by Lori Bond
Will glanced at the sky as if the answer was there. He then looked deep into my eyes, like he was the Seer trying to pull out a vision. Finally, he took a deep breath. My heart sank. He was going to think I was pressuring him like Arthur had said, and he’d now say no. I didn’t have the coding skills yet to hack my way into a new Percival. I hadn’t been lying about that.
“Yes,” Will said. “I’m in.”
16
WHERE I FIND AN UPSIDE TO BEING A KEEP
WILL WAS EVEN BETTER AT CODING THAN I HAD SUSPECTED. HE WAS no Ginny, but he had our outdated Percival ready for my modifications in only two days.
“You could have totally put a LANCE backdoor into the Keep systems.” I stared at his elegant additions. The Percival in front of us was now just as effective as the one running the Rook even if this version was years out of date. I turned to stare at Will’s satisfied smirk. “Why didn’t you? You could have done it the day you got here.”
“That day was a little busy,” Will said in a dry tone. “Someone jumped off a building if you remember.”
“How could I forget? You and Arthur remind me at least once a week.” I gave him a smile though so he’d know I wasn’t actually annoyed. “And you jump off buildings now, too.” Starting the day before yesterday, Will had joined Arthur and me in our training session. To my disgust, Will in his Galahad armor took out five knights this morning. After five and a half weeks my personal best was still two.
“I don’t jump off buildings without armor on.”
“Stop avoiding the question.” I stuck my finger in Will’s face. “Why isn’t there a LANCE backdoor in the Keep Systems courtesy of Will’s sneaky coding skills?”
Will crossed his arms over his chest almost as if he were hugging himself rather than being defiant. He half turned away. “How could you think I would betray Arthur like that? Betray Ginny after all they’ve done for me? Arthur promised to protect me, me, even from LANCE itself if he had too. I don’t know if he meant it. He probably didn’t, but he said it.”
It was a good thing Will wasn’t looking at me since my mouth was opening and closing like a floundering fish.
“Do you think so little of me?” Will added, his tone so low I almost didn’t hear him. “Do you really think I would do something like that to them? Open their secrets up to LANCE to exploit?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had thought Will had started drifting away from LANCE the day he got Galahad, but that was foolish of me. If Will had been a good little agent, he would have been following his orders, at least at the start. Will had never followed his directive. At least, he hadn’t done any of the stuff that hadn’t involved training and reporting on me.
No wonder he’d been so stiff those first couple of weeks. He’d been fighting an internal war between his agent training and his preference for Arthur’s style of heroism. After all, Arthur hadn’t promised to keep Will safe because Arthur liked him. I remembered that promise, made the first night Will spent here, just hours after I’d had my first horrible vision and had run away from home like a frightened child. Arthur hadn’t even been polite to Will back then, resenting a LANCE agent in his home. Still, he’d offered Will his protection not because he was a superhero or even to be kind, but because Arthur was fundamentally a decent human being, and it was the right thing to do.
I had to wonder if fundamentally decent human beings ran LANCE. In theory, LANCE was dedicated to the greater good, but I wondered how often they actually did the right thing.
I stood to hug Will, but my door flew open, slamming against the wall with a bang. Will and I both jumped, and Will reached for the gun he kept in a holster on his thigh.
Arthur came bouncing into the room. “You have got to see …” he began, but his voice trailed off. He took in Will’s strained face and my stricken one. “What’s the matter? Has something happened?” His eyes narrowed at both of us. “Are you two fighting?” He nodded as if he’d decided on the answer already. “Because Ginny and I have this wonderful counselor woman we talk to whenever we get in the big fights. Course,” he added, tapping his chin, “we also talk to her once a week for stress and stuff. Ginny sometimes finds dealing with the whole Pendragon issue a bit much and then Luciana, the counselor you know, has to help us mediate boundaries.” Arthur made a sour expression. “The boundaries always seem to be mine,” he complained. “No knights standing guard in the bedrooms. No playing in the labs after midnight. No sending a Percival controlled Pendragon in my place to social functions.”
