The Prince's Trap Read online

  After hours of waiting for his name to be called—Landon loathed the fact that his last name always fell near the end of the roll—he’d run the gamut of his own thoughts and, determining that stewing would only exacerbate his nerves, became bored. He now wished for some company. He’d welcome even idle conversation with strangers, anything to make the time pass more quickly.

  Unfortunately, by the time that realization hit him, his close friends had all left the room. Landon snickered at the oddity that the majority of his friends’ names fell within the first three letters of the alphabet: Riley Burton, Cortland Cartwright, Katie Leigh Chapman, Joshua and Jeremiah Crane. Well, the latter two weren’t close friends, but they were hilarious and would have definitely helped pass the time. The only people left in his mind were Peregrine and Celia, but when he found Peregrine sitting in the back corner of the room, she looked extremely pensive. Her determination to do well on her run was obvious. Landon knew how much the Pantheon meant to her and wondered if she feared being cast aside should she not perform well in this test. Unwilling to disturb her, Landon searched for his other option, no matter how fruitless he imagined it’d be.

  “Celia!” Landon called out to her as she walked by his table with a small plate of afternoon snacks to tide her over. She bore a strong, determined expression as she moved purposefully between the tables, without any indication that she had heard him. As if he no longer existed to her.

  Landon glanced down and away from her, ashamed by his role in their failing friendship. A sense of loneliness washed over him as he thought about her. She was his confidant—his partner. He’d barely managed to get by without her, and now that Celia was conscious again, it was as if she were still lying in the medical wing. How can I fix this? he wondered as he continued to sit by himself.

  As time crept by, the bodies in the cafeteria dwindled. Now just a few students peppered the benches with only the voices of two girls audible. Landon watched as Sam Willards, sitting alone, jotted notes and tabulations in his notebook, more concerned with the run of wagers than his run of the trials.

  “Selena Umbra!” Sofia called, signaling one of the chatting girls to stop mid-sentence and proceed out of the cafeteria. Just twenty minutes later Sofia took the floor again and requested “Landon Wicker!”

  A burst of energy surged through Landon as he rose from the bench. The dull and prolonged wait had sapped him of any nervousness or pangs of anticipation, and the sudden elation of finally leaving the cafeteria was enough to reinvigorate him.

  Landon approached Sofia for his instructions as every other student had done before him. When he got close to her, a smile flashed across her face for a split second. It was the first deviation from her severe demeanor Landon had seen all day.

  “Proceed to Room 242 for your Telekinetics exam. Dr. Brighton is waiting for you,” she said in her authoritative tone. “Through the dormitories is the preferred route. You have two minutes to get there.”

  Landon waited a moment to make sure he’d heard the entire instruction, and then walked past Sofia toward the exit of the cafeteria. But after just a few steps, Landon heard Sofia call softly, “And Landon,”—he swiveled around to face her—“good luck,” she finished in the soft, melodic voice Landon knew as her true self.

  • • • • •

  Landon opened the door to the training room. He’d never been in this one before, but it was just like all the others, wainscoted in dark wood with the top half of the walls painted a shade of off-white; however, the tables, chairs and desks were cleared, leaving only a single table in the center of the room. Dr. Brighton stood beside it, finishing his notes on Selena’s exercise.

  “Landon Wicker,” Dr. Brighton read off his pad before looking up at the familiar face staring at him from the door. “Come in. Don’t be nervous.”

  Landon stepped into the room, the door shutting automatically with a startling click behind him. As he approached the table, he noticed what was waiting for him. There were three slender wooden pegs rising from a small platform, and threaded onto the far left peg were eight discs forming a small-tiered tower. Landon had to hold back his satisfaction. He was intimately familiar with this puzzle. It was the Tower of Hanoi, a game his mother had in their apartment that he learned as a kid. He felt bad for his unfair advantage in this stage of the trials. Not everyone would be familiar with the workings of the contraption.

