The Academy: Book 2 (72 page)

“By myself?”

“I want to be clear,” Robert King said loudly, as though someone was listening somewhere. Asa looked over at the nearest windowsill and noticed that three crows were gathered there, sitting very close to the glass. “You don’t have to do this. This is only an offer. I’m not going to tell you anymore than what I’ve already said. You may be in danger, and I am offering you refuge, if you would like it. My living quarters are the safest place in the entire Academy. I think that it would be wise for you to stay with me, at least for tonight.”

             
Asa felt panic rise up into his throat. He couldn’t speak.
So even Robert King knows it’s true,
Asa thought.
Multipliers are going to attack tonight.
Asa wondered if knowing the attack was coming could make the Academy defendable.

             
In the distance, a horn sounded, momentarily covering up the noise from the crowd. This horn meant that the Sharks and Wolves were to report to the Starting Platforms for the Winggame Championship.

             
Robert King was still petting Jamie on the abdomen, regarding Asa calmly with his demonic-looking eyes.

             
Asa thought about his plan to go and set the bombs tonight.
Is that even necessary if Robert King knows about the Multiplier attack?

             
Asa knew the answer instantly: Yes. For an unknown reason, Robert King seemed to be trying to make the Academy implode upon itself—to kill every student. This semester’s Task had been strong evidence for this. Mama had greatly supported this theory.

             
Asa suspected that Robert King would try to shield Asa, and maybe Charlotte, from an attack from the Hive. But beyond that, he did not care what happened to any of the students in the Academy. He didn’t need them. He needed Asa and Charlotte, so that the Academy wouldn’t be taken over by Multipliers from the Hive, but that was it.

             
With a normal person, this would be an odd theory,
Asa reflected. He looked into Robert King’s enlarged pupils.
There is no human emotion in those insect eyes. He doesn’t feel love or remorse or a sense of responsibility to the hundreds of students that he kidnapped and took to this remote, terrible place.

             
He’s not going to do anything to defend this place. The Multipliers will probably be after Charlotte and me. If they don’t get us, the worst they can do is kill a large part of the student body. But he doesn’t care. He’ll do whatever he can to defend himself.

             
I’m going to place those bombs, tonight,
Asa thought.
And if Robert King, or Jamie, or one of Robert King’s assistants is monitoring me in The Boss’s living quarters, I won’t be able to.

             
“No,” Asa said. “I think I’ll stay at my place tonight.”

             
Robert King stood abruptly. “Very well. I think that you are making a very poor decision, but I must not force you into anything that you don’t want to. Good luck in your match, Mr. Palmer. And in everything else. You will need it.”

             
The Boss flicked Jamie’s leash, and the two of them walked briskly out of the building. Asa sat there for a moment, staring out the window. Then the second horn sounded, and he remembered that he had to report to the Starting Platform.

             
The Winggame Championship was about to begin. 

35

The Winggame Championship

             
Asa looked out onto the cobblestone path, thinking that he was not mentally ready to play the most important Winggame match of his life. The wind was absolutely shrieking outside, and Asa knew that the team with the wind at their backs would have a huge advantage. But he did not dwell on this long. His thoughts were on Robert King.

             
Right after the second commencement horn sounded, Asa looked out the nearest window and had a feeling in his gut that Robert King was not being genuine. At first, Asa didn’t know for sure what brought on the feeling, but he knew that something wasn’t
right
about the conversation they had just had.

             
Knowing that he should immediately present himself at the Starting Platform, but feeling apathetic about this, Asa stayed seated for a few moments as he attempted to sort out what had just happened. The music and the crowd were incredibly loud, even from inside.

             
Asa’s intuition suggested that he ponder over Robert King’s claim at being functionally all knowing when it came to the Academy. This idea did not sit well with Asa; something about it rubbed him the wrong way.

             
Robert King had told Asa that he knew more than Asa thought he did. Asa had been frightened when he first heard this; it could mean so many things. Robert King’s statement could mean that he knew that Conway and Mama were housing Teddy, it could mean that he knew that Asa and Teddy used the internet to watch the video of The Boss’s clone’s death, it could mean that he was aware that Asa and Jen snuck in and spied on Robert King in his office; there were a great number of things that it could mean.

             
But how is he doing it?
Asa asked himself.
Cameras? Secret recorders? Does he have a mutated animal of some type that spies for him?

             
Asa thought back to when Robert King had acted as though he knew that Asa had been told about his father’s involvement in the Academy.

