The Academy: Book 1 (24 page)

             
Confused, Asa picked up the carton of milk. It was in an opened cardboard box, and it still had milk in it. Asa wondered why Teddy brought it up.
Maybe he thought that it was especially good and wanted me to try it. Maybe he opened it, started drinking it, and realized that he didn’t want the rest. Maybe he just didn’t want to throw the milk away.

             
Asa was wishing that he could just lean his head over the side of his bed and ask Teddy what the milk was for, when a dark thought slithered into his mind.
Maybe he poisoned it.

             
Asa considered for a moment, then smirked and shrugged his shoulders.
Teddy wouldn’t poison me. Besides, I thought that I was done having dark thoughts for a while.

             
He gulped down the entire container of milk in a few quick swallows. He held the carton atop his thigh, dangled his feet over the edge of his bed, and looked at the beautiful view out the window. The sunlight shimmered on the soft waves of the Moat.
See? Nothing bad happened. You’re just a little paranoid.

             
That was when he saw it. Asa looked down at the milk carton, and saw that on the inside of the lip, the part that you would use to open it, there was a message scribbled in tiny, black ink. He held the carton closer to his face and read:

The guys with the black gums are trying to kill you!!! Poisoned the chicken & said don’t resuscitate. I saw him do it.

            
 
Asa’s heartbeat rose again, and he held the carton down as naturally as he could and tried to pretend that he hadn’t seen anything.
What had Teddy seen, or heard?
Asa’s face had gone pale. He was scared. Teddy had communicated with him, putting himself in danger. He half expected to hear the roar of machine guns take Teddy down.
You’re always watched here.
And, the mental security walls that Asa had worked hard to put up around himself to make himself feel safe had just all fallen. His mental attempt to make Volkner seem like he wasn’t a threat seemed silly to him, childish. Teddy had seen Volkner poison Asa. And hadn’t the nurse warned him, too? And McCoy: hadn’t he warned Asa?

             
The scariest part to Asa was how thoroughly he had convinced himself that he was safe. What else was he denying?

             
He used his thumb to smudge out the message that Teddy had written him while he gazed out at the mountains.

13

The Pet Cat

              A couple hours later, Asa sat in the cafeteria. He was the only Fishie who didn’t have someone sitting across from him, and he felt painfully alone.

             
The polar bears had served the food (bovine shoulder in a mushroom sauce, mashed potatoes, and a thick French onion soup), and Asa, deciding that he would have to eat at some point, had sampled everything the moment he sat down to make sure that none of it would kill him. Blood hadn’t started running from his nose, and he hadn’t passed out. The food was good, but still, he was dismayed to be sitting alone.

             
The cafeteria was packed. Fishies sat on the side of the tables closest to the window, with four or five feet in between each student. Across from each Fishie, except for Asa, sat a graduate who was talking to the Fishie. They were leaning forward, and imparting wisdom. Asa was the only Fishie left out. It was just one more way that he was at a disadvantage.

             
He had been in the dormitory half an hour earlier when Thom had shouted, for the second time that day, to gather around.

             
“Alight. I hope you all are enjoying your rest tonight—I promise you, after today, the speed of things is going to pick up quite a bit. Get sleep while you can.

             
“You are about to be dismissed for dinner, but before it begins, I’d like to inform you of one more aspect of the Academy. Each student will have what we call a mentor. Your mentor will be like your private teacher; it will be an authority figure and a mainstay of support while you are enduring this rigorous process.

             
“You’re mentor will be a graduate of the Academy—someone who has already gone through what you are about to attempt. Each Academy student has his or her own mentor, and each mentor only has one student. You’re mentor will stay with you, offering support, advice, and discipline, if necessary, for the remainder of your stay here in the Academy.

             
“Tonight at dinner, you will meet your mentor for the first time. Enter the cafeteria, and sit spread out as much as possible with your back facing the big window. The name of your mentor will appear on your armband, and your mentor will come sit down and join you.

             
“Still, the talking ban is in effect, so you may not communicate with your mentor. But, this gives you a unique opportunity—you get to listen. Just sit and listen; the powers that organize the Academy have thought that this would be best for you to receive information in an uninterrupted fashion, so try to find the value in it.

             
“Dismissed, soldiers. Go eat.”

             
As Asa ate, he thought that what Thom said was strange.
Dismissed, soldiers. Soldiers?
Why had he said soldiers?

             
Asa took another bite of beef, careful not to spill anything on his new, white suit. He glanced at his armband again, and saw, “Jul Conway,” written in. He guessed that it was the same Conway that he had met on the small fishing boat.

             
The cafeteria was filled with chattering voices all around. Teddy, Charlotte, Stridor: they all had mentors. Everyone did but Asa.

             
He took another bite and stared at the empty seat across from him.

After dinner, Asa thought that it would be a good idea for him to sleep, but found that he couldn’t. He was exhausted—he knew this: but still, his mind had too many questions for him to rest. He had an urge—similar to the one he had the day that he trekked out into the snow and the crow had saved him—to explore.

His armband said that it was 6:00PM, but the sun looked like it had hours to go before it went down. Asa went down the spiral staircase that he had entered through the day before. There was another spiral staircase on the opposite end of the room, that went up, but Asa was not sure where it went.

He came out into the curving, damp, lantern lit corridor that he had walked with the rest of the
Fishies the day before. It was even darker now, and only one in three torches were lit. The screeching rats seemed louder, and alone, the shadows seemed more ominous to Asa.

