The Academy: Book 2 (27 page)

             
Jen led Asa through a couple of scaled-down swinging doors into a silvery, shining, eatery. Many long, white-tiled walls partitioned this room into sections. Along each wall, were dozens of metal food bowls filled with what looked and smelled like dry dog food, next to bowls of clean, clear water. A few raccoons were leaned over the bowls of food, crunching on an early dinner. They stopped eating when Jen and Asa passed by, and one of them displayed a set of sharp, tiny teeth as though to say, ‘this is my food, get your own bowl!’

             
But even in the arcane act of guarding food, there is something about their eyes that is very unlike any animal that I have ever seen in the wild.

             
After this room, they crawled up a raccoon sized, flight of stairs, and then moved down a dark, cold, rock corridor. Coming up on their left were a series of circular windows that projected white light onto the opposite wall of the hallway. “Pass the windows quickly,” whispered Jen, as she continued to move forward.

             
Asa’s palms were becoming raw, and his knees hurt as he crawled. He obeyed Jen in passing the windows quickly, but gazed out as he did so.

             
The small windows looked out onto an office area far below. Thousands of humans were arranged into straight lines of desks where they were either writing with a pen, talking on a telephone, or clicking computer keys while staring at flat-screen monitors. They were all wearing normal office attire; suits and ties, tucked in shirts, and leather shoes. Asa was flabbergasted. He had never known that so many humans worked within the mountains of the Academy. But, it made sense. There was a lot of work to be done.

             
For instance, someone had to find the fifteen year olds who would be kidnapped as Fishies. There must be employees who monitored all sorts of news outlets to see if anyone had become suspicious of the Academy existing. There must be all kinds of scientists who worked on developing new Academy drugs, as well as Alfatrex drugs. There must be bankers, investors, and many more employees to run the Academy. And then, there must be managers, and supervisors, and people who are supposed to hire all these people.
And where do they live? They must have lodgings somewhere within the mountains. There must be someone to coordinate these lodgings, and decide who lives where.

             
Minutes later, the circular windows were far behind them, and they were in the pitch dark. Asa followed the noises that Jen made crawling, and used his echolocation every so often to check his surroundings. Finally, Jen stopped, and Asa ran into the back of her.

             
“Give me your hand,” she whispered.

             
He did so, and she guided it over to a cold, metal rung.

             
“This is a ladder. We are very close to Robert King’s office. Don’t say a word. Follow my lead. If something happens, leave me.”

             
Without further explanation, Jen began to climb. Asa could hear her hands and feet moving higher and higher up the metal.

             
Before he went up, Asa closed his eyes for a moment and placed his forehead against the chilled ladder.
This is a good decision. She knows what she’s doing. She’s been here before. And who knows what kinds of things I’ll learn from sitting in on a meeting in Robert King’s office?

             
For starters, I need to find out if he’s actually alive, as Jen seems to think that he is. It sounded like she had seen him in his office before. Is that possible? Didn’t I watch him die? Jen has never seen Robert King before in person, though. Maybe she mistook someone else for The Boss. I’ll never know unless I climb this ladder.

             
And so, he began to ascend. He felt that the weight of the entire mountain around him was pressurizing the space he occupied, weighing on him. It felt insane to crawl so deep into the mountain to spy upon someone so dangerous as Robert King.
And don’t forget, Jen said that Volkner will be in the office, too.
Moving up the ladder was like crawling into a wasp’s nest.

             
But I have to go.
Asa remembered how lost he had felt before he learned why the Multipliers were trying secretly to kill him last semester. He remembered thinking,
How am I supposed to defend myself from an attack if I don’t know what’s coming?

             
Now, he faced a similar situation. Last month he had happened upon non-Academy Multipliers in the forest behind Mount Two. And now Brumi had been bitten and a Multiplier attack seemed imminent to Asa. On top of this, there were highly intelligent apes, called Davids, being killed in the Academy’s surroundings. The picture of himself that a David had given to Asa in the arctic jungle at the foot of Fishie Mountain was stowed away in the same drawer that Asa kept Charlotte’s letter in. To top these things, Teddy was acting more murderous than ever, and the approaching Task was supposed to be the most lethal one yet.

             
The information he learned had the potential to shed light on any or all of these issues.

             
Asa let out a small moan and began to climb.

             
The best situation,
Asa told himself,
would have been for me to get my information from Conway. But, he does not trust me enough to tell me the things I need to know. He’s left me no choice. I need to know what’s happening.

             
As Asa climbed the ladder, his surroundings began to slowly brighten.

13

Volkner
, Robert King, and Jamie

              The ladder came to a spot where it ran vertical beside the glass siding of what appeared to be the world’s largest fish tank. Asa couldn’t see the top of it, or through to the other side. It was full of dark blue, clear water. Tiny, moving bubbles suggested currents in the tank. From high up above came the sound of water splashing.

