by Lori Bond
“Please focus.” I shut my eyes for a second. I had an overwhelming urge to rub them but didn’t bother trying since I was wearing a helmet.
“Can you hack it or not?” I added.
“Well.” Percy drew out the word like a preschooler trying to avoid telling a parent bad news. “I mean, yes, eventually. But it seems like we’re in a hurry, and you won’t want to wait that long.”
“Oh, for all that is holy.” During our run I had sheathed my dirks, but I pulled one out and activated the laser setting. This shot a small pinpoint accurate laser at the door. Unlike Pendragon’s Excalibur sword, my dirks did not have laser edges. There would be no slicing through the door. Instead I aimed the laser at one hinge. Slowly, the laser melted its way through.
I kept the laser steady, but inside my armor I fumed. This was taking forever, and I wanted Will free now. I unsheathed my second dirk and tried aiming both weapons’ lasers at the same spot on the hinge. According to the readout in my armor, this melted the hinge faster but still not fast enough.
“Is anyone coming?” I asked Percy. “Keep an eye out. I don’t want anyone attacking me from behind while I focus on this.”
“Only one around is Sir Galahad,” said Percy.
“My lady,” said the real Percival from Galahad’s armor, “I believe we could render you some assistance.”
“Go for it.” I shut the lasers off and stepped back.
“We would be honored, my lady,” Percival said. Galahad took my place at the door. “And if I may speak plainly, I am still not impressed with the upgrades to your suit’s systems.”
“Tell, me something I don’t know,” I muttered.
“Hey,” Percy said, the insult clear in his voice. “Who asked you, you stuck up piece of code?”
“Rescuing Will,” I reminded the two AIs. “We can argue about upgrades back at home once we’re all safe.”
“Of course, my lady.” Percival had Galahad give me a small bow. Then the knight dug his fingers into the metal door. Each digit poked a hole in the door like a worm through a rotten apple. Galahad then gave a huge heave and, with a metallic shriek, ripped the door out of its frame.
“Oh,” I said, my voice only trembling a little bit. “I didn’t realize the knights were quite that strong.”
“Indeed.” Even though I knew it was my imagination, Percival sounded smug. “Perhaps if your downgraded AI had not barred me from your suit, I would have assisted sooner.”
I didn’t answer. At least Percy kept his mouth shut too.
Galahad tossed the door into the corridor with a grating thud. The door slid halfway down the hallway with a screech, and I winced. “That’s subtle. If there weren’t any Dreki coming this way before, they’re on their way now.”
“I believe the alarm that knight set off when he ripped off the door alerted them,” said Percy with a sniff.
“Working on deactivating the alarm now,” Percival said.
I didn’t bother to reply or referee their argument. I stepped into the room. “Hey, Will, your knight in shining armor has arrived,” I called. “Will?” I said again when he didn’t answer. I flipped up my helm, scanning the room with my own eyes, since I was having trouble taking in the image on my viewscreen.
The chair where I had Seen Will in my vision was empty. I looked all the way around me, but the entire room was empty. Will wasn’t there.
24
WHERE MY LESS THAN SUCCESSFUL RESCUE GOES SIDEWAYS
I STEPPED FURTHER INTO THE ROOM, BUT WILL DEFINITELY WASN’T there. It was the same room from my vision, down to the scuff mark left by Will’s chair and a spidered crack in the room’s stereotypical interrogation-room-gray walls.
“For all that’s holy, Percy,” I all but yelled. “You said he was in here.”
“I don’t understand,” Percy said. “His tracker shows him in this room.”
“I must concur, my lady,” added Percival, joining the competition for most unhelpful AI. “Master Will should be in here.”
“Should be and is are two very different things. Anyone got any brilliant ideas what happened? Did the Dreki spoof Will’s tracking chip in our system? Does that mean the Dreki are in our system?”
Galahad had been patrolling the perimeter of the room. He stopped by a small dark stain and knelt down. He picked a small item off the floor.
