The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted

by Conor Grennan

  But Miles Watt stood at the front of the platform, blocking Freddy’s way. With a smirk, Miles lifted a finger to the hologram and swiped. Recruit Training spun away. The dial continued past Cadet and past Operative. It landed on a red setting: No Retreat.

  The planks of the bridge between Freddy and the recruits’ platform began to fall away, one after another, like tumbling dominoes. Freddy’s face was pure panic as he now backed toward Santori.

  “Freddy!” Jack screamed. “You’re an improbable. You’ve always known it. Go through him!”

  Freddy locked eyes with Jack as the boards a few feet from him tumbled away. His expression hardened, and he spun to face Santori. He let out a piercing war cry and stretched out his arm over the side of the bridge, palm open. His blade flew up from below and slapped into his hand. He twisted his wrist, and the blade deployed.

  Then he was on Santori, who raised his blade just in time to parry Freddy’s onslaught. As boards continued falling behind him, Freddy’s blade was a blur. He drove Santori back so quickly that Santori stumbled and tumbled all the way back to his own platform, landing on his back.

  Freddy leapt onto Santori’s platform just as the last boards fell away under him. He stood above the instructor, the tip of his blade pressed to Santori’s bull’s-eye. The blood from Freddy’s hand dripped slowly down his blade and sizzled on the blaze.

  A small smile crept across the instructor’s face. “That is how an improbable fights,” Santori said. “Welcome to Hadley, Link.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE THIRTEEN PROPHECIES

  Superior Blue met them on the way to the Dome wearing a wide smile. “Link, the improbable,” he declared, walking up to them. “My theory continues to be validated. Two dormants spontaneously becoming improbables in the same day. If that isn’t evidence, I don’t know what is.” He winked at Voss.

  “Most believe that Kinetics are the best swordsmen and women, but Theorics are by far the most powerful with the blade.” Superior Blue tapped the blue rectangle over his heart. “Theorics are visionaries. We can imagine an idea, no matter how radical, and our minds find a path to reach that goal. Once Freddy was encouraged by Miles Watt’s stunt, the blade movement came instinctively. And impressively, from the report I received.”

  “It was amazing,” Asha said, wide-eyed. “You should have seen it.”

  “I will, in the Dome. Half of you are now improbables. You are more than qualified to engage in a simulation.”

  In the amphitheater, the Dome wasted no time in calling Team One. Team Thirteen watched from the back of the amphitheater as the farm simulation settled over them. It was early evening on the farm. Folding chairs and long tables filled the front yard. White lights hung from poles outlining the area. Dozens of people chatted and ate barbecue from paper plates, couples sat on picnic blankets, and classic rock wafted from speakers on the front porch. It seemed the whole town was gathered to celebrate the end of the work week. Team One mingled among the guests.

  “Hunting a reaper in a crowd requires quick identification,” Bakari informed the recruits in the amphitheater. “You must blaze it without harming nearby civilians.”

  “There. That’s the reaper,” Jack whispered to Freddy, nodding at the cook working the barbeque smoker.

  “How can you tell?” Freddy squinted at the man. Jack didn’t know how he knew. He just knew.

  A moment later the cook turned from the smoker and began stalking a woman walking past the tables. Miles finally saw the reaper from across the yard and touched his ear. “The cook!”

  The reaper reached for the woman. Miles touched his temple and the woman collapsed in pain, causing the reaper to miss her. Janelle leapt like a grasshopper, landing next to the woman. Janelle grabbed the woman around the waist and leapt again, out of reach of the reaper. Civilians nearby screamed and ran. Kasun split into two and flanked the reaper, aiming his blade at the reaper’s chest. The reaper snatched both Kasuns’ blades and threw the twins across the yard, where he landed as one person. That left Claire, who stood twenty feet away. The reaper came at her. Claire snapped her fingers.

  Behind the reaper the propane tank of the smoker exploded, sending the reaper flying toward her. Claire’s blade was already out and braced against her shoulder. The reaper smashed into the blazing tip and combusted in a purple vapor.

  Claire was downright lethal.

