The Academy: Book 2 (39 page)

Asa reasoned that if the Hive existed,
a force outside of the Academy that uses Academy technology for evil, couldn’t there be a similar force that uses the technology for good? What if there was a group of scientists out there who had broken free of the Academy? What if they were using technology to mutate humans and animals so that they could do altruistic acts, like the dog saving Asa that night?

Yeah, but what else are they doing? And why don’t they do anything to stop the atrocities inside of the Academy, if they do exist?

And there were, in fact, many bad things happening in the Academy. Aside from the immoral premise of the place, a Multiplier recently bit Brumi, and Multipliers are camped out around the Academy premises. Why wouldn’t this outside force help with something like that?

Asa had a sick
feeling that the Academy wasn’t aware of Joney and the rest of the Multipliers around the Academy. He didn’t think that Robert King knew about them. And, it reasoned that they were from the Hive, and that they would attack the Academy.

But why have they waited for so long?

An enormous spider crawled over the ground just outside the mouth of the cave. Asa was glad that he had been asked to keep watch; there was no way that he would have been able to sleep.

It wasn’t the sounds of birds and the crickets and the wind
that would have kept him up. Asa had grown accustomed to sleeping through background noise. For the past couple months, Teddy had been drilling through rock up above Asa;
God and Teddy are the only ones that know what he’s doing up there,
Asa thought. He brushed the thought aside; he didn’t like to think too long about what Teddy was doing throughout the nights, or what was down the extra tunnel he had carved in the underwater secret passage above Asa’s dwelling.

The reason that Asa wouldn’t be able to sleep was because of the perilous situation he was in. He looked down at his digital camouflaged suit, and remembered what Robert King’s hologram had told them about the tiny batteries lodged within his suit. At this time, he had no way of knowing whether or not someone else had stolen the Shark’s KEE. If someone stole it and returned it to their Home Base, he would be instantly electrocuted to death, like a murderer in an electric chair. The thought made him sweat.

The deadly electric current could come on at anytime, as sudden, as unexpected, and as powerful as a lightening strike.

Likewise, if he and his teammates were successful in obtaining another team’s KEE, and returning it to their own Home Base, they would possibly be killing a whole team.
And we don’t know which team occupies which base. What if we get Charlotte’s KEE, or Teddy’s? Will I really be able to contribute to an act that will electrocute them to death?
He supposed he didn’t have a choice. There was no point in turning back to guard their own KEE now. If someone was going to take their KEE, they probably already had it. The only thing to do was to play the offensive game.

But the thought of hurting anyone else made him feel nauseous.

He remembered how he had broken that Armadillo player’s ribs right before the Task.
If I had known that the Task was about to start, I would have played more conservatively.

Asa checked
the countdown clock on his armband.

5
5 hours 58 minutes 31 seconds

The numbers continued to count down. From deep within the cave, everyone seemed to be sleeping. Asa’s bladder was full. He stood, undid his pants, and stood as close to the web as he dared. He urinated through the holes, and the stream flowed downhill outside of the cave. He
was acutely aware of the noise he was making and hoped that no one heard him.

When he was done, he resituated his pants and was about to sit back down for the remainder of his watch when a terrible noise came from the back of the cave. There was a gurgling noise, and something was slapping against the stone.

“Jack!” Asa heard someone say; he thought it was Viola, and she sounded worried.

Asa ran from his post back to where his teammates had been sleeping.
They were all awake now, most of them were sitting. Mike Plode threw some stored brush on the fire and it lit up again, illuminating the cave walls and everyone’s face. Everyone was staring at Jack.

He lay on the ground, clutching his throat. His face was puffy and red, his eyes swollen shut. His lips had inflated like balloons, and his tongue, which was hanging out of his mouth, was the size of a fist. On the ground beside him was a half eaten Mountain Berry. His lips were painted blue.

Gabby Carter was crying, her hands over her mouth. “Somebody
do something!”

“There’s nothing we
can
do,” Mike said, stoking the fire with a stick.

Jack Tool was slamming his fists and his feet into the rock in panic.
He’s going to fracture a bone,
Asa thought. His chest was rising and falling quickly, and a high-pitched whining sound was coming from his throat.

“I could try CPR,” said Viola. She was full of nervous energy, and was biting the fingers of one hand, while she used another hand to tug on her hair.

“Don’t,” Boom Boom said, not taking his eyes off the fire. “You don’t want that poisonous stuff on your mouth.”

“Well, someone has to do
something!”
Gabby was sobbing very loudly as the whistling sound stopped as Jack Tool’s throat had completely closed; Asa noted that the food was killing Jack even faster than he thought it would.

No one answered Gabby
. She continued to sob. Asa sat down, closed his eyes, and pressed his hands against his ears until it was finished. He didn’t want to hear Jack struggling. He couldn’t do anything to stop feeling the vibrations in the rock as Jack’s body seized, struggled, and then was still.

