The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,139

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 the 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.