  It was almost six o’clock as Team Twelve stumbled out of the Dome, looking relieved to be finished. Asha stood. “All right. Let’s do this.” The rest of Team Thirteen followed her down the broad shallow steps. The assembled recruits stared at them in silence. Jack felt suddenly ridiculous in his uniform, like a kid playing dress up as a soldier.

  “Confidence, man,” Freddy whispered to Jack. “Believe that we can do this, and we can do it. We’ve watched two dozen simulations now.”

  “It’s not that simple, Freddy.”

  “It’s exactly that simple. You saw me on the Bridge. If I can do it, you can do it.”

  They walked past Team One. Miles sneered at them. Jack wanted to punch him. Freddy lifted his chin in greeting at Claire.

  “Hey, Claire. How’s it going?”

  Jack looked up to catch her expression. Nothing. She watched them as if they were complete strangers.

  “Good to see you too,” Freddy whispered to himself in a high voice, pretending to be Claire. “Good luck, guys! And I totally forgive you, Jack. St. Paul’s Pride forever. Go Panthers!”

  Asha stopped in front of the Team Thirteen door. They lined up behind her. Alexander, off to the side, gave them a subtle thumbs-up. Instructor Bakari stared at the light that usually illuminated a door when the Dome called a team. Then he stared at their bands, waiting.

  A long, quiet minute passed. Jack could hear his own heartbeat.

  Then the same clear tone rang out. The Dome powered down. This time Bakari didn’t even look at them. He turned to address the Forty-Eight. “Recruits, you are dismissed. See you tomorrow.”

  Prophecy Hall was empty and quiet following another noisy dinner of teenagers stuffing their faces. Jack loaded dirty plates onto a counter next to the kitchen where an oversized yellow vacuum silently sucked up plates and silverware and transported them to the industrial-sized dishwashers. Across the hall, Asha swept as Freddy held a dustpan. Jack listened to them brainstorm how to get Voss to break through.

  “Voss already knows his spade is strength,” Asha said. “He’s just being stubborn—will you quit moving the dustpan?”

  “I’m moving it to where it needs to be.” Freddy argued. “And he’s not being stubborn. He’s afraid to try because he’s afraid to fail in front of other people. He’s got way too much pride. Why do you think he left early from cleanup and didn’t tell us where he was going? He’s probably out in the Long Woods right now trying to break a tree in half, out of sight from anyone else. Hey. You missed those french fries. Under the chair.”

  Nobody brainstormed how Jack could break through. What would be the point? Nobody even knew where to begin. Everyone else was getting a sign: Asha in the Pit, Freddy on the Bridge. Voss would get his sooner or later. It was as if their spades were calling to them, forcing their way to the surface.

  Jack’s steps echoed across the cavernous hall as he went back to clear more tables. He walked slowly, staring at the walls around him. The carvings were spectacular, if indecipherable, covering every inch of surface on the pillars, rafters, and walls.

  Jack stopped in the middle of the hall. Something seemed different.

  He put down the trays and turned in a slow circle, studying the great hall. Asha and Freddy were still sweeping and debating. The yellow vacuum was still cleaning plates. But he had seen other movement. Then his eyes were drawn to the walls. He was beginning to see a pattern forming. For the first time, he realized the carvings seemed to be ordered, progressing like the numbers of a clock face. At the one o’clock position a story of carvings proceeded from top to bottom.


  It was the first prophecy: the coming of the Shadow.

  A dark mist covered the world. Cascading down the wall, the mist funneled like a tornado and formed into a faceless beast. The carvings flowed from one to the next as Jack watched. As he tracked them downward, the beast took the shape of a man.

  Jack stepped to the two o’clock position. Where before he had seen only random carvings, he now saw the second prophecy: a village by the sea in ancient Ireland. The flagstone walls and sloping roofs of the primitive houses formed one continuous arch, with a small entryway as the only opening. Jack followed the story down to the orphan boy who had been found by the Order of the Grays. This was Jacob Hadley, the boy with the gift, a new kind of warrior. The Grays adopted him and raised him as their own.

