by Lori Bond
In the end, my parents agreed to go to Arthur’s ranch in Montana. He could protect them there—it was even more secure than the Rook. Before they climbed into the knights that would fly them there, Arthur handed them phones. Each one was a duplicate of the prototype back home in my room.
“You will keep in touch,” Arthur said, the steel in his voice again. “These phones are untraceable.” He showed them the special app. “You can keep in secure contact with Ginny and your daughter.” He stressed the last few words, but my parents only nodded. They each gave me a quick hug before climbing into a knight, but there weren’t any long goodbyes. It felt perfunctory.
“We’ll be in touch when we can,” Raul called in that cheerful voice I’d heard my whole life. I felt like I was waving goodbye to a stranger. The knights with my parents and half the knights Arthur had brought with us took off and headed for Montana.
I stood on the street, watching them fly away, with Will and Arthur on either side of me.
“They won’t stay,” I said. The knights had long since disappeared, but I kept watching that piece of sky as if I thought Tori and Raul would come back and say they’d changed their minds. That they didn’t mind staying with Arthur if it meant staying with me. The sky remained a cloudless blue.
“They won’t stay in Montana.” My voice cracked, and my throat clogged even though the tears were pooling way up in my eyes. “They’ll disappear again. Hopefully they won’t mess with the Dreki, but they won’t stay in contact with us either.”
Arthur’s arm wrapped around me and gently pulled me against his chest. “I know, Princess,” he said into my hair. “I know.”
Will’s arms embraced me from behind so that his chest pressed against my back. My father’s other arm wrapped around Will and me. The three of us stood there in a little knot while I cried, and the knights circled around us protecting us from physical danger.
15
WHERE I CORRUPT WILL FOR MY OWN ENDS
THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS WAITING BY THE DOOR WHEN WILL showed up to take me on our morning run. Most mornings he had to bang on the door for half a minute before I opened up. Today, I had it open before he even raised his hand to knock.
“You seem eager.” The shock was written on his face.
“Not to run.” I pulled him into my room, slamming the door behind us. “Percival, shut off every sensor and tracking device in this room. Get out of here and off my tablet too.”
“Yes, my lady,” Percival said. Small red and blue lights all over the room blinked off. I checked on the tablet I’d gotten from Ginny last night, but Percival wasn’t running in the background.
The curious expression on Will’s face had turned to alarm. “Look, I don’t know how comfortable I am with randomly being used for kissing practice, or whatever it was your mom said.”
At any other moment, I would have expired from embarrassment or died from the confirmation that Will wasn’t attracted to me that way. I had more important topics to discuss, but I decided to put him at ease first. “Please, I’m the least attractive person ever born.” I gestured at my unwashed hair. “No doubt you’ll be able to keep your hands to yourself, and I have other stuff on my mind.” I pulled him over to my desk. He couldn’t possibly think I’d want to do anything scandalous somewhere as uncomfortable as my old-fashioned metal desk.
I propped up my tablet and pointed to the lines of code, scrolling up and down so Will got a glimpse of the scope. “That is the dummy code Ginny gave me so I could learn how Percival works. We’re going to make this code not so dumb.”
Will quirked one eyebrow at me because of course he would do something so sexy when I wanted to have a serious conversation. “We?”
“Oh, please. Don’t pretend you don’t have some kind of extensive coding and hacking experience. You’re a super spy from super spy boarding school with the most secret of secret agencies. If you aren’t spending half your day rooting around the Keep systems, then I’m pretty sure you aren’t doing your job.”
Will dropped into my desk chair like I’d somehow punched him in the gut, knocking all the air out of him. We’d been training for weeks now, and I’d never once seen him look even half this defeated after one of our training sessions.
“What did I say?” I asked.
Will put his head in his hands, covering his eyes the same way Arthur did when stressed. Arthur’s mannerisms had rubbed off on all of us.
“I’m not doing my job.”
“What?” I sat my tablet aside, my Percival Project forgotten. “What are you talking about? You’ve been invaluable here, and I’m not talking about the whole vision lodestone thing. No one could have predicted that.”
