The Academy: Book 2 (47 page)

             
The period wasn’t without unfairness and sorrow—this was present in any stint at the Academy—the twisted moral foundations of the place made it so. Asa learned that a dozen students had refused to compete in the Task in the Tropics; all of these had been killed. Stan, having saved the Sharks by returning another team’s KEE, was more obnoxiously cocky than ever. He refused to look at Asa, and he and Janice were absent from every practice and team meeting. Teddy was acting stranger than usual. His pupils, as impossible as it seemed, grew even more dilated. He twitched compulsively, got A’s on all his tests, and disappeared into the secret compartment over Asa’s dwelling so much that Asa rarely saw him. Over the course of time, rumors came to Asa about more students being bitten by Multipliers. Through March and April, five more had been bitten, and the Academy seemed to do nothing about it. But these things were like flies sprinkled over the icing on the best cake you’ve ever eaten. If you could brush the insects away and get over mental blocks and normal notions of good (which Asa was becoming proficient at), you’d find that the cake wasn’t as tarnished as you first thought.

             
Though Stan and Janice didn’t cooperate much with Roxanne’s instructions, and the Sharks had been cut down to a team of ten players (one of which, Gabby, was missing a leg), they were performing well. They technically won their next five games, although they only had to actually play three. Two of the teams they had been paired against were completely eliminated in the Task. From there, they lost a game, and then won the next one, ending the season with a record of six wins and two losses. With these wins alone, Asa had earned one hundred twenty points.

             
During their final two games, Asa noticed that Stan had lost weight. He would have attributed it to the tremendous stress he was under, but then there were the bruises—they popped up on his forearms, his neck, and under his eyes. Stan hated Asa, and was perhaps more scared of him than anyone else in the Academy. Because of this, Asa never considered asking Stan where the bruises were coming from.

             
Though the majority of Asa’s teammates had gotten over the myth that he was a murderer, most of the Academy’s students still feared him. This played to his advantage, as defensive players were less likely to put their bodies in his path as he zoomed over the Moat. He scored in all of the Sharks’ last five games, and in one of the matches he zigzagged in and out of the hoops to score three goals at once. Having scored seven goals in all, he was the league’s ninth highest scorer and was featured in the Academy paper.

             
The Sharks were headed to the playoffs. If they won the championship, it would then be possible for Stan to live, having earned one thousand points. Though the Sharks record was good up until that point, it was doubtful that they would be successful in the playoffs. They had been playing teams that were, like themselves, competing with fewer players than usual due to the deadly nature of the semester’s Task. In the other conference, however, one team had made it out of the Tropics without a single casualty. The Wolves. Before the Task, they had been a good Winggame team. Now, as they played with greater numbers than all their opponents, it was thought that they were impossible to defeat. They had a perfect eight win and zero loss record going into the playoffs.

             
Regardless of how the Sharks performed in the playoffs, there would be a dance held after the championship. This was more of a source of anxiety to Asa than even playing in the championship game would be. He had never been to a dance before—he didn’t know exactly what happened at dances or why they were enjoyed. And who would he ask? Was he expected to ask someone? He felt he had no one he could confide these questions in.

             
School continued to go by, and Asa was becoming more successful in his classes than ever before. Even Professor Stern’s Science Class was manageable. All of the hours Asa had spent cooped up in his dwelling, reading the textbooks on the fabric of his armband by firelight, or scratching out equations onto yellow paper at the library were paying off, and in unexpected ways. Asa’s brain was being molded towards scientific reasoning like an unsightly chunk of metal is hammered into a statue. Studying that would have previously taken him four hours was now taking him one hour. And at the end of the semester, there was a scheduled summer break.

             
When Asa heard this news, he was elated. After working at such a nonstop pace for ten months, the hours of lost sleep were catching up with him. Roxanne informed him that there weren’t classes in either June or July.

             
“What do you do, then, if there are no classes?”

             
Roxanne shrugged. “Just hang out. You can do whatever you want, really—just no leaving the Academy. Last year a bunch of students organized a baseball league and played among themselves. Personally, I spent a lot of time with Travis.” She frowned slightly, almost imperceptibly, and then brightened. “You’ll have fun.”

             
Flying Class had its success as well. Asa took Teddy’s advice and changed tones as he traveled throughout the giant wooden obstacle course. His echolocation no longer supplied him with bad information; a steady change in pitch prevented this from happening, and made it so that he could accurately anticipate all obstacles ahead. With this advantage, he grew so that he regularly splashed through the finish line with the best times, but, like Stridor, he was unable to use the spear gun to hit the target that would allow him to select from a list of available mutations. He tried shooting above the target, below it, to the left, and to the right; no matter what strategy he used, the spear always hit an invisible force field and crumpled to the ground. Twitching, Teddy told Asa that he would figure out how to hit the target, but after two months of pondering, Teddy had no good ideas. Asa thought that the game was rigged; he believed that hitting the target could actually be impossible.

