The Academy: Book 2 (19 page)

             
As he flew, Asa tucked his hands into his armpits. The chilly wind stung the small wounds that Joyce’s glass had made in his hands and fingers. Also, his hips were beginning to stiffen from where Stan had tackled him into the ground. His neck was tender to the softest touch, too, where he had been choked.

             
Injury doesn’t give you a day off at the Academy, though.
I think that’s part of what they’re testing us on—how well we can perform when injured. Or, maybe how long we can go without being injured. You’ll need to do well in one or the other to make it through this program.

             
Asa moved over the canopy and was just about to glide over the Moat when he saw something he had never seen before. A bird shot past him, moving at least twice the speed of Asa. Its feathers were purely red, and the animal had at least a six-foot wingspan. The wind from the close encounter hit Asa in the face, and he watched the hawk-like bird dip down into the forest.
Must be newly mutated, or maybe I’ve just never noticed those red birds.

As was growing typical, crows were completely absent from the sky. Asa hadn’t seen one in over a week now. For some reason, the crow’s absence in combination with the presence of this new bird made Asa feel uneasy.

He flapped harder and shortly he was over the Moat. The Winggame courts were now empty; the team that had been practicing earlier had dispersed so that the students could attend their classes.

Asa’s heart began to beat faster as he thought about how Dr. Gene Gill had said that the students would be competing in this semester’s task with their Winggame teammates. This meant that the task had to be somewhat different from the gladiator-style competition that the rumors had suggested.

But the rumor was right about one thing—it’s going to be lethal. If Chandler Martin’s speech at the assembly hadn’t made that clear, the letter surely drove the nail home.

Asa thought of the way the Sharks had stared at him when he entered the meeting yesterday. They did not trust him,
or want him near them. If the Task started today (and Chandler Martin said that it could start at any time), his team would probably kill him in the very beginning. Asa could picture Stan suggesting it, and everyone else would go along with it. Sure, Jen and Roxanne didn’t hate him, but there were twenty-three other players on the team who did. And with the way that the task was set up, Jen and Roxanne would know that the rest of the team trusting them would be vital to their survival.
Would they put their relationship with the other teammates in jeopardy to stop Stan from killing him at the beginning of the task, if it came to that?

Asa didn’t think so.

So there was only one thing that seemed reasonable for Asa to do: He would have to make friends with the rest of his teammates, Stan included, if he wanted to live to see his third semester.

Stan tried to kill me this morning. I’ve got a long way to go.

A gust of wind blew strong from behind him, and he loosened the tautness of his wings. The membranous sections of his wings filled with air and he shakily shot higher above the earth. Then, he straightened his legs behind him, pulled his wings’ membranes tight, and leaned forward. Immediately, he was slicing through the air with only a minute lift from wind resistance that kept him from plummeting straight down.

Asa closed his eyes as the air pulled at his whipping hair, his cheeks, and shot evenly down his suit. He turned his body left and right, letting the air massage him with pressure on different sides. The sensation was relaxing, and now that his eyes were closed he found that he was more tired than he had thought. He decided to relax some more as he glided towards Mount Two, and to keep his eyes shut for longer. He wasn’t planning on sleeping, but just wanted some time to shut his brain down. The wind was incredibly loud at the speed, but he could tolerate this.

His thoughts went to the meeting he wanted to have with Conway that night.
Maybe he’ll invite me into his house.
Asa had never been inside Conway’s cabin before, and the thought of seeing how the man kept his place seemed fun. With how serious Conway was, Asa imagined Conway’s living area as clinical and without much decoration.

Asa
knew that he wasn’t supposed to talk with anyone about Dr. Gene Gill’s letter, but Conway had confided confidential information in Asa before. And, maybe Conway would be able to offer a word of advice or explanation. Maybe he knew what this semester’s task was already, or perhaps he could help Asa to understand what Dr. Gill really meant when he said that Asa wouldn’t have as many accidents this semester.

What Asa was more interested in learning about, though, was Roxanne and Travis’s relationship. It wasn’t a rational interest—it wouldn’t help him survive like the other information would—but he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Does she kiss him?
The thought made Asa nauseated. The thick, black serum that the Multipliers secreted from their gums smelled awful. The scent was reminiscent of an infected wound that was weeping purulent, yellow drainage.

The reasoning behind
her wanting to date him was obvious—she was scared, and he offered some amount of protection. But why was he attracted to her?
Maybe there aren’t a lot of options for the Multipliers.

Asa recalled that Conway had said Multipliers have an insatiable urge to Multiply, to inject their black venom into another human’s body so that they will then turn into a Multiplier. Technically, Multipliers were just genetically engineered vampires. Asa wondered if Roxanne was ever scared that he would bite her, inject her, and change her. He also wondered if Travis had to fight the temptation, and how other Multipliers felt about their relationship.

Asa opened his eyes to see that he was much closer to Mount Two than he had expected. The red flag was flown on the South side of the mountain, directly opposite Asa’s dwelling. He glanced in the direction of Conway’s cabin, which was obscured in trees from this vantage point, and then began to flap towards the flag. Other students could be seen distantly as they began to make their way around the mountain.

Asa landed a few feet away from the pole on a stone platform that jutted out from the mountain. The only way to reach it, it seemed, was to fly to the area.

Snow crunched beneath Asa’s feet as he made his way over the sizable protrusion in the Mountain towards two doors in the rock wall. One said “Entrance” and the other said “Exit” above it. The entrance’s surface was either gilded with gold, or the entire door was made of gold; either way, it reflected brilliantly. The door’s handle was also golden and shaped like a dove’s wing. Icicles hung off of the individually carved feathers.

