The Prince's Trap

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Text Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Griffith

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  Published in the United States by Gryff Publishing, Ltd.

  6300 E. Hampden Ave. #1310, Denver, CO 80222

  www.gryffpublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Design by Patrick Griffith

  Text set in Adobe Garamond Pro

  First American Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-0-9837017-5-0 (Kindle)

  ISBN 978-0-9837017-4-3 (Paperback)

  Follow the author on Twitter @PDGriffith

  Follow the publisher on Twitter @GryffPublishing

  To my friends and family who inspire me every day

  CHAPTER ONE

  GETTING IN

  THE WAY

  “No!” Landon struggled to pry open the thick doors of the Nitranos Industries vault with his bare hands. The alarms deafeningly sounded overhead. “Castor and Atalanta are still inside!” he yelled back to the others.

  Landon stepped back and tried to rip the heavy door out of the wall with his telekinetic abilities, desperate to free his trapped Pantheon teammates, but nothing happened. He couldn’t grip the door. Something blocked him.

  Every time Landon donned his tactical uniform before a mission he questioned how he got to this place. When he turned fifteen the past August, he had been living the pseudo-normal life of a student entering his sophomore year of high school. How could he have expected to instead discover he was a psychokinetic—a person capable of manipulating the space around him, moving things on reflex like they were muscles, hearing outwardly projected thoughts, and feeling the world around him as if it was his own body? Or that discovering his abilities would have tragic consequences, forcing him to run from home and end up at a secret facility hidden in a secluded mountain valley—the Gymnasium—built for the sole purpose of training psychokinetics like him? That was enough for him to handle, but then he was recruited to the Gymnasium’s ultra-secret, clandestine tactical unit and frequently found himself placed in situations just like the one he was in currently.

  This was Landon’s ninth mission in three weeks. It had only been just shy of a month since that fateful retrieval operation at Metis Labs. That mission made his complicated life all the more chaotic, . . . and it only seemed to get increasingly convoluted with each passing day. Because he was so integral in successfully completing the Metis Labs mission, the Pallas Corporation transitioned him out of member-in-training and into full active duty. And as of late, the Pantheon was active. A new national emergency seemed to arise every time Landon took a breath.

  This time, the team was tasked with breaking into Nitranos Industries, a leading developer of substance deployment technology. It had come to the Pantheon’s attention that the company recently finished development of a special atomizer that would vaporize any solid or liquid into a gas and carried the potential to revolutionize chemical warfare should the technology become weaponized.

  Just like with the Metis Labs operation, the Pantheon was tasked with retrieving the device, grabbing all research associated with it, and returning to base, thus ensuring that exact circumstance didn’t happen. Unfortunately, this mission became more like Metis Labs with every passing minute.

  There, they were trying to recover research on Project Herakles, but were met with communications breakdowns and an innumerable army of security agents that made their mission difficult to say the least. Here, they were just supposed to acquire a device, but after running into guards around every corner who were trying to kill them and facing unexpected missteps that resulted in mission–jeopardizing delays—missteps like unintentionally trapping two of their teammates within a secure vault—they now found themselves in a whole new pickle.

  Landon rushed forward and started pounding on the heavy door, the sound of his fists against the metal only mildly audible through the alarms. He couldn’t leave them behind. It was his fault they were trapped. While the team focused on acquiring the device and research, Landon had intentionally triggered the alarms. The hope was to force the team to abandon their target and get out, but Brock—call sign Ares and Landon’s head-butting roommate—was adamant about getting the device before leaving. As second-in-command, Brock was leading this operation since Dr. Brighton had been dispatched on a solo mission days earlier. The delay in their escape caused by Brock’s orders inevitably resulted in Atalanta and Castor not making it past the heavy metal doors before they sealed shut.

  “Castor! Atalanta! Can you hear me?”

  There was no reply. Landon knew Celia’s plan to sabotage the mission was risky when he heard it. This was only his ninth mission. He was still getting his spy legs. It was not a time to play saboteur too. Why did I listen to her? he thought.

  After the Pantheon’s briefing earlier that day, Landon had met with Celia in the Library of the Gymnasium. They convened there prior to every mission, and before the Alpha Chariot left the Stable, they discussed the mission target, their theory on the company’s true intentions behind their stated objective, and what the two of them could do to disrupt it. To Landon, the entire process of being a double agent was both exciting and exhausting. He couldn’t help but get an adrenaline rush from the entire thing. But the stress of potentially revealing himself, and the possibility that his actions might cause his innocent teammates harm, weighed heavily on him.

