The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted

by Conor Grennan

  “Your face is visible to your team,” Asha answered. “We’re still in shadow to everyone else.” She grabbed the first rung of the ladder. “You go first, Voss. The shadow reaper is in there somewhere. If it’s on the other side of the door, the simulation will be over quickly.”

  Voss leaned into the door, hand on the knob. The three boys crouched together. Jack gripped the hilt of his blade as Voss mouthed one . . . two . . . three!

  They slammed into a mass of humanity. Blood rushed through Jack’s ears like whitewater, and the hilt of his Hadley blade slipped from his hand. He dropped to his knees and patted the ground among a forest of moving legs.

  “Excuse me. Did you drop this?” A soft, unfamiliar accent. Female.

  Jack rose slowly. Holding out the six-inch handle was an elegant older woman in a light green gown and an impossibly ornate hat. Jack took the hilt from her, wondering if this was a trap.

  “I was just wondering where you got that gorgeous eyeglasses case,” the woman said. “My husband would love one.”

  Her voice was replaced by Asha in his ear. “Jack! Move!”

  Jack mumbled a response to the woman and pushed through the crowd, running into the base of an angel statue.

  “It’s a wedding,” Asha said over the monitor.

  “Do you have a visual, Asha?” Voss was already cutting through the crowd.

  “I’m in the rafters,” Asha said, breathing heavily. “There’s a balcony. Jack, get up there. We need you spotting.”

  Freddy’s voice cut in. “I’m already heading up. Jack, stairs in the back, through double doors, west side.”

  Jack squeezed past coattails, glossy gowns, and shimmering jewels. Then he pushed through the doors, climbed a back staircase, and emerged into a wide balcony where a hundred or so people were already seated.

  Freddy waved to him from a front-row seat reserved for somebody else. Below was the great hall of a grand cathedral, every inch of every pew occupied. Oversized vases of lilies lined the aisle, and the smell of bouquets and candles wafted up. The altar at the front was a bed of white flowers. Jack stepped over several seated wedding guests and perched next to Freddy.

  “Voss is crowd control,” Asha said. “Jack, you’re always the quickest to spot the shadow reaper. You think you can pick it out?”

  “Of course he can,” Freddy said, elbowing Jack. “He’s gonna rock it. He’s gonna rock it like a . . . pocket.” He grimaced.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Voss whispered over the monitor.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Jack answered. “He said it because it rhymes.”

  “Focus.” Asha urged as Jack scanned the crowd below.

  “We’re in Belgium,” Freddy whispered.

  “Huh?”

  “Belgium.” Freddy motioned around him.

  “You know that speed metal band, Geit Hoofd? I made that playlist for you.”

  “No.”

  “You said you liked it.” Freddy exhaled. “Anyway, the band is Belgian. I recognize some of the Flemish words on the signs. The prince must be Belgian.”

  “What prince?”

  Freddy motioned to the man in military dress uniform at the side of the cathedral. “The groom—he’s royalty.” Freddy pointed out the security detail posted around the cathedral. “Those are the visible security. But you see the others?” Freddy began picking out seemingly random people in the crowd, all on the aisles. “Those are the real security. Undercover. Professionals.”

  Jack shifted to face Freddy.

  “If you . . .” Freddy stopped. The woman next to him was eyeing Freddy’s hand at the hilt of his retracted blade.

  Freddy gave her a reassuring smile. “My lucky pen.” He held up the hilt. “For signing the guest book.”

  The woman squinted at his shadowed face. Then she gave up and smiled back. “That is very sweet,” she said with a thick accent. “You are English?”

  “American.” He leaned back so she could see Jack. “This is my brother Panther.”

  The woman gave a little wave. “Hello, Panther,” she whispered loudly. “Are you enjoying your time in our country?”

  “Oh, he loves it here,” Freddy assured her.

  “Freddy!” Asha hissed in their ears.

  “There’s no reaper here,” Jack whispered.

  “There’s gotta be,” Voss said. “That’s the whole point of the simulation.”

  “You’re sure?” Freddy asked.

