The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,66

He almost could feel the physical sensation of the quickly chewed morsels fall into his empty stomach.

“So what happened?” Landon asked after swallowing down the last bite.

“After our session, I brought you here,” Dr. Brighton began. “It was the closest place for us to wait out the storm where we could warm up and you could rest a bit, but next thing I knew you were out like a light.

“I figured you’d nap for a few hours, but when the sun started to set, I wondered why you hadn’t woken up. I was afraid something was wrong so I asked Sofia out here to help me. She said you were fine, a little feverish, but fine, and she insisted that I move you off the couch and out of your wet clothes. So we put you in those and laid you in the bed. You’ve been there ever since and we’ve been waiting for you to wake up. That was three days ago.”

“Three days ago?” Landon asked in shock.

“You went through a pretty big ordeal out there . . . no thanks to me. And I’m hoping it worked. How do you feel?”

Peaceful. Once Landon thought about it, he realized he actually felt calm and rested. The gruesome nightmares of his mother’s lifeless body and the terrifying display of power he’d unleashed the night of his apocratusis had since left him without a single uninterrupted night’s sleep. From his three-day slumber, however, Landon couldn’t recall a nightmare—or a dream for that matter—that had entered his mind. His brain had finally shut off, and he actually just slept.

“Rested,” Landon replied. “But sore.”

“Understandable. I shoulder some of the blame for the, uh,”— Dr. Brighton motioned to the area covering his entire torso—“bruising.”

Memories of the stones pelting him over and over again flashed through Landon’s mind. “So who’s winning?” he asked, directing the conversation to the chessboard.

“Ah, my pupil, such cannot be determined.” Dr. Brighton spoke in a strange altered voice, attempting to imitate someone in an accent Landon couldn’t imagine was appropriate. “When it comes to chess, you must ‘be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.’

“You must ‘empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.’”

Sofia sat across the table with a grin stretched across her face, laughing softly.

“Who’s that? Confucius?” Landon asked.

“Bruce Lee.”

“Well, Bruce Lee,” Sofia interjected as she moved a piece on the board. “This time you crash. Check mate.”

“Wha-?” Dr. Brighton blurted in surprise.

“You went on the offensive to quickly.” Sofia’s response was pointedly nonchalant, a sort of passive-aggressive gloat directed at the heart of Dr. Brighton’s ego. “What is it you always say? ‘The two most—”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Dr. Brighton interrupted as he waved his hand around in front of him, seeming to swat away Sofia’s triumphant words. “You’ve won this time my Soviet Siren. Don’t expect it to happen again.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she commented as she rose from her chair. “But now that Landon’s awake and I have sufficiently defeated the king of the gods, I have to return to some work I’ve been neglecting. Landon would you like to come with me back to the Gymnasium?”

Soviet Siren? King of the gods? Landon felt like he was witnessing a moment not intended for him to see. The banter between Dr. Brighton and Sofia was uncomfortably personal and informal.

“Sure . . . I bet Riley’s freaking out. He’s probably thought up all sorts of things for what’s happened to me,” Landon replied.

“Good. I’ll go get your things, and a jacket—it’s a bit cold outside—and then we’ll head back.”

A few minutes later, Landon and Sofia made their way through the woods and were soon back at the Gymnasium. Once inside, Sofia gave Landon an unexpected hug and then silently departed, heading toward the Restricted Tower. Landon watched her slender body slink gracefully away. As she disappeared from view, the question of what was truly going on in the prohibited section of the Gymnasium returned to the forefront of his mind, but he dismissed his conjecturing and theorizing for the moment and went