The Academy: Book 2 (57 page)

             
“Fight?” Viola asked; she looked pale.

             
“Yeah,” Mike said. “It’s not a pretty option, but it’s the only one we’ve got. If the Academy goes down, it’s the end of the world. It’s as simple as that. The Wolf Flu is taking more human victims every single day, and the Hive is probably biting more people and making more Multipliers daily, also. And when the Hive decides it is tired of remaining underground and they want to have their own country, who’s going to stop them? The United States? China? Honestly, no one has a good standing army. People are sickly, weak, and dying. The Academy is the only hope. So if there is going to be an attack on this place, I think it’s better to die fighting here than to be hunted down like a rat in a hole a couple years later.”

             
“But we can’t fight Multipliers! They’re much too strong!” Viola rolled her eyes. “That’s crazy!”

             
“Well I think that waiting for them to take over the world is crazy,” Mike said back. “And they’re strong, but we have a lot of weapons. With technology, humans can extend their reach further than natural. I know this; I’ve made bombs before! We do have a fighting chance, let’s not doubt ourselves.”

             
Viola crossed her arms and stared down at the floor. When she spoke, her voice was shaky. “It just scares me. I think you’re right though, Mike. We don’t have another option.”

             
Asa rested his chin on his hands, trying to think of some other possibility that no one else was seeing. The idea of waiting for an inevitable Multiplier attack that was supposed to come at the end of this semester gave him chills.

             
“There’s something that I haven’t told any of you,” Roxanne said. “And I’m sorry! I just… I didn’t see any use in you knowing. But now, I think that it’s time.” All eyes went to Roxanne. “After I climbed King Mountain as a Fishie, I was given a Random Box Talent as a reward, just like everyone else. The mutation I received was an ability to electrocute things, sort of like an eel can.”

             
Asa perked up, and rubbed his shoulder where he had received the vaccine earlier in the day that would give him this same mutation. So far, he felt no different.

             
“At first, the ability wasn’t very valuable. I could shock someone, but it was very tiring for me. But then Bruce came along and helped me to realize my true potential.” She looked up at Bruce. “Bruce also has an ability. It’s a similar mutation to what platypuses have.”

             
“I can demonstrate.” Bruce stood up so that he was looking down at the table. “Jen, hold up a certain number of fingers beneath the table. Don’t let me see. Don’t tell me what it is.”

             
She placed her hands underneath the table.

             
“Seven,” Bruce said.

             
Jen held her hands up so that everyone could see. Indeed, she had seven fingers pointing out.

             
“What can you do? Do you have xray vision?” Viola asked.

             
“Not exactly.  Just like a platypus, I can sense electric fields. I couldn’t
see
Jen’s fingers, I could just sense them. It’s hard to explain. Her muscles are contracting with electric signals that are sent from her nervous system, and in a way, I can
see
those electric signals.”

             
“So that’s how you knew that Adam Trotter was in the creek bed when we were walking through the Tropics,” Asa said.

             
Bruce smiled and nodded before sitting back down.

             
Roxanne continued with what she was saying. “Bruce came to me one day and explained that all our nerves send electric and chemical signals. He wondered if I could control my muscles with my electrocution ability. I learned that I could. Bruce instructed me to lower the voltage I was using. I did. I was clumsy at first, but then I learned to control it with hours of practice. Bruce is the only other person to know this so far, but by shocking my muscles, I have a kind of super-human strength. Well, I guess we all do. But my strength is beyond anything I was able to obtain from the regular Academy mutations. I think that I’m stronger than any Multiplier.”

             
Bruce nodded beside her. “I’m supposed to have seven times the strength of a normal human, and her strength is so superior to mine that it’s not comparable.”

             
“And now,” Roxanne said, gesturing to Asa, “he’s got the same ability. It’ll take a year or so until he’s able to use it as well as me, but it will happen.”

             
Asa leaned back in his chair and looked quizzically at Roxanne. “I saw you jump out of the way of Stridor’s bullet in the Tropics with speed like I had never seen before. Were you electrocuting your muscles then?”

             
Roxanne nodded. “If you can learn to control this, Asa, we’ll have two people here who are somewhat stronger than a single Multiplier. It’s not much, but it will help. I want you to start lessons with Bruce and me tomorrow. Hopefully, you’ll be able to use this ability some by the time we reach the Winggame championship, if we make it. And, if the Hive attacks, I want to be as prepared as possible.”

             
“Okay. I’m looking forward to training.”

             
“And I want to be very clear that everyone must keep this secret,” Roxanne said. “I put a lot of effort into hiding it. I could have been the Winggame MVP this year, but held back to avoid suspicion. Please, no one say anything about this.”

             
From then on, there was a five-minute lull when no one spoke. They were all incredibly tired from the rigorous course work, the stress, Winggame practices, and sleep deprivation. Asa found Jen’s hand under the table and held it. His eyelids were heavy, and he felt in danger of falling asleep in his chair.

             
Bruce began to snore, and Roxanne put a pillow under his head before leaving. Everyone else got up and walked towards the door. “I think that it would be better if you stayed here tonight, Asa,” Viola said. “We can put up another hammock for you.”

             
Asa nodded sleepily and was grateful for the offer. He didn’t want to sleep alone, and wasn’t sure that he would even be able to after all the talk about Multipliers. Viola locked the front door after everyone else left, and together they strung a rope hammock from two I-bolts in the stone.