Arthur’s babbling didn’t seem like it would ever stop. I stared in disbelief at the words vomiting from his mouth until Will pushed past Arthur with a mumbled apology and a vague reference to reports to write. He fled the room.
Arthur shut up and stared after Will for a second before closing my bedroom door. With all of his original spontaneity gone, Arthur settled himself on my couch and raised his eyebrows at me. “Well?” he said when I didn’t respond. “What’s the matter with Will? Do I need to call the counselor for you two, or are you going to tell me what’s really going on?”
“We’re not fighting,” I said.
“I didn’t think you were.” Arthur crossed his arms and stared at me. “What’s wrong with Will?”
I shut the cover on my tablet so Arthur wouldn’t see my Percival code. I sat down and swiveled in my chair and faced Arthur. “Why do you think it’s Will? This could be about me.”
Arthur gave me a look that screamed, “oh, please.” Instead, he said, “Because Will just ran out of this room looking like he was on the verge of tears. Now, LANCE agents are carved from cold marble and wrapped in steel hardened in the forges of Vulcan’s fiery pit. That cult they call a school beats any emotion they might possess out of them. It’s nice to see that Will is human and not another Conservatory-created drone, but that young man is beyond upset if he’s lost his conditioning to this extent.”
I pulled on the hem of my T-shirt, not sure what I could say that wouldn’t betray Will but might help him instead.
“You need to be nice to Will, Princess,” Arthur said.
I looked up in surprise, but Arthur wasn’t looking at me but at the door as if he could still see Will on the other side. He turned back and nodded. I’d never seen him so serious, not even when he’d been explaining how my armor worked. “Ginny and I did some extensive digging after that first night Will was here. Remember? That night you told me LANCE would have Will killed? It took us awhile to get all the records, but it turns out he wasn’t exaggerating about retirement. Conservatory-trained agents have ridiculously short life-spans considering how much money LANCE spends training them.” Arthur shook his head. “Such a waste.” He rubbed his eyes for a moment before he seemed to remember what we were discussing.
“Then there’s some mystery surrounding Will that LANCE or possibly Stormfield removed from the online files. They’ve never sent a kid to the Conservatory at six like Will, not before or since. Everyone else starts at eleven or twelve. And although it isn’t stated explicitly, Stormfield seems to have done his best to isolate and monitor Will to an extent that goes beyond any other LANCE operative I’ve seen. Stormfield resents what he doesn’t know and fears what he can’t control. He seems to both resent and fear Will.”
I stuck my hands between my knees so Arthur wouldn’t see them shaking. “What does that mean?”
“It means I was much too hard on Will when he first got here. I was mad that LANCE had finally gotten a foothold in my house. I didn’t trust Will because of well, stuff …” Arthur’s voice trailed off, and he gave me a sheepish grin. “And, I was jealous I would need to share your time with someone else. Twelve years you were gone, Princess.” Arthur looked away again. “I’m not proud, but I resent every minute you spend with Will or Cassie or Ginny. I know I can’t cram twelve years of time into a few weeks.” Arthur waved away the objections I wasn’t making. “The gods know I’ve spent enough time in counseling on that subject, but that doesn’t mea
n I don’t want to try.” Arthur gave me a small tentative smile.
The smile I returned was just as awkward.
Arthur’s smile faded. “But beyond needing to be kind to the lonely boy I suspect is trapped in all that agent training, I’m worried about the threat presented by Stormfield, and to a lesser extent, the entire LANCE organization. I’m not sure how safe Will is with them.”
“Exactly.” I scrambled for my desk drawer where I kept my sketches. Yanking the drawer open so hard I nearly pulled it all the way out of the desk, I pawed through my drawings trying to find the ones I’d made of Will in captivity. I pulled them out and hurried across the room, dropping them in Arthur’s lap. Here was my chance to help Will without having to tell Arthur about all the awful stuff Stormfield had wanted Will to do.
