The academy book 3, p.8
The Academy: Book 3, page 8
Asa sat in silence. He could hear birds singing from the branches above him. “That sounds like a good plan,” he said. “I support what you’re doing. I think that it’s smart. If Gene Gill is as good as you say, I’d much rather him run the Academy than Robert King.”
“That’s the one part of the plan that I feel really good about,” Conway said. “If Gene Gill takes over, he’ll do a great job.”
“I’ll trust you on that,” Asa said. “But now I’m wondering why you brought me out here. It sounds like you had thought up your plan before today—you didn’t need my consultation. I know that you prefer secrecy, especially when you’re planning to do things that could potentially get you killed if they were leaked out. So why tell me your plan?”
“Because you have a part to play in Robert King’s murder.”
Asa sat still. I have a part to play? He was happy to help. Even if Gene Gill wasn’t as great as Conway thought, anyone would be better than Robert King. And Conway is right—we need the Academy to be unified if we want to have a shot at defeating the Multipliers. A handful of people won’t have nearly the same shot as a whole organization would at taking the Hive down. And I can see Conway’s point that if the Academy becomes less murderous, the employees and students who live within the Five Mountains would be more likely to comply if there was a joint effort in place to destroy the Hive. “Conway, I’m happy to help you,” he said, “but I can’t see what you would like me to do. The plan that you described sounds like a one-man operation.”
“That’s true. You won’t have anything to do today. And, there’s a chance that you won’t have any responsibilities at all, except to keep your mouth shut about this conversation,” Conway said. He eyed Asa sternly.
“Of course,” Asa said, perturbed that Conway felt the need to continually remind him.
“Let me start by saying this, Asa—I think that I can make the shot. My rifle is equipped with a state of the art scope, and, as I said, I’m good. There’s a spot at the edge of the water, between two buildings, where I’ll be about two hundred yards away from Robert King. I’d say that my chances of hitting my mark and killing him are ninety percent. I’d be surer, but I’ll be shooting from the edge of the water. Also, there’s a lot of wind around the Moat and I won’t have a lot of time to sit and make adjustments. In addition to those things, the water will be bobbing me up and down.”
“Ninety percent?” Asa asked. “So, there’s a one out of ten chance that you can’t make it? Conway, can’t you find a way to minimize the risk?”
“Do you have a better plan? I need to be that far away so that I have good enough cover. I think that a long-range shot is the best chance that I have of killing him. And, I think that taking the shot at the Winggame match today will give me the best odds. No other event that’s coming soon on the calendar will keep so many graduates and Multipliers busy.”
“Won’t they notice that you’re not there?” Asa asked. “Are you not expected to come?”
“I don’t come to many Winggame matches anyway. I don’t think that anyone will find my absence odd.”
“You don’t think, Conway?”
Conway narrowed his eyes. “Yes, Asa, you heard me correctly. I don’t expect that I’ll get caught. There are no certainties. And, do you want to know the honest truth? If I could have Robert King dead, but have to be locked up in some cell within King Mountain for the rest of my life, I’d take that trade.”
“Explain,” Asa said coldly. “You could be such an asset in the fight against the Multipliers.”
“That’s true, but there won’t be much of a fight if Robert King is running the Academy. The humans will be demolished. This would be a good trade. There aren’t better chances than this one, Asa. I know that it is frightening, but it’s the best decision that I can make.”
Asa rubbed his neck. He ran the tactile pads on the ends of his fingers over the scar tissue from where he had been bitten by Allen the Multiplier last semester. “I’ve made similar choices,” he said. “I understand. Sometimes, you come to a crossroads where taking a frightening, aggressive action is safer than doing nothing at all. I understand.”
“Good,” Conway said. “I would have gone ahead with or without your consent, but you’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and there’s a certain amount of confidence I gain from knowing that you’re on board.”
“But what’s my role in this?” Asa asked. He was anxious to find out.
“You only come into play if something goes wrong—if the one-in-ten odds are actualized. A lot of things could happen. I could simply miss due to human error. My gun could misfire. Robert King could move at the last second. If something like that does happen, I may be killed and I may be apprehended. Whatever the case is, someone has to do what I tried to do, but failed.”
“You want me to kill Robert King if you can’t?” Asa whispered. His heart began to thud in his chest, partly because he was scared and partly because it would be satisfying to be the one who avenged his mother’s death.
“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” Conway said. “But there are rules.”
“Okay,” Asa said. “Let’s hear them.”
“First, you’ve got to promise me that you’ll try to kill him in some way that allows you to escape. You can’t plan on getting caught or killed after that. Your father…” Conway winced and then looked away, towards the trees. “He meant a lot to me, and I feel a certain responsibility for you. Can you promise me that you’ll at least try to escape afterwards?”
“Yes,” Asa said.
“Secondly,” Conway continued, “before you go through with your plan, you have to recruit someone to help you.”
“In case I die or get captured, right?”