He stood there, at the bottom of the stairs, at the end of the
two-mile corridor, and wondered if free time really meant that he could go wherever he wanted.
Thom saw me descend the staircase and didn’t stop me,
he thought.

It was decided. He took a deep breath, cursed the pain in his back, and started off on a slow jog.

His run was a fight. In one corner stood all of the bad things: he was fatigued, his back felt like it was getting stabbed around his shoulder blades by thick knives, his stomach was still upset, and the air seemed thin. He hadn’t thought about it before, but the surrounding mountain ranges could mean high altitude. He found that around one mile in, when he should be getting warmed up, he was sucking for more oxygen. In the other corner stood all of the positives: he was in great shape (months of extensive cross country training ensured that), he was excited about the run (exploring new places always did this for his exercises), and he wanted to forget the threat that the Academy presented, if only for a moment. Running always had helped him in the act of momentarily forgetting whatever was going on. When his mother was sick with the Wolf Flu, he would sometimes run more than twenty miles in a single day, spread out into four or five sessions. When he would slow down and stop, and the act of momentarily forgetting was over, the realities that he had to face didn’t seem as ominous after the run.

With the hope that some of his gloom would sweat out of him, he kept moving. The corridor was cold,
but As
a’
s body was heating up. About halfway through, he turned down the heater on his suit by rotating the rubber on his armband.

When he reached the end of the hallway, sweat was beading down his face, and he was breathing hard. The doorway at the
end, that led to the entry foyer of Fishie Mountain, was closed. He reached for it, found it unlocked, and pushed his way through.

The foyer was entirely empty except for Asa, two dark shapes sitting in chairs in front of the fires, and one lying by the fire.
One of the figures in a chair spoke, rich and thick, and Asa knew the voice immediately—Volkner. “And why is my lesson plan color coded, Kayce?”

“I don’t know, sir. I-I-I thought that it would be easiest to understand,” said the other man. It was the scoliosis ridden, thin graduate who taught the History of the Academy class. He seemed to be
Volkner’s assistant. And by his feet, lying on the rug, was his 130-pound pet mountain lion. It had the high arching head, like many of the animals did around the Academy. Its muscles were taut and vein ridden beneath its yellow fur.

“Well, I’m not a child you know. Get rid of it. All black. Never do that again.”

Asa stepped into the room, headed for the front entrance, and Volkner turned in his armchair and looked at him, a sneer on his pale face. Asa kept moving towards the door, not looking back to see if Volkner was still staring at him. The two men did not talk until Asa was gone. Asa could feel their eyes following him as he made his way out the door.

Outside, the air was much cooler, and Asa turned up the heater
again. The cold air felt good as it filled his lungs. Asa tried to concentrate on the run ahead, and forget about Volkner and his assistant in the foyer behind him.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing, or where he intended to go. He was only sure that he wanted to go
somewhere,
and see
something new.
He was looking around from atop the large set of stairs that led up the Fishie Mountain; he hadn’t looked out at the snow jungle from this vantage point before, and was noticing things that he hadn’t seen the other day. Laced throughout the thick jungle there were a series of roads and paths running around the compound; this was perceivable from the breaks in the high trees. He could not tell, however, where they went. He could only follow them so far with his eyes before they were lost in a sea of snow sprinkled, green, winter jungle.

He remembered the warnings that Hubert
Boistly had given as he jogged down the steps. He could hear the gap-toothed man’s voice in his head:
Further, you may also notice an assortment of odd creatures in the jungles surrounding. Do not talk to these creatures, ever. They are wild, untamed, too smart for their own good, and dangerous. They may look like they are humans, they may act like humans, but they are not humans. I’ve seen far too many students killed for showing compassion to these animals.

Asa thought that it was probably a fair warning to give: he had seen the monstrous being swimming through the moat, and had seen the way the cleaning raccoons behaved. Things around here were off, different. He guessed that the tundra-jungle would be a perfect place for odd things to grow and reproduce.
Deadly things, probably. But what did Hubert Boistly mean, that they
may look like humans, they may act like humans?
Despite his better judgment, his heart rate rose with excitement. He had always been fascinated with exotic animals and places, and the thought of coming into contact with a creature that only a handful of people knew existed, was exhilarating.

Before he reached the bottom of the marble steps, he had turned the temperature up on his suit even more. Snowflakes were falling in soft waves overhead, and the atmosphere was much colder than it had been when Asa arrived.

He began to jog off on the pebbled path before him, his breath as white as smoke when he exhaled. The pebbled path was steaming, and glistening with water; Asa could feel the heat coming off of the electronically warmed surface.

He was faced with the same challenges he had seen in the corridor that led to the boys’ dormitory: his back ached in his shoulder blades, his stomach was still in knots from the poison he had consumed the night before, and the thin air was making him more tired than expected. He pushed on, and did not notice her behind him. He rushed past the trees on either side of the path. A glance to his left or right gave him a look into a dark, dense mess of foliage tunneled by a thick canopy above.

The tropical sounds that he had heard with Teddy played in the air: the cry of a cockatoo, the hiss of insects, and the occasional screech of a lemur. Even though he had had over twenty four hours to get used to the idea that a jungle existed in such a cold, artic area, the sounds still seemed odd with the snow covered mountains looming in the distant skies.