  The third prophecy: The Grays traveled the ocean to Elk Island, where they built a world inside the world. The carvings told of the building of the Silo and the forging of the Spade Threshold.

  And on they went, every prophecy. The tenth: The Battle Beyond the Wall. The eleventh: The creation of the Dome. Jack felt like he was understanding a new language for the first time.

  Finally, Jack made his way back to the front of the room, where the carvings told the twelfth prophecy. It was the only one Jack didn’t understand. The symbols appeared to show two people facing each other. Each of their hearts was made from charred wood.

  There was something about it, something important. Jack had heard bits and pieces of the other prophecies, but nobody ever spoke of the twelfth one.

  And then another question occurred to him. “Where’s the thirteenth?” Jack asked aloud.

  Freddy and Asha paused their clean up. “The thirteenth what?” Freddy asked.

  “The thirteenth prophecy,” Jack clarified. “The other twelve are here but not the thirteenth.”

  Freddy and Asha looked around at the walls. Asha crinkled her nose. “What prophecies? I just see a bunch of abstract carvings.”

  Jack kept turning slowly. The thirteenth prophecy had to be up there. Unless . . .

  He ran over to one of the enormous wooden pillars. Using the carvings as handholds, he scaled the beam.

  “Dude, what are you doing?” Freddy called up.

  “Move the tables,” Jack called back, carefully pulling himself onto the broad rafters. “Just move them from the center of the room.”

  The other two shrugged at each other. Strange requests at Hadley were becoming part of everyday life. They put down the broom and dustpan and pulled tables from the center of the room.

  The floor of Prophecy Hall was a dark mahogany. Jack had assumed the light marks were scratches from the years of shifting tables and chairs. But now he saw it: a towering silo, a black sky with a black sun, and between the sky and the earth, a figure. It was falling from the heavens. The Great Prophecy.

  Jack stared at the figure plunging through the sky. That’s not me, Jack thought. He was not gifted. He definitely didn’t fall from the sky. It was day two. In twenty-four hours they would mind-scrape him, and he wouldn’t remember any of this.

  He wouldn’t remember Claire.

  A switch flipped inside him. He had no purpose at Hadley. Tonight, though, he was still Jack Carlson. Jack Carlson, thirteen-year-old kid from St. Paul’s Prep School in Jersey City. There was one thing that he could still do.

  Jack climbed down. For the first time since he had arrived at Hadley, he knew exactly what he was going to do next.

  “What were you looking at?” Freddy asked.

  But Jack was already pushing through the main door. “I’ll meet you back at the Watchtower,” he called back.

  Jack walked outside into the fresh night air. The last forty-eight hours had been the most difficult and painful and strange of his life. So why couldn’t he stop thinking about Claire? What was wrong with him that his emotions controlled him in a way his rational brain couldn’t?

  The day that Brandon had asked out Claire was the day Jack realized he had feelings for her. As ridiculous as it sounded now, that had been the worst day of his life. His mother had seen it on his face the moment he stepped in the door.

  “Hard day,” she had said. It hadn’t been a question.

  “Please don’t give me the it-gets-better talk,” Jack mumbled, opening the fridge.

  “I won’t because it doesn’t,” his mother told him. “This is what it feels like to have your heart in somebody else’s hands. Helpless, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll get over it.”

  “Not too quickly, I hope. It’s good practice, realizing that you have very little control over this life. It teaches you to make good decisions in the moments you can control.”

  Then his mom had pulled out the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, as she had done since he was a little boy coming home with scraped knees.

  Jack broke into a jog toward the Barracks. He needed to try to talk to Claire. This was a moment he could control. This was his decision.

  The lights were on in all twelve barracks when Jack arrived in the quad where the Spade Threshold stood, eerily lit in the dark. He walked up to the brick and white-pillar mansion with the colossal number one hanging from it. But before he reached it, the door opened. Miles Watt came striding out.

  “You don’t belong around here.”

  “I just want to talk to my friend,” Jack said.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.” Miles crossed his huge arms.

  “I want to make sure she’s okay.”

