The Prince's Trap

by Griffith, P. D.

  “She was trying to warn me, I think, about this Sentry who showed up yesterday, Washington Sykes.”

  Katie Leigh suddenly looked nervous. “Wait. There’s a Sentry here?” she asked, concerned. “Really?”

  Landon wondered if there was anything Katie Leigh didn’t have a pulse on. “How is it everyone else knows about these Sentries, and how dangerous they are, and I’m just completely in the dark?”

  “Landon, it’s not your fault. I make it a point to know everything.” Katie Leigh was trying to make Landon feel better for his lack of awareness, but her prideful tone diminished her desired effect. “And Celia knows about the Sentries?” The distant expression on Katie Leigh’s face told Landon her mind was fast at work. A small smile stretched across her face as she continued to look off to the side. “I knew there was more to that girl,” she added under her breath. “Last year, when she—”

  Still concerned with someone overhearing their conversation, Landon leaned across the table again and interrupted Katie Leigh, “What are you talking about? How do you know all this?”

  Katie Leigh leaned in until their faces were mere inches apart. Spectators might have thought they were each going in for a kiss. Landon could feel her warm breath on his face, as she stared sternly into his eyes, and then she said, “Landon, what I know would astound you.”

  Who is this girl? he wondered. Yet while he was frozen in a state of shock, Katie Leigh grabbed her book and her tray of cold food and stood in the aisle. She looked down at Landon with an eager expression. “Well, are you coming or not?” she asked as if the two of them were expected somewhere.

  Without questioning her, Landon rose to his feet and followed Katie Leigh to the exit of the cafeteria, dropping his tray of untouched food in the waste area on the way out.

  • • • • •

  Katie Leigh led Landon up to the sixth floor and into her dorm room—628. Landon entered her room with slow, cautious steps, unsure of her purpose for taking him there. Katie Leigh, however, scurried around him, setting her book down and quickly tidying up the place as Landon took a seat on the edge of her bed.

  Looking around, Landon realized that the second bed was just a naked mattress. Katie Leigh was one of the lucky few students who weren’t assigned a roommate, so she got the place all to herself. Apart from the unruly stack of books on her bedside table, an array of papers riddled with notes scattered across her desk, and a few articles of clothing she was now feverishly shoving into drawers, the room was neat and clean.

  Landon peered around anxiously. He had never anticipated Katie Leigh knowing so much, and now that they were alone, there was no telling what other confidential information she was privy to; he couldn’t figure out how she’d come to acquire it all. As he watched her walk around the room, he wondered if Celia would approve of his asking Katie Leigh for help . . . or whether even he approved anymore.

  Following a final shove to close the top drawer of her dresser, Katie Leigh came over to her desk and flopped down in the office chair. “Okay.” She let out a quick huff to indicate she was settled and ready to tell Landon her intentions in bringing him to her room. “There seem to be things going on here that even I don’t know about,” she began. “And you trusted me, so I’m going to have faith that I can trust you, too. There are some things about me you don’t know.” Katie Leigh hesitated, clearly having the same internal debate Landon had experienced in the cafeteria.

  “Have you ever had lights randomly go out when you get close to them? Like in a parking garage? Or a street lamp while you’re walking down a sidewalk? That happens because you’re interrupting the electric field. Because of how our abilities work, we give off a sort of electro-magnetic field that makes us particularly sensitive to electricity. That’s why this place has gas-powered lamps in the hallways,” she added. “It’s also why our computers don’t have power cords.”

  Overly excited by the information, Katie Leigh unwittingly continued on this tangent for a little while longer before realizing she’d gone off topic. “It’s actually really cool. The scientists developed this battery that collects and stores the electro-magnetic energy we give off and use it to power the laptops. Can you believe that?” she asked rhetorically, still amazed by the innovation. “We are powering our computers simply by being near them.”

  “Katie,” Landon interrupted. He wanted her to answer the question he asked earlier. “Why do you know all of this?”

  “Right,” she said. “I’m getting there, I promise. You trusted me with your secrets so I’m going to trust you with mine, but I think by showing you, it’ll make more sense.” Refocused, Katie Leigh continued, “You know those splinter skills I referred to in the cafeteria? Well, they aren’t as uncommon as you might think. Peregrine has her vision-like tactometric sensitivity . . ..”

  Celia can walk through walls, Landon thought as she talked.

  “And Riley with his . . . well, maybe not Riley. Anyways, I developed a sort of splinter skill of my own.” Katie Leigh swiveled around in her office chair and opened up the laptop sitting on her desk. Like a spy placing her hand on a scanner to gain access to a secret base, she set her hand flat over the keyboard. Suddenly the screen sparked to life with a bright, white light and then settled on the home screen, followed by a sequence of windows opening, coding language appearing as if typed, and code running, but Katie Leigh never moved her hand from the computer—she didn’t move her hand at all.