  “Positive,” Jack said.

  The prince made his way to the altar and the crowd hushed. Jack stood. “I’m going to look around.” He squeezed out of the pew and back down the stairs. Instead of going into the main hall or back into the entryway, he tried a door to his right. Locked.

  He reached into his Hadley pack and focused on needing a key. His suit was really just his academy uniform, adapted for the occasion. He retrieved something like a short, flat screwdriver with a forked end. He pressed it into the lock. The door popped open.

  Jack stepped into a small room, where a woman in an angel-white dress stood facing a second door. She hummed to the music, awaiting her cue. Jack’s heart beat loudly in his chest. He needed to back out quietly, but his feet wouldn’t budge. It was stuffy in the room, and he felt a little faint. Blackness gathered at the edges of his vision.

  “You’re not supposed to be back here,” she whispered.

  Jack flushed and started to apologize. But she wasn’t talking to him.

  “I’m a friend,” said a man on the far side of the room.

  The man approached her confidently. He was slender, with dark hair, about Jack’s height. There was something strange about him and also something familiar. “I want to offer my congratulations. This will be a historic day.”

  He extended his hand. Reluctantly, she took it. He bent and kissed it, then stepped back. The bride froze. Something crackled. The sound of water pouring over an ice cube.

  The lights blinked and went out.

  Through the door the wedding march began. The bride seemed to wake from a trance. Then she glided out of the room, which opened next to the main hall’s entrance doors.

  Through the doorway Jack could only see her back. As he watched, the first guests turned. The room glowed with the midday sun filtering through the vaulted stained-glass windows and with candles flickering. The electric lights were off.

  The bride faced the hundreds before her. Then she took a practiced step into the aisle.

  The man turned slowly and faced Jack. A deep cold penetrated Jack’s organs. Wyeth smiled. “You recognize me, don’t you? Interesting. I didn’t know if you would.”

  Jack, with cold sweat dripping into his eyes, grabbed his blade hilt. An unseen force yanked the weapon from his hand, and it smashed against the brick wall behind Wyeth.

  “Oh, it’s too late for that, Jack. But watch if you like.” Wyeth nodded toward the main hall.

  “What did you do?” Jack forced his voice out.

  “Hmm. You’re not fighting me,” Wyeth said. “You’re weaker than I thought.”

  Then he walked past Jack, who was still paralyzed, out the back door that Jack had come in. The door shut, and Jack could move again. He grabbed his blade and followed, but Wyeth had vanished.

  Jack ran back through the room and to the gaping doors of the cathedral hall. “Wyeth,” he hissed over the monitor.

  “Jack! I’ve been calling you,” Freddy whispered. “I was afraid you’d blacked out.”

  “The bride,” Jack said. “Wyeth touched the bride and darkened her. He gave her the virus. Get to her before she kills somebody.”

  Voss’s voice came over the monitor. “Taking out the princess bride on the altar? No way, Jack.”

  Jack stared up the aisle. The bride wasn’t attacking anyone. She was standing at the altar, across from the prince. Could he have imagined it? He sprinted back to the stairs and up to Freddy to get a better view, drawing the grumbles of those around him.

  “T
here’s something wrong with her eyes,” Asha whispered. “They’re completely black.”

  The bride clasped the prince’s hands. The prince seized up and twitched. His head snapped to the side as if he had been electrocuted. The bride let go. The prince stood perfectly still.

  The bride wandered down the steps. Murmurs rose from the audience. A few in the front pew stood to catch her.

  Then the prince jerked again. Even from a distance Jack knew his eyes would be black. The royal groom grabbed the bishop by the chest and slammed him to the ground. The bishop convulsed, eyes squeezed shut. Guests screamed.

  “The bride darkened the prince!” Jack yelled over the monitor.

  “Wait. The bride is Wyeth?” Voss asked.

  “The darkening is spreading!” Jack shouted. “Don’t let the bride touch anyone. Voss, get to her. Now!”

  But it was too late.

  In the front pews, the family reached for the bride, trying to help her, to steady her. Others ran to get the prince off the bishop. But the bishop was already rising to his feet.