“Dad, look. It’s a vision I’ve been having of Will.” I pointed at the drawings when Arthur seemed focused on me and not them. He glanced down and sort of growled as he took in the bruises on Will’s face.
“I think this happens at LANCE. I think Will’s in a LANCE holding cell here. Will said something about Stormfield expecting some kind of report in four days.” I swallowed to give myself a little time to think. Report sounded vague enough I decided. “It happens then.”
Arthur glared at the page for another moment, but then he snatched the pictures up and stormed from my room. At first I thought he would confront Will, but instead he crossed the hall and hammered on Cassie and Patrick’s door.
“Something the matter?” Cassie asked.
Before she’d even gotten the door all the way open, Arthur thrust my sketches in her face. “Were you planning on telling me about this?”
Cassie looked surprised and then put out. “You didn’t know?”
“Is that Ginny in the picture? Elaine? Me?” Arthur didn’t wait for Cassie to answer. “It is not, so no, I didn’t know.” He pushed past her into the room. “Cassie, we’re supposed to help each other with this kind of stuff.” His voice had calmed down, but Arthur still looked upset. “You know my limits.” He kind of collapsed down onto her sofa with his head in his hands, his eyes covered. He sat there for a moment before looking back up. “They haven’t changed.”
Although Cassie seemed to understand, I didn’t. “What is going on?” I asked, but Arthur and Cassie didn’t seem to hear me. Patrick, who had just wandered into the room carrying two suitcases, answered instead.
“I’ve got to be back on the Danger Road set tomorrow, and Cassie’s coming with me.” Patrick sat the suitcases down near the door where I still hovered. I tried to nudge one aside, but the thing had to weigh at least a hundred pounds. Patrick had carried them like they were empty.
“I’d forgotten,” Arthur said. He tried to give them one of his devil-may-care grins, but he couldn’t quite keep the despair from his face. “Are you sure you have to go with him, Cassie? It’s seems like we’re being hemmed in on all sides. There’s this LANCE threat to Will, the Dreki are still after Elaine, and we got six more death threats against Ginny and me this morning.”
“Death threats,” I squeaked, but Cassie waved them away. “You get dozens of death threats every day,” she said.
“One of them was credible.” Arthur gave her a meaningful look.
Cassie nodded, understanding what he meant. “And has it been dealt with?”
“Of course. LANCE arrested the Moral Menace this morning.”
Cassie shrugged. “Then you don’t need me here.” She sat down next to Arthur and grabbed one of his hands. She patted it in a consoling manner, the way a mother calms a frightened child. “Arthur, I See visions. I don’t fight battles. I can get visions on a beach in Fiji just as easily as I can here in your fortress against the world.”
“Fiji? Is that where you’re headed?” I turned to Arthur. “I want to go with Patrick too.”
Like I had intended, that got a real smile out of Arthur. “Not a chance, Princess. You’re not going anywhere without armor until this Dreki situation calms down.” He leaned forward as if sharing a deep secret even though everyone in the room could hear him. “And you do not want to take your armor anywhere near a beach if you can help it. Sand gets everywhere, I mean everywhere. Do you know how hard it is to get sand out of an armored glove? And the blisters it rubs until it’s gone?” Arthur shook his head in a solemn manner, but the gleam had returned to his eyes. He seemed to have rebounded from whatever horrors worried him. “Definitely no beaches for now.”
I mock-sighed a huge exaggerated gust of air. “I guess I’ll live.”
Arthur stood up and herded me out of the room. “Let’s give them some privacy. Besides, once all this is over, Ginny and I will take you and the boyfriend to the island we own in the Caribbean.”
I ignored the boyfriend jab. I assumed he meant Will. Will and I might get along better and share secrets these days, but we were a far cry from being boyfriend and girlfriend. That wasn’t something I even pretended could happen. It seemed too far-fetched.