“Yes. Obviously, I don’t think that it will come to that, but I try to be pragmatic and think of all the options.”
“Who should I choose?” Asa asked.
“That’s up to you,” Conway said. “You’ve shown a knack for picking good accomplices in your missions before. I think that you should pick someone that you trust a lot, and someone who you think is very capable.”
Asa wondered how he would try to kill Robert King, if it came to that. He didn’t have access to rifles, like Conway did, and he wasn’t skilled with firearms. “If your plan fails, how should I do it?”
Conway shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You just haven’t thought of this?” Asa asked.
“No, I’ve thought of it plenty. The best plan is to not make a plan.”
“Why?”
“Because, if I miss and Robert King lives through my assassination attempt, things will change; he’ll heighten security. It will become even harder for anyone to get closer to him, and in ways that we can’t predict. It would be foolish for us to make a plan right now, when we don’t know what security will be like then.”
“That makes sense,” Asa said. “So, if I understand everything correctly, you’re asking me to try to kill Robert King if you can’t, and to recruit someone before my attempt, in case I fail.”
“Exactly,” Conway said, standing up. He put out his hand for Asa to shake. “Do you agree to help me?”
Asa took the hand and shook it hard. He stood up, too. “Absolutely.”
Conway looked at Asa for a long while, his eyes running over Asa’s face. “It really is incredible how much you look like Edmund,” he said. “Now, Asa, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things that I need to get ready.”
Conway’s dark, transparent wings shot out on either side of him with a loud whoosh sound. He began to flap, stirring the pine needles beneath him. Asa watched as his mentor soared above the tallest tree branches and out into open sky.
8
Asa’s Favorite Spot
After Conway left, Asa stood up and walked through the forest, heading further away from his apartment. His mind was buzzing with all that he had just learned. I’m glad that he didn’t tell me a month ago; the anticipation would kill me. I can’t believe that it’s going to happen today. Robert King could be dead by the time the sun goes down.
The thought made him giddy, though it was disturbing. Robert King had been the one who made the Academy so lethal. Asa had seen more people die because of that man than some war veterans.
The sky was darkening overhead, and a soft wind began to rustle the branches high above him. He recalled how still the air had been earlier, and how there had been almost no chop in the Moat. I hope that the waves don’t pick up much, he thought, looking overhead at the gently swaying branches. I want Conway to be stable and unmoving as he lines up his shot.
As he walked, he thought of his encounter last semester with the hologram that had acted as his father. That had been wonderful. He recalled being able to see the pores on this father’s face, and that red was intermingled with his brown beard. It had been as though my father was actually there. He had said he loved me. He also said that I should befriend the Davids.
Asa had no such luck on this task. He hadn’t seen any live Davids, aside from Jaime and some corpses, since the David gave him the polaroid picture of his father. After Teddy left about a month ago, Asa had gone out and given the Davids that Joney and Edna had murdered a proper burial.
“Respect them,” his father had said.
“I did that,” Asa said to himself. “Nothing has happened. Isn’t giving them private burials respecting them?”
It hadn’t really been Asa’s father that had said that, though. It had been a machine that mimicked Asa’s father. He recalled what the hologram had said after Asa had asked it what he should do about the growing Multiplier population. “I don’t know.” The machine had gone on to explain that it wasn’t very good at critical thinking, but it could mimic things that Edmund Palmer had said in certain situations.
Maybe the machine didn’t know what it was talking about. It told me that my father would have advised that I get in contact with someone named Francine Black, and befriend the Davids. Is it possible that those wouldn’t be my father’s true intentions? Asa thought that this was very possible, considering the fact that the machine admitted to not being a good critical thinker. Maybe the advice to get into contact with Francine Black and the Davids was something that my father gave, but in a different context.
Asa let this thought sink in. He walked between two narrow trees and then out onto his favorite spot around the Five Mountains. He had discovered it two weeks ago. He came out onto a jagged rock on the back of Mount Three that ended in a deadly, breath-taking drop. On the edge of the cliff sat a tree with long, knotted branches that reached out over the drop. Asa gripped the trunk between his two hands, planted his feet against the bark, and began to climb. This motion would have been impossible before he had been mutated, but now it was quite easy. It made him feel like a monkey. When he was roughly twelve feet up, he reached the lowest and largest branch the tree held. This branch reached far out beyond the cliff and over the deadly drop. Asa gripped the branch with his hands overhead and began to put one hand over the other, making his way out over the drop.
Out here, the mountains didn’t block the wind. A howling gust came unexpectedly up behind him, making his body swing like a pendulum from the branch and pushed all of his hair towards the front of his head. He laughed out loud and let go of the branch with his left hand so that it dangled by his hip.
He recalled going over to his friend JJ’s house when he had been about ten. JJ had a pool. Asa liked to swim beneath the diving board, and grab onto it. He would do pull ups, assisted by his buoyancy. They were very easy. He could do them with one hand, and it was fun to pretend that he was actually strong enough to do pull ups that easily.
