The Academy: Book 2 (24 page)

What am I supposed to do now?
Asa thought. So many issues rushed around in his head. Gene Gill’s letter, which told Asa that he would be allowed to play Winggame without fear of unfair treatment. He thought of Roxanne and her Multiplier boyfriend who beat her bloody. He thought of the video of Robert King’s death that he and Teddy had watched, and how the Academy insisted that Robert King was not dead. The female gorilla (
David
) with the polaroid picture of Asa in a lab coat. Then, most frighteningly, there was the recent Multiplier attack on Brumi. In conjunction with Asa finding the wild, unkempt Multipliers killing gorillas (
Davids
) in the forest earlier, this really frightened him. He wondered if the Multipliers were killing the gorillas because of their superior intelligence.
Do they want to kill all the Davids off so that they can’t get in their way if there is an attack?

He thought that an attempted escape
from the Academy might be warranted.

I’ll have to decide alone, though,
Asa thought.
Conway won’t help me. Damn him!

Asa’s wings beat through the air even faster as his anger increased.

Damn him!

Asa’s blood was boiling. He remembered the first day that he had ever met Conway, when he was about ten years old. The crows had filled the sky, and Conway had injected Asa with a serum to protect him against the coming wolf-flu epidemic.

And he had the solution, and could have injected my mother, my mom, but instead he let her die! DAMN HIM TO HELL!

Asa landed on a lonely portion of the mountainside and cried angrily for thirty minutes. He didn’t want to enter his dwelling and
have Teddy see him crying.

And Teddy’s crazy! He won’t help me either. And then I broke it off with Charlotte. There’s no one to turn to.

It took hundreds of tears for his crying to subside, but it did eventually. He hugged his knees and wanted to go home.
The real home. The home with my mother there, alive, where she can take care of me. I don’t want to go back to that empty house.
Then Asa cried more because the place he so strongly wished to go no longer existed.

The sky was beginning to darken when Asa returned to his dwelling. His tears were dried, and he felt confident that he could face Teddy without crying again. On a normal day he might have stayed on the Mountainside longer, but he didn’t want to be out after dark, especially with the recent Multiplier attack.

Frost hung from his dwelling’s doorknob, which he turned and opened the door. There were candles that were burning low, and the room was empty. Asa moved in, shut the door behind him, plopped down on the hammock, and shut his eyes.

He rocked back and forth in the hammock, and his shadows danced along the walls.

A buzzing sound filled the air and his eyes shot open. Somewhere up above, Teddy was using his drill in the secret compartment again.

What’s going on, Teddy? What are you drilling for up there?

Not for the last time, Asa wondered about the extra bit of water-tunnel that Teddy had dug above him, and wondered if it had purposes beyond architecture. He couldn’t imagine what Teddy would need with a secret room.

Before he could contemplate it too much, Asa was asleep.

11

Boom Boom

              As January became February, it only grew colder. Asa would have liked to think that the crows disappearing from the sky was merely a function of the extreme weather, but he couldn’t convince himself of this. It had been cold before, and they had persisted. What was different now?

             
He suspected that it was due to the strange, red birds that were popping up around the mountains. They had become much more prevalent since the day he saw one while traveling towards Flying Class. Now, he scarcely traveled without seeing them. If they were present, they were hard to miss; their wingspans ranged from five feet to ten feet, and they were capable of incredible speeds. They were always present in the room where Flying Class was held, watching as the students dove into the barrel-maze. Asa had seen one in mid January feasting on a mountainside. The red bird was eating something that looked suspiciously like a crow.

             
Asa felt as though his classes were continuing along at an unreasonably quick pace. Professor Stern taught Science Class at the speed and skill level that a medical school class would be taught. The material required a large amount of prerequisite knowledge that most of the students didn’t have. Asa wasn’t alone in spending most nights studying hours past the time when his headache set in. He had never learned so much in such a short time span before, and he thought that an outsider might have said it would be impossible for Asa to go into such a strenuous course and keep up.
Your abilities will surprise you when someone’s got a gun to your head. When someone’s threatening to kill you if you don’t pass a class, your mental abilities, and level of discipline improve greatly.

             
On top of this, he was constantly competing in Flying Class and attending Benny’s Responding to Medical Emergencies Class. This course was just hard enough to be considered a nuisance, and it was frustrating to Asa that he had to sit through Benny’s boring stories about his past Winggame success when he could be studying for Science Class.

             
With all the commotion, Asa hadn’t had much time to fear the impending Multiplier attacks that Brumi’s death had suggested. When he finally found a moment to reflect on the fact that the raid hadn’t occurred, he was baffled.
They’ve broken the contract, so why don’t they just attack?
Asa thought.

             
But, apparently, the crows didn’t believe that the Multipliers had broken the contract. According to Teddy, who illegally used the internet to keep up with world events, there hadn’t been any more malicious information about Alfatrex, or any hint of the Academy or Multipliers in the news. The outside world was still oblivious to the existence of the Academy.