A couple minutes later, Jack Tool was dead. His face was a shade of purple Asa didn’t think was possible. In the end, he had torn away some of the flesh in his throat with his fingernails, making a bloody mess.

The struggle for air had woken everyone up. Roxanne looked at her watch; somehow, she appeared even more tired after her nap than before it. “We need to get going,” she said.

Everyone stood slowly. They left Jack’s body and moved to the mouth of the cave; Gabby was still sobbing. Mike took a torch to the web he h
ad created the night before. The filaments burned to hot liquid, and Asa stepped over it on his way out into the Tropics.

18

Land of Giants

             
It wasn’t dark for long. The Tropics grew hot and muggy as the Sharks made their way through the land.

             
When not blocked by trees, the Home Bases could be seen looming in the distance. Asa’s heart picked up to an uncomfortable pace each time he saw what they were walking towards. It reminded him of the realities of the game he was living in—
Kill or be killed
—and of the fact that at any moment his suit could electrocute him to death without warning.

             
The Tropics were beautiful, though.

There were only eight Sharks, now that Jack Tool was dead. They followed a brown, fast flowing stream, with Roxanne in the lead. There were purple, black,
and blue flowers. Purple hummingbirds fluttered over petals and drank up the nectar. Thirty and forty pound fish occasionally leapt out of the river, and iguanas and turtles rested on the bank. There were black squirrels. There was grass that was such a dark shade of green that it was almost blue. And everything was enormous.

Asa walked beside Boom
Boom, who had two coconuts tied around his waist; each of these had been pierced with half-inch diameter holes and had vines sticking out of them. Asa didn’t ask what they were for.

Mike looked pale, just as Roxanne and Bruce did. Asa felt pale. The Tropics were incredibly humid, and Asa was continually producing sweat onto his face. This did not help with his nausea or hunger.

The flow of the river was somewhat directing the course the Sharks were taking through the jungle. Two Home Bases—tall, white structures—could be seen in the distance. “Remind me,” Asa said to Mike, “which Home Base is ours?”

“That one,” Mike pointed to the one closest to them.

Asa felt his hopes sink. They were only a third of the way to an opponent’s Home Base. Even if they reached it before they were electrocuted, they would then have to capture the KEE from potentially hostile Academy students, then turn around and walk
back.
He became uncomfortably aware that no one was guarding his own team’s KEE and that the electric shock of his suit could come at any time.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how far we traveled yesterday before stopping, and why we’re not closer. Remember after the Boss’s hologram left, when I estimated the distance to the nearest Base at
about fifteen miles?”

Asa nodded.

“I was wrong. Very wrong.” Boom Boom looked even paler for a moment, and Asa thought that this was due to a twinge of fear mixed in with the nauseous hunger. It was strange to Asa to see such an emotion in someone who had lured their household dog into a trashcan and then blew it up with fireworks.
You’re scared of the electricity charring you, but you’ll kill a dog for fun,
Asa thought in disgust.

Through the canopy overhead, Asa saw a pterodactyl flying through the air; it seemed too muscular for a creature in flight.

“How far apart do you think these Bases are?” Asa asked. He kept his thoughts about Mike’s demented tendencies to himself.

“Fifty miles. Maybe seventy-five or a hundred.”

“
What!
?”

Boom
Boom shrugged. “If it was even twenty miles, we would have reached it by now.”

Asa thought back at when he first saw the other Bases out the window of their own Home Base. “But they didn’t
look
that far away.”

Boom
Boom smiled. “Have you noticed the sky, Asa? Look at it.”

Asa did. High above his head, the day was a perfect, clear blue. There wasn’t a single cloud. “What about it?” Asa asked.

“There’s no sun,” Boom Boom said.

Asa gazed up again.
Their view of the sky was limited by the jungle surrounding them. “It’s probably still on the horizon,” Asa said. “It’s early in the day still.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought yesterday when I couldn’t find it in the sky. Except, it was getting close to nighttime, so I thought that the sun was close to setting. But then we came out into a high clearing where I could see the whole sky. I looked all around, Asa. There is no sun here.”

Asa felt uneasy. “What does that mean?”

“It means we’re not outside. We’re in some kind of an arena. Do you remember when they transported us? We weren’t traveling for very long at all; the climate here is much different from that at the Academy. We couldn’t possibly have moved from an artic region of the world to a tropical region in so little time.”

Asa felt a warm breeze move in the same direction as the flowing stream beside them.
It’s true. This place is far from artic.

Mike Plode went on: “I think we’re deep underground. The ‘sky’ seems to be some kind of ceiling that glows bluish white in the daytime and gets black at night.”

“You think that the Academy dug out hundreds of square miles of earth to make an underground arena for the Task?” Asa asked, having trouble believing the proposal.

“No,” Boom
Boom said. “I think that the Academy dug out
thousands
of square miles of earth to make this arena. Which leads us back to why you and I both incorrectly estimated the length between our Home Base and the opponent’s bases.