Pendragon's Heir

by Lori Bond

  I don’t know how long I laid on my bed staring at the home screen of my phone before someone knocked on my door. Before I could tell them to go away, one of the knights that now guarded the hall had opened the door. He gestured inside, and Cassie entered my room. She held a small tray with a plate of food and a drink. “I suspected you were hungry,” she said.

  I rolled over and sat up. “You Saw that?” I could not even imagine being that powerful of a Seer.

  “No.” Cassie shook her head and gave a small laugh. “Your stomach was growling the whole time you were in the room.” She sat the tray on the small table in front of my room’s sofa. She sat down and gestured. “You need to eat. I heard about the training Arthur and Will put you through this morning. You need calories.”

  “And vitamins and electrolytes.” I was still a sweaty mess, but I hadn’t bothered to shower, choosing to wallow in misery on my bed instead. I sat on the floor across from Cassie. Before I scooped the first bite in my mouth, I said, “You know what upset me though. I bet you Saw that.”

  Cassie nodded. “You’ll tell me in a minute. I think you still should,” she added when I opened my mouth to point out I didn’t need to now. “Even though it’s awkward, it’ll help to get the words out.”

  I stuffed another bite of refried beans in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to talk right that second. While I thought, I traced shapes in my food. One of them was an abstract conception of my mother’s face.

  “It’s not that I’m upset to have you here.” I said after a swallow of the lemonade Cassie had brought. “I mean, it’s good to have another superhero here, and the gods know I need some kind of mentor. It’s not like Arthur or Ginny can help me with this whole Seer stuff.”

  Cassie opened her mouth like she was about to say something. Instead, her eyes clouded over, and she left for a moment. Her eyes cleared, but whatever she had planned to say had gone.

  “Does that happen a lot?” I asked. “You getting sucked into a vision?”

  Cassie shook her head. “No, at this point, I can stop a vision or even cause one if I want. I didn’t stop that one because it seemed relevant.”

  She didn’t explain further, but I was a little relieved. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with one foot in the present while the other skipped around in the future.

  “You said you don’t mind us being here,” she prompted when I ate instead of talking.

  “Yeah, that.” I swallowed. “It’s just, Arthur was vague about who was coming. He wanted it to be a surprise. And that’s sweet,” I added. I didn’t want Cassie thinking I was mad at Arthur. I wasn’t. This whole mess wasn’t his fault, not really. He didn’t make my mom hack the Illuminati. He didn’t send LANCE and the Dreki after me when I showed signs of clairvoyance. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe Arthur was doing the best he could too.

  “It’s just …” I couldn’t figure out a good way to say something so hard. I went with the blunt truth. “I thought he’d found my parents—that Mom and Dad were coming through the door. I mean,” I rushed on, “I’m still glad you guys are here.”

  “You just wished they had been here instead,” Cassie finished for me.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I also looked down at my lap so Cassie wouldn’t see my face.

  “Then, I think we know what visions we’ll work on first,” Cassie said with a decisive nod. “It won’t be quite the same. You won’t be able to interact with them, but we’re going to practice until you can call up visions of your parents.”

  “How?” I asked. “I thought touch triggers my visions. I can’t touch them because they aren’t here.” The frustration leaked into my voice although I was trying to stay calm. “That’s the whole problem.”

  “I knew I wasn’t clear enough yesterday,” Cassie said. She sat back against the sofa, her fingers tapping little rhythms on the cushions. “I was in a hurry though. After I Saw the Dreki and Pendragon coming, I didn’t want to be there for that.”

  I nodded and took another bite of food. Even though no one had gotten hurt, I wouldn’t have wanted to stick around for a meeting between Vortigern and Arthur either.

  “Yes, touch trigger your visions. Scents trigger mine, but a strong Seer can have visions independent of their triggers. After all, it sounds like you’ve been having pre-visions for years, and touch didn’t trigger those. And you were practicing hand to hand combat today with Agent Redding. Were you using gloves?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did it trigger a vision?”

