The Academy: Book 2 (46 page)

             
Mama nodded. “That makes sense,” she said, and then she sat back in silence for a long while. It was now dark outside the cabin windows, and the little wolves that lived in the mountains were howling at the moon. Asa drank his tea—minty, dark—and looked at Mama, trying to discern her facial expressions. She was so still in her pondering that he feared she had fallen asleep when she spoke.

             
“Forgive me, Asa, if I don’t address what you’ve said in order. My old brain isn’t as organized as it used to be.

             
“We need to consider the fact that Robert King is alarmed. You said that he looked alarmed in the meeting. And, do you remember Hubert Boistly?”

             
Asa paused for a moment, and then felt his heart rate rise. “Yeah! He’s the president of the Academy.”

             
“The what?” Jen asked.

             
“Exactly,” said Mama. “Jen hasn’t seen him. And you haven’t seen him this semester, have you Asa?”

             
“No.”

             
Mama scratched her chin. “I think that Hubert Boistly did a fine job managing the day to day activities of the Academy for a time; he is kin to The Boss, you know? But now, I think that Mr. King, The Boss, wants to take leading the Academy into his own hands. Hubert Boistly was, frankly, an idiot. I think that Robert King wanting to take the reigns is proof that he is becoming more tightly wound; he may think that there is more on the table as far as the Academy is concerned than he used to. I think that it means he is scared.”

             
“What happened to Hubert Boistly?” Asa asked.

             
“I don’t know. I bet that he’s dead.”

             
There was another moment of silence before Mama spoke again. “And then, the monkey that Robert King is keeping in the cage beside his desk also makes me think he’s nervous. He’s a David. Your father, Asa, wanted the Academy to be run by Davids. Robert King didn’t agree with this, he thought that they weren’t intelligent enough. I think that he was frightened of the idea that there might be a life form that is smarter than humans, and didn’t want to face that fact. Him going back on that belief makes me feel as though he is scared, also. I bet he’s thinking, ‘what if the Davids are smarter than me? Maybe one can help me out of this mess.’ He’s scared, all right.

             
“And then, of course, you have the fact that his clone was killed by that cop earlier this year, and then that video was put online.

             
“And then there’s this thing you speak of—the Hive. A place, outside of the Academy where there are over two hundred thousand Multipliers.”

             
Mama closed her eyes, trying to think. “If the Hive existed, why wouldn’t they have already attacked the Academy?”

             
She answered her own question—“Oh, I don’t know! There are so many reasons.” She was just talking to herself now, and Asa and Jen were observers of a mental process. It was like she had forgotten they were there. “First, the Academy is
still
putting the Wolf Flu virus into the world’s water supply. If the Multipliers wait to attack, to come out, there will be less human’s alive in the world to resist them, and domination will be easier. In other words, it will be easier for them to
Multiply.
And Multipliers can only
turn
a human once every month. So, maybe they are waiting for the number of humans to lower to some critical figure.”

             
She closed her eyes again, and ran her lips over her teacup, thinking. Asa and Jen didn’t want to move; they didn’t want to break the old woman’s concentration.

             
“Yes!” she put her teacup down and smiled—almost laughed. “They are going to attack the Academy first!”

             
“First? Who?” Asa asked.

             
“The Multipliers.” In the excitement of discovery, Mama looked momentarily younger. “They are growing in this, this
Hive
thing, right? Maybe on one of the earlier missions, when Multipliers were allowed to go out and help with Academy work with the graduates, one ran off. Or, in Africa when the Multipliers broke out, maybe the graduates thought they caught all of them, but hadn’t. I don’t know. But anyways, if the Hive thing exists, you have to assume that there is some kind of critical figure. Sure, maybe they have a quarter million now, but they can’t continue growing underground, and not expect to be found out. And when they are found, what is going to happen? The Academy will shut them down. I know it sounds crazy, but the graduates are very formidable when they are on a mission.”

             
Asa’s head tilted as he listened.

             
Not seeing, Mama went on: “And this Hive-thing, they may have numbers, but what kinds of technologies do they have? Even with a quarter million, they couldn’t take over the world right now; I really don’t think so. But…” she shrugged, “if they were able to take over the Academy; to use its weaponry, the facilities, now that’s a different story.

             
“Just think,” Mama said, “where do you think the Hive is hiding? Maybe a small town in a third world country? Maybe some of them are underground? Maybe they are spread out. They are probably excellent at not being noticed; they probably do their best to stay indoors with their shades drawn, wherever they are; Mexico, Peru, the U.S., Australia, Somalia. But their plan is a ticking time bomb. Just think; all it would take is for one of them, just one, to have a suspicious police force break into their home, find that the residents aren’t entirely human, and then the whole operation is over with.”