“I believe I may have an answer,” Percival said.
“Does it have to do with whatever Galahad just found?”
“Indeed, it does. He appears to have found Master Will’s tracking chip. Either the Dreki discovered it, or Master Will removed it for his own reasons.”
Either option was chilling. We had to find Will, and we needed to find him fast. “The tracker hasn’t been shattered. My guess is the Dreki didn’t find it. If they had, they would have destroyed it to keep us from tracking him.” I froze for a moment. “Or they used it as a trap.” Percy scanned the surrounding area, but no one was coming for us even though we had set off an alarm when Galahad ripped off the cell’s door. Not a trap then. Besides, they would have just left the tracker in Will for that. “Will must have removed his chip. So, we don’t know where Will is, but neither do the Dreki. That’s an advantage, I guess.”
“I guess,” Percy agreed, but he sounded doubtful. It was less than encouraging.
“Your reasoning sounds logical,” Percival said.
“Any ideas how we find Will? If he somehow took his own tracking chip out, then he probably left the room on his own. The Dreki didn’t transfer him somewhere.” My body tried to shudder as I remembered Evie’s comment about torture, but my suit held me in place. I had to hope that Will had left of his own volition. “How did he get out of here?”
Percival reported that the door Galahad had mauled only locked from the exterior hallway. There was no way for Will to access the electronic lock from inside the room. There weren’t any panels or access points for him to use to override the door’s locks.
I scanned the walls of the cell, but there weren’t any secret tunnels hidden behind any of them. The cell didn’t sit on an exterior wall, and besides, it wasn’t like this place had windows. It was as solid and secure as a medieval fortress even if it hovered over the ocean.
Finally, I looked up—straight into Will’s grinning face.
I screamed in shock. It was not one of my finer moments.
Will laughed and swung himself down to the ground. He’d been suspended between two pipes running across the ceiling. I had known for quite some time that Will’s gray suits hid an impressive array of muscles. I hadn’t seen them in action like that before. He’d been holding himself up there for who knew how long, but he hadn’t even broken into a sweat. It was unbelievable. It was unrealistic. It was movie-level feats of strength. My eyes narrowed, and I wondered if there was more to Will than a persuasive power. I didn’t have time to worry about that now. We’d wasted enough time in this room.
Will had been shaking his head at me while I stood in my shocked silence—at least the silence I’d fallen into after my undignified screech. “Took you long enough,” he said. He brushed at some dirt on his gray suit and frowned when the scab in the center of his hand reopened leaving a bright red line on his pant leg. “No one ever looks up. Lesson number one in infiltrating an enemy stronghold: always look up.”
“Are you kidding me?” I found my voice again, and it was high-pitched with indignation and laced with annoyance. “You didn’t show yourself the second we came in this room because you think this is some kind of training exercise?” I huffed for a second before muttering under my breath, “Besides, Percy and Percival didn’t think to look up either.”
Will got this serious expression identical to the one my old science teacher used to get before she would deliver a diatribe on neat handwriting. I didn’t need to be a powerful Seer to realize a lecture was coming. “Always be training, Elaine. Use every situation to learn. It’ll help keep you alive in the next.”
“Yea
h, yeah. Always be learning.” I cut Will off before he went full on teacher mode. “You can continue your after-school-special after we get off this flying hunk of metal. You realize we’re working under some serious time constraints, right?”
Will shrugged. “I kind of figured if you were getting me yourself, there was a sizable LANCE operation going on. It’s not like Arthur would let you in on something like this without significant backup.”
“You are wrong on so many levels. LANCE didn’t come. It’s just Arthur and me and Patrick and whatever knights we could scrounge up after this afternoon’s attack.”
The color drained out of Will’s face, leaving his complexion almost pasty.
