by Lori Bond
One stubborn Dreki, though, hung onto my neck, forcing me to give the goon the piggyback ride of a lifetime. I shifted and turned, bucked and tossed, trying to get the rhinoceros sized soldier off, but he stayed just out of reach. I changed my flight path and slammed the back of the guy against one of the Rook’s walls. The impact knocked the air out of him. The guy’s hold loosened, and I tossed him down to the terrace below. The guy must have done something to my armor just before I slung him off because my flight control became erratic. I dropped back down to the ground before I crashed, but my landing wasn’t pretty. Picking myself up, I readied my weapons, but the Drekis were once again surrounding me.
I aimed at the nearest group, but I never had to fire.
Pendragon slammed down in front of me, his sword already unsheathed. The sword’s laser edges activated, allowing Pendragon to slice through the group trying to swarm us. Around me six of the other eight knights Arthur had taken with him to LA landed and fired on the Dreki forces, driving them back. Arthur hadn’t been kidding. One knight was equal to about ten Dreki soldiers. If even two of the knights Arthur had left behind had survived the pulse weapon, I might have been able to handle the Dreki attack all by myself. With six functioning knights led by Pendragon, the Dreki were in full retreat within seconds.
From inside his armor Arthur called commands to his knights. He destroyed the remaining two helicopters and had the knights gather up the surviving Drekis.
By the time the Defender flew in, less than two minutes later, the battle was over.
I ran back to the spot where I’d last left Will, relieved when I didn’t find his body slumped on the ground. “Will!” I yelled. “Will, you okay?”
When he didn’t answer, I had Percy scan the area. My heart sank with the results.
“I’m sorry, Elaine. I really am,” said Percy. “I can’t find Will anywhere.”
21
WHERE WILL’S PAST CATCHES UP TO HIM
I TURNED AND RAN FOR PENDRAGON. ARTHUR HAD ALREADY STEPPED out of his armor, his tailored business suit rumpled from fighting in Pendragon. Arthur directed the knights into security and clean-up details. Behind us, Patrick secured the Dreki prisoners, tying them up with such speed, I couldn’t follow it with my eyes, not that I tried.
“Percival, I’m reading damage to Dame Morgause,” Arthur said, staring down at a small screen projecting out of the glove of his left hand. The glove was the only part of his armor he still wore. “Get her up to a diagnostic chamber and begin repairs immediately. Prioritize over any other knight.”
“I got this,” said Percy. “Don’t worry, he’ll never suspect a thing.”
I didn’t have time to answer. My armor flew off of me in little parts as I ran, not even slowing me down. I ignored it, uninterested in where it headed.
Arthur frowned at me as I ran up. “Most of these things will have to be rebuilt from scratch.” He kicked at a knight injured by the pulse weapon. “Are you okay?” He pointed the glove still on his hand at me and frowned at something that appeared on the little screen. “Percival says your heart rate is through the roof.”
“No.” I panted trying to catch my breath from the sprinting and the unspent adrenaline caused by the battle. “They got Will, Dad.”
Arthur looked confused. “Impossible. I locked him in his room this morning before I left. I told Percival to keep him there to thwart your vision. If I’d known you’d be in danger too, I would have locked you in yours. Or maybe locked up the two of you together.” He rubbed at his eyes again. “Or maybe not.”
I glared at him and his high-handed attempts to protect Will and me. That, though, would have to be an argument for later.
“No, the Dreki have him. Will’s the one who pushed me in the moat, saving me and the armor by accident.”
Arthur paled. “I didn’t see him, but I didn’t look. I assumed he was locked up safe.” He ran his unarmored hand over his eyes for a second. He shook his head. “Percival, how did Will get out of his room?”
“He was quite persuasive, my lord.”
I gasped, furious at Will. Not only wouldn’t he use his power to get himself out of trouble, he had used it to send himself into danger. How dare he think protecting me from LANCE more important than his own life? Especially when I’d made my views on the matter clear.
