by Leito, Chad
Asa sighed. It was a Hail Mary pass, it was a half court shot, and the odds didn’t look good. But still, he wasn’t going to give up. The odds of him living were certainly worse if he did that.
When all of the Fishies in the male dormitory had gathered in the crowd, the graduate spoke—“Okay, Fishies, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Thom.” Thom was one of the smallest people in the room. He stood just over five feet, and with his broomstick arms, legs, and his protruding rib cage, Asa doubted the graduate to be over ninety pounds. But still, Asa did not doubt that Thom was probably incredibly strong. Within the circle of the Five Mountains, things aren’t always what they seem. Asa wondered what powers the genetic mutations had been given to Thom, if any.
“There is a metal handle on the wall behind me,” Thom began. “Tug on it, and a chute will open. All Fishies are now required to strip off all of their clothes, and drop them down the chute. If you have anything in your pockets that you would like to keep, go and put it in your chest now. You are forbidden from keeping any of your clothes. From there, you will follow the green hallway line down to the showers. When you return, your Academy issued suit will be waiting for you in your trunk.”
Some of the Fishies looked around, bewildered. It was the second time that Asa had been forced to take all of his clothes off. He didn’t want to; being in this strange place, he felt exposed and unprotected as it was. He thought again about what the graduate had said when they first stepped into the dormitory about there being hidden cameras. They’re always watching you.
Asa had nothing in his pockets. When McCoy had snatched him up in the woods behind his mother’s house yesterday morning…
God! I feel like that was years ago!
…he didn’t have anything with him. He didn’t carry a cell phone—most people didn’t after the economy crashed. The Wolf Flu had thoroughly changed everyone’s way of life; a cell phone went from being a necessity to a superfluous luxury. And he had left his wallet on his nightstand. When he saw the crows attacking Harold Kensing that morning, he left without much preparation. He didn’t know that he was about to leave on an extended trip.
Despite his aversion, Asa took off his clothes. Most of the boys in the dormitory kept their eyes pasted on the walls around; many of them acted as though they had a sudden, intense appreciation for the taxidermied animals on the walls surrounding the dormitory. Asa was grateful for this. He stood there, naked, before the fire, and waited in line to drop his clothes into the chute. With his clothes off, he felt unprotected. Looking at the other’s faces, he felt that they were thinking the same thing. The shared shame somehow made the process more bearable.
Asa dropped his clothes in the chute, and made his way, barefoot and naked, to the tile hallway, and followed the yellow strip on the ground. He walked past the five portraits, and stared at the crooked smile of Robert King.
Why are you doing this? he asked the portrait in his mind. What is this for? What are you training us for? Is this some kind of military? If so, what’s the enemy? Who are we fighting, Mr. King?
Asa walked on. The shower room was just around the corner, and sat very close to the dormitory. The naked Fishies walked in. The water was already on, falling from faucets high up in the walls. The sound of the water falling echoed around the dark rock. The room was nearly as big as the dormitory, with water falling from faucets all around the walls. The shower room looked to be simply carved out of the mountain itself, and all of the water rolled down a gentle slope toward a large, gaping, uncovered drain in the center of the room. The drain was three or four feet wide, and seemed to fall down forever. The bottom wasn’t visible from the shower room, and Asa wondered what would happen if he fell in. Asa moved carefully over the rock, slick with water and soap, and kept a good distance from the drain.
He stood under one of the faucets and rinsed off, and found that dispensers were located along the wall with soaps and shampoos. Whenever he was finished, he grabbed a clean towel located just outside the shower room. He dried off, wrapped the towel around his body, and made his way back to the dormitory.
A few of the Fishies who had finished showering before Asa were already in their suits. They appeared to be the exact same as the ones that the graduates wore, only white. Asa’s steps quickened a bit, anxious to try his on.
He climbed the ladder to his bed, naked except for the towel wrapped around him, and positioned himself over his chest. There was a slight vibration in the black metal as Asa pressed his palms down onto the top of the compartment, and then it opened up. On the bottom slab of metal, next to his bag of pills, were two new items—a pair of shoes (these were completely white, and made of thinly shaped cloth, with a rubber sole at the bottom. They had no shoelaces), and one circle of white cloth. The suit was nowhere to be found.
Asa’s armband, which was resting atop the charging cylinder in the chest, showed a message into the black fabric as Asa watched.
Stand naked with your feet flat on the ground, and put the circle over your head, like a necklace.
Asa grabbed the roll of fabric and jumped down to the ground below, his feet slapping on the wood. He noticed that several other Fishies were watching him with rolls of white cloth in their hands. Asa took his towel off, took several steps back toward the window, and put the white, thick, circle of cloth over his head.