  When she introduced him to it, his mother told him this fantastic story about the Tower of Hanoi. Apparently, a French mathematician, Édouard Lucas, inspired by an Indian temple he’d visited, invented the puzzle. In that temple, she said with mystifying fervor at the time, were three timeworn posts surrounded by sixty-four golden discs. According to the legend, Brahmin priests moved the discs from post to post in accordance with an ancient prophecy that when the last move of the puzzle was completed, the world would end. To this day, she said, those priests continued to move the discs from one post to the other, with each move counting down toward the end of days.

  Back in their apartment, Landon had spent hours working on the puzzle—the one he had as a child only had six discs, rather than eight—but once he realized how it worked, it lost the majority of its allure. He would then remove a disc, taking its starting number from an even six to an odd five, which required a different sequence of moves to solve. But, like a Rubik’s Cube, the intrigue was housed in the solving, so once the mystery was gone and the logic understood, it was no more difficult than bouncing a ball against a wall. The moves were simply a sequence of events leading to the solution. As he got older, Landon would play with the Tower of Hanoi just to pass the time, finding it only slightly more engaging than tapping his fingers on the tabletop while he waited for dinner.

  “Landon, this is a timed trial, meaning you will be scored based on how long it takes you to complete it. I will be timing you with this.” Dr. Brighton lifted a stopwatch dangling from around his neck with noticeable indifference, the watch swinging slowly from his lax grip on the string. He spoke with a certain amount of boredom, reading from a script he’d repeated over a hundred times by Landon’s arrival. “Before you is a puzzle. You must move the discs from one peg to the other without ever placing a larger disc on top of a smaller one, until the entire tower has been moved to this peg.” Dr. Brighton waved to the one nearest him, two pegs to the right of the tower’s current location.

  Landon nodded in understanding, knowing the rules already, and then squared up to the table, widening his stance and readying himself as his competitive spirit took hold. Landon kept his focus on the pegs, feeling them and the discs with his abilities. He sensed the discs were noticeably heavier as they became larger, most likely an attempt to make the task telekinetically more difficult. Out of the corner of his eye, Landon saw Dr. Brighton lift the stopwatch from against his chest and cradle it in his hand, his thumb resting on the start button at the top.

  “You may begin . . .” he said, his inflection rising as an announcer starting a race, before he finished with, “now.” Landon heard the starting beep of the stopwatch a split second after Dr. Brighton told him to go.

  Without a hint of hesitation, Landon grabbed the first disc with his powers and moved it to the middle peg. Eight discs, an even number, so he knew that was the first move. He proceeded to move the next disc off the tower and to the farthest peg. Then he moved the first disc to the farthest peg, setting it on top of the one he’d just moved, the third disc to the now-empty second peg, the first disc back to the starting peg, the second disc on top of the third disc in the middle and then the first disc on top of the second disc, creating a tower of three. The fourth disc he moved to the farthest peg, and then he continued the sequence of moves as he knew them to complete the puzzle.

  Five minutes into the exercise, he was getting close to the solution but felt himself tiring. This, he assumed, was part of the test. The way he saw it, t
he first part of the test came down to understanding the puzzle. It was a game of logic, and the students who couldn’t understand it would use up all their time trying to figure it out. The second part dealt with possessing the telekinetic fortitude to manipulate the discs effectively, accurately threading them from one peg to the other. And then in the end, it became a matter of endurance. The constant moving of the heavier and heavier pieces wore on Landon’s strength, but he was in the homestretch.

  The starting peg on the left held only the largest disc and the final peg to the right lay open to start the final transition to the completed tower. Landon closed his telekinetic force around the disc and tried to lift it up, but to his surprise, the disc didn’t move. He mustered a bit more of his strength and concentrated, motioning his hands and arms to center his intent, connecting his mind and body through the physical motions as Dr. Brighton had taught him, but the disc still didn’t move.