             
Asa interrupted now: “What do you mean?”

             
Mama’s bushy white eyebrows drew together. “If some police officer finds a human with black gums, he’s going to tell the leaders above him. Word will be communicated out through telephone conversations and e-mails; the news will spread like a virus. When the Academy got word, they would step in, and the Multipliers don’t want that. That’s why this Hive thing has taken such pains to stay hidden; that’s why no one has heard about it before.”

             
“So they want to get out of these hiding places? Is that what you’re saying?” Jen asked.

             
“Yes! I think that they’re not only trying to get out of these hiding places, I think that they’re trying to get into the Academy. If they could take over the Academy, they could grow so much more. These mountains and the Town can hold well over a million people, easily. They’ll want this place, and they’ll try to take it. The question is when. It scares me to wonder if Volkner was feeding them information. They are probably very well informed about this organization. And there might be other traitors too; Multipliers, graduates, humans working for Alfatrex. Anyone could be helping the Hive.”

             
Asa thought of Harold Kensing;
who had he been working for, if not the Hive? It made sense. Who else would threaten to kill a police officers family if they don’t kill Asa?

             
“So what do we do?” Jen asked.

             
The clocks ticked on the wall for a moment. “What do you mean?”

             
“How do we stop them?”

             
Mama’s face fell and she suddenly looked old again. The roll of intellectual discovery had slowed. “I don’t know.”

             
The three of them fell into silence again. The fire crackled and the cuckoos along the wall ticked off the time as they went deeper into the night. At first, Asa suspected that Mama might be pondering what to say next, but after several minutes she began to snore. Asa’s frame found a comfortable niche in the corner of the couch and he wondered when Conway would come home. They had nothing to do now but wait.

             
The wolves continued to howl outside and Asa was glad to be locked in doors. He thought of the other predators out there;
Joney, Michael, and Edna are probably cooking a deer over a fire right now, licking their lips with black tongues. And who knows how many other Multipliers are waiting in the wild? Will Robert King send out a search party to comb through the forests? These aren’t benign Multipliers; they’ve already bitten Brumi, and if the past is a way to predict the future, they will bite more students.

             
Asa’s body was exhausted. His joints were sore from the terribly long run earlier in the day, and his head still ached from the hallucinogenic drug that Lilly had sprayed him with. His back hurt from where he had been slammed down by a pterodactyl.

             
Slowly, his eyelids fluttered down and then he shot them back open, sitting up.

             
I must not sleep.

             
Mama was snoring on her chair, and Jen was curled up on the other side of the couch.

             
Asa relaxed.

             
Conway can wake me up when he gets home, if I do take a small nap.

             
He leaned back against the soft cushions and rested his head on the fabric. Within ten seconds his eyes were shut and his breathing was slowing down as he fell into a deep sleep.

21

Beautiful Months and the Multipliers’ Nighttime Visit to Asa Palmer

             
When Asa awoke, he saw golden beams of sunlight shining through the windows onto the floor. He stirred, and found that his arm was around Jen as she slept next to him on the couch. He stood slowly, trying not to wake her. Confused, he saw that he was still in Conway’s cabin. On the tree stump coffee table was a silver cassette player with a sticky note on it that said:

Press play,

Mama

            
 
Asa did so and was greeted with Mama’s African accented, croaky voice: “Good morning, Asa. I would have written you a note, but with my eyes I sometimes write over what I’ve already written and the meaning gets all jumbled. Conway called last night. He’d been sent on a mission. He didn’t say where, but he’ll be gone for a while. There’s some eggs, bagels, cheese, and all sorts of stuff in the refrigerator. Help yourself. I would have made breakfast for you, but Ozzie and I had to clock in at The Shop before seven this morning. Stay as long as you want. You and Jen won’t have class today ‘cause many students are still in the Task. Have a good day, Asa. I want to see you soon.” And then Mama’s voice cut off and the tape kept reeling.

             
Asa and Jen had breakfast on the small, dark wood table and then cleaned their dishes and put everything away. They made sure to leave the cabin cleaner than they found it and then went off to spend the day together.

March came, cold and sleeting, and led to April, which Asa enjoyed. Flowers began to bloom throughout the fields and valleys tucked away in the mountains, and brown grizzlies came out of hibernation and roamed over the land. The snowy summits began to
partially melt away under the sun, making clean, crisp streams that ran down the mountainsides into the steaming Moat.  The frightening portion of April began at the end of the month, when Multipliers banged on the door of Asa’s dwelling, demanding to see Teddy Jujune. The time leading up to this event was the best Asa had had in over a year.