The Academy: Book 2 (21 page)

Time seemed to slow. He held his breath and felt his wings hit the object first. They didn’t slow him down at all. The object pressed into his hands, and his arms collapsed under the pressure, leaving his head to take the impact.

He hit the object, hard, and the next moment he was tumbling in the air summersaulting. His head pulsed, his neck ached, but he was alive. He shot his wings out, stabilized himself, and was able to see that he had flown through a hard, tan tarp. He also noticed that after the impact his speed had slowed down considerably.

More objects were coming up. He righted himself and used echolocation to see out ahead of him. He dodged over a wooden plank, flattened himself between two metal bars and went forward.

Dispersed along the walls were ten by ten feet tarps, just like the one he had already flown through. Asa picked up speed, moved through a hoop, and then came into another curve. He kept his eyes closed and was shooting out echolocation cries at the rate of a machine gun.

He glided over a wooden beam, and then was out in what he thought was open air. He let out an echolocation cry, and received the echo, which told him that he had a one hundred yard drop before he would reach the next obstacle. He gritted his teeth and fell through the opening, gathering up speed. He was only halfway down the straightaway when

BANG!

he
hit something. The familiar headache returned, and he looked above him, using his eyes this time, and saw that he had gone through another tarp.
My echolocation missed it!
His anxiety worsened.
What if that had been a beam! I would have died! And why did my echolocation give me false information?

Asa decided that for the rest of the course he would trust his eyesight. He maneuvered in and out of the obstacles and every time he felt that he was going too fast, he would slam into one of the tarps to slow himself down. He hit the walls a few times, but luckily he was able to come out the other end with nothing more than a bloody cheek.

The course ended in an enormous pool of warm, bubbling water that came after a blind curve. He sliced deep into the water, swam up for air and heard McCoy call, “Twenty-nine seconds! Not bad, Palmer!”

Asa put a thumb up in acknowledgement, and began to wade to the edge of the pool. He was too out-of-breath to talk.

He found himself in a large, dripping cave with the other students who had completed the course and McCoy. There were large stone bleachers that occupied a wall, and the students were filling them up. The students were wet, and many of them were dripping blood.

Though Asa wasn’t exactly friends with Stridor, he was glad to see him sitting up, watching the end of the obstacle course for the next student to slam into the water. His head was bleeding considerably, but he was conscious after the blow he had taken in the course.

Asa pulled himself out of the water and said to McCoy, “It felt like a lot longer than twenty-nine seconds!”

McCoy
pat him on the back. “Your first time through is always the scariest. You did pretty well, though. Stridor made it in twenty-two seconds; he’s got the fastest time so far. Go, sit down, and catch your breath.”

Asa obeyed, sitting hi
gh above everyone else, and he watched as the students slammed into the water. He looked around, saw no one was watching, and took out the polaroid. It was wet, but the picture was still intact. He set it aside to dry.

Every half minute, someone would come slamming into the water, and they’d come up out of breath. As more and more students came out, the water turned a darker shade of red. No one died in the course, though. No one died that day, at least.

On the far wall was something that Asa found equally as interesting as the splashing bodies of his classmates. There was a huge, glass panel, and inside, roughly fifty yards into the well-lit room was a large, round target. The room was perfectly circular, and the target was near the left back of the room. On Asa’s side of the glass was a rifle’s trigger and handle, and on the other side, the barrel came out with a spearhead on the end. Above the glass window that looked into the other room was a clock. It said 09:15:12, and then the seconds ticked onward from there.

Teddy came through screaming, and his cries ceased when he hit the water. He crawled out, nose bleeding, vomited in a trashcan, then came and s
at by Asa. “Enjoy the ride?” Asa asked.

Teddy looked at him, blood streaming out of his nose and over his mouth. “I
oughta kill you for saying that,” he said, smiling. His eyes didn’t look like he was joking with Asa, though.

Asa was quiet and they didn’t talk for the rest of the time. Asa wanted to know what Teddy thought about why his echolocation didn’t work inside the course, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to talk to him.

After the last student had collided with the water and made their way to the bleachers, dripping blood, McCoy stood before them. “Great job, everyone!” he said. He had relaxed some since he had first spoken with Asa. “You all flew well today; I know that this course is a bit intimidating, but you’ll get the hang of it.”

McCoy studied his armband for a second. “By the way, has anyone seen…oh, I hope I’m pronouncing this right…
Brumi Ann-bah-rah-see?”

“It’s Ann-bah-rah-sue,” a girl said near the front. “I’m her best friend. I saw her this morning; she was running late, though, and I left before her.”

“And what’s your name?”

“Jessica Stine.”

“Was she planning on coming today?” McCoy asked Jessica.

Jessica nodded fervently, her dried hair bouncing up and down. “Ah-
yuh! She said that she was following me out the door.”

McCoy nodded somberly. “I see. Well, it’s unfortunate that she couldn’t make it.”