  “No.” Horrified, I imagined how much worse training with Will would have gone if I’d Seen a vision every single time I’d grabbed his wrists.

  “Our visions are tied to our emotions and to our loved ones as well. My strongest visions involve Patrick, and they are most easily brought on by smelling his cologne. Visions tied to my love for him and triggered by his smell.”

  My strongest visions so far had both been while holding Will’s hand. I did not even sort of want to contemplate what that might mean. Instead I tried to figure out Cassie’s point. “So, you’re saying that even though they aren’t physically here, I should be able to See my parents since I’m tied to them?”

  Cassie smiled, pleased I’d made the connection. “Exactly.”

  “But I still don’t get how to trigger a vision without, you know, a trigger.”

  “It’s a lot harder, but most Seers can do it. Only Ahmet, the LANCE Seer, has to be in a deep trance state to See. The rest of us can call up a vision if we work hard at it.”

  “Us? How many Seers are there?”

  “A fair few.” Cassie dodged the question. She watched me eat for a few more minutes, and then she sat up straight. “If you’re finished eating, we can try to channel a vision now.” She glanced down at her watch. “Ginny doesn’t expect you in her office for another twenty minutes.”

  Ginny and the coding lessons. I had completely forgotten about them. Pushing the tray of mostly eaten food further down the coffee table and out of the way, I decided to find my parents using my Sight. But if it didn’t work, with Ginny I had another way. I would hack my way to them.

  Cassie joined me on the floor, and we sat facing each other. I matched Cassie’s cross-legged position.

  “So, how do we do this?” I asked.

  “We focus,” Cassie said. “How much do you know about meditation?”

  FROM THEN ON, MY DAYS SETTLED INTO A ROUTINE—A WEIRD ROUTINE, but it became more normal as the days went on. First thing every morning, Will taught me self-defense and hand-to-hand combat with everyday objects.

  “Why don’t we ever use guns or swords?” I asked him one day when he was showing me how to incapacitate someone with a spatula.

  “Don’t you get enough of that with Pendragon and the Defender?” Will seemed surprised by the question. He let his guard down just enough I was able to kick him in the stomach. I ruined the triumphant moment by tripping on my feet and slamming into him. Will managed to keep us both upright, but I somehow elbowed him in the eye, giving him a nasty bruise. It did not mar his good looks in the least. Some things are just not fair.

  While we were getting Will some ice for his eye, Will asked again why I was so eager for conventional weapons.

  “I don’t want them, not really,” I explained. “It’s just that armor that sprouts guns and electric-edged swords are all fine and good, but it’s not like I’ll ever face an enemy with those things.”

  Will winced, and I apologized again for the eye.

  He waved me away. “It’s not that. Arthur had a robot go rogue last year. LANCE had to help hunt it down. Trust me. It’s a good thing to have lots of practice with electric-edged swords.”

  “Yeah, but assuming I’m ever allowed to leave Keep Tower again—without armor,” I added when I could see Will about to point out I left every morning on a training flight with Pendragon or the Defender. “But if I ever get to go out again in normal clothes, the people I might fi
ght then will attack me with more conventional weapons. I doubt the Dreki will come after me with a spatula.”

  Will didn’t argue. Instead, he gave me a long thoughtful look before I left for the armory to get my Morgause armor on. The next day he taught me how to disarm a gunman and then turn the guy’s weapon against him.

  Training with Pendragon and the Defender wasn’t as physically tiring, but it was more frustrating. Within a week I ducked and dodged with the best. What I could not seem to do was fight.

  A week after Will started teaching me how to use normal weapons, the Defender hovered above me near a wall in Arthur’s training room. Patrick didn’t wear his Defender costume. Instead he was in regular workout gear, looking like he was sitting on an invisible chair suspended sixty feet above the ground. I had asked Cassie about him, but she’d given me some vague response about how Patrick wasn’t “quite human.” Since the not-human parts of him meant he could fly, had super-strength, could spit fire, and knock a person over with his movie-star good looks, I didn’t think he’d suffered from his differences.