  “I’m a technopath, at least that’s what they call it in comic books. I still don’t know exactly how it works, but I can control the computer just by thinking about what I want it to do. It’s like it’s a part of my brain. I don’t even have to know how to do these things, but the computer responds to my intent, and performs the task accordingly. Even before I came to the Gymnasium, computers made sense to me, sometimes more than people did. They are massive data storage devices and they process information logically. . . . I know, I know. Makes sense I can do this because I’m a robot,” she added playfully.

  Landon rose from the bed and walked over to Katie Leigh, propping himself up with his hands on the desk so he could lean in close to the screen. “How long have you been able to do this?” he asked with wonder.

  “I imagine I’ve been capable of it since my debut, but the first time it happened was only a few months before you showed up here,” she explained. “I actually thought I was going crazy. I sat down to look up something for a paper, and before I could even type anything, what I was looking for appeared on the screen. After that, though, I started trying to concentrate, and it was like I could see everything in the system. That’s when I came across this.”

  Landon watched as the computer, seemingly on autopilot, went to a script writer, entered a sequence of code that made no sense to him, highlighted that code, and then executed it, all in a matter of seconds. Then the entire monitor faded to black before returning with a white screen that displayed the golden eagle of the Olympic Tower and username and password fields for logging into the system.

  Pulling away from the screen and looking down at Katie Leigh, he asked, “Is that what I think it is? Is that really the secure log-in for the Pantheon network?”

  “Yes,” she replied, as if coming across this interface was no big deal. “It was surprisingly easy to hack into the system the first time. Since then, though, security has beefed up the encryptions and firewalls.” As Landon looked bewilderingly at this tiny girl who was secretly a master computer hacker, another script editor popped up on the screen and a new stream of code populated the program and executed. “But when I noticed what they were doing, I told the computer to make me another way in, and it created this back door for me.”

  Landon watched, slack-jawed, as a green bar with the words “ACCESS GRANTED” popped up on the screen just like it did when Landon entered the Olympic Tower. Next, the log-in sc
reen faded away as the computer welcomed Katie Leigh into the system.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ACCESS DENIED

  “This is unbelievable,” Landon said. “So is this how you found out about the Pantheon and the Sentries?”

  “Yep.”

  “How have they not asked you to be on the Pantheon yet?”

  Katie Leigh looked at Landon over her shoulder. “Who said they haven’t?” she replied with a mischievous smirk. “No, I don’t think they know it’s me hacking into the system or that I can do this in the first place. They think I know my way around a computer and that I’ve figured out how to access the Internet, but I don’t think they find me capable of breaking into their secure network. I’ve been trying to keep it as much of a secret as I can.”

  “Does anyone else know?” Landon asked. “I can’t be the only person you’ve told. That’s a lot of pressure on a guy to keep this under wraps.”

  “Well, Landon, you’re the first person that I’ve actually told,” she said, “but you’re not the only one who knows I’m a technopath. Celia knows too.”

  “Celia?” Landon blurted out in surprise. “How does she know?” Why didn’t she tell me? he wondered while shaking his head in disbelief. What else hasn’t she told me?

  Katie Leigh lowered her head, still disappointed in herself for unwittingly letting someone find out her secret. “You remember the picture of you lifting that bus in the city with all those people around?” she asked hesitantly. “I’m kind of the one who printed it out and passed it around.”

  She braced herself for the backlash from Landon. He stayed silent but looked at her with a stern expression, waiting to fully react until she explained herself.

  “What happened was, on your first day at the Gymnasium, I asked you about your debut, but you never answered me. So that night I hacked into the network and looked up your file.”

  Landon tried to maintain his deadpan expression as a wave of panic surged through him. Does this mean Katie knows I murdered my parents?

  As if she heard Landon’s worried thought, she continued to explain, but adopted a sympathetic tone. “I know what happened to your parents, Landon.” She confirmed his fear. “And that you ran away and were homeless. Once I saw what you had been through, I realized why you didn’t answer me when I asked. Landon,” she said emphatically, “it’s not anyone’s business to know what happened to you, but people here, like Riley, would never stop asking until you told them. So when I saw the blog photo in your file, I thought it would give them what they wanted without putting you through all the interrogating questions.” Katie Leigh motioned her head toward the hallway to make sure Landon understood that she was talking about everyone else at the Gymnasium—and that she was not a part of that group.

  Landon scoffed. He was having difficulty getting past this breach of his trust. She might want to separate herself from the rest of the people in the Gymnasium, claiming to be different, but her actions reinforced the fact that she was just like all the rest. Because of her ability, she may even be worse than the others. Nothing was a secret to her. Had he made a mistake trusting her?

  As Landon tried to figure out how he felt about Katie Leigh, he was able to calm down enough to think more rationally. Absorbing her words, he started to realize that her actions were actually selfless. She could have easily told everyone what she had found in his file, and then everyone in the Gymnasium would know he had killed his parents during his apocratusis, but she didn’t. He would have been shunned. An outcast, he would’ve been miserable and alone. Even though the Gymnasium provided a roof over his head, his life in the Gymnasium and his life on the streets would have been no different. He owed Katie Leigh for what she had done for him. “But how did Celia find out you were a technopath?” Landon asked, trying to sound forceful and direct.

