The Academy: Book 2 (13 page)

             
“Can you believe that they’re pretending that Robert King is still alive?” Asa asked. His voice was croaky; it was the first time he had spoken that day.

             
Teddy didn’t respond, but continued to stir at the eggs. Now, it sounded as though he were humming “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” He had stopped sobbing a few minutes ago.

             
“Teddy?”

             
Teddy jumped, just like he had yesterday when Asa accidentally snuck up on him. The spatula went flying, but luckily, the eggs remained where they were in the pan. He turned, hand on his heart, a terrified look on his face. “What, Asa?” he asked.

             
Asa paused for a moment. “I just wanted to talk about this article. They keep on going on pretending that Robert King is alive. I just don’t know how long it can last.”

             
Teddy picked up the spatula, and scratched the side of his face while thinking. He didn’t even notice that this action was coating his cheek with grease. “Do you remember seeing Volkner yesterday?” Teddy asked, as though Asa hadn’t just spoken.

             
For a moment, Asa was offended: Teddy had just completely ignored the comment that Asa made. But, after staring at Teddy’s face for a moment, the agitation turned to pity. The guy was dying on his feet. He swayed where he stood, a few strings of thin blonde hair falling out of the side-part above his forehead and into his eyes, which were now lined with pigmented skin so red it looked like blood; the red-rimmed eyes made him look a bit like a rabit.

             
“Uhhh, no. I guess that I don’t remember seeing him,” Asa said.

             
Teddy swayed some more, and then turned back to the eggs. He talked while he worked on them. “You bring up an interesting point with the way they keep acting like Robert King is alive,” Teddy said, as though Asa had just now asked the question. He was talking louder than normal, and Asa wondered how much of their conversation could be heard in adjacent dwellings. “I saw something on the news last night that I think would interest you. Here, come grab a plate and we’ll talk about it. Eggs look done to me.”

             
Asa got up from his hammock, stretched, and padded over to beside the stove. The rock was cold on his bare feet, and he dreaded having to go outside in just a few minutes. Teddy went and grabbed the jars of icy chocolate milk from outside. When they were sitting again, plates mounded with cheesy eggs and heavily buttered nut bread atop their legs, Teddy told Asa of the news program he watched last night.

             
“They now have come out and said that they don’t know how Alfatrex could have invented this virus. They’ve searched the company’s buildings from top to bottom; they said that they even pulled up rugs looking for clues as to how this company got the stuff in the water supply. Or how they created it. They can’t find anything. Nothing.”

             
“Don’t they do all that kinds of experimentation here?” Asa said.

             
Teddy breathed through his mouth for a moment before talking; with the bloody nasal tampons hanging from his nostrils, he was having trouble eating, talking, and breathing, so he needed to take a small break to concentrate on the latter. “If it’s not here, it’s really well hidden. But people are becoming livid at that police officer that killed Robert King. Troy whatever-his-name-was. They say that this is why everyone deserves a fair trial.”

             
Asa shrugged. “I can agree with that. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Robert King got what was coming to him, but I don’t think giving everyone a trial is such a bad idea.”

             
Teddy began to giggle: It made a deep, muffled noise with his nose plugged up. “I’ll be honest with you, Asa. I’d kill every one of the graduates that work here, given the chance. EVEN CONWAY!” He laughed some more, and then calmed down, wiping a tear from his eye. “Forget a trial! They didn’t give us a trial!”

             
“Well,” Asa said, standing. It was a bit early for him to leave, but he suddenly found that he didn’t want to stay longer. “If, after Robert King is dead, the Wolf Flu slows down, then they’ll know The Boss was the culprit. Right?”

             
“That’s right!” Teddy said, waving a hunk of bread in the air. “They’ll know the truth eventually.”

             
Asa put his plate in the sink and moved towards the door, already turning up the heat on his armband to deal with the frigid air outside.

             
“And,” Teddy continued, his red puffy eyelids widening with excitement. The only thing that Asa could compare the yellow-white color that Teddy’s skin was turning was the underbelly of a catfish. Or a dead man. His cheek was still shiny with grease from when he had scratched his face with the dirty spatula. “If they keep searching, maybe they’ll find us here, and rescue us. Hopefully.”

             
“Yeah,” Asa said, taking one more pitying look at his unwell friend. “Hopefully. See you, Teddy.”

             
“See you.”

             
Teddy was still eating as Asa exited. The air outside was even colder than the stone floor had suggested it might be. Asa loathed extracting his wings for the first time in the morning. The air was unmercifully cold, and his wings were so warm, crumpled up deep in his back tissue.

             
But, with no choice in the matter, he extracted them quickly, jumped, and began to flap over to his Winggame team’s meeting spot—right in front of Fishie Mountain. He thought about Roxanne’s comment to the newspaper and was glad to have a captain that would at least give him a chance; that was more than he had been expecting.