Conway, McCoy, and Avery are the only Academy officials that I’ve talked to about this issue,
Asa thought.
Conway told me the story of my father one day on the back of King Mountain, inside one of the thousands of caves. Surely neither Conway, Avery, nor McCoy was a spy, right? And, there’s no way he had wire-tapped the cave that Conway had told the story in—how would Robert King have known that Asa was going to go into the specific cave he went into to?

             
Those ideas seemed farfetched to Asa. He didn’t believe that Robert King knew that Asa was aware of his father. Robert King may have suspected it, but Asa didn’t think that the Boss had proof. He hadn’t given any specific examples. He was so vague in how he accused Asa of knowing Edmund Palmer’s past.

             
There was another reason that Asa didn’t trust Robert King’s accusations. This other reason was something that would be hard to prove, but that he believed nonetheless.

             
Robert King likes to play pretend,
Asa thought.
He wants to be a God, but he can’t be. So, he desires the second best thing—people thinking that he’s all-powerful and all-knowing; people thinking that he’s godlike.

             
Asa was feeling confident in this belief. He truly was beginning to think that maybe Robert King just used careful wordplay to make it seem like he knew more than he did, when a thought came to Asa that halted him.

             
But how did Robert King know that Stan had visited me last night?

             
That fact was tricky to dance around. Did that mean that Robert King did have cameras all over the mountainside?

             
Asa didn’t think so. He thought about how Robert King felt threatened by the Multipliers from the Hive, and yet they were able to live on the outskirts of Mount Two, killing Davids, without being caught.
Joney has been living in the wild around the Mountains for a whole semester now,
Asa reminded himself.
If Robert King actually found Joney, he would kill him.

             
Asa was then stuck with another question;
if hidden cameras or microphones don’t monitor the Academy, how did Robert King know that Stan had visited Asa yesterday and then left the Academy?

             
The answer came rapidly to his mind:
They caught Stan and interrogated him. It’s as simple as that.
At this, Asa recalled looking out onto the plains past the Academy last night. They seemed to go on and on. Once you were out of the mountains, the land rolled on without a tree for miles in sight. Asa thought that it was possible that Robert King had lookouts that sat in different stations and monitored these fields to see if any students tried to escape.

             
They probably caught Stan, interrogated him, and that’s the only reason Robert King even knows about the upcoming Multiplier attack.

             
The horn sounded for the third and final time, which meant that Asa had one minute to report to the Starting Platform if he wanted to play today. He slid out of the chair, and left the building at a trot.

             
As soon as he opened the door, he was hit with a wall of noise that sent undulating pressure on his eardrums. The music was even louder than when he came in, and it sounded as though the crowd had tripled. Asa began to run, his heart hammering in his chest, nervous that he would be late.

             
When he came out from behind the last building and could see the crowd, he swore quietly to himself in awe. There were not hundreds of people on the bleachers, as there had been at every other game he had been to. Instead, the floating bleachers above the water looked like they had grown to a dozen times their original size, and on each side of the Plaid there were
thousands
of people.

             
Asa wondered who all these people were. Then, he remembered all of the Alfatrex workers that lived in the mountains, but were never seen by many of the students.
These must be them. Robert King must have allowed them to come watch.

             
The majority of the crowd consisted of men and women in business casual attire. They gazed around at the scenery, and many of them were rowdier than the Academy students. Raccoons walked up and down the different aisles. Some were selling popcorn and candy, and others were giving out ball caps. The audience members were given a choice; they could choose the blue hats with the sharks on them, or the gray hats with a picture of a wolf attached to the front.

             
The supporters of the Wolves outnumbered the fans of the Sharks twenty to one. Asa couldn’t blame them. For one, the Wolves were a heavy favorite;
it feels bad to cheer for a losing team.
Secondly, the Sharks had some odd students on their team. They had Asa, who had been accused of conspiring to kill students. There was Mike Plode, who had blown up a bank before he came to the Academy. And then, before today, the Sharks also had Stan Nuby, who had killed his entire family.

             
Asa smiled at how unlikeable his Winggame team was, on the surface.

             
There was a howling wind blowing North to South that made the water choppy and was blowing people’s hair in wild tangles. As Asa made it to the Starting Platform, Jen informed him that the coin toss had been a success. The Sharks team captain, Roxanne, had won the toss, and the Sharks would by flying North to South. Having the wind on their backs was a great advantage.