supposed to acquire a device, but after running into guards around every corner who were trying to kill them and facing unexpected missteps that resulted in mission–jeopardizing delays—missteps like unintentionally trapping two of their teammates within a secure vault—they now found themselves in a whole new pickle.

Landon rushed forward and started pounding on the heavy door, the sound of his fists against the metal only mildly audible through the alarms. He couldn’t leave them behind. It was his fault they were trapped. While the team focused on acquiring the device and research, Landon had intentionally triggered the alarms. The hope was to force the team to abandon their target and get out, but Brock—call sign Ares and Landon’s head-butting roommate—was adamant about getting the device before leaving. As second-in-command, Brock was leading this operation since Dr. Brighton had been dispatched on a solo mission days earlier. The delay in their escape caused by Brock’s orders inevitably resulted in Atalanta and Castor not making it past the heavy metal doors before they sealed shut.

“Castor! Atalanta! Can you hear me?”

There was no reply. Landon knew Celia’s plan to sabotage the mission was risky when he heard it. This was
only
his ninth mission. He was still getting his spy legs. It was not a time to play saboteur too.
Why did I listen to her?
he thought.

After the Pantheon’s briefing earlier that day, Landon had met with Celia in the Library of the Gymnasium. They convened there prior to every mission, and before the
Alpha Chariot
left the Stable, they discussed the mission target, their theory on the company’s true intentions behind their stated objective, and what the two of them could do to disrupt it. To Landon, the entire process of being a double agent was both exciting and exhausting. He couldn’t help but get an adrenaline rush from the entire thing. But the stress of potentially revealing himself, and the possibility that his actions might cause his innocent teammates harm, weighed heavily on him.

He had yet to completely come to grips with the fact that Celia was Artemis: the Gymnasium’s infiltrator responsible for countermining numerous Pantheon missions and Pallas Corporation research projects; the woman whose name Dr. Pullman whispered on his deathbed; the keeper of the answers Landon had searched for over the course of a year. But Landon could never have imagined the secrets she kept.

How could he have expected to hear that neither the Gymnasium nor the Pantheon were funded and operated by the U.S. government as he’d been told, but actually by a rogue criminal organization, the Pallas Corporation?
Can I really be working for a branch of a global network of illegal activity and organized crime that calls itself the Triumvirate of Titans?

She’d also showed him that there was another facility like the Gymnasium, called the Academy, filled with psychokinetics—a facility the Gymnasium’s leader, Dr. Wells, told him couldn’t exist. The last thing she told him, though, he refused to believe. . . . How could he believe that his mentor and the Pantheon’s leader, Dr. Brighton, was a cold-blooded murderer who’d killed Celia’s parents when she was just seven years old? Learning all this emboldened him to get to the truth. Agreeing to help Celia made sense. Not only would he do anything to help her, but he also saw it as a way to find proof of his mentor’s innocence and help him navigate out of this maze of lies and deception.

After hearing about the chemical atomizer, Celia was adamant that the Pallas Corporation didn’t get their hands on it. Apart from Landon destroying the device on the mission, which Celia initially suggested—and which they decided was way too risky—the only other option was to force the mission to fail. Setting off the alarms seemed the most plausible way of doing that without giving Landon away, but he set them off too late. Maybe if he had tripped them earlier, he thought, he wouldn’t have put the team in their current situation.

His fists continued to pound against the metal to break open the door, but to no avail. With every thrust of his arm, Landon could feel the true strength of his abilities fester and heat up at his core. He struggled to contain them; in his current state of mind, he knew the consequences of unleashing them would be tragic. He’d already lost his family because of his power; he wouldn’t lose his friends, too.

“Guys, why aren’t you helping me?” Landon shouted back at his teammates. They all stood in a line a few feet back from Landon—each wore an odd expression that fell somewhere between frightened and amazed, save Brock.

Brock lifted his right arm into the air, and with the powerful closing of his outstretched fingers into a fist, forced the intercoms down the hall to crumple and break. The alarms shrilled into silence.

“You finished?” Brock asked, annoyed. “The door is obviously coated in ichorium, nitwit. No matter what you do, you’re not getting through it. Nitranos planned for this exact situation. Our reputation precedes us,” he finished with a smirk.

“What do you mean his abilities won’t work?” Cortland interjected. “Look what he did to it!”

Landon looked at his teammate, perplexed, before turning to the door he’d been pounding on so desperately. To his surprise, he saw two massive dents in the metal where his fists were connecting.
How did I do that?
With his mind blurred by passion and a need to free his stranded teammates, he’d failed to realize what he was doing to the door.

The first time he heard of ichorium was at Metis Labs. Peregrine, who was tasked with guiding the team through the research compound with her hypersensitive and expansive tactometric sphere—she was a veritable living radar—became as blind to the building’s interior as her actual vision. The ichorium compound Metis Lab’s had coated the exterior of the research compound in hindered her abilities from sensing what was inside. Landon later found out from Cortland that ichorium was an extremely heavy, neutral element engineered by the government, created for the sole purpose of deflecting their psychokinetic abilities. When creating a monster, one mustn’t forget to devise a way of containing it. One never knows when the monster may turn on its creator.

“Hector, he can’t get through that door,” Brock repeated sternly to Cortland using his Pantheon call sign before turning to Jeremiah. “Pollux, can you still get through to your brother? I think the vault’s jamming their comm. links.”

“But you just said the doors were coated in ichorium,” Landon said. “Our abilities won’t get through it.”

Brock disregarded Landon’s outburst and repeated himself, “Pollux, can you still get through to Castor?”

“I think so,” Jeremiah replied.

“Echo, you able to see any other ways out of there?” he directed towards Peregrine.

Peregrine creased her forehead as she concentrated and then said, “The entire vault is coated, but there appears to be a small ventilation shaft hidden behind the bottom row of safety deposit boxes. I think if they can manage to get into the ducts and head south, they should come across a vent that’ll drop them right into the lobby.”

“Okay, Pollux, tell Castor what Echo said about the vents and to rendezvous at the
Alpha Chariot
.” Brock directed his team with such authority. Landon did not get along with his roommate, but in moments like this, he admired Brock’s natural ability to lead. That momentary feeling of admiration always aggravated Landon afterward. “And tell them to hurry up. We’ve worn out our welcome.”

Jeremiah stared strangely toward the dented, ichorium-coated vault door. After a few seconds, he turned back to the team and said, “They’ll meet us there.”

“All right, Echo, like we planned . . . lead the way and get us out of here.”