The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,138

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