  Landon felt frustration simmering to a boil inside him, but with one glance at Dr. Brighton, he realized the levels of this examination were not as clear as he’d thought. True to Dr. Brighton’s constant desire to teach hidden, profound lessons, Landon realized that this was a trick his professor had added to see how the student reacted. After a moment’s thought, he guessed that the final disc was probably coated in ichorium, making it impossible to lift telekinetically. Then how am I supposed to complete the puzzle? he wondered.

  Thinking back to Dr. Brighton’s initial speech, Landon replayed the instructions in his head, imagining there to be a clue hidden in his words. He couldn’t figure it out. He stepped back from the puzzle and stared at the pegs with occasional glances over to Dr. Brighton, who now wore a devious expression on his face but gave no hint as to the detail Landon was missing. Then like a dart striking the bull’s eye, Landon had an epiphany.

  He never said we had to complete this telekinetically, Landon reminded himself. I assumed we had to use our abilities to do this entire thing, but he never said that. Landon sighed, disappointed in himself. He’d been taught from a young age the dangers of assumptions.

  Landon directed his attention to Dr. Brighton with a telling expression, his eyebrow raised as he tilted his head toward him. A satisfied smile flickered on his teacher’s face, but when Landon saw the stopwatch resting in Dr. Brighton’s hand, his attentions shifted back to the puzzle.

  Stepping up to the table, Landon couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it earlier. It was Dr. Brighton’s most basic lesson: “Our abilities are a gift, but reliance upon them is sure to bring failure.” He’d said it many times in their training sessions, reiterating that sometimes their abilities would not be the best solution to a problem and dependence upon a talent would only hurt them—for if they found themselves in a situation where their abilities were neutralized, they’d be stranded. “Mental fortitude and quick thinking are the only sure way to survive whatever life throws at you,” he had told them.

  Landon reached out and grabbed the largest disc on both sides and slid it up the peg. It was heavy and difficult to move given the awkward way he had to hold and lift it to get the high peg through the hole. He staggered backward from the weight once it cleared the top of the first peg. After recovering his balance, he stepped to the right and maneuvered the disc onto the empty peg next to Dr. Brighton. Once Landon was sure he’d lined it up properly, he let go of the disc, allowing it to fall unsupported to the table. He watched with satisfaction as Dr. Brighton jumped slightly from the resounding smack the disc made when it connected with the table.

  With that out of the way, Landon went back to using his telekinetic abilities to finish the puzzle, determining it to be faster than doing it manually given the height of the pegs and the awkward angle he’d have to work with. About a minute later, he was done. The moment the smallest disc connected, forming the completed tower on the end post, Dr. Brighton stopped his watch with a beep.

  “Great job,” Dr. Brighton said to him as he jotted Landon’s final time down on his notepad. “Dropping the weight was a bit much though, don’t you think?” he asked with a hint of a smile.

  Landon just smirked in reply.

  “You should head to the next task,” Dr. Brighton continued. “Room 251 with Professor Tzu. Tactometry.”

  Landon nodded and headed out of the room, pleased with himself and his performance. As the door closed behind him, he wondered if anyone could beat his time. The following tests, however, left Landon feeling far less confident.

  The Tactometry exam was an exact replica of the exercise Landon’s class was doing when he accidentally put Celia in her coma. Like the Telekinesis task, it was a timed trial. The clock stopped once the ball, hidden in a labyrinthine puzzle box, was released from the maze into the student’s hand. It took Landon over an hour to complete. The maze, though far less complex than the one they’d used in the training session, was still difficult to navigate, and his patience wore thin numerous times while he struggled to complete the exercise.

  When he’d walked in, a few students still worked at it. Tutors, charged with handling the stopwatches and timing the students, stood beside identical testing stations, each merely a table with a puzzle box resting on top of it. Professor Tzu paced the room, overseeing the operation and watching the students work. Given the difficulties during training, they had expected some students to have a hard time, and unlike the Telekinesis exam, there was no advantage to watching someone else work.