Arthur had frowned at Percival’s statement, but he didn’t comment. He pulled data up on his small screen and turned for the house. “Pendragon, follow.” He didn’t quite run, but he walked fast enough I had to trot to keep up. Pendragon brought up the rear.
“He was determined to go into LANCE this afternoon. Nothing I said was going to stop him. Dad, we have to go after him.”
“I know.” Arthur skidded to a stop in front of the huge bank of built-in cabinets lining the rear of Ginny’s office. He yanked open one of the wooden doors revealing a second metal door with an electronic keypad, thumbprint lock, and retinal identifier. “All fried.” Arthur waved Pendragon over. “Get us in there, but don’t damage anything. Ginny will kill us if we disturb a single processor or somehow damage a byte of data.”
Using his remaining glove, Pendragon cut open the metal door.
I paced back and forth while Arthur played with his little screen. After about half a second, I’d had enough. “Arthur, this is taking too long. I don’t know what’s in there, but we have to go after Will now.”
“What? No more Dad?”
“What?” Sometimes it was like Arthur’s grip on reality was even more tenuous than I had thought. “What are you talking about?”
“Not important.” Arthur turned back, but his shoulders slumped a little bit like I’d somehow hurt his feelings. I didn’t have time to deal with his adolescent mood swings.
“We have to go now.”
“Princess, we have no idea where Will has gone. The battle damaged your armor, and except for Galahad and the three knights I left charging in the armory, we’ve lost the entire complement here. The best thing we can do is regroup and notify LANCE of Will’s abduction. He is one of them after all.”
“Is he?” I stared at an envelope on Ginny’s desk addressed to Arthur in Will’s handwriting. “He had to go in today because he’s in trouble. He hasn’t been stealing your tech like Stormfield wants.”
“Not stealing? What do you mean he isn’t giving LANCE my tech?” Arthur gave me a humorless smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “And after I’ve been going to all the trouble of leaving worthless pieces lying all over the place.”
“What?”
Arthur shrugged. “Ginny and I read a memo Stormfield sent Will when your young man first got here. That charming idiot running LANCE authorized Will to kill me if needed.” Arthur smiled as if it was the greatest joke in the world, but there was no frivolity in his voice. “It’s not like anything in that email was a surprise. LANCE has been trying to get their hands on my tech for decades. I sort of doubted they would pass up this rather prime opportunity. Oh, finally.” Pendragon had gotten through the metal casing.
Arthur grabbed a bunch of wires and connected Pendragon’s glove to the bank of computer equipment hiding behind the shielded metal door. “Will wasn’t one of my favorite people back then, but I don’t want him disobeying direct orders. I told you before that Ginny and I looked into the whole LANCE retirement program.” He grinned up at me, pausing for a moment from whatever tinkering he was doing with Pendragon’s glove. “And by ‘looked into’ I mean downloaded half the LANCE database and created a permanent hack into the rest. I wanted Will to do a good job here, no matter what tech I had to sacrifice to Stormfield’s greed and paranoia.”
I must have looked as surprised as I felt.
Arthur stared at me for another moment before going back to adjusting the new set of screens that projected out of the glove. It wasn’t as elegant as the usual mess of floating screens that populated Ginny’s office, but it was more functional than the little screen he’d projected before. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “I
don’t trust LANCE, but I do trust Will. And even when I didn’t, death seemed like a high price for a career he didn’t choose.”
I didn’t know why I felt as surprised as I did. I’d realized that Arthur was sorry for Will, but I’d never realized that at some point, he’d started liking Will too.
“Besides, Will grew on me,” Arthur said with a small smile as if he was reading my mind. “He’s actually a good man, and he’ll make a good …” Arthur paused as if he had planned on saying one thing but had changed his mind. “Boyfriend,” he finished. He made a weird grimace and then gave me a small apologetic smile. “Ginny says I have to stop freaking out about you dating. I have to stop thinking about you as a preschooler. Did you know Ginny and I had been trying to get full custody from Tori for years, even before you all vanished?” Arthur didn’t give me a chance to answer. “There’s a good chance I’m having trouble reconciling the memory of the little girl with the almost adult daughter I actually have. Twelve years is a lot to miss even if Tori was right and it kept you alive.”