             
Along with the bears and flowers that painted the wilderness, another animal had returned—the crows, Asa’s guardians. They flocked to the mountains where they made nests in the forests close to Asa. Sighting the red birds that sometimes preyed on the crows was becoming a rarity. In the past, Asa had been fearful of the black birds’ incessant stares as he walked by, but now he welcomed them. Each morning of April he found them waiting on the mountain above his dwelling. They were perched there like sentinels, and with their presence, Asa felt mildly better about the Multipliers that lurked on the Academy’s boarders, and the possibility of an attack from the Hive.

             
And, he was making friends. This was a thing he thought would never happen after the tarnish of his reputation last semester. He and his Winggame teammates (except for Stan and Janice) often ate dinner together. They talked about their pasts, and shared histories. They began to trust each other.

             
One Friday night they sat around a table in the cafeteria below the Town. Winggame standings and scores scrolled over the walls in a rainbow of neon colors. The Sharks were ranked third in the league, and Asa proudly saw his name pop up on the list of the best scorers. In the overall category, Roxanne was ranked best on the team, due to her defensive prowess. She finished third in the race for the league’s most valuable player award.

             
Being Friday, they didn’t have to wake up early in the morning, and were in especially cheery moods. They were having such a good time that they found themselves still talking after the cafeteria cleared and the custodial raccoons began to filter in and clean up after the students. They spoke of Winggame, different strategies, and gossiped over the recent annoying thing Janice, who all agreed must be a compulsive liar, had said.

             
The time went by without them noticing; Asa’s abdomen was sore from a fit of roaring laughter he had suffered from after watching Bruce do his imitation of Roxanne’s Multiplier boyfriend, Travis. Roxanne didn’t defend Travis, but laughed along with the rest of the team. Her eyes sparkled when she looked at Bruce, and when he looked back at her she bit her lip. Seeing this made Asa uncomfortable; they were forbidden to be together; Travis would murder Bruce if he ever showed that he was interested in anything beyond a platonic relationship with Roxanne.

             
“Wow, it’s midnight,” said Jen, gazing at her armband. She was sitting by Asa. She always sat by Asa, who sometimes found Charlotte staring at him from across the cafeteria as they ate. “Where did the time go?”

             
“I don’t know. I didn’t think it was this late. Look at the rest of the cafeteria; it’s completely cleaned. I bet even the raccoons have gone to bed,” Bruce observed.

             
It was quiet for a moment, and then Asa looked up and saw Lilly Bloodroot staring at him; her purple eyes were like stormy skies, her white hair was like lightening. “Asa,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”

             
Asa felt the good mood run out of him, and suddenly his heart was in his throat, pumping nervously. He had been expecting someone to ask him about what had happened last semester for some time now, and a premonition told him that the time had come. His teammates were spending dozens of hours with him every week.
Don’t they want to know why everyone thought I was a murderer last semester?
He found that his mouth was too dry to talk, so he nodded.

             
“Tell us; if you weren’t responsible for the death of all those people on your Winggame team last semester, why did they all die? And why were you poisoned your first meal here? And why did that mountain lion chase you and Charlotte into the jungle last semester?”

             
Asa’s teammates were staring at him solemnly. The cafeteria was empty, and the scores continued to roll over the ceiling and walls. “Not here,” Asa said. “But I’ll tell you. Let’s go somewhere else.”

             
They traveled as a group to Viola Burns’ dwelling, which was carved diagonally adjacent to Asa’s. Though Viola’s door was only yards away from Asa’s, the rock surfaces within were much darker. A tree sat above her door, and inside her dwelling smelled strongly of earth. She made tea for them and they sat on her wooden benches around the kitchen table. The walls and ceiling were knotted with the roots of the tree above them. Paintings lined the walls on canvas made from bark, and the fire, which was vented through wooden shutters in the ceiling and walls that were opened with drawstrings, illuminated the entire room. 

             
Asa made them all swear to secrecy, and then revealed everything. The whole story was told with the help of Jen, and by the time he had filled in all the details, beginning with the crows, the wooden vents showed that morning had come.

             
Having a group of students understand him was a relief to Asa. He felt lighter than before. None of his teammates betrayed their oath of secrecy, and Asa was glad to have a cohort of students that he could come to with his questions and concerns. It was now possible for him to seek multiple frames of reference when he had an issue.

             
Though nothing could replace the mother and father that he wished would have stayed on the earth and taken care of him, he began to use a new word to describe his team in his mind:
Family.

             
On the night of April 30, Asa was lying in his hammock as it rocked gently back and forth beside the fire, thinking of how much he loved those he had gone through the Task with. In a way, the atrocities of the event had brought them closer than would have been possible otherwise.

             
The polaroid of his father rested on his chest. Though he didn’t understand his dad, or his suicide, he wanted to try.
There must be a reason you left me,
he thought at the ceiling.

             
That was when a knock came at the door.

             
Thinking that it must be Jen, Asa hopped up in his bare feet and padded over to the door, placing the polaroid in his suit beside his chest as he went. He removed the padlock from the door and opened it up to feel the cold air rush in and to see the moon shining between silver clouds in a black sky. Two Multipliers stood there, watching him.

             
Asa’s sympathetic nervous system went into high gear, dumping cortisol and adrenaline into his bloodstream. From Asa’s perspective, time seemed to slow down as the Multiplier on the left smiled widely—
threateningly.