             
This perplexed Asa:
I thought that the contract stated that if a Multiplier turned someone while either Charlotte or I were in the Academy that the crows would release their information about the Academy to the outside world. Is this not true? Or have those red birds kept the crows away so that they are now unaware of what has happened?

             
Asa didn’t know. He didn’t have much time to think about it, due to school.

             
In mid January, Teddy changed again. Though they didn’t spend a lot of time together in that period, Asa noticed that Teddy was starting to act differently.

             
At first, he thought that his friend was changing for the better.

             
Teddy looked more awake and revitalized. The bags under his eyes were disappearing, and his color improved. He was eating more. The nosebleeds stopped, and he seemed to be his old self again. He even laughed occasionally, and not in the crazed, maniacal way that Asa had gotten used to.

             
But with these improvements came trade-offs. Teddy would go days without sleeping, but he stopped showing normal signs of fatigue. Asa would wake up at all times of the nights to Teddy’s noises. They were more than just the occasional drill going off now. Asa would hear small explosions, sounds like great impacts, and repeatedly there were sounds like glass breaking. Asa never had the courage to ask Teddy about these new sounds coming from above, and he stopped visiting the secret compartment all together.

             
Teddy’s eyes were always dilated now. His pupils were constantly the size of nickels. He looked like he was on some kind of stimulating drug, but that didn’t make sense.
Where would Teddy get such a drug?
Asa just attributed Teddy’s physical changes to stress and lack of sleep.

             
The sight was very unnerving, and when Asa and Teddy ate in the cafeteria, people stared at them even more often than they used to. Not only were they the murderer and his friend, but now Asa’s friend looked demon-possessed, crazy, non-human.

             
Also, he twitched a lot. It was involuntary, and Teddy seemed not to notice it. The majority of the twitches were quick, rightward jabs of his skull, as though his neck muscles on the right side temporarily tightened up.

             
Teddy talked very quickly, and it seemed as though the overall processing speed of his brain had tripled. Asa knew that his friend was highly gifted in math and sciences, but he still felt that he was able to answer questions in Science Class far more easily and quickly than normal. He could perform large, algebraic equations with exponents and multiple factors with five digits in his head as if they were part of a multiplication table. Asa didn’t know why, but this new ability, along with the dilated pupils struck him as creepy.

             
Teddy never wanted to talk about emotions, or social pressures anymore. These things seemed to be nonexistent to the new, dilated-pupil-Teddy. He was now only interested in things from which a foreseeable result could be gained. From mid-January to the beginning of February, the only thing that really interested Teddy was talking about why Asa’s echolocation failed him in the Flying Task.

             
The phenomena had continued to happen, and though it frustrated Asa, he didn’t think that there was anything that he could do to solve it. When he was outside of flying class, his echolocation worked, but as soon as he jumped into the barrel-maze, his sixth sense gave him incorrect information. Teddy asked Asa dozens of questions about what echolocation felt like. He asked Asa about where the sensation’s failures happened in the course, and offered many different possible solutions. “Try flying feet first.” “Have you tried continuously spinning during flight?” “What about using the echolocation with your eyes open?” None of these worked for Asa, and the inconsistencies in what his vision detected and what he saw using echolocation gave him a headache. But Teddy wouldn’t stop. He was absolutely obsessed with why Asa’s echolocation didn’t work in Flying Class.

             
“Maybe they have some kind of emitter that stops me from using it, Teddy,” Asa suggested. “Maybe there’s no way around it.”

             
Teddy would stare at Asa with his too-big pupils and say, “there’s just got to be a way around it.”

             
Asa didn’t get the obsession. Even if he did get the fastest time in the barrel maze, he would then have to step up and try to shoot the spear gun at the target in the next room, if he wanted to be allowed to choose a new mutation. He had watched Stridor shoot dozens of times after he achieved the fastest time through the maze, and even though there was no perceivable barrier between the gun and the target, the spears always crumpled as though they had struck some invisible force field.

             
In the hours of free time that he gave to himself, he liked to spend them with Jen. Though she was wild sometimes, she always respected Asa, and didn’t shun him like the majority of the student body did. They spoke about Teddy together; Asa voiced that he was concerned Teddy wasn’t sleeping enough. “Why would he want to work that much every night? I mean, it just sounds painful to me to go that many days without rest.”

             
Jen shrugged. “When my daddy died from the Wolf Flu, I didn’t sleep much. I took on a lot of new activities. I started drawing, reading new books, and I found a stray a dog and was training it to do all kinds of tricks. Personally, I didn’t want to rest. If I was busy, doing something, I didn’t have to think of the reality that my dad was gone, which hurt. The activities gave me shelter. Maybe Teddy feels the same way.”

             
This rang true for Asa. He knew that Teddy truly hated the organization he was being held in, and Asa thought that maybe Teddy wanted to work all the time so that he didn’t have to focus on reality.