I didn’t have an answer for Arthur. I didn’t tell him about finding his videos. I didn’t say I suspected he’d been kept away, not to keep me alive, but so my other parents could keep their secrets. Their illusion of the perfect, average suburban life would have fallen apart the moment Arthur had shown back up.
We sat there in silence for a moment while I tried to process everything. Arthur worked on something with a small curse every now and then when the screens didn’t tell him something he wanted. I couldn’t take the silence anymore.
“Arthur, we still have to save Will. You promised.”
Arthur looked confused for a moment. “I did?”
“You promised him that no one would kill him while he lived here.”
“Oh, that.” Arthur’s face took on the rather pleased, but fierce, look he got before going after some bad guy. “That’s a promise I plan to keep.” A screen beeped. Arthur tapped an icon and a self-satisfied look replaced his fierce one. He looked like a cat that had just discovered an unattended plate of chicken. “Gotcha.”
The screen changed into a map of the eastern seaboard and the western part of the Atlantic Ocean. A small orange dot inched across part of the ocean.
“There he is.” Arthur tapped on the dot, bringing up a screen full of numbers. “His vital signs appear good. It doesn’t look like he’s suffering from shock, so if he is injured, it’s not serious.” Arthur gave a half snort. “He looks pretty annoyed though if that heart rate is any indication. I pity the Dreki if your boyfriend gets loose.”
“You mean that’s Will? You can track him?”
“I implanted a small micro-transmitter. It feeds the system a constant stream of biodata and location coordinates. How else am I supposed to keep an agent like Will safe if I don’t know when he’s in trouble or where?”
“You chipped Will? Like a dog?”
Arthur gave me a wide-eyed innocent stare, like he couldn’t understand my surprise. “Not like a dog. Like a loved one.” He zoomed the map out to show three more dots. A yellow one moved somewhere over the Midwest. Arthur pointed to it. “That’s Ginny flying back.” He pointed at a blue and a green dot clustered together. “And that’s you and me.”
“I’m chipped too?” I couldn’t decide if I was relieved that Arthur really would always know where to find me or revolted that Arthur really would always know where to find me.
“Of course, Princess. I implanted one in your neck the night of that first Dreki attack here. How do you think I followed you that day you ran away from home? I would have had a hard time saving you from Vortigern if I hadn’t been able to follow you with this.” He waved his arm at his creepy tracking system.
Deciding the ethics of secret family tracking systems would have to wait, I couldn’t deny a chipped Will would prove mighty convenient today.
“Then if we can track Will, let’s get going.”
“Slow down, Princess.” Arthur grabbed my arm, physically keeping me from dashing from the room. He pulled up another screen with a schematic of my armor. “Your armor has at least another fifteen minutes of repairs, and we don’t have enough knights here. Even with Patrick and all of his powers, this will be hard for us to pull off by ourselves.” He pointed at Will’s dot crawling across the screen. “At least one helicopter survived the attack, and it’s headed back to some sort of base. Those things don’t have ocean crossing capabilities. We need more fire power to storm a Dreki aircraft carrier or whatever that helicopter is aiming for.” He frowned and loosened his grip on my arm. “I don’t like it either, but our best option is still to alert LANCE. They can mobilize a retrieval force faster than we can.”
I protested, but Arthur didn’t listen. He typed a string of code on his screen, and another screen opened in Ginny’s office. It showed Stormfield from the back. Arthur had hacked into Stormfield’s office’s chat program.
Arthur was not subtle at getting Stormfield’s attention. “Stormfield!” he yelled out.
Stormfield turned around and gave Arthur the irritated glare you give a toddler you find pulling all the pots and pans out of the kitchen cabinet. “I see your wife has been playing in our system again. I suppose that means we need to up our security. Again.”
“It’ll take Ginny two, three minutes to get through the new firewall,” said Arthur. “I don’t know why you bother. That’s not why I called.”
“Indeed.”