             
Asa looked upward, and just as he couldn’t see the top of the tank, he couldn’t see the end of the ladder.

             
Jen was slowing down, and he could hear her breathing above him as she continued to move higher on the ladder that never seemed to end. Asa, who had been mutated to be almost three times as strong as a normal human, was fatigued. He couldn’t imagine how hard this climb must be on
her,
considering what it was doing to him.

             
I don’t understand her,
Asa thought. She had gone through the raccoons dwelling, past the parking garage, up the spiral incline, through the living room, through the kitchen, through the tunnel that looked out onto the thousands of workers and up this ladder by herself at some point in the past. Why was she so bold? And why, after finding out that this was a back entrance to Robert King’s office, did she want to return? Asa wished that he had had a chance to ask her this earlier, but she had been hurrying him along from the moment that she had greeted Asa in his dwelling.
Either she’s stupid and a thrill seeker, or she’s smart, and sees value in sneaking around this place that other people can’t. Maybe she knows something that I don’t.

             
It was so hard to guess what Jen was thinking because of her sporadic behavior. She was unpredictable.

             
Asa was in awe at the size of the aquarium he faced. Slowly, as they progressed upward, the water turned a lighter shade of blue. The splashing noise grew louder. Asa could now visualize the top of the ladder a couple hundred yards above his head. Still, he couldn’t see all the way through the water to the other side.

             
This must be bigger than some lakes,
he thought. It smelled like salt, which made Asa wonder if they were housing ocean creatures here. Or
mutated
ocean creatures. The thought was unnerving. Due to the vastness of the tank, the potential size of the creatures was virtually unlimited. Asa guessed that a blue whale, the largest of the known living creatures, would be comfortable in a tank this size.

             
A turtle glided past him, kicking with long, spotted feet. It took note of Asa with its black eyes. Its face was deeply lined and wrinkled, and the green animal appeared to be decades old. Its brow furrowed and it then looked upon Jen, who was a bit higher. The animal swam up to Jen’s height, examined her, and then swam off.

             
Does it recognize us? Does this turtle know who we are? Is it going to alert someone to our presence?

             
The thought sounded crazy, but in the Academy, it was never safe to assume that you understood the capabilities of an animal.

             
As they climbed higher, there were occasional schools of tropical fish; most displayed more than one bright color over their shiny scales. A hammerhead shark slithered through the water, past the school of smaller fish, taking no notice of them as though it wasn’t hungry. In the deep, dark blue distance of the water, Asa thought that he saw an enormous creature stir in the water. The distance and lack of light obscured what the animal looked like, and after a moment of stillness, Asa questioned whether something had truly been there in the first place.

             
Minutes later, Jen finally reached the top of that ladder. She was panting, sweat glistened on her blotched face, and she rested her forehead in the crook of her elbow for a moment, trying to catch her breath. Her cheeks were flushed, and this was the first time that Asa thought she looked beautiful.

             
They waited there for a moment before moving on. Asa tried not to stare at Jen, so he looked out over the tank. He couldn’t see where they would go to next. They were at the top of a fish tank, but there was no adjacent ladder that they could go over.
How does this lead to Robert King’s office?

             
It was now clear, though, what the ladder was for. From the top of the ladder a raccoon could reach a thin beam that ran parallel with the topmost edge of the tank. This beam was an eight-inch thick platform that was held five feet above the water by intermittent cables that ran from the ceiling. Running perpendicular to this beam to make T-like formations were dozens of similar beams that stretched far out into the water. If a raccoon were to crawl out far over the water, they could reach small ladders that led upward to a matrix of metal pipes coming from the ceiling. These pipes, which were spread out above the entirety of the aquarium, had spouts that shot water at high speeds directly downward, into the water. There were hundreds of spouts that were simultaneously shooting water into the aquarium. This, Asa reasoned, was what insured that the sharks and deep-sea creatures far below the surface received adequate amounts of oxygen. This artificial oxidizing system did what ocean waves automatically did in the wild.

While Jen rested, Asa looked in the water some more. Orca whales were shooting wide mists out of their blowholes a quarter mile away. A large white shark was swimming close enough so that Asa could see its teeth, which were crammed in its mouth. Its white, rubbery face was deeply scarred.

              Without saying a word to Asa, Jen slipped over the side of the aquarium and began to crawl on the thin beam that ran parallel with the glass Asa was looking into. Reluctantly, Asa followed her lead. They moved over the beam for some time, and then they crossed over onto beams that stretched far out over the water. Jen pointed to a beam for Asa to crawl onto, so that they were side by side. Asa had no idea where they were going, but he hoped that they were close.

             
The beams swayed back and forth with their weight, and the bolts and cables that attached the platforms to the ceiling groaned with the added pressure.
These things are made for 20-pound raccoons,
Asa thought.
I weight eight times that!