Now that’s my reality, Asa thought. He figured that holding onto the branch now was about as difficult as it would be for a normal person to hold onto it if most of their body was underwater.
Still holding with just his right hand, he looked down.
My God!
The sight was breathtaking in two ways. The first was that he was absurdly high up, triggering a gut reaction of fear. He looked at his feet, dangling below him. He kicked them back and forth. He pulled his body halfway up with his right hand and then released. Before he fell much, he shot his left hand up and caught the branch. The tree branch moaned and creaked. This is a good way to get over what fear of heights I have left, he thought.
The second way that it was breathtaking was that it was beautiful. Asa figured that the drop below him was one thousand feet. Even if a person were to somehow land on the area directly below Asa, however, their descent would not stop there. The rock was so steep in that place that a non-mutated person couldn’t stand on it. The grey and black rock sloped drastically downward; small trees were sparsely situated on this patch of rock. Further down, farther away from the cliff, there was a white and blue river running through a patch of dense forest.
Asa gripped the branch above him with both hands and pulled himself so hard that he became airborne. Like a gymnast on the bars, Asa landed atop the branch on his buttocks. The branch creaked some and bounced with his weight. Involuntarily, he was smiling.
It’s kind of fun being a mutant.
He thought about his time in the Academy. Broadly speaking, a lot of this is fun—fun but scary. He thought about the different things the students had been asked to do during his time there. There were the Blood Canaries—the large, mutated birds that were about the size of ostriches. Students had had to train them so that they would walk obediently from one stall to the other. Then there was Winggame, one of Asa’s favorite activities. He loved everything associated with the sport. It was fast, intense, and he was good at it, too. It was satisfying to work hard and see the results displayed on the statistics board in the cafeteria in Town. There was also the classes where he learned at a pace he wouldn’t have thought possible previously—his intellect had grown partly because of great teachers, partly because he had worked so hard, and partly because it was simply expected of him. I’m not a loser. He had worked perhaps harder than anyone else in his grade while studying for Science Class the previous semester. There’s also the wildlife, Asa thought. The landscape surrounding the Academy was filled with creatures that no one had seen before. Asa had the opportunity to see and interact with dinosaurs and animals that had never existed in the natural world. There’s also the unnatural changes to me. The mutations did have their costs—growing wings had hurt, and the strength increases that Asa benefited from made his caloric needs go through the roof. But I would never be able to safely climb out here if I weren’t a mutant; I also couldn’t fly over rivers or benefit from echolocation.
Asa took a deep breath. The air was crisp, and smelled of pine trees and coming rain. The clouds had darkened overhead and he admired the rocky landscape far below him. He spat and watched the wind carry the saliva until it was out of sight.
If Robert King were dead, this place would be wonderful. Robert King’s belief that growing up in a more lethal environment makes people more capable is the root of most things I dislike about the Academy. If he was gone, there would still be terrible things—like the fact that the Wolf Flu is still being produced and that the Hive is growing, but at least if he died there would be fewer distractions. I could concentrate on ways that I could help in the war against the Multipliers rather than being preoccupied with whether or not I have enough points, or working on a deadly, sick task that Robert King has devised.
The temperature dropped a few degrees and Asa turned up the heat on his suit by turning the rubber dial.
This suit is cool, too, he thought. It could be subzero temperatures outside, but Asa could stay warm at all times.
It felt unreal to Asa that The Boss would probably be dead in a few hours. He looked at his armband. It was ten thirty five in the morning. The Winggame match was at two o’clock. Just three hours and thirty minutes and he’s dead.
Asa didn’t feel sorry for him.
I just hope that Conway’s able to get a clean shot at him.
Asa remembered last year when he and Teddy saw the video that purportedly showed Troy Webber killing the Boss. In the end, it had turned out that he had killed a guy that had been mutated to look like Robert King, as a sort of decoy for anyone who tried to kill him.
Will the same thing happen today?
Asa didn’t think so.
Robert King feels safe when he’s within the Five Mountains. He’s an egotistical bastard who likes the attention he gets at Winggame matches.
Asa rubbed his face.
But what if Conway misses?
Asa did not have a plan as to what he would do. He agreed with Conway’s sentiment that it would be wise to wait and see what kinds of increased security the Boss put into effect after a failed assassination attempt before making a new plan.
Something that I could plan for is who I should ask to try to kill him if I fail.
Immediately, Charlotte came to Asa’s mind. She wasn’t the most obvious choice, but she was obviously capable. She was smart, organized, careful, and collected in times of turmoil. Asa recalled how he had been much more scared than she had been when McCoy and Conway had kidnapped them and taken them to the Academy almost a year ago.
I can’t do that; I love her too much.
As the thought came out, Asa winced. I don’t love her. I barely know her! And even if I did, I don’t let emotion get in the way of my thinking. I just don’t think that she would be the best fit.