“Ahmet the LANCE Seer should have Seen it,” Will said with a small smile. He dropped his hands from his face, but he still looked ill.
“Seriously, you are an excellent agent.” I struck a fighting stance. “Look at how good my form’s gotten. Come on, try to throw me. I dare you.”
Will’s smile widened, but it was still only half-hearted. He knew as well as I did that he could still toss me over one shoulder if he wanted.
“I’ve been an excellent fight instructor and trainer,” Will said. “Not a good agent.”
I knelt on the floor and took Will’s hands in mine. “Explain.”
Will sighed, but he didn’t let go of my hands. “Arthur was right to not want LANCE agents here. I am your handler, but my mission went well beyond keeping you safe and seeing you trained.” He let go of one of my hands to pull his phone from his hoodie pocket and brought up his emails, loading a memo from Stormfield. He handed the phone over.
I skimmed the email, and my other hand fell out of Will’s. He let me go, and I sank to the floor. “Complete inventory of Keep tech? Technical specifications for as many inventions as possible? Permanent backdoor into Keep systems? Neutralize Arthur Keep if necessary?” I looked up at Will. “Does neutralize mean what I think it does?” My voice dropped to a whisper, but Will still heard me. “Do you have a kill order for my father?”
Will didn’t answer. His head dropped back into his hands before he gave a sharp nod.
“Well, clearly you haven’t killed Arthur, but how much of the rest of this have you done?” My voice had a hard, brittle quality I didn’t hide. I’d been more than half-crushing over this wyvern hiding in our home, and the whole time he’d been betraying us for his lousy secret organization. Will might say LANCE was the good guys, but I was having some serious doubts. I opened my mouth to tell him what I thought of him and his precious fellow agents.
“None of them,” Will said before I could start. He reached for one of my hands again. “I swear I haven’t been doing any of them. And I don’t know how much longer Stormfield will tolerate my being here if I don’t start. His communications are getting explicit.”
The phone fell from my lifeless fingers. “None of them? But Will, doesn’t that mean you aren’t useful to LANCE. Doesn’t that put you in danger of …”
“Retirement.” Will finished the sentence when I couldn’t. “Dangerously close. Despite starting me at the Conservatory at six, despite making me his personal secretary, despite my supposed abilities, it’s always been clear that Stormfield doesn’t trust me. That being his secretary was to keep me under direct supervision, not an earned accolade. The excuses I’ve been giving him have been wearing thin, and my report from yesterday seems to have raised even more red flags. From the texts I received last night, it’s clear he doesn’t believe I’m ignorant of Tori and Raul’s current location. He flat out questioned my loyalty before going silent. I have one week to turn in a report of measurable value.” Will’s voice and head sank again, but his grip on my hand tightened.
I panicked. There was no other word for it. Gripping onto his hand, I threw myself at a vision, any vision, of Will’s future.
I snapped into one at once with none of the strain or difficulty I normally had. The vision was as clear as the one I’d had of Vortigern shoot
ing Will in the head. Only, the vision didn’t show me if Will would survive Stormfield’s wrath. Once again it showed the same image of Will tied to a chair.
I’d Seen this vision four different times now, and I’d drawn it twice as many. Will never found it upsetting. He maintained he could get out of a setup like this anytime, and he’d taught me how. The Will in my vision didn’t try to get free. He sat in his chair radiating a calm I didn’t share. Since I was fully immersed in this vision for the first time, I tried to take Cassie’s advice and hunt for clues in the room. It was a boring institutional gray cube with no windows and a single door. There didn’t seem to be a way to open it from the inside. Perhaps that was why Will was so patient. Other than the chair with Will, there was nothing else in the room.
I circled the chair and studied the knots holding his legs in place. The zip tie I ignored. For some reason, Will wore his gray suit again. Will hadn’t worn it in weeks except for the one time he’d reported in person at the New York LANCE headquarters. Most likely I wasn’t Seeing a vision from today. I realized that if I angled myself just right, Will’s phone stuck out of his jacket’s pocket. Something had broken the screen, but the date and time still showed. The date was six days out. One week from Stormfield’s ultimatum.