“And you’re right,” I continued, “that Arthur wouldn’t send me without an entourage, but you’re looking at what’s left.” I waved at his knight still standing in the corner where he’d found Will’s tracking chip. I was a petty enough person to get some satisfaction out of Will’s growing concern. It was nice to see him finally take this whole rescue thing seriously. “So, if you’re done with the whole Very-Special-Episode of this week’s ‘LANCE Loves Lecturing Elaine,’ I’d like to get out of here before Arthur loses his temper and does something stupid like blow up whatever keeps this thing in the sky before we’ve managed to fly away to safety.”
Will nodded but kept his mouth shut.
I sighed. I wasn’t trying to come off as an over-bearing rescuer. No wonder people hated being a Damsel in Distress. I pulled the handset I’d brought for Will out of my knight’s compartment and tossed it at him. “Just get in your armor.”
Percival opened the front of Galahad, and Will backed inside. A minute later, his voice came on over the comms. “Percival has everything up and running in here. What’s the plan?”
“Percy and Percival, please find us the fastest way out of this place and back over open ocean. Percival, update Arthur on our status. Tell him we’ve secured Will and are attempting to retreat. Percy, get calculating on those routes.”
“Percy and Percival?” Will asked. “Does Arthur know about Percy now?”
“No, but he knows about your persuasive power. He’s not real thrilled you used it to get Percival to unlock your door.”
“Seems fair.”
“Gotta admit I’m not real thrilled either.”
Will didn’t answer, and Galahad’s blank helm didn’t give me any clues to Will’s thoughts.
“Got it,” Percy said. “We need to run down this hallway.” A floor plan popped up in front of me with a red line showing the way out. We would turn right out the door and then run straight until the next-to-last turn left. That would take us to an access shaft we could blow open.
“Got that, Will?” I asked.
“Roger,” Will said. “Percival has shown me the same map.”
“Let’s get this show on the road!” Percy shouted in the most cheerleader-rah-rah kind of voice I’d ever heard from either a real or artificial intelligence.
Galahad’s head shook in disbelief, but I wasn’t sure if that was Will or Percival controlling the knight.
I led the way out of the room and down the hallway. We were running as fast as our knights could go, but we still had a long way before our turn. The flying fortress was huge. I wasn’t great at judging distance, but Percy was. We still had six hundred yards to go.
We’d only made it another two hundred yards when a figure stepped out in front of us. It was the hot girl from my vision, Evie. She held some sort of large weapon in her arms she aimed at us. I’d never seen anything like it. The rectangular thing was too weird to shoot bullets, and the front was too wide for something like a laser. If anything, it looked like a sonic pulse weapon Arthur was developing.
“Going somewhere?” Evie asked, sounding like the villain in pretty much every spy movie I’d ever seen. “I don’t think so,” she said, answering herself. She aimed and fired.
“Evie, no,” yelled Will, but it was too late. Evie looked shocked for a moment, but then she regained control with a smug look on her diabolically gorgeous face.
“Sorry, Will. Looks like you picked the wrong side.”
I flinched waiting for the shock wave or whatever to happen. There was a rippling effect in the air as whatever the weapon fired came toward us. It was like the air in front of us had turned to water, allowing us to see the waves caused by the rock Evie had thrown in this pond.
The wave hit us and seemed to wash over us. I squenched my eyes shut, but I felt nothing. I opened them back up, but all my displays seemed the same. Nothing seemed to have happened.
“That was anticlimactic,” Percy said, and then my armor fell off.
It all just crashed down from my body. One minute, Will and I were standing in a pair of technological knights outfitted with weaponry LANCE and every government in the world would kill to get their hands on. The next moment, we were standing in our normal clothes with pieces of our knights scattered on the floor. Yes, I was wearing leggings and a T-shirt, and Will had on his dirty gray suit, but I’d never felt more naked, more exposed, in my entire life.
“Not much to look at now,” Evie sneered. She pulled out a pair of regular pistols. In our bulletproof knights, the guns would have been pointless. Now, we were sitting ducks.
“Percy,” I screamed into the comms set still attached to my head as both Will and I dove for the open doorway to our left.