             
He lay there only a couple of minutes before falling asleep. The hammock creaked beneath him every time he stirred and he looked up at the ceiling. Dozens of thick, wooden roots curved out over the stone above him, stretching from the tree on the Mountainside atop Viola’s dwelling. He thought about how early he would have to wake up for their Winggame practice in the morning. He hated the idea of such an intense workout after so little sleep, but he knew he needed the practice. He looked at his hands in the pale moonlight that came in through the wooden vents in the ceiling, and wondered what it would be like to control his body with a kind of peripheral electricity source. He remembered Roxanne’s displays of incredible strength earlier in the year and couldn’t wait until he was at that level. He closed his eyes. It was a little before three in the morning. Images rose up behind his eyelids as sleep began to overtake him. His last thought before drifting off was of how thankful he was for his team. They were, in every way that mattered, his family.

26

Vipocrit

             
The next day, Asa ran his hands along the wooden railing as he walked down the basement stairs at Conway’s. From below, where Teddy was still trapped, he could hear a grating, sawing noise. Because Asa knew how terrifyingly smart Teddy was, any unusual noise was alarming, and he wondered if the cage could truly hold his friend indefinitely.

             
As he lowered himself down the stairs, he felt the fatigue in his legs. He was even more tired than the day before. His body desperately craved a nap before attending that night’s Winggame practice, but he forced himself to go see Teddy. He felt a responsibility to check up on him, and didn’t want Mama and Conway to feel as though they had been used as a dump for Asa’s problem.

             
Even though Asa no longer had to attend Flying Class, his schedule was as packed as ever. Just as Roxanne and Bruce had talked about the night before, they had begun practicing Asa’s electrocution power in the morning.

The three of them took a trip to Roxanne’s apartment at nine in the morning so that Asa could begin to learn how to use his new electrocution power. The apartment was decorated the same way it had been when Asa visited at the beginning of the semester. The floor was covered in thick sand, there was a bamboo coffee table, there was a giant fish tank with catfish swimming inside, and a fifteen-
foot wide picture of a beach at sunset was hung up onto the wall.

Rica, the black leopard that lived with Roxanne, hissed at Asa when he entered, and Roxanne let Asa feed her a catfish so that she would grow fonder of him. He dropped the catfish into the feline’s bowl, and was rewarded with a noise somewhere between a hiss and a growl. Rica picked the fish up in her massive teeth and pranced off into one of the back rooms to have her breakfast alone.

Asa and Roxanne got onto the floor, crossed their legs, and held hands. They spent an hour and a half trying to get Asa to shock Roxanne, and saw no real improvement. Roxanne sent Asa tiny sparks up his fingers, and told him to try to “feel the energy prickling down your arms, and just kind of move it down to my hands.” The exercise felt crazy to Asa. He thought that he needed more time to mutate before he would be able to shock anyone. When he first got his wings, it took weeks before they even emerged.

Asa spent his Responding to Medical Emergencies class studying for Science Class. Benny
Hughs spent the whole period rambling on about his Winggame career, and about how, “If I were to bet, I’d say I’ll be remembered as one of the greatest of all time.”

Science Class was brutal. Professor Stern went over the ideal gas law so quickly that Asa couldn’t keep up. When it came time to work on problems in class, Asa found himself lost. Professor Stern marched around the room, tugging on his mustache, looking over the students’ shoulders. When he saw the lack of progress Asa was making, he went up to the board and repeated a large portion of the lecture. “Not everyone has to listen,” he said. “You can continue working. Mr. Palmer seems to have been snoozing during the lesson, so this is for his benefit.” Asa’s face went red, but he converted his armband to an electronic notepad and scribbled frantically, trying to keep up. Even the supplemental lesson didn’t make the concept stick with Asa. He couldn’t understand what the purpose of “R” was in the equation PV=
nRT, and he didn’t understand why the value of “R” kept changing constantly.

As he stepped off the last stair and onto the basement’s tile
floor, he hoped that Teddy would be willing to tutor him some before the final exams, which were two weeks from then.

Teddy was sitting on the tile floor behind the bars, facing the back wall. There was that grating noise again.

Asa moved over the tile in between Conway’s exercise machines. “Teddy?”

Teddy turned, “Hi, Asa! Good to see you!” He only smiled with the right side of his mouth. His left cheek still had a hole in it from wher
e the Multiplier had bitten him; the skin was now full of black, infected boils.

“What are you doing?” Asa asked.

On the floor in front of Teddy were strips of aluminum coke cans laid out like a rat’s nest. “Making a radio. I figure if I have to be in here, I should make the best of it. It would be nice to have music. It’s good to see you, though.”

Teddy stood and reached one of his hands through the bars for Asa to shake it. He had removed his camouflage suit, and was now wearing a white cotton t-shirt, and blue jeans. His muscles were more toned than ever, and Asa believed that Teddy’s bone structure had changed in a slight, but significant way. His toes had always pointed out when he walked, and his wrists had been noticeably small for the size of his hands. Now, his feet pointed exactly straight, and his wrists had grown. His back seemed straighter. Overall, he looked much more athletic. Aside from the terrible scarring, his face was more handsome too. His jaw was more defined, and his features seemed more symmetric. Asa assumed that these were all side effects of turning into a Multiplier.