  “The prince and bishop have black eyes now!” Asha shouted over the monitor.

  One after another, the bride touched the guests in the front pew. The crackling echoed through the cathedral like an iceberg splitting in half. The sound of skin hardening. The sound of darkening.

  “Get to the prince, Voss,” Asha shouted. “I’m going for the bride. And watch out for anyone with black eyes. Those are the darkened!”

  A massive pillar of ice exploded from the rafters. Asha slid down into the fray accompanied by a hail of hard ice pellets. Jack checked his band. A bright crimson arrow stretched toward the front of the cathedral. Then more arrows appeared, fanning out as if they were filling a clock. “The darkened are everywhere!” he said.

  “I can’t get to the prince,” Voss panted. “I just tried to tackle one of the security team members, and he threw me off. Who are these guys?”

  Jack heard a scuffle and a clash of metal over the monitor. “I can’t get past security either,” Asha called.

  Freddy turned to the woman next to him in the now-dim light of the balcony. “Don’t go down there!” He flicked his wrist, deploying his blade. The woman’s jaw went slack in the light of the blue blaze.

  Freddy and Jack ran the length of the balcony. Below, Voss wrenched an entire pew from the floor. He smashed it down on the darkened, which were multiplying through the cathedral, tearing at the panicked civilians. Jack and Freddy ran down the wide back staircase. Crowds of the darkened raged forward, still in suits and gowns.

  Freddy yanked Jack out of the way and spun his blade in a blurry figure eight. He held the pack off just long enough to cock his blade and reignite the flame.

  He blazed the closest of the darkened coming at him. Jack managed to blaze a second one. Both darkened shattered and vaporized. But in the split second before they disappeared, the whites of their eyes reappeared. Jack thought he heard a high-pitched exhale.

  There was no time for thinking—Freddy and Jack leapt over the bannister together. They dropped onto the landing several feet below, then jumped down the last few steps and pushed through the swinging doors into the entryway.

  They ran into a wall of darkened. Jack and Freddy stood back-to-back, blades drawn, blue flames reflecting off pitch-black eyes.

  Suddenly Jack felt like his body was being sucked through a garden hose. Then he was stumbling out the door of the Dome. He landed in a heap with the rest of Team Thirteen in the predawn morning glow. The green light, the one that lit when a simulation had been completed, remained dark. It looked as if the Dome had never turned on.

  Instructor Bakari marched over. “What were you doing in there?” Bakari’s hair was pillow-squished, and his tunic hung crooked.

  Team Thirteen pulled themselves from the floor.

  “You can’t just wander into the Dome,” Bakari shouted. “It has to signal you. How did you get the door open?”

  “It was open when we got here, sir,” Freddy stammered.

  “You realize you could have damaged the AI?” he barked back. “It’s not a playground! You can only go in when there’s a simulation.”

  “There was a simulation, sir.” Asha struggled to catch her breath. “We were signaled.”

  Bakari stalked over to the glass podium, traced a passcode on it, and tapped. The hologram display of the amphitheater glowed white, then gray, then faded to black. “If you completed a simulation, why isn’t it playing back?”

  “Maybe there’s something wrong . . .” Asha started, but Bakari was staring out past the amphitheater. “Instructor Bakari?”

  He shushed her. A siren swelled, filling the amphitheater like water rushing into a sinking ship.

  “What’s that?” Voss asked.

  “That’s the portal siren.” Bakari didn’t look at them. “Something has happened out in the dormant world.”

  CHAPTER 19

  INTERROGATION

  Team Thirteen stood next to an old stone well in the center of a large circle of well-spaced trees. They faced an operative, sitting in a simple wooden chair just outside the circle. She scribbled with a pen on an actual legal pad, although she also wore a band.

  “Welcome to the Focus Atrium,” the woman called. “My name is Operative Sanders-Watson. I’ll be interviewing you about the events of the past couple hours. The Focus Atrium is simply a tool to help you recall the facts of your experience in the simulation dome.”