“Still here,” Percy said. “That wasn’t another EMP. Everything’s still functioning down here. The pieces for the armor just can’t maintain magnetic cohesion for now. Percival and I are working on how to counteract the effect if we can. I’ve notified Arthur of the problem, but he can’t send any knights down here in case that she-devil uses that weapon on one of them too.”
“Well, isn’t that just awesome,” I said.
I turned to Will sure he’d already taken stock of the room we’d lunged into. It was a big space, kind of like Arthur’s lab. It had desks and tables, but it did not have a bunch of inventions lying around. In other words, there wasn’t anything we could use as weapons. There was a large table at the back of the room. Will pulled himself off the floor and headed to it. I followed. When we were close enough, we pulled over the nearest table, spilling its computer and papers all over the floor. We stacked the table in front of the larger one, and then we ducked under the one still upright. This gave us a small amount of cover from the front and above, but without weapons, we were only slightly more protected than the targets in the shooting booth of a carnival midway.
At least Will hadn’t had to tell me what to do. In fact, we had worked together as a team without saying a single word. It was a radical departure from that time I had cowered with him behind a desk in my old room back in the Rook.
“We have about six seconds before your girlfriend gets here,” I told Will. She’d been far down the hallway when she shot her weird weapon at us, but it wouldn’t take her much longer to reach our room. It wasn’t like she had to look for us. She’d seen us dive through this doorway.
“Girlfriend?” Will looked confused for a second. “Evie’s not my girlfriend.” He made a sour face like I’d suggested he eat a chocolate covered dog turd. “She’s more like a big sister. She helped me get through the Conservatory.”
“Whatever.” I turned away and peeked out from the side of the desk. The room was still empty, but Evie should have reached us by now. I hoped she wasn’t gathering tons of reinforcements. Arthur would kill me if the Dreki ended up getting their hands on me after all. “If I had a brother, I sure wouldn’t kiss him like you kiss her,” I muttered.
“Kiss her?” The disgust in Will’s voice had me turning back to him. He looked pretty revolted. “The only time I kissed her in my entire life was today when she slipped me the razor blade I needed to cut the plastic cuffs and to get the tracker Arthur implanted out of my hand.” Will’s eyes widened. “Wait, did you See that kiss? Like See see it? With your clairvoyance?”
I nodded.
I shrugged like it was no big deal. “I touched something you had touched. Apparently, that’s now enough.”
“Your powers are growing so much so fast,” Will said with a shake of his head. “You know that, right? That you are just so amazing.” He gave me the sweetest, most sincere smile I’d ever seen. “There’s absolutely no one else like you.”
My anger at Will and my insecurities I’d been feeling all melted away. In that moment, I could have kissed him. So, doing the craziest, most insane thing in my life—and that included the time I had jumped off the top of Keep Tower with no guarantee I wouldn’t end up an Elaine-pancake on the pavement below—I grabbed Will by the front of his gray suit jacket and kissed him.
Will probably thought I had lost my mind, but I didn’t care. We were about to die or be captured by the Dreki, which might be worse. I would not have this moment go by and then regret it for the rest of my life. Holding onto Will’s jacket like it was the only thing keeping us from being pulled apart by Dreki goons, I let myself enjoy the kiss.
I didn’t get to enjoy it for long. Just as I had begun to appreciate how very good at kissing Will seemed to be, I Saw Evie and two Dreki troops dash into the room. Since I had my eyes closed and a thick table sat between me and the door, I realized I was having a vision. But instead of this being something happening in the distant future or even in a few hours, it had to be a vision of something happening any second now.
To my surprise, I also realized I was watching this vision like I was a fly on the wall, and that the Elaine and Will in the vision weren’t making out behind a table when Evie and her goons burst in. We had pressed up against the wall on either side of the door, and the second they arrived, Will and I each took a goon out.
Disappointed that I had to end the kiss, I pulled back. To my intense satisfaction, Will looked as dazed as I felt.