With a wrench, I pulled myself out of my vision. “It’s a LANCE holding cell. That’s why you’re not trying to escape, Will. It’s a LANCE holding cell.”
“What?” It was a sign of how upset Will was. He hadn’t noticed I’d gone into a vision.
“My vision. I pulled myself into that vision I keep having of you.”
For a moment, life seemed to return to Will. “You called up a fully immersive vision at will? That’s a fantastic leap in your abilities, Elaine.”
I waved away his true, but irrelevant, statement. He wasn’t getting the important parts. “You don’t understand. I think you’re tied up in a LANCE cell. It’ll happen on the day of Stormfield’s ultimatum.”
Will looked skeptical. “I don’t know. No, it’s not that I don’t believe you,” he said, noticing my outraged expression. “I bet I will be tied up in six days. It’s more that it doesn’t sound like LANCE. If they retire me, they won’t beat me up and then tie me up somewhere first. It’ll be a lot faster than that. I won’t realize it’s happening.”
“That is not comforting.” I stood up and paced in front of him. “We need to tell Arthur and Ginny about this.”
Will looked horrified. “You can’t. They’ll never believe I haven’t been following my directive. I couldn’t betray them like that. Your father barely tolerates me now. Can you imagine how he’ll act if he finds this out?”
I fiddled with my hair while I marched up and down my room. Will had a point. Arthur and Will had some sort of turning point yesterday, but that might all go away with a revelation like this. “Ginny would understand,” I tried, but Will shook his head.
“She’d tell Arthur.”
I shrugged, but Will was right. They were the kind of couple that didn’t hide stuff from one another. It made for a healthy relationship, but it wasn’t useful for our current crisis.
“There must be something we can do,” I said. “Can we fake an inventory list? Give LANCE bad plans?”
Will shook his head. “They already have a rough idea of what Arthur has developed. They’d know some of the things that should be on the list, and they’d notice if I left them off. And I don’t have the engineering experience to fake technical drawings. Do you?”
I glared at Will. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
I sighed. My pacing had brought me back to Will, and I dropped myself down on his lap since he was sitting on my only desk chair. I hugged him tight, my chin digging into his shoulder. “We’ll figure out something. You’re not allowed to give up. Understand?” I pulled back so I could stare into his beautiful eyes. “Promise?”
Will nodded and stared back. His eyes seemed to search my face. For some reason, they settled on my mouth. I wrinkled my forehead at him, trying to figure out what was going on when the speakers in my room squawked.
“Why is Will in your room with the sensors off? Why did you need to kick Percival out?” Arthur hissed over the intercom. “Will, you can’t let her pressure you into doing things that make you uncomfortable.”
“What? Me pressure Will?” I sputtered. I stood up and told Percival to turn all the sensors back on. Lights blinked on all over my room, and I brought up a mid-room screen with my livid parent seething at me. “I’m the girl here. Will is the one who’s supposed to be pressuring me.”
Will now made sputtering noises from behind me, but both of us ignored him.
“Please. I can’t imagine anyone can pressure you into anything.” Arthur frowned at me and turned his attention to Will. “You can always tell her no. She won’t like you any less for it. It won’t change your place in this family.”
Will didn’t respond, but I didn’t turn around to see if he’d gone into shock. “Why are you so convinced I’m in here trying to make out with Will? Is it because of what Mom said?”
“Make out with Will?” Arthur looked horrified. “Who said anything about kissing anyone?” He rubbed his eyes for a second. “But thank you for giving me something new to worry about. This parenting thing is hard,” he said to an offscreen Ginny.
“Then what am I pressuring Will into doing?” I asked. I glanced around the room as if the answers had been written on the walls.
“I assumed you were trying to talk him into some bad idea. Just because you both have armor now, it doesn’t mean you two can fly around anywhere you like.” Arthur gave me a pointed stare. “Was I wrong?”
“Elaine isn’t trying to pressure me into anything,” Will said. I glanced back at him to find him giving me a considering look. “I don’t think.”
Ginny came wandering into view in an exquisite silk robe embroidered with poppies. She yawned and gave a small wave. “What are you two doing that requires such secrecy? You can see why we might have gotten the wrong impression.”