“You own an island?” I said instead.
“Six,” Arthur replied. “But the one in the Caribbean is my favorite.”
“You own six islands.” I didn’t bother hiding my disbelief.
“We,” Arthur corrected. “They’re owned by the family although your large trust holds your portion.”
Until now I had focused on all the disadvantages of being Arthur Keep’s daughter: the archvillain nemesis, the tabloids’ interest, and the omnipresent danger.
“I own part of an island.” It didn’t sound any more believable just because I had said it out loud.
“Six of them,” Arthur called back. He headed for the great hall, but I went back to my room, shaking my head. Maybe being Arthur Keep’s kid had some perks after all.
17
WHERE PERCIVAL GETS A MAKEOVER
WILL DIDN’T COME OUT OF HIS ROOM FOR THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON, not even when I took him a tray for dinner. He was polite, but he didn’t invite me in, and I didn’t push. With Patrick and Cassie gone and Will hiding in his room, dinner was a quiet affair.
Ginny talked at Arthur about some upcoming meeting through most of dinner. Even though she’d stressed how important the meeting was, and how important it was that he attend, he didn’t seem to hear a word she said. Although she never raised her voice, by the end of dinner she was making outrageous suggestions. Arthur didn’t even notice when she informed him she was divorcing him to take up with the recently widowed Prince of Sweden. She winked at me so I’d know she was only messing with Arthur, but he didn’t notice. Around a mouth full of food, he told her to do “whatever was best,” and went back to staring into space.
“Creative geniuses,” Ginny muttered. Then, she left the table and stalked off to her office to prepare for the meeting. Arthur stood to leave, but before he made it out of the room, I tried to get his attention. It took waving my arms in his face before he focused on me.
“Can I go to the armory by myself, or do you have to be with me?” I asked. “I want to go look at my armor, maybe run a diagnostic to see how it’s done.”
Arthur gave me a suspicious look, but whatever had distracted him through dinner was still taking up most of his mind now. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be in the armaments lab if you need me, but Percival can walk you through most stuff.”
“And if I decide to fly around the training room?” I called after him.
Arthur waved his permission without turning around. “Whatever. But don’t leave this building, understand? Percival, secure all exterior walls, windows, and doors. Elaine is not to leave this building.”
“Yes, my lord.”
I rolled my eyes, but I didn’t complain. I had no intentions of leaving the building anyway.
After taking Will that dinner tray, I trotted over to the elevator and rode up to the armory in silence. Once inside I headed for my armor in the throne room. Pendragon, Leodegrance, and Galahad stood in their niches, but I ignored them.
“All r
ight, Morgause,” I said to my armor. “Open the front. I don’t need you in a million pieces.” The front of my armor split down an invisible seam and opened wide like a doll house. The back of the interior of my armor wasn’t all that fascinating. I studied the back of my helm and then bent down to get a better look at the torso. I found what I was looking for there.
“Bingo,” I whispered. I pulled a small USB drive from the pocket of my leggings. I plugged my drive in to the port in the torso and then waited a moment.
“New software detected,” Percival said.
“Great. Percival, bring up a screen that allows me to see all the software installed in Morgause and the software on the USB drive.”
One of the small readouts on the wall of my niche appeared to expand until it took up all of a mid-air screen in front of my armor. It looked like an FTP interface with Morgause installed software on one side and my USB software on the other. I copied the new Percival software onto the drive in my Morgause armor.
“Warning,” Percival said. “Existing file detected with that name. Completing this command will override existing software. Do you wish to continue?”
“No,” I said. I went back and changed the name of my new Percival file, going super-original and naming it Percival2. I tried copying the file again.
“Copying,” Percival said. “Twenty-two minutes remaining.”
“Hey, Percival,” I said. “Can you talk while this thing is downloading, or are you too busy?”