“What’s going to happen to her?” someone else asked.

McCoy shrugged. “I’m going to report her absence, and then someone else decides. It’s not really up to me.”

Jessica Stine didn’t seem fazed. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. It would be so unlike Brumi to miss class.”

McCoy changed the subject:
“You might have noticed that big room behind me—you can see it through the glass. On this side, you’ve got the butt of a spear gun and the trigger. On the other side, you’ve got the barrel, the spear, and the target. Pretty simple.

“This is the new addition to F
lying Class that was mentioned in the paper. Here’s the way it works. Every day, after you all fly through the course, the person who had the fastest time gets to take a shot at the target with the spear gun. If that person hits it, they get to choose a new mutation, and this class is over for the whole semester. If he or she misses the target, we convene again for the next class day. You only get one shot per day. So, Stridor, step up here, bud. You were fastest.”

Stridor stood on wobbly feet and walked forward slowly. He had lost a lot of blood and was pale. He walked around the large pool of water to the butt of the gun.

“Just point and shoot, it’s that simple,” Conway said.

Stridor looked back at him. “What’s the catch?”

“That’s all I can tell you.”

             
Asa watched closely as Stridor gripped the butt of the gun and wrapped his long index finger over the trigger. The gun was in a ball-socket in the wall so that Stridor could aim it in the other room, but he couldn’t remove the gun, or push it inward.

             
As Stridor aimed, Shashowt said to Charlotte: “That’s all he has to do? Hit some stupid target?”

             
Stridor took his time lining up the shot, and McCoy watched from the side of the pool. Stridor pulled the trigger, and the gunshot’s sound was muffled from the other room. The spear projected forward at a blazing speed, and Asa saw that it was headed right for the target.

             
But then something happened. Asa didn’t believe his eyes at first, but then he saw the crumpled spear lying on the ground a few feet in front of the target. Stridor stepped back, confused.

             
The spear had crumpled in mid-air just before it made it to the target, as though an invisible barrier had blocked it.

             
“Good shot! Maybe next time!” McCoy said.

             
“That was rigged!” cried Shashowt.

             
“Duh,” McCoy said back. “Get out of here, guys and girls. You’ve got other classes to go to. See you tomorrow.”

That was when they heard the screaming and moaning coming from outside. It was a weeping, sobbing, desperate sound, like the survivor of a bomb that killed her whole family might make. The sound was definitely coming from a female.

Many of the students had already stood in the room, and were preparing to exit. McCoy put a hand up to them. “Sit down!” he commanded. He walked over to the exit and opened up the door. That was when the girl ran inside.

             
She was wild, and it was obvious that she was hurt. It wasn’t just injury that made her emit those terribly desperate sounds, though. There was something much more terrifying than injury going on here. Dripping from a deep, crescent-shaped gash on the girl’s neck was a mixture of clotted black and red. The red was blood. The black liquid was Multiplier venom.

             
For the first time since Asa’s arrival at the Academy, a Multiplier had bit a student.

10

Mama

             
Asa had seen the girl before—brown skin, large brown eyes, and a diamond nose ring. But he didn’t know her name until Jessica Stine stood up and shouted “Brumi!” with a shaking voice.

             
Brumi entered the room in hysterics, she was moaning with drool running out of her mouth and gasping for air.

             
McCoy let the exit door fall shut, after peering out and seeing the landing deserted.

             
“Brumi!” Jessica said again. Jessica was already crying, and she began to sprint over to her friend, who had collapsed on the wet stone floor.

             
In a display of speed, McCoy caught Jessica by the arms before she reached her injured friend. Apparently he thought that Jessica could only make the situation worse. Jessica thrashed and tugged, trying to release herself from McCoy’s grip, but he was too strong. “Go sit down!” McCoy said. “Now!”

             
“No! My friend! Brumi!”

             
Brumi wasn’t talking. She was huddled down on her knees in the fetal position with her face pressed against the already bloody floor. Her white Academy-issued suit had been ripped in half so that her torso was completely exposed. Asa felt indecent watching, but couldn’t turn away.

             
The girl was bleeding from her scalp, her face, her shoulder, and her neck. She had scrapes up and down her back that looked as though they had been made by fingernails. The injury on her neck—the one that was caused by a Multiplier bite—looked the worst. Asa wasn’t ready to think about what it could mean yet.

             
“Sit down!” McCoy called at the crowd. Most of the students were standing now. The standing had started when the first row stood, then the row behind them couldn’t see, then the row behind that row couldn’t see and stood, and it went on like that. “Sit down!”

             
No one seemed to be listening to McCoy. Jessica was still thrashing in McCoy’s arms. No one was willing to sit and miss a second of what would happen with Brumi—the Multiplier-bit student was a tragedy you couldn’t look away from. They all recognized that black stuff leaking from her neck. A sick curiosity overcame the crowd and they wanted to know what would happen to her.

             
Teddy’s nose was gushing with blood.