The Academy: Book 2 (25 page)

             
But the problem is that I still don’t know how to help him.

             
As Asa’s relationship with Teddy was strained, he grew closer to both Jen and Roxanne. Roxanne defended Asa to the other students, and Asa suspected that she understood more about his situation than she should have. He attributed this to the fact that Roxanne had a Multiplier boyfriend.

             
But, these were the only relationships in Asa’s life that strengthened at that time. The most Asa could say about his other teammates was that they didn’t fear him as much as they used to.

             
After Asa received the letter from Gene Gill, which outlined that for this semester’s Task the students would be working with their Winggame teams, he had become even more concerned with whether or not his teammates liked him. He knew that not having mutual trust in a team could mean premature death in whatever sick Task the Academy’s leaders had devised for this semester. However, he didn’t know how to bridge the gap from perceived murderer to friend with his cohorts. His teammates were understandably weary of him.

             
In the time leading to early February, there was a slight shift in how Asa’s teammates viewed him. Some, such as Janice Curnsworth, a girlfriend of Stan’s who had the mutated ability to blend in with her surroundings like a chameleon, seemed to grow only more distrusting of Asa with time. But this was not how most people were acting.

             
Asa thought that he could detect that his teammates were becoming slightly more trusting of him. When he showed up for meetings, they no longer grew quiet. During practice, they freely spoke with him when necessary. Asa was never invited to lunch with any of the other Sharks, and they didn’t ever talk with him just for fun, but they also weren’t afraid that he would slit their throats the moment they turned their backs.

             
They were getting to know him, and they saw that perhaps all the stories they had heard of the terrible Asa Palmer weren’t exactly true. As they spent more time together, Asa inevitably learned more about his teammates too. He learned their background stories, their mutated abilities, and about their natures.

             
It then became confusing to Asa, when he learned about Mike Plode, a third semester student on the Sharks. It was odd to Asa that the other students feared him, but they didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of spending time with Mike Plode.

             
Mike Plode had a nickname—“Boom Boom.” This sounded silly and light-hearted, but it wasn’t. His cellmates in a high security prison for adults had given him the names when he was only fourteen years old. Mike Plode had been on the national news, and after hearing his story Asa thought that he had heard a blurb about the guy while watching television in an emergency department’s waiting room with his Wolf-Flu stricken mother.

             
All of the students were aware of what he had done, but none wanted to ask. One evening, when they were all exhausted after running hours of flying drills, Jen came out with the question everyone wanted to know. “Why did you do it?”

             
Mike smiled. He didn’t smile often, and his lips trembled with the happy expression, as though his facial muscles weren’t used to the position. The team circled him, sprawled out on the Plaid in the middle of the Moat. The Plaid was levitating 100 yards above the water, suspended by magnets; this was a new Winggame change, and one that had each team working hard on strategies to accommodate the new course. It was awfully cold, but the students’ bodies were so hot from the gruesome exercises that it didn’t bother them.

             
“Well,” Mike said. All eyes were on him. “Because I wanted to see what would happen, I guess. That’s all, I think. People always think it was done for some kind of heroic or villainous cause.” Boom Boom shook his head. “It was just a coincidence that it was a bank. I don’t have problems with banks; this was just the biggest building I could find.” His eyes lit up. “And I wanted to see a big fire! A damn big fire!”

             
While he spoke, Asa thought that it was a ridiculous coincidence that perhaps the world’s most obsessed pyromaniac had hair that looked like fire. Boom Boom’s hair was finger-length all over, and wavy shades of yellow and bright orange that stood straight up. His green eyes were the color of shallow ocean water, and they widened when he spoke of the crime that made him famous.

             
“When I was a baby, my parents said that I couldn’t sleep unless there was a fire in the fireplace. I’ve always liked to watch things burn. The power. The dancing
energy
!” He shuddered. “And I love the way it grows; it multiplies, just like us. When I was two, I was caught throwing my teddy bear into a campfire my grandfather made in the woods behind his house. My parents got mad at me, and said I’d miss my stuffed bear. But I didn’t. No. I
loved
watching that thing burn. It was worth it.

             
“Fire had me from a young age, and I guess it just grew from there. My love for it multiplied, just like the fire does. When I was five, my older brother got some fireworks for Christmas. These weren’t sparklers, but the kind that they blow up in the ballparks around the Fourth of July. We had a Labrador retriever, a real old, dusty, yellow thing. His name was Ike, and it always frustrated me because my name was Mike. My mom would yell at one of us, and I wouldn’t know who she was talking to. No one would. It was stupid.

             
“Anyways, I lured Ike into a tin trash can, closed him in there with some of the fireworks, and blew him to hell and back. Well, he didn’t come back, but it’s an expression.” He giggled. “But I loved watching the lid explode off that thing. POW! I mean, what a rush! My parents should have known then.