  He had yet to completely come to grips with the fact that Celia was Artemis: the Gymnasium’s infiltrator responsible for countermining numerous Pantheon missions and Pallas Corporation research projects; the woman whose name Dr. Pullman whispered on his deathbed; the keeper of the answers Landon had searched for over the course of a year. But Landon could never have imagined the secrets she kept.

  How could he have expected to hear that neither the Gymnasium nor the Pantheon were funded and operated by the U.S. government as he’d been told, but actually by a rogue criminal organization, the Pallas Corporation? Can I really be working for a branch of a global network of illegal activity and organized crime that calls itself the Triumvirate of Titans?

  She’d also showed him that there was another facility like the Gymnasium, called t
he Academy, filled with psychokinetics—a facility the Gymnasium’s leader, Dr. Wells, told him couldn’t exist. The last thing she told him, though, he refused to believe. . . . How could he believe that his mentor and the Pantheon’s leader, Dr. Brighton, was a cold-blooded murderer who’d killed Celia’s parents when she was just seven years old? Learning all this emboldened him to get to the truth. Agreeing to help Celia made sense. Not only would he do anything to help her, but he also saw it as a way to find proof of his mentor’s innocence and help him navigate out of this maze of lies and deception.

  After hearing about the chemical atomizer, Celia was adamant that the Pallas Corporation didn’t get their hands on it. Apart from Landon destroying the device on the mission, which Celia initially suggested—and which they decided was way too risky—the only other option was to force the mission to fail. Setting off the alarms seemed the most plausible way of doing that without giving Landon away, but he set them off too late. Maybe if he had tripped them earlier, he thought, he wouldn’t have put the team in their current situation.

  His fists continued to pound against the metal to break open the door, but to no avail. With every thrust of his arm, Landon could feel the true strength of his abilities fester and heat up at his core. He struggled to contain them; in his current state of mind, he knew the consequences of unleashing them would be tragic. He’d already lost his family because of his power; he wouldn’t lose his friends, too.

  “Guys, why aren’t you helping me?” Landon shouted back at his teammates. They all stood in a line a few feet back from Landon—each wore an odd expression that fell somewhere between frightened and amazed, save Brock.

  Brock lifted his right arm into the air, and with the powerful closing of his outstretched fingers into a fist, forced the intercoms down the hall to crumple and break. The alarms shrilled into silence.

  “You finished?” Brock asked, annoyed. “The door is obviously coated in ichorium, nitwit. No matter what you do, you’re not getting through it. Nitranos planned for this exact situation. Our reputation precedes us,” he finished with a smirk.

  “What do you mean his abilities won’t work?” Cortland interjected. “Look what he did to it!”

  Landon looked at his teammate, perplexed, before turning to the door he’d been pounding on so desperately. To his surprise, he saw two massive dents in the metal where his fists were connecting. How did I do that? With his mind blurred by passion and a need to free his stranded teammates, he’d failed to realize what he was doing to the door.

  The first time he heard of ichorium was at Metis Labs. Peregrine, who was tasked with guiding the team through the research compound with her hypersensitive and expansive tactometric sphere—she was a veritable living radar—became as blind to the building’s interior as her actual vision. The ichorium compound Metis Lab’s had coated the exterior of the research compound in hindered her abilities from sensing what was inside. Landon later found out from Cortland that ichorium was an extremely heavy, neutral element engineered by the government, created for the sole purpose of deflecting their psychokinetic abilities. When creating a monster, one mustn’t forget to devise a way of containing it. One never knows when the monster may turn on its creator.

  “Hector, he can’t get through that door,” Brock repeated sternly to Cortland using his Pantheon call sign before turning to Jeremiah. “Pollux, can you still get through to your brother? I think the vault’s jamming their comm. links.”

  “But you just said the doors were coated in ichorium,” Landon said. “Our abilities won’t get through it.”

  Brock disregarded Landon’s outburst and repeated himself, “Pollux, can you still get through to Castor?”

  “I think so,” Jeremiah replied.

  “Echo, you able to see any other ways out of there?” he directed towards Peregrine.

  Peregrine creased her forehead as she concentrated and then said, “The entire vault is coated, but there appears to be a small ventilation shaft hidden behind the bottom row of safety deposit boxes. I think if they can manage to get into the ducts and head south, they should come across a vent that’ll drop them right into the lobby.”

  “Okay, Pollux, tell Castor what Echo said about the vents and to rendezvous at the Alpha Chariot.” Brock directed his team with such authority. Landon did not get along with his roommate, but in moments like this, he admired Brock’s natural ability to lead. That momentary feeling of admiration always aggravated Landon afterward. “And tell them to hurry up. We’ve worn out our welcome.”

