The Search for Artemis (The Chronicles of Landon Wicker) (14 page)

It wasn’t until five minutes before two that he decided to at least head toward the Atrium and listen to what Peregrine wanted to say. Her offer to help him was kind. It was the proposed time of their meeting that he found strange, but Landon’s brief encounter with her that afternoon had piqued his interest.

From the dormitories, Landon proceeded down the foreboding hallway that led to the Atrium. Its massive stone pillars disappeared into the darkness above with only their bases scarcely lit by a pale midnight glow. The silence was palpable, and the sound of his steps echoed ominously through the abandoned halls.

He turned down the hallway that lead straight into the Atrium, but once he saw the massive oak tree in the distance, he stopped. With every step, Riley’s voice crept into his mind, making him wonder if this late night rendezvous would warrant another tirade of attention he didn’t want. He stood there for a few minutes having the same argument with himself he’d been having since he left dinner. Could she really help? What did she know that no one else did? He didn’t want to cause another situation like before, but he also was running out of options.

“Landon, what are you waiting for?” Peregrine’s voice echoed through the hallway, surrounding Landon and startling him. There was no turning back now. She knew he’d come. He would just have to see if she could help.

Peregrine stood stoically under the tree. The clouds of the afternoon storm had dispersed and given rise to a clear night sky with only the stars and a large luminous moon hanging overhead. Beams of moonlight streamed through the glass dome, sheathing the marble of the Atrium in a porcelain sheen and making Peregrine’s figure gleam like it was covered in polished silver.

“Please, come here,” she beckoned, raising both arms toward him. Her voice was ethereal and calm.

Landon plodded over to her and stopped a few feet outside of her reach.

“Please, come,” she repeated. “Take my hands and sit with me.”

Landon cautiously placed his hands in hers, but his worries were needless. She delicately closed her hands around his and pulled him closer. Her hands felt soft and smooth, like alabaster. She guided him to a spot under a large branch and descended to the floor, sitting with her legs crossed. Landon joined her, mimicking her position, and stared wonderingly at her.

“I can feel how nervous you are. Your entire body is tense,” she said. “I know you don’t really know me, but I wasn’t lying before. I think I can help you. Your problem is your sense of touch—it’s blocked.”

“My sense of touch?” Landon asked.

“Yes. It’s how we use our gifts,” she continued. “We reach out and touch the area around us. I was born blind, but what no one realizes is that I can see more clearly than anyone else in this place. I’m not strong—my lifting is nearly nonexistent—but my abilities, they are my sight. That’s how I knew it was you standing in the hallway just now, and how I knew exactly where to find you this afternoon to tell you I could help. I can feel you. I can feel everyone in this place. And that feeling—that’s your issue. You can’t figure out how to touch.”

“I’ve tried,” Landon said.

“But I believe you are going about it the wrong way.” A beam of light streamed through the branches casting a shadow across her compassionate face. “Please, all I ask is that you try something with me tonight. If it doesn’t work, you can continue doing what you were doing.”

“Why do you want to help me? We don’t even know each other.” Landon searched to understand the enigmatic stranger sitting before him. He knew she was only a year older than him, but her impaired eyes appeared to run deep with wisdom.

“Because I know what it’s like to be alone. I know what it’s like to be trapped in a place where everyone around you can do something you can’t, something that seems so basic to them yet impossible for you. I know what it’s like to be lost.”

“You think I’m lost?”

“I know you’ve spent almost every night since you’ve gotten here on the fifth floor of the Library poring through books, trying to understand who you are and what you’re becoming . . . searching for answers but finding none.”

“How do you know that?” Landon asked defensively as he rose to his feet.

“I told you, I can sense it,” she explained. “Now, please, sit back down and let’s see if you can at least solve one of your problems.”

It took a few moments before his curiosity grabbed hold of him, and he returned to the floor.

“Good. . . . Now let’s start with this,” she proceeded as she slipped a simple silver band off her finger and placed it in her palm. “Lift this. You don’t have to move it or place it back on my finger or anything. Just lift it off my palm and let it hover there.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. . . . Lift the ring.”

Landon exhaled deeply, thinking her request ridiculous, but he decided to at least humor her. He focused his attention on the tiny circle of metal resting in the palm of her hand. He then tensed every muscle in his body, willing the ring to rise into the air.