  Miles got closer. “You’re nobody. You know that, right? You’re the mistake of a deluded Superior.”

  “You worry about yourself, Miles,” Jack shot back. “I’ll be fine.”

  “But you’re not fine, are you?” He narrowed his eyes at Jack.

  Jack felt like a vise was tightening around his mind, squeezing out his thoughts. He gritted his teeth. “Get out of my head, Miles.”

  “That blackout you had outside the diner, when you were supposed to meet Claire—it happens a lot, doesn’t it? You lose time.” Miles’s hot breath hovered on the top of Jack’s head. “It happened to you last night, even, didn’t it? You didn’t tell anyone. You woke up outside Requisition? What were you doing there?”

  It was true. Jack had blacked out, or sleepwalked, or something. He didn’t remember anything after going to bed until he had woken up slumped against the stone wall outside Requisition. He had tried to forget about it; he didn’t want to freak anyone out.

  Jack fought to get Miles out of his head. “You’re the one with a secret, Miles.”

  “You let Claire walk home, alone, in that neighborhood.” Miles seemed to savor Jack’s discomfort. “But something happened to her, didn’t it? She screamed, and you weren’t there to help her.”

  “Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong,” Jack growled. But Miles wasn’t wrong. Miles was dead right.

  “This has nothing to do with what I’m thinking,” Miles hissed. “I’m just a mirror.” Jack felt a searing pain in his head, as if a hot iron pressed against his brain. He clutched his head and stumbled backward.

  The pain stopped suddenly. Jack looked up to see Voss standing over Miles, whom he’d just tossed to the ground. Miles sprung back up like a cat and leapt at Voss. For a moment, they had each other by the throat. Miles was incredibly strong, but Voss was in another league.

  “Get off my teammate,” Voss snarled at him.

  “Found him!” Freddy called from behind, where he and Asha were approaching. “Boy, you’re lucky Voss got here first, Miles. I would have really kicked your butt.”

  Kasun and Janelle stormed out of the Team One residence. Kasun split into two and flanked Voss and Freddy. Janelle crouched slightly, ready to attack. Upstairs, a figure appeared at the window.

  Miles held up his hand, halting his teammates. A smile drew across his face as he studied Voss. “You are desperate, aren’t you, Torque? I didn’t realize how bad it was back home for you. What sort of trouble are you in, exactly? Because—”
>
  Miles stopped. Then he squinted thoughtfully at Voss. “Wait. You went to go see her, didn’t you?” Miles asked. “I knew you were a coward.”

  “Went to go see who?” Freddy asked.

  Miles’s eyebrows went up, and he looked back at Voss. “You didn’t tell them you were going? You put on a show for your teammates here, but you’re just going to abandon them, aren’t you?”

  Voss picked Miles up by the front of his uniform. Miles swung hard and hit Voss across his bare skull, but Voss barely flinched. The twin Kasuns grabbed him. Janelle leapt at him and held him in a headlock. Voss carried them all as if they weighed nothing. He took two steps and catapulted Miles, Kasun, and Janelle across the entire quad. They landed on Team Seven’s porch in a stunned heap.

  Freddy pointed at him, slack-jawed. “Dude. You just threw three people about a hundred feet.”

  “Leave me alone, Sanchez,” Voss growled, turning and stomping off toward the Watchtower.

  “That’s not just strong, man,” Freddy called after him. “That’s improbably strong. That’s what they call a breakthrough.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “That’s impossible.” “Improbable,” Asha corrected quietly.

  TORQUE’S STRENGTH

  Jack looked back at the Team One barracks. Claire wasn’t at the window anymore. He cursed under his breath and ran to catch up with the others.

  Asha was already walking backward in front of Voss. “Who did you go see? Spill it.”

  Freddy, speed walking alongside them, suddenly had a thought. “You were coming from the Bunker. You went to see Darius, didn’t you?”

  “Get outta my way, bro.”

  “Or what? You’ll toss me over the wall with your new super strength?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  A fog was forming around Voss. He batted it away. “You making this fog, Asha? You trying to slow me down?”