The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,44

unconscious on the tile floor. It took ten minutes to wake him up, and Landon had to wait after the session ended to talk privately with Dr. Brighton.

The conversation went the same way it always did. Dr. Brighton told Landon that he couldn’t keep endangering students with his presence in the training sessions. Landon apologized, but had no real answer to explain his failure, and the doctor eventually consoled him and said that he needed to try harder. But this time, the doctor decided conversations weren’t enough and assigned Landon mandatory private training sessions with him on the weekends.

“I’m going to personally make sure you figure this out. For your benefit, as well as for the safety of everyone else in this place,” he told Landon as he leaned against his desk. Starting the next Saturday, Landon would have to meet his instructor at seven in the morning at the forest line on the north side of the facility, and he would be required to do so every Saturday until Dr. Brighton was satisfied with his progress.

As Landon wondered what kind of training required him to venture into the woods at the crack of dawn, he thought about Peregrine and contemplated whether she might have some other techniques to miraculously save him from these painfully early weekend sessions.

Following their meeting in the Atrium, he only saw Peregrine on a few occasions, mostly in passing. He wouldn’t admit it, but Landon was avoiding her. Her intimate knowledge of his feelings and late night wanderings to the Library unnerved him. What else did she know? Did she know what happened in the apartment?

So far, he had managed to keep the true nature of his apocratusis a secret. He didn’t want the student body to know they were standing alongside a murderer, and the photo of the bus incident was powerful enough to squelch any questions concerning his past. People’s blind assumptions were the best way to disguise the truth.

A few times, however, Landon seriously contemplated telling Riley everything. Over the months they’d grown to be close friends. Landon thought he could trust him with anything, but the way Riley went on excitedly about his mischievous adventures with his brother and sister back in Colorado made him wonder if he would understand. Riley appeared to have a great relationship with everyone in his family, so Landon couldn’t understand how Riley would be able to handle a friendship with a parent killer.

Like any good friend, Riley seemed to want to know. On many occasions, he asked Landon about his family and his life before the Gymnasium, but Landon diverted the question, changed the subject or just remained silent.

Landon opened his eyes and looked down at the worn cover of the imaginative tale he had finished, choking back a lump that formed in his throat as he thought about his mother. He didn’t go a day without thinking about her, and he thanked the Gymnasium for keeping him busy to the point that he didn’t have enough time to break down.

Intent on using telekinesis to file away the large book on the shelf facing him, Landon re-entered his meditative state. He sensed the pulse of his powers as they traveled around the room. He felt the book in his lap, the chair, the reading lamp, the tables and the bookshelves around him. As he concentrated harder, he could even feel the spiral ramp that ran up the Library’s center and the floors above and below him. Once he’d calibrated himself to his surroundings, Landon reopened his eyes and stared at the book, but before he could raise it, his body sensed something new. It was moving quickly in the hall. It had to be a person, and they were sprinting down the ramp.

Wondering who else was up at this hour, Landon got out of the chair and placed Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on the table. He briskly moved through the maze of bookshelves and stepped out onto the large rotunda, but the person was nowhere to be seen.

Shutting his eyes and concentrating, Landon sensed the person as they neared the bottom of the ramp; he moved over to the thick wooden railing and looked down only to see a figure bolt across the floor, heading toward the southern entrance to the Gymnasium.

“Wait!” he yelled down at them.

The mysterious figure froze in the middle of the ground level and looked up at him.

The person wore all black, carried a black messenger bag, and,