  Jeremiah stared strangely toward the dented, ichorium-coated vault door. After a few seconds, he turned back to the team and said, “They’ll meet us there.”

  “All right, Echo, like we planned . . . lead the way and get us out of here.”

  Peregrine nodded in acknowledgement before spinning around and guiding the team through the labyrinthine hallways toward the exit. Landon quick-stepped a few times to catch up to Cortland—his closest friend on the Pantheon—at the back of the pack.

  “How could Pollux do that?” Landon asked Cortland while narrowly avoiding tripping over the unconscious body of one of Nitranos’ security force.

  “Twins,” he replied nonchalantly. “Their abilities work differently for them.”

  The strange glances, Landon thought as he kept pace with the team. That’s why the Cranes are always giving each other weird looks. They’re communicating, and we just can’t hear it.

  The trip to the Alpha Chariot, which they had stationed about a mile away from the compound, was easy. The team had neutralized Nitranos’ security on their way to the vault, and they managed to be clear of the building moments before the reinforcements arrived. There was a slight scare, however, as Jeremiah fell over unexpectedly just before reaching cover inside the forest. It was as if his right leg was pulled out from under him, like he’d snagged his foot on an invisible tripwire.

  Landon’s legs jittered up and down as he anxiously sat in his chair on the team’s aircraft and waited for the return of the two teammates he felt responsible for stranding; nevertheless, he couldn’t help but stare at the atomizer securely gripped in Brock’s right hand. It was such a small device, about the size of a baseball, yet with the right substance fueling it, it could disperse any substance into the surrounding air. Landon easily saw how it could be turned into a deadly weapon. What was the Pallas Corporation intending to do with it?

  Celia believed they were planning to sell it on the black market to a terrorist organization or a cell of religious extremists to continue funding Pallas’ criminal operation, but Landon knew in his gut it wasn’t that simple. The Pantheon had been run ragged in the past month with mission after mission; like the Metis Labs operation, they claimed this one was spur of the moment and, according to Dr. Wells, vital.

  Brock placed the device into a holding container beside the cockpit for safekeeping. Once the door of the container closed, the world around Landon faded away—the commotion of his teammates as they secured themselves in their seats, the sound of the engines as they warmed up for take-off, the discussions of the mission, and speculation regarding when Atalanta and Castor would arrive—it all blurred out of existence, leaving only Landon and a secret mission that became more and more impossible to complete with every passing moment. There must be a way he could still appease Celia by keeping the device away from the Pallas Corporation. Landon had to figure out a way to succeed at his countermeasure and redeem himself for Celia.

  “Well, that could’ve gone better, don’t you think?” Cortland collapsed into his seat in front of Landon and propped his feet up on a groove in the wall of the aircraft cabin. “I mean, with all the security we had to take out, tripping the alarms in the vault, and Castor and Atalanta getting trapped, we’re kind of lucky we made it out of there this time, right?”

  Cortland turned his head slightly to lo
ok at Landon over his shoulder. Landon didn’t respond. He heard what Cortland was saying, but the words didn’t register in his brain. He was lost in his own mind, staring at the box, searching for a solution to his problem.

  “Apollo,” Cortland said with enough force to pull Landon from his thoughts, “you all right?”

  Landon did his best to put aside his current issue and pay attention to Cortland. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied unconvincingly. “I was just thinking about Atalanta and Castor. Do you think they’re going to make it back?” Concern for his teammates’ safe return served as the perfect cover for what he was really worried about—there was truth to it.

  “Don’t worry about them. They’re pretty capable, and I can’t imagine Parker going down without a fight. In fact . . .” Cortland turned away from Landon with a pensive look on his face. “Echo,” he said loud enough to get her attention, “can we get a twenty on our two missing compadres?”

  Without hesitation, Peregrine turned her head up, thin vestiges of light glimmering off her short, platinum blonde hair. Her sightless violet eyes looked beyond what stood in front of her, as she focused on what she sensed in the far reaches of her tactometric sphere.

  “They’re close,” Peregrine answered. “But the guards aren’t far behind them. It looks like Castor’s been hurt, which is slowing them down.”

  “Ares,” Cortland called up to Brock, “we need to be ready to take off the second Castor and Atalanta get here. Echo says they’re being followed, and I don’t think we still want to be here when the guards break through the tree line.”

  Brock disengaged his harness with purpose and stood up to address the team. There wasn’t an ounce of panic on his face, just a hard look of determination. Landon was impressed by his ability to remain strong under pressure.