  I was staring at him when one of Arthur’s knights rammed me from behind. For the fourth time in as many days, I slammed into the wall upside down. My rockets kept me from sliding down three stories to the floor. My armor protected my body from cracking in two, but it still wasn’t comfortable. I snapped the visor up on my helm to get some fresh air.

  “Do I have to keep getting thrown like that?”

  A light popped on in the control room where Arthur, augmented by Percival, sat controlling a baker’s dozen of knights all at one time.

  “I’ll keep throwing you until you manage to fight back.”

  Above me, Patrick laughed, but he didn’t comment.

  I righted myself and flew down to sit on an overturned car I’d tossed in the corner after the knights and I had finished playing keep-away. “It’s fourteen to one. I’d like to see you do better.”

  Arthur swung his feet down off the electronic control board, stood, and stretched his back. “You’re on, Princess.” He disappeared from the control room.

  The Defender drifted down next to me. “I’m not sure you’ll like this,” he said. “I watched Arthur take out forty-two Dreki foot soldiers in six minutes once.”

  “Arthur is always saying that one knight is worth ten men,” I said back in a prim voice. “I’d like to see him knock out fourteen knights in six minutes.” I glared at the empty control room as if I could fry Arthur with my annoyance.

  Patrick shrugged and shot up to the top of the room out of the way.

  “And no helping him,” I yelled up after the superhero.

  Arthur strolled into the training area, headset on, his Pendragon armor wandering in behind him. If he heard my little talk with the Defender, he didn’t mention it. “Watch the master at work,” he said instead. “Percival, execute Elaine practice four, target me.”

  Before he even got into his suit, the fourteen knights gathered and attacked him. Arthur jumped back, and Pendragon opened and shut around him. Faster than I could familiarize myself with my armor’s displays, Arthur took out the nearest knight with a laser shot to the eye slit. Spinning and jumping, flying when necessary, Arthur performed a virtual ballet across the floor incapacitating knights as he went. In less than four minutes, not a single robot remained standing. Pendragon didn’t get thrown once.

  Careful not to set off by accident the micro-rockets mounted on my knuckles, I clapped as slow as possible, infusing each clap with as much sarcasm as I could manage.

  “Bravo,” I said. “Very impressive. You realize it’s kind of cheating to fight knights you programmed. You knew where they were going to be.”

  Arthur popped Pendragon’s visor up so I saw his huge smile. “Who cares? I took out all fourteen in under four minutes. What’s your personal best? Three in eighteen minutes before you get thrown?”

  I bit my tongue before I said something I would regret.

  “Percival execute Elaine practice two, target Elaine,” said Arthur. He leaned back against the wall, still in his armor, to watch. Patrick floated down to join him.

  I slammed my visor back down and shot into the air, aiming at the three knights already regaining their feet and headed for me. I took the first one out, but the second grabbed my legs, and the third grabbed the boosters on my back. They tossed me, but at least I flew away before I hit a wall. Down below, Arthur and Patrick were laughing so hard, I thought they might fall down. I would have shot a rocket at them if there had been even the slightest chance it would have had an effect.

  THE BEST PARTS OF MY DAY, THOUGH, WERE IN THE EVENINGS. Normal kids got evenings for regular extracurricular activities. I got to code with Ginny when she was available and to work on my psychic powers with Cassie when Ginny had pressing Keep Consolidated business to deal with. The basic coding skills I’d learned at school might not be up to Ginny’s or my mom’s standards, but it surprised me how fast I picked up the more advanced stuff Ginny taught. Soon, she started using Percival’s code to demonstrate different concepts including machine learning.

  She gave me my own dummy copy of Percival to tinker with the neural network algorithms. Ginny seemed pleased with my work, but the real Percival was not. At random moments he would offer comments on the code for dummy Percival. It was disconcerting, like operating on a patient while the patient critiqued your methods.