“That’s never going to work. Can you even feel the ring?” Peregrine asked while knowing the answer. “If you can’t feel it, you aren’t going to be able to move it. Tell me, what’s in this room?”

Landon looked puzzled, unsure if she was asking a trick question. He cautiously replied, “Umm, the oak, some pillars, you, your ring and I.”

“Wrong,” she said. “You’re relying too much on your other senses. When I asked you that question, you looked around and told me what you saw. It’s expected. You seeing people were taught to rely on your sight to identify something, but vision is limited. You’ve only touched the surface of what’s in this place. Now close your eyes and relax. You’re way too tense. And clear your mind. Don’t try to think.”

As she continued, Landon complied with her instructions. He was lost to her intentions with her seemingly random commands, but he was starting to feel comfortable in her knowledge and hopeful that he might get something out of it.

“So tell me again, what’s in this room? Don’t tell me what you already know is here, what else?”

Landon racked his brain for an answer. He didn’t know what she wanted. After a length of awkward silence, Landon began to crack his eyelids hoping to see something else that could provide some insight, only to be scolded the second his eyelids opened.

“I don’t know,” Landon replied, frustrated.

“Stop trying to find some trick to this. You’re thinking about ‘how’ too much and not just doing it.”

Raising his voice, Landon said, “That’s because I don’t know how to
just do it
. This was such a mistake. You obviously can’t help me.”

Landon started to lean over on his arm to get up and leave, but stopped when Peregrine’s hand pressed on his knee.

“Landon, please don’t leave.” Her voice sounded empathetic and gentle. Landon settled back on the floor and listened to Peregrine’s words. “Close your eyes again; clear your mind of all your thoughts; forget everything else and focus on your body. Concentrate on your breath and feel your heart beating in your chest. Now follow that beat as it courses through you. Feel it pulse at your fingertips and in your toes.”

Landon reluctantly followed her directions. He slowed his breathing and worked to center himself. He began to feel his heart beating in his chest.
Thump thump, thump thump
. It was strong and steady. It felt so powerful, he wasn’t sure how he wasn’t aware of it all the time. He continued to feel his heart beating and began to sense every inch of his body as his blood coursed through him.

“Now, keep following that beat. Follow it as it moves outside of your body.”

Suddenly, Landon became aware of everything around him as the wave moved through the room. It was like radar in a submarine. He felt things around him but couldn’t identify them. He could sense their weight and their presence but nothing was clear. They were just blurry blips in his mind.

With every heartbeat he gained a broader sense of his surroundings. He figured the large object he felt was the massive oak, but in that he began to sense the thousands of leaves on its branches and perceived, albeit faintly, the motion of hundreds of little things moving over the bark. He noticed objects varying in size around the roots of the tree that he imagined were stones and rocks. He could feel the pillars around him, and the dome overhead. He could feel Peregrine sitting in front of him, and lightly resting in her palm, he felt the ring.

“I feel it! I can feel it!” Landon was elated, feeling the weeks of failure and disappointment washed over with optimism and excitement.

He opened his eyes, his beaming stare fixed on the wondrous girl before him who had an exuberant smile stretched across her face.

“So what’s in the room?” she asked through her smile.

“So much more than I thought, but I can’t really tell you.”

“I should’ve expected that. I’ve been doing this for so long I forgot how it starts,” she said. “As you get better, you should be able to actually see everything for what it is. Instead of giant fuzzy blobs, the things should come into focus and you’ll actually see that it’s a tree or a rock or a bug. It’ll also become instinctual. You won’t have to shut your eyes and concentrate like you just did; you’ll just know what’s there.”

• • • • •

Closing the copy of
Alice in Wonderland and
Through the Looking-Glass
, Landon sat up in the large chair and closed his eyes. Peregrine’s words from weeks ago replayed in his head, and he became aware of everything around him as he accessed his powers. Since that night, Landon steadily gained more control over his abilities and learned more and more about himself. In Tactometry, which he could now actually participate in, he discovered that his extensity was somewhere in the range of twenty-five meters, creating his tactometric sphere. It was relatively large compared to most, but his recent lessons in Telekinetics taught him that sensing was not even half the battle. He had feeling, but no finesse.

That morning, case in point, Landon had accidentally given Riley a black eye after his training ball zoomed across the room, ricocheted off the wall and connected with his friend’s unsuspecting face. It happened in seconds and ended with Riley laying 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.