The Academy: Book 1 (20 page)

             
From around a corner came two raccoons driving one of their small red cars at thirty miles per hour, cleaning supplies being thrown around in a barrel tied to the back. They took the corner hard with screeching wheels that left ten-foot long tread marks on the tile floor. As the car approached, Conway waved at Asa. “I’ll take this ride. See you later.”

             
As the car sped by, Conway jumped onto the roof, crouched down like a baseball catcher. The car bobbled with his weight for a moment, and then stabilized, moving a little slower. The raccoon that was driving turned the wheel and the car disappeared behind another corner, screeching as it went.

             
Asa pressed the power button on the laptop, and watched as the fabric stitched itself back into its original shape. He pulled the armband on, picked up his bag of pills, began to amble down the hallway, following the red line in the floor, and the small arrows drawn in the line every ten yards that pointed the appropriate way. Normally, the walk would have taken ten minutes, but it took Asa twenty atop his wobbly legs.

             
The assembly hall door slammed behind Asa as he entered, much louder than he intended. Still, no one looked up from their work or seemed to notice him. The entire room was filled with the sound of clacking keys, and hundreds of Fishies sat alert and erect, typing as quickly as they could while the man on stage spoke.

             
Asa recognized him. The man was slender and balding, with ribs that stood out strongly against his black suit. His spine was contorted so that he leaned to the right, afflicted with a harsh case of scoliosis. Asa had first seen the man on the island in the center of the moat; he had been following the man in the white suit with black gums, and scribbling frantically on a yellow legal pad. He had looked frightened then. Now, he looked as though he had just consumed a barrel of black coffee. From the back of the room, Asa could see his long, slender hands twitching while he spoke. His head rotated in quick, stop-and-go twitching movements as he looked around the room. His voice was high, strained, and cracked every couple of sentences.

             
His body had changed some since Asa last saw him a couple days ago—he appeared to have aged a decade; his hair was sparser, his eyes had deep bags under them like yellow welts, and when he talked, he was missing teeth. Asa didn’t remember him missing teeth while walking down the cobblestone. The man’s neck was swollen, and blue in places. He had a six-centimeter laceration that was sowed shut on the top of his forehead: it was still red and healing. It looked to be brand new.

             
Asa considered for a second the possibility that this man was suffering from the Wolf Flu. If so, he was the first person that Asa had seen since Dr. Varbas at Alfatrex Station number Sixty-Three. But, after a moment’s consideration, Asa dismissed the idea. The man was moving much too fast. It reminded Asa, not of those afflicted with the virus, but of Harold Kensing. They both had eyes that moved in a dumb, paranoid type manner.

             
Stranger still, than the slender man, was the animal that was on stage with him. It was in a harness—a big, thick leather one, made of straps big enough to hold a saddle on a horse, though the harness wasn’t tied to anything. Asa felt his breath catch as the thing looked at him.
Those eyes—those green eyes.
They seemed to show recognition, like they had seen Asa before, or an image of him.

             
Laying there, on the stage, next to the professor, was what appeared to be a mountain lion. Asa knew enough about the animals to tell buy its body composition and light fur that it was a female. Female cougars average 95 pounds, and this one, Asa thought, was much bigger than average.

             
It yawned, showing yellowed teeth at two inches long, and stretching out its tongue. It closed its eyes, and rested its chin on its paw.
Is that the professor’s pet?
Asa asked himself?

             
On the screen above the stage was a black-and-white picture of a young boy. Above the photograph was script:

Robert King

Age 6

             
The man on stage spoke in a frenzied sort of way—“By the time Robert King was six, people knew that he was a prodigy. It was so obvious, anyone would have known, understand?”

             
No one said anything. The clicking of keys continued on.

             
“Like I said, he could read at two and play chess at four. By the time that he was six, he was doing high school math. All of the teachers were amazed. They knew that he was bound for greatness. They would often say…”

             
Asa searched for a seat and considered what was being said. Robert King, although he was the richest man in the world, did not seem too smart. In fact, his slow drawl made it appear as though his brain processed information, if not slower than others, than on par with the average human.

             
“They tested his IQ at that time,” the man in front went on, shuffling around the stage. “The IQ, or intelligent quotient, test, is a measure of how smart a person is versus their cohorts, or people their own age. For instance, an IQ score—“

             
He paused, and actually growled out at the audience. Many of the Fishies had taken a break from typing to flex their overworked hands.

             
The man began to scream and jump where he stood—“You’re going to have to know this, you idiots! Don’t be stupid! You’re all so stupid!” His face had turned red with crazed anger. He pounded his fists into his broomstick thighs and pointed a long finger out at no one in particular. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t ever say it. If you don’t pass this test on the History of the Academy after this six-month period, you’ve got no hope here. If you can’t do this, what hope of you at completing the strict regimen ahead?”

             
He took a deep breath, smiled, and then continued on.

             
“As I was saying, the intelligence quotient test…”

             
The assembly hall was packed. The only seat that Asa could find was next to Sam, Charlotte’s redheaded friend. As Asa made his way down the row to sit, he smiled at Samantha. Her reaction was unexpected: instead of smiling back, or giving a small wave, she closed her eyes, as though Asa was a bomb that was about to go off. Asa continued down the row to his seat.

             
The man was still lecturing. Asa turned his armband into a laptop and began to take notes.