  The woman spoke in an elegant English accent. She took off her glasses and placed them on the notepad. “Please place your right foot—or whichever is your dominant foot—on the short, round post behind you. There should be four of them. I’ll wait until you get your balance.”

  The wooden post was the diameter of a large fence post, wide enough for Jack to balance on one foot, but small enough that he had to concentrate. It rose a little more than a foot off the ground.

  “Everyone ready?”

  The well next to them began to overflow, and their posts rose as the water level increased. Jack concentrated to keep his balance. Before the water reached Sanders-Watson, it stopped at a transparent wall that stretched between the trees.

  “Hey! We’re in a tank,” Voss said.

  “Well observed,” Sanders-Watson said. “A former instructor drew the transparent sap out of the trees and stretched it between the trunks. Beautiful, really.” The water was now fifteen feet deep, their posts two feet above the surface. “There, that’s high enough, I think,” she said.

  “High enough for what?” Asha asked. But a moment later, three tiger sharks swam up and out of the well. They circled the poles.

  Voss yelped and almost fell, maintaining his balance at the last moment. Jack felt like he was going to throw up. He looked up at the woman. “What are you doing?!”

  “I will be conducting your interview, of course.”

  “Why are there sharks below us?” Freddy demanded, breathing heavily.

  Sanders-Watson crossed her legs and repositioned her notepad. “I have learned that it is extremely difficult for a person to tell lies when their mind is singularly focused on a physical task, for example, maintaining one’s balance.”

  She motioned to the four of them. “Just as importantly, when one of you is speaking, I will read the faces of the others. At a place like Hadley, it is always possible that one of you is a gifted liar. But you will not all be good liars,” she said.

  “I can’t deal with sharks.” Voss sucked air in short gulps.

  “Well then let’s conclude this quickly. The use of spades in this session will result in your immediate dishonorable discharge. And I recommend not looking down for the duration of our time together.”

  Jack looked down. The tiger sharks slalomed between the posts and circled the tank. He had never wanted to be home so badly.

  Operative Sanders-Watson read from her notepad. “You told Instructor Bakari that the Dome called you in. Yet there is no record of the Do
me summoning you. More importantly, there is no record whatsoever of the simulation you say you completed. Instructor Bakari informs me the Dome has never run a simulation without recording it.” She looked up. “Ice. How do you account for any of this?”

  “I can’t,” Asha said quickly, her arms out like a tightrope walker. Her ladybug circled Asha frantically, seemingly unsure how to help. “But we went in. We all experienced it.”

  “Link. Did you encounter a reaper?”

  Freddy started to nod but realized that it messed with his balance. “Yes.”

  “Torque, did you engage the reaper?”

  “Yes! There were a lot of them.” Voss spoke in a loud whisper, as if to avoid drawing attention from the sharks below. “Wait. They were darkened, not reapers.”

  Operative Sanders-Watson dropped her hands to her lap. “I’m sorry. Did you say darkened? Hadley operatives received a briefing on the darkened less than six hours ago. The Dome has already incorporated the darkened into the farm simulation?”

  “We weren’t in the farm simulation,” Jack said. He stared straight out to the horizon to keep his balance. “It was a completely different simulation—a Belgian cathedral, during a royal wedding. Wyeth was there. I saw him myself.”

  The operative had been watching the faces of the others as Jack spoke. Now she stopped and focused back on Jack.

  “A Belgian cathedral with a royal wedding?” she demanded. “That can’t possibly be accurate.” She quickly scanned the faces of the others.

  “It is!” Freddy insisted. The rest of the team howled that it was true.

  “Lose the sharks,” Voss demanded.

  “You are all absolutely positive?” she asked carefully. “You have those details correct: a Belgian cathedral and a royal wedding?”

  Freddy nodded vigorously. And in that moment, he lost his balance. He tried to recover, but his foot went out from under him. He screamed as he hit the water.

  The operative was already standing up and speaking into her band, her back turned. “Central, this is Operative Sanders-Watson at the Focus Atrium with Team Thirteen. Requesting immediate emergency Council manifestation here.” She turned back around, eyes down on her notebook.