             
As the forest below turned into arctic jungle, Asa thought about how it was an interesting choice on the Academy’s part to put the most vulnerable, least mutated students in the region of the Mountains that had arguably the most dangerous wildlife. Artic monkeys swung over the branches, and snakes so poisonous that they’d stop a blue whale’s heart slithered in the foliage. It was a dangerous place to be.

             
He landed a few minutes later, crunching down on a thin layer of ice that covered the pebbled walkway. At first, he thought that he might be in the wrong place. He checked his watch, which said “7:21 AM,” in the cloth. He wondered if he had misheard what Roxanne had said the night before.

             
As a nervous tick, he brought his fingers up and rubbed his temples.
She said in the interview that she wanted to give me a shot; if I show up to the first meeting late because I wasn’t listening, she could kick me off the team. No one would blame her. Think! What did she say yesterday? Where are we supposed to meet?

             
Then he heard someone sniff behind him.

             
Asa’s heart seemed to be caught in his throat. He turned quickly to see who had made the noise, but in that fraction of a second he had time to think all of this:
How could I be so stupid as to not use my echolocation? If I had used it, I wouldn’t have been snuck up on. And, oh, please don’t let it be Volkner! Please, God! But I know it is. I can feel his eyes on me; it must be similar to how a zebra feels when a lion watches it from the brush.

             
But it wasn’t Volkner. It was Stan, muscular arms crossed over his small frame. There was something odd about seeing all that muscle packed onto a small body—the oddity probably was that nature never intended him to be as strong as he was.

             
Stan spat. “Read what Roxanne wrote about you in the newspaper.”

             
Asa stared into Stan’s blue eyes. Stan had an attitude, and was small. Asa guessed that he was probably picked on when he was in human school;
He seems to love intimidating people. Perhaps it’s his way of compensating for something that happened to him in the past.

             
“I want ‘chu to know somethin’. I respect my captain. That’s my captain, you hear? You gotta respect.” He was pointing a finger at Asa now, and his voice was shaking. He looked either very angry or very scared; Asa wondered if Stan was experiencing a combination of both emotions. “I respect her opinion to trust you. And I’ll do whatever she says. She makes the decisions, you know? But I don’t trust you. I don’t care. I don’t trust you.”

             
Asa was stunned by Stan’s flawed logic and poor grammar, but he kept his mouth shut; there was nothing to be gained by making Stan feel stupid. But, he didn’t have anything else to say, and so he just stood there, staring into the deep blue eyes.

             
The Fishies arrived a moment later, then Roxanne arrived, and before 7:30 AM the whole team was assembled before the front doors of Fishie Mountain.

             
Stan walked by Asa to greet someone he knew, and whispered to Asa: “You’re gonna answer me when I talk to you, Piggy.”

             
But again, Asa didn’t answer.

             
The Fishies were all silent, and it took Asa a moment to remember that they were now under the talking ban. There was one Fishie in particular, a redhead with a streak of purple running through her hair, who looked very scared.
She’s probably seen someone die already.
Asa did a quick head count and saw that the Sharks were still completely intact; everyone had shown up.

             
Roxanne looked rested and alert. The nasty bruise around her right eye had diffused a bit more, and was turning a lighter shade of yellow.
It’s getting close to the color of Teddy’s skin.
“Good morning, everyone. Second semesters, listen up: I assume you all read the bit that Benny Hughs wrote in the paper this morning. If one of you does well enough in Flying Class and gets to choose a talent, you consult me before choosing, do you understand? If you refuse, I’ll kick you off.

“Okay, now, let’s get moving. We have a five mile run today, and the starting point is a little bit down the road.”

              Quietly, the groggy team began to trudge over the pebbles.
Why do we need to consult her if we acquire the chance of picking a new mutation? Is she going to pick for us?
Tropical birds were waking up in the arctic jungle around them, and beginning to sing their morning songs.

             
“The course we’re going to run,” Roxanne explained as she walked, “is a complete circle. Follow the orange flags, I’ve just gotten done putting them all up, but there should always be one within eyesight of you. Cardiovascular health is going to be crucial to us as a team; not only will it enable us to fly with more intensity late in games, but it will allow us to practice longer.”

             
Asa was walking in the back of the group, and Jen fell back to walk beside him. Stan shot a look over his shoulder at them.

             
Don’t come walk beside me, they can construe that as communication!
Asa wanted to tell her this, but was afraid that she would respond. He remembered in the Assembly last year when they shot that Fishie down just for saying, “bless you,” to someone who had sneezed.

             
And then, to Asa’s horror, Jen whispered to him: “Good thing it’s a circle: you can cut through a circle.”

             
Asa’s eyes widened and he looked around to make sure that no one had heard or seen her speak. The rest of the team trudged forward and apparently wasn’t aware that Jen had spoken. “You can’t cut through the arctic jungle,” Asa said. “You’ll get eaten alive!”

             
Jen waved a hand at him. “I’m not running the whole thing.”

             
“Yes you are. Now stop talking!”