I thought fast. Reaching over, I grabbed my tablet and showed Ginny the dummy Percival code. “I wanted to make a change and surprise you with Percival’s code, but I need Will to help. But it occurred to me you might not be real thrilled if I showed it to a LANCE agent even if it was just Will. I mean, no one’s forgotten Arthur complaining that any LANCE agent here would steal all his stuff.”
I didn’t look at Will again. It was hard not to turn my head, but I didn’t want to draw more attention to him.
Arthur looked put out, but Ginny gave a small smile. “You may show Will, dear. We trust him. Besides that’s an older version of Percival, about eight years out of date. LANCE has already seen much of that code, and they could see the rest with my blessing. LANCE’s AI Dandrane is based on Percival’s original code.”
“Of course,” Will said. “Dandrane is Percival’s sister.” I shot him a funny look, so he added, “In the Arthurian myths, I mean. I read all of them—the Vulgate, Mallory, even Tennyson—when I first got here.”
Ginny looked pleased that he’d caught the symbolism behind the AI’s name. “So, feel free to help Elaine with her project. Like I said, we trust you.”
Arthur didn’t say anything, but Ginny nudged him in the back. His head sort of wobbled back and forth, but it was an agreeing sort of bobble. “We trust Will.” He ran his fingers across his face, rubbing his eyes for a minute. When he brought his hand back down, he seemed surprised as if he’d had a revelation in the last second. He smiled and all of him seemed to relax. “We trust Will absolutely.” Ginny smiled at us from behind him.
“Okay,” I said. “Great then.” I smiled, but my heart fell. There was no way we could tell Arthur about Will’s problem with LANCE now.
Will came to stand beside me in front of the screen. “Thank you for the confidence, sir.” He reached over and squeezed my hand. “You won’t be let down.”
Arthur frowned at our joined hands. Ginny poked Art
hur in the back again. He managed a grimace that might have been intended as a smile. “Get training, you two. You can tinker with your practice Percival this evening.”
We nodded, and I shut the screen down. We headed for the terrace and ran the first mile in silence.
“Why do we need our own working Percival?” Will asked me during our second mile.
I admired his clever timing. My groaning and wheezing made it impossible for any of the mics on the terrace to pick up his words. I was in better shape than when we first started five weeks ago, but I still found running four miles all but impossible.
“Want armor Arthur can’t lock us out of,” I gasped out. Since I only managed one-word every ten steps, Will surprised me by figuring out my meaning. “You in?”
“I don’t know, Elaine.”
When we finished our run, I stood near the moat’s decorative waterfall bent over gasping for air. Will bent down. On the cameras it would like he was tying his shoes, but really he had his head near mine. Between the noise of the waterfall and my continued coughs and choking sounds, it would be harder to hear what we were saying. Will wasn’t the only one with some spy-craft skills.
“Look, I know you gave your undying loyalty or whatever to Arthur, but this is important, and I don’t think I can jailbreak Percival on my own. Arthur can’t lock me out of my armor again.”
“It’s for your safety.”
I didn’t stand up, but I shot Will a death glare that would have incinerated him on the spot if I had the superpowers of the Red Ranger. Instead, he waited in a patient silence.
“This is about more than just staying safe. Yes, the armor is for protection, but it’s also to make sure others stay safe. The armor is more than a physical firewall for me to hide behind. It’s for keeping the ones I love safe too. Arthur, Ginny, you, Tori, Raul. Even the world. Being a knight of Arthur’s Round Table means something. Yes, it’s Arthur’s weird obsession, but it also stands for a lot of noble things. Being a knight might not have been my first choice. It wasn’t yours, but we are ones now. And that means Arthur can’t lock us out anytime things get dicey. We need our own Percivals outside Arthur’s control.” I’d gotten so into my little speech, I’d forgotten to stay crouched over or to cough. We now stood facing each other. At some point I’d reached up and grabbed Will’s shoulders although I didn’t remember moving. I hoped the waterfall was loud enough to mask my voice. “Are you in?” I asked Will again.