More second semester students landed in the snow surrounding Asa and he entered through the door. The entrance opened up into an extremely vast box of a room. The walls and ceiling were the same rock that the Mountain consisted of, and the floor was a red, springy mat. On the front wall, there were massive, slanted windows that let in a large amount of light. On a cloudless day, this would have been sufficient to light the room, Asa thought. But with the clouds overhead, the electric lights had to be turned on. Each of these lights were installed flush with the rock, and the size of a normal bedroom door. They glowed with even
, white light, and weren’t giving off the buzzing sound that fluorescents sometimes do. There were roughly three hundred of them dispersed along the walls and the high ceilings overhead. Though they didn’t seem too bright when looked at directly, they lit the room very well. Asa guessed that these were an Academy invention.

Maybe they were even invented in Mount Two,
he thought.

The room was enormous, with the ceiling appearing as high as low hanging clouds. Asa had never seen a ceiling so tall in his life, and thought that this room would rival some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. Looking up at the ceiling made Asa feel dizzy.

From halfway up and higher, dozens of wooden beams crossed the expanse from wall to wall. Perched on many of these were the large, red birds, just like the one that Asa had seen earlier in his flight to Mount Two.

There were two structures inside of the enclosure that reached from the floor almost all the way to the top. The first was a glass tube. It was roughly four feet wide with blue tinted, transparent glass. There was a door that opened up onto the floor of the tube, and Asa couldn’t see high enough to decipher whether or not a door existed on the top. On the ground, inside of this glass tube, the floor was made of crisscrossing metal grates, with holes beneath. The holes were small enough so that one could stand atop the grate without risk of their foot falling through.

The second structure was quite unusual. It was the width of a tennis court, but round, and made out of wood. It looked like a giant barrel that rose all the way to the top, except it twisted and curved at times. Strange, mechanical noises were coming from within. The bottom of the wooden structure went into a wall, and the students couldn’t see where the thing ended.

Asa gazed up at the top of this wooden structure and saw that near the top there was a railed, wooden deck. This was situated right next to where the tube
ended.

The other students were also amazed at the structures, and upon entering took a few moments to gaze upwards. Dozens of Multipliers were scattered
around the ground floor, and they too were looking at the enormous constructions.

As Asa made his way deeper into the massive room, he found that the ground floor was much bigger than he had initially thought. Now, he saw that it could comfortably fit
at least a thousand people. The height of the ceiling and the massive, rising structures seemed to create an illusion, making the floor seem smaller by comparison.

A shadow fell over Asa and he felt a strong hand fall on his shoulder. “Hello, mate! Long time since I’ve seen
ya’!”

Asa turned and said “McCoy!”

McCoy smiled back. His golden hair shimmered in the room’s light, and he wore the same crooked smirk that Asa had grown to associate him with. Great, white dove-like wings were protruding up and out from his shoulder blades, shadowing Asa.

“Hey, guy! What happened to your neck?” McCoy lifted Asa’s chin to look.

“I had an altercation. It’s nothing.” Asa shifted a bit and the polaroid picture in his suit poked him some more. Asa looked around the room and saw that the Multipliers surrounding weren’t paying attention to the two of them.
Maybe McCoy would know why a gorilla has a photoshopped picture of me in a lab coat.

“It sure doesn’t look like nothing. Someone tried to off you?” He lowered his voice, and took on a more serious tone. “It wasn’t a Multiplier, eh?”

Asa rubbed his throat. “No, a teammate. But my captain took care of it.” Asa glanced around once more. “Can I show you something McCoy? I’m wondering if you can shed some light on the meaning of a photograph for me.”

“A photograph? Sure. You got it?” His blue eyes twinkled and the carefree smile persisted.

Asa dug his hand into the neck of his shirt and pulled out the polaroid that the female gorilla had given to him in the arctic jungle earlier. He handed it to McCoy, who held it close to his face.

Asa had intended to get a quick answer out of McCoy, but his reaction only brought on more questions. The smile dissipated from McCoy’s face, his eyes widened, and Asa actually saw the color drain from his cheeks. He shoved the photo back at Asa. “Where the hell did you get this?” he whispered hoarsely. Before Asa could answer he said: “No, I don’t want to know. Just put the damn thing up, you hear? Destroy it. You shouldn’t have a thing like that. Bringing it in here, what were you thinking, Palmer?”

Asa didn’t know what to say. He put the photograph back into his suit and stammered for a moment.

“This conversation never happened,” McCoy said. His voice had taken on an authoritative tone that Asa did not like at all. Asa felt guilty, and mentally reprimanded himself for doing something to anger McCoy to such a degree.

McCoy stormed off. His expression still seemed strained and his wings were very erect.

Why would an altered photograph of me in a lab coat with a beard offend McCoy so much?

“Okay, listen up! All of you!” McCoy said. He whistled between his fingers and everyone quieted. “This is Flying Class! You can address me as McCoy, I’m one of the graduates here.” His temper still hadn’t subsided. Asa remembered how McCoy hadn’t even seemed stressed at the end of last semester, when he had illegally left his post and convened with Conway, Asa, Charlotte and Avery in the caves in the back of King Mountain.
What is so damning about the photograph? And why did the gorilla have it?
“This isn’t so much of a class as it is a test. But, tests are sometimes the best forms of instruction.