by Leito, Chad
“What brought you here today, Asa?” Conway asked.
Asa didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk anymore. He felt wounded, and wanted to get away. His mind went to the picture in his suit that he had gotten from the gorilla (David) in the jungle, and he considered how Conway didn’t want to have to talk about the Davids.
Asa stood abruptly. “I thought we could talk, but I don’t think that we can.” He was surprised to find himself emotional. Mama stopped rocking and sat still. Conway regarded Asa with his brown eyes, but his face didn’t show what he was thinking. “Thank you for the white cake and the tea, Mama. And thank you for talking to me.”
She smiled and said, “So polite… You are welcome.”
Asa didn’t say goodbye to Conway, but instead he stormed out of the cabin. He was thankful to make it out into the snow before the tears came to him. Angry, upset, distraught, he leapt into the air, ripped his wings from his back, and thrashed them through the atmosphere so that he shot upward into the sky, towards his dwelling.
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.
But the problem is that I still don’t know how to help him.
As Asa’s relationship with Teddy was strained, he grew closer to both Jen and Roxanne. Roxanne defended Asa to the other students, and Asa suspected that she understood more about his situation than she should have. He attributed this to the fact that Roxanne had a Multiplier boyfriend.
But, these were the only relationships in Asa’s life that strengthened at that time. The most Asa could say about his other teammates was that they didn’t fear him as much as they used to.
After Asa received the letter from Gene Gill, which outlined that for this semester’s Task the students would be working with their Winggame teams, he had become even more concerned with whether or not his teammates liked him. He knew that not having mutual trust in a team could mean premature death in whatever sick Task the Academy’s leaders had devised for this semester. However, he didn’t know how to bridge the gap from perceived murderer to friend with his cohorts. His teammates were understandably weary of him.
In the time leading to early February, there was a slight shift in how Asa’s teammates viewed him. Some, such as Janice Curnsworth, a girlfriend of Stan’s who had the mutated ability to blend in with her surroundings like a chameleon, seemed to grow only more distrusting of Asa with time. But this was not how most people were acting.
Asa thought that he could detect that his teammates were becoming slightly more trusting of him. When he showed up for meetings, they no longer grew quiet. During practice, they freely spoke with him when necessary. Asa was never invited to lunch with any of the other Sharks, and they didn’t ever talk with him just for fun, but they also weren’t afraid that he would slit their throats the moment they turned their backs.
They were getting to know him, and they saw that perhaps all the stories they had heard of the terrible Asa Palmer weren’t exactly true. As they spent more time together, Asa inevitably learned more about his teammates too. He learned their background stories, their mutated abilities, and about their natures.
It then became confusing to Asa, when he learned about Mike Plode, a third semester student on the Sharks. It was odd to Asa that the other students feared him, but they didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of spending time with Mike Plode.
Mike Plode had a nickname—“Boom Boom.” This sounded silly and light-hearted, but it wasn’t. His cellmates in a high security prison for adults had given him the names when he was only fourteen years old. Mike Plode had been on the national news, and after hearing his story Asa thought that he had heard a blurb about the guy while watching television in an emergency department’s waiting room with his Wolf-Flu stricken mother.
All of the students were aware of what he had done, but none wanted to ask. One evening, when they were all exhausted after running hours of flying drills, Jen came out with the question everyone wanted to know. “Why did you do it?”
Mike smiled. He didn’t smile often, and his lips trembled with the happy expression, as though his facial muscles weren’t used to the position. The team circled him, sprawled out on the Plaid in the middle of the Moat. The Plaid was levitating 100 yards above the water, suspended by magnets; this was a new Winggame change, and one that had each team working hard on strategies to accommodate the new course. It was awfully cold, but the students’ bodies were so hot from the gruesome exercises that it didn’t bother them.
“Well,” Mike said. All eyes were on him. “Because I wanted to see what would happen, I guess. That’s all, I think. People always think it was done for some kind of heroic or villainous cause.” Boom Boom shook his head. “It was just a coincidence that it was a bank. I don’t have problems with banks; this was just the biggest building I could find.” His eyes lit up. “And I wanted to see a big fire! A damn
big fire!”
While he spoke, Asa thought that it was a ridiculous coincidence that perhaps the world’s most obsessed pyromaniac had hair that looked like fire. Boom Boom’s hair was finger-length all over, and wavy shades of yellow and bright orange that stood straight up. His green eyes were the color of shallow ocean water, and they widened when he spoke of the crime that made him famous.
“When I was a baby, my parents said that I couldn’t sleep unless there was a fire in the fireplace. I’ve always liked to watch things burn. The power. The dancing energy!” He shuddered. “And I love the way it grows; it multiplies, just like us. When I was two, I was caught throwing my teddy bear into a campfire my grandfather made in the woods behind his house. My parents got mad at me, and said I’d miss my stuffed bear. But I didn’t. No. I loved watching that thing burn. It was worth it.
“Fire had me from a young age, and I guess it just grew from there. My love for it multiplied, just like the fire does. When I was five, my older brother got some fireworks for Christmas. These weren’t sparklers, but the kind that they blow up in the ballparks around the Fourth of July. We had a Labrador retriever, a real old, dusty, yellow thing. His name was Ike, and it always frustrated me because my name was Mike. My mom would yell at one of us, and I wouldn’t know who she was talking to. No one would. It was stupid.
“Anyways, I lured Ike into a tin trash can, closed him in there with some of the fireworks, and blew him to hell and back. Well, he didn’t come back, but it’s an expression.” He giggled. “But I loved watching the lid explode off that thing. POW! I mean, what a rush! My parents should have known then.
“From there, I had various encounters with the law. I had set four or five brush fires and blown up the shed out back with gasoline by the time I was twelve. Then I got into chemistry class at the community college.
“I tested real well on aptitude tests, like most of you guys, but I always got bad grades. I didn’t care about school. The counselor advised that I be put into a class at a community college so that I could be challenged.
