The Academy: Book 2

by Leito, Chad

  The back door squeaked open, and Roxanne came out. Her cheery mood was gone, and she held a bloody rag up to her lip. Asa tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it. She came around and sat on the couch beside Asa. She removed her rag to show that now, in addition to the bruise beneath her eye, she had a bloody, busted lip. Luckily, none of her teeth had been broken.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” she asked. “It’s a stupid thing to say, I know. Nearly everyone thinks he beats me, but no one outside of the relationship knows for sure. Except for you, I guess. I want to keep it that way.” Her eyes looked intense and hurt all at the same time.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Asa said.

  She reapplied the bloody rag for pressure, and opened up a small drawer in the bamboo coffee table. She took out an envelope. On the front the name “Roxanne” was written. “This is why I brought you here,” she said. “I wanted to show you this. It’s from Dr. Gill, you know, the guy that made the Gill initiative. He’s one of the owners.

  “Anyway, I read it, and wanted you to see it. I thought it might help; our team has a long road ahead of us. It’s going to be hard for the others to ever trust you, but maybe if you know, it’ll be more likely.”

  She held the letter for a moment, and closed her eyes for a second. When they opened, a single tear slid down her cheek. “I don’t like what they are doing to you, my boyfriend included. I don’t like what the Multipliers stand for. But… but…” she sobbed once, then regained her composure. “I want to live. And since Travis and I started dating, things have kind of… leaned in my favor, I guess. He has a lot of power in this place, they all do. And I want to graduate.”

  Asa looked at her in the face. She looked back at him. “That makes sense,” he said. He hoped that he was able to communicate how seriously he meant those words. How could I hold it against her that she is dating a Multiplier if it is increasing her chances of living? It’s not as though they’d stop being terrible to me if she broke up with Travis.

  “Dr. Gill told me that I could show you this letter, if I wanted to. And I want to. I trust you. But, just know that if you tell anyone what it says, you won’t be answering to me. You’ll be answering to the Academy. Do you understand?”

  “Basically, they’ll kill me if people find out what’s in this letter?”

  “Basically.”

  “I can deal with that.”

  She thrust the paper in his hands. “Leave it here when you’re done. Just put it back in the drawer. I’ll be in the back if you need anything.”

  She left him there alone, and he heard her shut the bedroom door. Asa turned the envelope over in his hands. The top had already been torn open, and the letter stuck out a bit. Asa grabbed at it, and unfolded it. The message had been typed up on a word processor, and Gene Gill had printed his name and signed at the bottom.

  Roxanne Price,

  It has come to my attention that the student, Asa Palmer, has been selected to join your Winggame team. A fine selection, indeed! Though, it is a selection that comes with its share of necessary precautions, or, words of confidence.

  He is a fine student, Asa Palmer!

  I am sad and dismayed to find, however, that his reputation does not precede him accurately. My sources tell me that some think the accidental deaths that occurred last year inside his team were due to actions committed by Asa himself. Koab’s death, Shelby’s death, Darren’s death, Kitna’s death, and Hamm’s death were all merely accidents that happened last year. It was, by no stretch of the imagination, Asa’s fault.

  That being said, some may argue and have argued that the deaths surrounding the Bulls last year have put Asa at an unfair disadvantage for graduating from this program. They say that not only did his team lose points, but that now his reputation will haunt him for the remainder of his time at the Academy. Though I find these accusations false, I can understand where they are coming from.

  Hear me on this one: The Academy will do everything in its power to ensure that no accidents befall your team, Roxanne. Do not fear young Palmer, he’s a good boy.

  Things are changing in the Academy (as they always are). These changes include things that will ensure that mishaps and accidents that led to deaths within the Bulls last year will not occur this season.

  The importance of you understanding this cannot be stressed enough. This semester’s Task, as you may have already heard, is to be the most lethal yet. It will involve all students at once. Participation will be mandatory. For this Task, students will remain in their Winggame teams. Your survival will depend directly on your teammates’ performances. Therefore, it is of great importance that you trust young Palmer. There is a great chance that your life will rest in his hands at a point in this semester. You will need to trust him.

  Please, contact me with questions,

  Wishing you the best,

  Gene Gill

  Darren and Koab did not die by accident, thought Asa, outraged. They were strangled to death by graduates and Multipliers! How is that an accident?

  He read through the letter once more. These changes include things that will ensure that mishaps and accidents that led to deaths within the Bulls last year will not occur this season. At first, he was tempted to believe the words within. Maybe, he reasoned, with Robert King dead, things really are changing.

  But, on the other hand, he thought, maybe I’d be easier to kill if they could get me to let my guard down.

  For the time, he believed the more cynical approach. Roxanne was still in the back, and Flying Lessons were scheduled to start soon. Not wanting to be late, Asa tucked the letter back into the drawer, and left the apartment.

  Rica growled at him on the way out.

  9

  Flying Class

  Asa’s wings thrashed through the air, fighting to pull him off of the ground. They won, and he watched his feet as they left the earth, and then were higher than the surrounding trees. I don’t have any problems flying, Asa thought, so why do we have a Flying Class now, just when I’m getting comfortable in the air?

  First, he gained altitude, and then he picked up speed and moved towards Mount Two. A message on his armband had told him that a red flag had been erected on the mountain, and the entrance to flying class would be at the base. From this far away, he couldn’t see the flag yet. The wind whipped around him and tugged on his body. The clouds to the East had turned a sick shade of purple and were lessening the intensity of the morning sun. It looked like dusk outside.

  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 semeste
r’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. “He
llo, 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?”