  “So what happened, as you know, is that everyone pretty much accepted your near-death experience with the bus as your debut—except Celia. After what you told me at dinner, I suspect you have your ‘special connection’ to thank for that.”

  “Yeah, she knew from the beginning what had happened to me,” Landon interjected. “She said I was like an open book before Dr. Brighton started giving me those private sessions.”

  “Well, that aside, about a month after I leaked the photo, she came up to me after dinner and told me that she knew what I was. She also knew I could get into the secure network, that I was the one who released the picture, and then she asked if I could help her access some restricted files.”

  “What did she ask you to look for?” Landon inquired.

  “She wanted to know where the scientists were keeping the samples for this project,” Katie Leigh paused for a moment, wracking her brain for what it was she had been asked to locate nearly a year before. “Project Herakles, she called it.”

  Project Herakles. Landon looked off to the side and slowly patted his lips with his fingers while he considered this information. That project came up constantly. Not only had Celia stolen the files on the project and delivered them to Metis Labs, but the Pantheon had also launched a mission—Landon’s first—to recover the research. Landon had tried to find out what the project was, but Dr. Brighton told him it wasn’t his job to know.

  Since then, Celia had told Landon on numerous occasions that Project Herakles, whatever it was, was important. She didn’t know why, but the fact that the Pantheon had gone through the trouble to steal back the research from Metis Labs confirmed for her that it was a pivotal piece of intel.

  He turned back to Katie Leigh, who nervously twiddled her thumbs while she waited for Landon’s reaction. Like a physicist checking over his most recent equation, Landon cocked his head and glared at her curiously as he continued following his train of thought.

  This was Katie Leigh he was talking to—Katie Leigh. Of all the people in the world, she was the one who would feel morally obligated to know everything about a mysterious project. Whether just to clear her conscience or more likely to feed her insatiable curiosity, Katie Leigh would never rest until she knew what was really going on and why the project was so important.

  “Katie, do you know what Project Herakles is?” he asked calmly, trying not to alarm her to the severity of this discovery.

  “No,” she replied, sad and dejected. “Celia’s timing was terrible. Right after I found what she was looking for, I had to go to a training session, and then dinner, and then Riley wanted to hang out, so when I finally had the time to go back into the system and see what it was, the files on the project were gone . . . erased . . . deleted. Every last file, every last trace of Project Herakles, wiped from the system. It was as if the project never existed.”

  Landon fell back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Listening to her story, he knew why Katie Leigh wasn’t able to find anything when she went back into the system. Under the cover of darkness, Celia had removed the files from the computer and taken the hard copies and test samples, smuggling it all off to Metis Labs. It seemed he would never get the real answer on Project Herakles or anything else. It was just a cluster of roadblocks and dead ends. Like Odysseus, he was lost, unable to see when his journey to the truth would finally be complete. But then he realized he was right next to a technopath.

  The files may have been missing from the system when Katie Leigh looked for them last year, but they were sure to be in the system now. They would have reinstalled the materials after the Pantheon brought them back a month ago. And he’d already seen that Katie Leigh could access the secure system. Why couldn’t she do it again and finally tell him what was so important about Project Herakles?

  “Katie,” he started earnestly, pushing himself up to look her dead in the eyes, “I need you to go into the system now and find the files on Project Herakles. They should be in there. Something weird is going on, and this seems to be at the center of it.” H
e rose from the bed and strode up to the desk with a new sense of determination. “I’m not leaving this room until I finally know what it is.”

  Katie Leigh gave Landon a quick nod before swiveling around in her chair to face her computer. She resolutely placed her hand back on the keyboard, and before Landon could blink, “ACCESS GRANTED” was displayed over the Pantheon log-in screen. Landon held his breath, anxious to see what they’d find hidden deep in the network.

  “All right, Project Herakles,” she said, as she brought up a window containing a single folder. She looked up at Landon, waiting for him to signal that he was ready for her to look inside.

  Landon turned to her and smiled.

  “What?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “You’re awesome,” he said, astonished by her ability. At this moment, his fears about trusting her washed away. She would be an asset to him that stretched far beyond the expectations he had when he went to dinner earlier that night. Celia would be proud, and with Katie Leigh’s help, he’d have tons of things to tell her when she woke up. “Now let’s see what’s in it.”

  Katie Leigh gave him an eager smile and turned back to her computer. With her technopathic command, she selected the file and tried to open it. The anticipation was killing Landon, but rather than a slew of documents opening up on the screen, a window popped up with “ACCESS DENIED” blinking across the top.

  Katie Leigh looked flabbergasted. She was shocked that the system had somehow denied her request to access the folder, so much so that she’d even pulled her hand off the computer in disbelief, severing her technopathic connection. “Huh, that’s weird,” she said, perplexed. “I’ve never been denied access to anything before. Their firewalls aren’t strong enough to stop me.”