Read Online The Last Days of Lorien by Pittacus Lore - Free Book Online

sneak off campus and sneak into the club.
    Yes, I knew that if I got caught, none of my technical skills and no amount of groveling would save me from a fate worse than the Kabarak. I also knew that Devektra hadn’t really even invited me in the first place.
    Neither of those things mattered. First off, I wasn’t going to get caught. Second, it didn’t matter whether Devektra had been totally sincere. She had invited me knowing there would be no way for me to actually go. I figured if I pulled off the impossible, she’d have to be impressed.
    It was a big task, but I was up to it. Planning it had been my main source of entertainment ever since I’d come back from the trip with Daxin. It had even gotten my mind off the nagging worry that I was missing something around here—that something wasn’t quite right.
    The first thing I’d done was to to scope out the nighttime security situation at the academy. That wasn’t so hard, because it turned out there basically wasn’t any. Students weren’t allowed to leave the grounds after dark, but all the other students here were so boring and committed that no one bothered actually enforcing it.
    There were no security guards, no cameras, no sensors, no nothing. They didn’t exactly advertise it, but it was honor system all the way.
    The more complicated part of my plan would be Daxin. I’d done a little spying on him, and had discovered that he had a single-occupancy bedroom down the hall from me, and a habit of going to bed early. I’d briefly worried that Daxin, as an active Mentor Cêpan, might have the privilege of a lock on his dorm room. But on the last night before Quartermoon, I snuck out of my room at midnight, crept down the hall, and quietly tried turning the knob. It opened without any resistance at all.
    After listening carefully for the sound of his snoring, I crept into the room and approached Daxin’s bed. There it was: his ID band was lying right there next to his pillow, and he was curled up next to it, sawing logs, oblivious to my presence. This was going to be too easy. The following night, I would sneak in, snatch the ID band, commandeer the Egg from the transport hangar—I had already covertly preset the time and coordinates for my departure—and make my way to the Chimæra for Devektra’s performance. Then I’d sneak back, return the Egg to transport, return Daxin’s ID band to his pillow, and no one would be any the wiser for my absence.Sneaking around, conniving, scheming: it would be just like the good old days.
    The Saturday of Quartermoon was my best day yet, a half day of classes followed by a quick workout in the gym and an early dinner in the commissary. A professor had authorized a screening during mealtime of an intercepted satellite transmission of a visual entertainment from the planet Earth.
    It might have been an overall pretty crappy place to live, but they sure knew how to do their visual entertainment right. Although the transmission was video only, I had seen my share of Earth intercepts and had no problem following the story.
    It wasn’t really that complicated. At all. A well-dressed man traveled the world, hung out with beautiful women, snuck around to retrieve valuable objects, chased and got chased by bad guys.
    While watching the movie I thought, I want to be like him one day .
    But then, taking another bite of my dessert and smiling up at the screen, I realized that I already was.
    The Egg handled like a dream.
    Despite its silly name, it was a sleek and sexy machine, especially from behind the steering wheel—not that different from the transports in the Earth movie I’d watched earlier that day. I had preprogrammed the journey so it would start at my command, but once I’d snuck into transport and slipped inside the vehicle, it occurred to me that would create a potentially incriminating log of my route, so once I’d started the engine, I deleted the preprogrammed route and began my trip to the capital