  My sessions with Cassie though were not as productive. We’d sit on the floor meditating, and I would get a big fat nothing. It even felt like the calmer my mind got, any visions I might have drifted further away. In this state I could still bring up a vision if I touched someone’s bare skin, but the images were faint, less substantial than the pictures that used to form in my mind back before I manifested real psychic powers. I still Saw several embarrassing scenes involving Cassie and Patrick that way—even if they were dim and muted by something that resembled distance. After the third time, I glimpsed them locked in a passionate embrace, Cassie decided we needed another test subject. To my horror, Cassie decided Will would be the best candidate.

  She shrugged when I objected. “You have the easiest time calling up a vision with him.”

  “I don’t call up visions of Will. They slam me over the head. It wasn’t like I was trying to See Will die that time.” I got up and paced around Cassie and Patrick’s room. Their room was bigger than mine or Will’s. They had a two-room suite with an entire living room to themselves where Cassie and I worked.

  “Exactly,” Cassie said. “Calming your emotions doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s try stirring them up. And based on what I’m watching right now, Will stirs them up quite nicely.”

  I groaned at her smirk. Will and I had been getting along better. He’d been easing back out of his Agent Redding persona over the last few weeks, but we still weren’t comfortable with one another. Meals were a never-ending minefield of awkward, punctuated with glares from Arthur anytime I so much as glanced at Will.

  If I thought about it, it was weird Will and I hadn’t bonded more. We were the only kids in a house full of adults—and robots. But then again, Will tended to out-adult the adults. He acted decades more mature than Arthur on most occasions.

  Will didn’t seem any more thrilled than me the first time he sat in with us. With visible reluctance he placed his hand in mine at Cassie’s request. If I hadn’t been feeling just as nervous, I might have been a little insulted by his reluctance. After all, it wasn’t like I had sweaty palms. Well, they weren’t very sweaty. I’d just wiped them off on my jeans.

  With my heart pounding so hard, Will probably felt it through my hand, I focused on his hand resting lightly in mine. I Saw a vision almost the instant I shut my eyes and focused. It wasn’t of Will dying, which was a relief. He had some massive bruises on his face though. This wasn’t some happy future like the one where we’d been hanging out watching a movie. Someone had tied Will’s legs to a metal chair, and his hands were zip-tied in front of him, resting i
n his lap.

  I pulled my hand out of Will’s before I Saw more.

  “Easy, Elaine,” said Cassie. “Will, go grab Elaine some water.”

  Will rushed from the room. He glanced back at me, but concern hurried his steps. He ran for the kitchens.

  “That got rid of him,” Cassie said. “Do you want to tell me what you Saw? You’re paler than a ghost, so I assume it wasn’t a happy vision.”

  “Will wasn’t dead,” I said.

  Cassie gave a small smile. “Then that’s an improvement over last time.”

  I described the vision, and Cassie had me draw it. By the time Will had made it all the way back from the kitchens, I had recovered.

  “Oh, silly me,” Cassie said. She pointed to a small fridge tucked behind a cabinet door in the entertainment center. “I had water here.”

  Will only looked a little put out. I don’t think he wanted to hear about his future either.

  He looked relieved though when I showed him the picture. “That’s not a big deal,” he said. “I could get myself out of something like that in minutes.”

  When I shot him a disbelieving look, he only nodded. “Four minutes tops. I’ll show you how tomorrow.”

  After that night, though, Cassie insisted that Will join us every evening we practiced calling up visions. “There’s always one person that visions center on. For me, it’s Patrick. For you, it’s Will.”

  I tried not to make any assumptions about what that meant for Will and me, but seeing as she was marrying Patrick, it was hard not to wonder.

  Will, though, seemed pleased by Cassie’s comment. “You mean, I’m almost like a trigger?”

  Cassie laughed. “Not quite. It’s more like she’ll always have more visions about you than anyone else. Seeing you will always be easiest. And it will be easier for her to have visions of other things if you’re around.”

  I frowned at that. The whole point of all this training was to make me less dependent on other people, more able to take care of myself. Visions wouldn’t be all that useful if I had to touch people or keep Will around me like a good luck charm.