             
“From there, I had various encounters with the law. I had set four or five brush fires and blown up the shed out back with gasoline by the time I was twelve. Then I got into chemistry class at the community college.

             
“I tested real well on aptitude tests, like most of you guys, but I always got bad grades. I didn’t care about school. The counselor advised that I be put into a class at a community college so that I could be
challenged.

             
“Long story short, I learned the things I needed to learn. And when you’re fourteen, people aren’t very scared of you. I was amazed that they let me move so freely. I just walked into the parking garage below the building, like I belonged there, and worked on setting up the explosives for six hours.
Six hours,
and no one asked me a thing!

             
“I lived a mile away from the bank. I climbed into my tree house at home, and watched from the tippy top. I felt the heat, baby! A mile away, and when I pressed the button on my cell phone, I felt the heat!” Boom Boom shuddered again.

             
The story sickened Asa, especially the part about the dog.
Why would you do that to an innocent animal?
Asa never asked how many people died in the bank explosion. He didn’t want to know.

             
Boom Boom was a trusted, well-respected student in the Academy. Asa didn’t get it.
Maybe it’s because he’s so smart.
Professor Stern, who taught Science Class, talked highly of Mike Plode. Asa could understand how a criminal organization like the Academy could use such a skilled arsonist, but didn’t know how you could trust someone like that.

             
He had heard that Boom Boom was mutated so that he could make a spider web. Asa had never seen him do it, but it was said that Boom Boom’s webs could stop a charging bull.

             
Despite being sickened by Boom Boom’s previous murders, Asa couldn’t help but think that he could be very powerful force in this semester’s Task. He just hoped that he could get Boom Boom and the other members of his team to trust him enough, so that he wouldn’t be left to fight and die alone.

12

Sneaking into Robert King’s Office

February the seventh was a day that Asa would remember.

The
visibility was low. A thick fog had fallen over the mountains of the Academy, and Asa was wondering if it would persist until the next day, when the Sharks were scheduled to have their first Winggame match.

A few days later
, Asa reasoned that the weather had subconsciously helped Jen to convince him to sneak with her into one of the most guarded places in the Academy on February the seventh. He thought that if the day had been clear and blue, he would have been too scared that someone would see them sneaking into that place on the mountainside.

             
Asa was tired. He had just finished a Science Class exam and was looking forward to a weekend in which his studies did not consume him. He had stayed up two nights in a row to study, but felt confident that he had done well.

             
As he flew towards his dwelling in the side of Mount Two, he had to change course twice after veering off in the wrong direction in the fog. His head was pounding from the mental rigor of the final, which took him two and a half hours to complete. Each question had a component of complicated mathematics, and contained six or seven terms that Asa had not known at the beginning of the class. In his tired state, he reflected on how nervous he had been when Professor Stern handed out the exam. Now, he felt a great sense of accomplishment at achieving something that he previously thought was impossible.

             
Teddy had finished the exam long before anyone, and Asa suspected that he got every answer right. Though the students were warned that not keeping your eyes on your own exam could get you killed, Asa couldn’t help but peak up when Teddy stood up fifteen minutes after beginning. Teddy looked at Asa, winked at him with one of his pupil-filled eyes, and turned in his exam. Stridor turned his test in second fastest, and that was an hour later.

             
Asa landed on his dwelling’s doorstep, retracted his wings, and looked out at the white mass of clouds that blanketed the Academy. The fog was so thick that he couldn’t even see Fishie Mountain, which was just a short flight away.

             
As he entered his dwelling, he was so thankful for the warmth and the promise of rest that he didn’t notice the human-shaped shadow that flanked the stone wall, projected by candlelight.

             
“Hello,” Jen said.

             
Asa shut the door behind him.

             
Though they had been spending a great deal of time together, she had never been inside his dwelling. They always had taken walks around Town, or spent time in the many paths that sprawled out from Fishie Mountain. Asa was nervous about Jen being inside his dwelling. He didn’t want her to hear Teddy working above them. She was so incredibly bold and confident that he feared she would suggest that they swim through the water-tunnel and see what he was working on up there.

             
“How did you know this was where I live?” Asa asked.

             
“I have my ways,” Jen replied. “Who is Volkner?”

             
Without any concrete reason, Asa felt fear. He hadn’t seen Volkner, the Multiplier who had been the most aggressive about killing both Asa and Charlotte, since last semester. It had struck him as odd, but he had welcomed the absence, and hadn’t questioned it much. “Volkner?”

             
“Yeah,” Jen said. She crossed her legs on the bearskin couch and said, “Am I saying it right? Volkner? That’s what I thought he said. Is that someone you’ve heard of?”

             
“I’ve heard of him.”