  Following the completion of the task, Landon headed toward the final trial—Thought Reception. Even though he was discouraged by his poor performance in freeing the ball from the puzzle box, Landon was glad he’d done it faster than some people who started before him. When he made it to the room for the Thought Reception examination, he found a line of students waiting their turn. He walked to the back of the queue, standing patiently as students filed in and out of the room in exact two-minute intervals. Landon only waited ten minutes before his turn arrived.

  Transcription was the name of the game in the last stage. Professor Clemens, with his trademark military crew cut and beady, serious eyes, sat at a table in the bare-bones training room, an empty chair across from him. A piece of blank paper and a pen awaited each student. The task was simple: Professor Clemens read a passage of text to himself while projecting his thoughts outwardly, which allowed the student to hear what he read. All Landon had to do was write down exactly what he heard. They’d score his performance based upon accuracy. Landon was terrible at Thought Reception, though, and when he finally managed to hone in on Professor Clemens’ words, he’d missed what Landon imagined to be a substantial portion of the text. He wrote down what he could and left the room feeling totally defeated before he made his way to the Atrium to stew with the rest of the student body as the final few completed their exams.

  Even before the Atrium was in sight, Landon heard the roar of chattering students as they excitedly discussed their successes and failures at the various tasks and assessed the likelihood of winning their bets. When he turned the corner, he was dumbfounded by how packed the Atrium appeared. His fellow students swarmed the circular room, congregating near pillars and appearing dwarfed by the massive oak tree as the late afternoon sun reflected off the mirrors in the center of the glass dome. A few of the tutors stood at the entryways to the Atrium, ensuring the students didn’t get into trouble or wander around while the testing was in session.

  Apprehensive, Landon slinked past one of the tutors and merged with the crowd. Feelings of claustrophobia and anxiety pulsed through him as people bumped and shoved him. Weaving through groups, he tried to find a quiet spot, and eventually found himself pressed against the trunk of the oak tree, the roots providing a bit of a buffer between him and the corralled masses.

  Landon looked out on the crowd, searching for anyone he cared about. Even though he hadn’t made a wager, he was curious how everyone had performed and wondered i
f anything interesting had surfaced while he mulled in silence in the cafeteria for all those hours. After scanning the crowd for a few minutes, he caught Riley’s eye.

  Riley pushed through the crowd, navigating it with unbelievable ease, and made his way to Landon. He’d either been given the go-ahead by Katie Leigh to talk again or the excitement of the situation made him forget their need for discretion. Soon enough, Riley stood on a knotted piece of root close enough for Landon to hear him talk.

  “So how did you do?” Riley asked, noticeably excited.

  “All right,” Landon replied. “I know I did well on the first stage, but I’m not sure about the other two.”

  “Well, I hope you made it to the tournament,” Riley added. Landon gave him a quizzical look, coming to the realization that Riley may have placed a bet on that outcome. “But everyone’s been talking about Brighton’s test. Some people are really pissed about it.”

  “Really?” Landon asked, confused. Now that Riley said it, he realized there was an aggravated tension in the air.

  “Yeah, apparently a lot of people quit because they couldn’t figure it out.” Riley bore a guilty expression. “I’m not gonna lie, I was one of them.”

  Landon had never expected the trials to elicit such reactions. He also couldn’t help feeling a sense of gratitude that he’d seen the Tower of Hanoi before. He could only imagine what it would have felt like to move the discs one after the other without seeing the pattern. His advantage was greater than he had realized.

  “So what happens now?” Landon asked as he continued to glance around him as the students restlessly shuffled around the Atrium.

  “Once the testing is over, we’ll be free to do what we want. And we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see the brackets.” Riley’s voice tinged with uncontrollable excitement. “The tournament this year is going to be amazing! I can feel it.”