“As I’m sure you noticed, Keep Tower was the subject of a Dreki attack,” said Arthur in a formal tone. He added, almost as a sarcastic aside, “Thanks for coming to help, by the way. The Dreki had some kind of EMP that knocked out every knight except hers. They almost got Elaine.”
Stormfield shrugged, and I wanted to slap the disinterested look off his face. Fortunately, he was on the other side of a view screen, so I was spared the temptation.
“I’ve said from the beginning that our Institute was the safest place for her,” Stormfield said. “If Elaine gets captured or killed, that’s on your head not mine.”
“Well, she wasn’t, thanks for the concern. And you will never put her in your Tool Shed.” Arthur’s fists clenched so tight I thought he might snap the electronics he held. “The Dreki took Will, though.”
For a moment Stormfield looked as though he didn’t know who Arthur was talking about. Now, I really wanted to strangle the man.
“Agent Redding? He’s due to report here in five minutes.” Stormfield looked around his office as if he expected Will to materialize for their appointment.
“Well, he’ll be really, really late,” said Arthur. He rubbed his eyes again as if having trouble focusing them. “If ever. You need to send a retrieval team after him. I’m not in a position right now to mount a rescue operation with all my knights here out of commission.”
I tuned out as Stormfield and Arthur argued the merits of mounting a rescue operation. Stormfield was put out when he discovered Arthur had chipped one of his agents “like a dog.”
I wandered over to Ginny’s desk where Will’s letter to Arthur sat. Picking up the letter, I wished it was Will’s hand. I could get a vision from holding Will’s hand, not from his letter.
Or at least, that had been my assumption. I’d been holding the letter for less than a minute when my eyes clouded over, the telltale warning I was entering a vision. I froze, clutching the letter. This wasn’t a fully immersive vision yet, but it was enough I could still See Will sitting tied to the chair, his immaculate suit from earlier filthy with a rip at the right shoulder seam.
I pushed myself all the way into the familiar vision, hoping I would be able to glean something new.
Like every other time, Will sat calmly, staring straight in front of him. He made no effort to escape his bonds. Instead, he might have been a carved sculpture. Even mussed and bruised from the fighting, he was handsome enough to be one.
I sighed, but Will didn’t hear me. It wasn’t like I’d teleported myself into the room
. Just like the time I’d Seen my parents attacked, I was still nothing more than an observer of this same uninformative scene.
So, I was both frustrated and relieved when the scene changed. For the first time since I’d had this vision, the single door to the room opened and a girl about Will’s age or a little older entered.
The human mind is a fickle thing. Here I was worried out of my skull for Will and his safety, but I still couldn’t help feeling jealous. If Will and this girl were anything to go by, secret agents were just as hot in real life as they were in movies. This girl wore the same SWAT uniform like every other Dreki goon I’d seen, but on her, the outfit was form fitting and accentuated every curve. She’d pulled her hair back into an efficient ponytail, but it still looked full and lustrous, like she’d just stepped from a photo shoot. My hair was in a ponytail, but in a greasy, lumpy mess that made me look like I hadn’t bothered to shower in thirty-six hours. In other words, the Dreki girl looked like a model, and I looked like my real life. No wonder Will was looking at the girl with a wary mixture of fondness and contempt.
“Will, Will, Will. What have you gotten yourself into?” asked the girl. “Long time no see.”
Will rolled his eyes. “I missed you too, Evie. You realize that LANCE has a shoot on sight order out for you with the shot preferably going in your head.”
Evie shrugged without the slightest hint of concern. “I never was one of their favorite students at the Conservatory.”
My head snapped back as if vision Evie had somehow smacked me. Did Will know this girl, not because she was a wanted Dreki terrorist, but because they had attended morally questionable spy school together?
“I think this has less to do with your poor grade in Diplomatic Relations,” started Will.
“I always was more of a shoot now, talk later kind of girl,” said Evie with a grin.
“And more to do with the whole traitor thing,” finished Will as if Evie had never interrupted him.
Evie held up a finger to correct him. “Not a traitor. Double-agent. A traitor is someone who changes loyalties. I was never loyal to LANCE but to the Dreki and my father.”