His father had boarded up the bedroom windows and moved the lock to the outside of Pete’s door to ensure no one could get out of the room. The no one in question referred to any representative or envoy from the academy that might infiltrate the Drake home to spirit Pete away to the interdimensional school.
The drastic measures were the result of Pete showing up at home with an acceptance letter from the academy just days before (according to local time). At the sight of the missive, Pete’s father had devolved into a pale, quaking mess. It was the only time Pete had seen the lieutenant worried, let alone terrified. His father had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure Pete went unnoticed and blended in—even moving house now and then as an added precaution to prevent the academy folk from finding Pete.
Yet, find him they did.
The current home was new to the Drakes who moved there the Friday prior to Pete’s academy departure. To Pete’s mother, Cassie, the new town represented a fresh start for the family. To Pete, the bungalow was just another in a series of flophouses that were part and parcel of his life as the sheltered teenage son of an overprotective Marine.
It was from that same barricaded bedroom Pete had made his daring pre-dawn getaway, flouting his father’s commands and escaping house arrest to travel through a park portal. Pete spent a partial term at the institution without his parents ever being the wiser, or so he was assured. Time advanced at a distinctly slower rate at home than at the academy, and although he’d been away at Omni for several weeks, only a matter of hours had passed at the Drake domicile.
The true test of his jailbreak’s success would come when his father unlocked the door to Pete’s room and released him from confinement. Would his father sense Pete had flown the coop and was now back in the nest?
Pete would have loved nothing better than to use his tinkering skills to break out of his room again, just to show his father he could do it. However, he was well aware that such a show of bravado would do nothing to impress the lieutenant. It would only inspire him to beef up security at home, making it even tougher for Pete to sneak off to the academy for the start of the next term.
Lt. Drake’s disapproval of his son’s penchant for gadgets and inventing was old news. But it was only since arriving at the new base that Pete learned about the academy and his father’s disapproval of everything and everyone remotely connected with it—disapproval equating to loathing. What would the lieutenant think if he found out Pete’s gadgetry was instrumental in freeing the academy’s students and staff when they were held hostage by the lawless Exaequos rebels that had infiltrated the school using students to get onto the high security campus?
During the takeover, Pete had been holed up in a vacuum chamber known as the Nexus, hidden from the rebels’ heat-seeking scanners. The school term prior to the attack, XQ (as Exaequos was commonly called) had already taken half of the student body hostage during an infamous incident known as the Kappa Kidnapping. The fallout of the calamity resulted in hundreds of students being recruited for academy admission to fill the vacancies.
If Dad knew about all the rebel stuff, he’d probably say something like “good riddance” to the people who were kidnapped and then punish me for helping the others.
Lt. Drake bore a relentless grudge over the fact Cassie had nearly died in service to the academy while a student there. Add to that, the lieutenant had been rejected when he applied to the school in his youth. Pete was unclear as to why his father wasn’t accepted at Omni, but he was crystal clear about the fact his father wanted Pete to have nothing to do with the place.