             
“And so, as a small boy, he was developing at an unprecedented rate. Scientist Hilary…”

             
“Ahhhh-Chooo!” Someone in the assembly sneezed.

             
“Bless you,” someone said back.

             
It sounded as though bombs were going off, the way the sound echoed throughout the hall. Gunshots rang out from up above on a balcony, and a young man sitting on an end row was killed in a mess of blood and metal.

             
The person who had sneezed screamed, and a chaperone swooped down from above, wings extended. Asa saw a short male frame and curly blond hair. The girl was snatched up, and flown to an above empty balcony. From there, she was shoved, screaming, into the back hallway and out of sight. Asa couldn’t see her anymore, but he saw flashes and heard gunshots. She stopped screaming.

             
The professor went on as though nothing had happened, “Trudell boasts that a good way to understand such an IQ score at such an early age is with the principal of entry-space statistical analysis.”

             
The slender man was talking on in choppy sentences, and hadn’t paused for even a moment. The mountain lion was still asleep on stage.

             
I just saw two people die.

             
Asa looked at Sam and saw that she had begun to cry. Asa pulled down the desk from the back of the seat in front of him, opened up the ‘Note Taker’ application on his laptop, and began to type everything that was said furiously. He couldn’t, however, concentrate on any of it.

             
Sam flinched when I smiled at her because she thought that I was about to get shot. I communicated! How stupid!

             
Asa felt sick again at the realization that he had lived because of dumb luck.

             
Sam already knew. That means that other people have already been shot. Who’s dead? Teddy? Stridor?

             
Asa continued to type, his fingers working as fast as they could, for the next three hours. Each letter that Asa typed was subsequently sowed into the fabric that served as the laptops screen. He tried to keep as still a face as possible for the rest of the session.

             
I’m not ready to die.

11

The Man in the White Suit’s Class

            After the lecture was over, the
Fishies were commanded to exit out the back and follow the purple arrows to a small area of classrooms. From there, they were supposed to follow directions that would be given on their armbands.

            They were all silent, walking through the halls of the massive facility that they had been kidnapped and taken to. Asa’s upper back, next to his shoulder blades, was throbbing much worse than it had been that morning. Most upper back pain was located among the spinal column, and inhibited ease of motion. Asa’s was different; although it was located on his back, he felt that it did not prohibit him from moving freely. Motion aggravated the sensation, but did not stop it. It felt as though someone had inserted rocks into his back that stabbed as his muscle as he moved. He wanted to scratch the spot, but couldn’t reach it.

            Asa had an entire bag full of pills that he knew could make the pain go away. It was a tempting idea. He hung onto the bag, but didn’t dare take any of them. His aunt had been addicted to muscle relaxers, pain killers, and mood stabilizers before rolling off a highway and killing herself when Asa was nine. Asa had seen what pills like that could do; they made you lazy, lethargic. Asa decided that at this time, if he wanted to survive, he needed to be as alert and oriented to his surroundings as possible. You could get killed in the Academy if you weren’t paying attention.

            The footfalls of the
Fishies followed the purple line, which led them through a massive, half-mile long hallway with dome shaped windows on their left, and exposed mountain-rock on their right.

             
Asa looked out the window as he walked. He realized that he was much higher in the mountain than he would have guessed; the trees and the Moat sat hundreds of feet below him. He looked directly South, up to the peak of the biggest mountain of The Five, and wondered if he would live long enough to know the secrets of the Academy.

             
In the middle of the expanse of hallway, four raccoons dangled in harnesses outside of the windows, squeegeeing the glass clean hundreds of feet above the ground below. They looked in at the Fishies as they passed and Asa examined their heads, and their skulls that protruded further upward than normal raccoons. The animals’ fur coats were puffed out against the cold, and with one hand they held onto the rope they were hanging from, while they cleaned the outside of the windows with another. A strong gust of wind came by and made them swing from their ropes. Asa watched the face of the one that hung the furthest to the right, and saw the animal look down at the drop below with an expression of concealed fright. Again, that word played in Asa’s mind:
Sentient.

             
They walked out the end of the hallway, down a few more corridors, and reached the end of the purple line ten minutes later. Asa’s back was experiencing waves of undulating, radiating pain. Sweat dampened his hair, and he was still feeling the effects of the poison he had ingested the night before. His stomach churned and gurgled and would not settle. He feared that he might vomit again.

             
The purple line in the floor had led them to the most unpolished area of the Academy that Asa had seen so far. The place was dark, damp, and cold. Asa wished that he had brought his parka. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all rough, gray, jagged rock, like the inside of a coalmine. They were in what appeared to be a massive cave, lit poorly by industrial fluorescents that hung from the rock ceiling by rusting metal chains.

            Wooden, unpainted doors lined the walls, with the number 1 through 32 atop them. Asa saw the other
Fishies looking at their wristbands and then walking towards a certain door. On Asa’s wristband, the time had disappeared and was replaced with a white “9.”

            Asa walked among the moving crowd until he found the doorway with the number 9 labeled above. He entered.

            The doorway led to a classroom that held a striking contrast to the great, cavernous hall that he had just exited. The room was bright, painted with sky-blues and canary-yellows. Long, wooden tables sat with desks behind them. The walls were painted to look like a spring day, and there was a tree painted into the wall in the corner, its branches stretching over the ceiling.