In a moment, he knew that he had made a mistake. Volkner rigged it. This is the second assassination attempt. He gave me a suit that would strangle me. They would just think that it was a malfunction; no one would ever suspect him, just like they didn’t when he poisoned me.
The thick circle of white fabric constricted around Asa’s neck like a python. He brought his hands up, grasped the squeezing thing around his neck, and tried to pull it off to no avail. He would have screamed had he been able to. Fishies were watching him from their bunks, sitting there and doing nothing.
Then, Asa could breathe again. The cloth rolled down his body, clinging immobilizingly tight to each area as it made its way down. Finally, the last of the fabric wove itself around his ankles and he was in his suit, standing there, covered in white.
Asa was panting, and he looked up to see Teddy watching him. I’m being paranoid, Asa thought. His heart was thudding beneath the tight fabric covering his chest. He ran his hands along his suit; it felt like snakeskin on his body.
He climbed back into bed and lay his head down on his pillow. He stared at the slanting, wooden ceiling above. The wood swirled in different shades of brown. Around him, no one spoke. He could hear the soft sounds of suits conforming to bodies; he could hear the fibers whipping through the air as they sowed themselves into the proper positions.
He felt his neck where, just a few moments ago, he had thought that the suit was going to strangle him.
Am I going crazy? He thought to himself.
At first, it was a weak thought, and he almost dismissed it, thinking—I don’t feel crazy.
But then, how did he know what that was supposed to feel like? Did everyone with a mental disorder have some undeniable sensation that they could point to, and know that they weren’t thinking right? Probably not. They probably just feel a little strange.
Asa’s body stiffened.
An image flashed in his mind of himself, sitting in some mental health hospital. In his mind’s eye, he was strapped down in a clinical chair with bungee cords—like he was a used piece furniture the back of a truck. His hair was greased with body oils, and pointed in every direction. An unkempt shadow of facial hair grew dark and ragged from the middle of his neck, to halfway up his cheeks. His eyes were shifting back and forth, not really concentrating on anything in the room, just moving to move. Nurses were giggling in the hall about their lives outside of the hospital. They just thought that he was a loon, a nut. Someone who had gone off the deep end. They, and the doctors, thought that he was in a coma like trance; that even though his eyes moved like that, and he twitched and jerked, he was doing the ment
al equivalent to being in a dreamless slumber. He imagined himself physically being there, but thinking that he was here, in The Academy, where raccoons drove cars, and polar bears served food, and there’s a group of black-gummed individuals who are trying to kill you but you don’t know why.
Or maybe I’m dead. Maybe Harold Kensing just shot me in the head. He had the gun held up to me, and he was ready to pull the trigger, and then the switch happened—things went from making sense to not. The world turned upside down at that point. The moment that the officer was about to pull the trigger, a massive dog, that didn’t look quite right, banged into the drivers side door, and ripped the massive police officer from the car. From there, things began to make less and less sense by the moment. A flock of crows killed Officer Kensing. An absurdly strong, fast, and muscled man had picked me up, taken me to King’s Lake, tied weights around me legs, and dropped me down to the bottom of the lake to be fish food. But I hadn’t died! I came out of the bottom of the lake into some sort of underground railway station with people who can eat their body weight in one meal, and then I was transported to this place—some obscure location hidden between Five Mountains where everyone is training, but they don’t know what for. How plausible is that?
Asa’s forehead was slick with sweat. He had never considered that he was insane before—living his entire life in his own head—or that he was dead. But now, the ideas seemed compelling, and maybe even more believable than what he thought was going on around him.
Or maybe I am here. Let’s just say that it’s true—let’s just say that I’ve been taken to some elite organization in the mountains, where you’re not allowed to talk for the first week or they’ll gun you down. Couldn’t that make me a little off? Couldn’t that affect my senses? Don’t people with PTSD sometimes have unrealistically paranoid ideations about family members killing them?
And if I am a little off, wouldn’t I perceive threats where they actually aren’t? Couldn’t I think that something that’s actually harmless is trying to kill me? Maybe the Multipliers, the people with black gums, actually aren’t out to get me. What if Harold Kensing really was just crazy? He could have pulled me over, and just told me nonsense. Sure, he said some things that came out to be true: He told me that there were people with black gums, and that I was going to a Fishie place. But he also said things that weren’t true—like that my dad knew these people. My father was a truck driver; Harold was mistaken.
And, if Harold Kensing didn’t know what he was talking about, what other proof do I have? I thought that Volkner snarled at me that time, but couldn’t that have happened in my head? And I think that he poisoned me, but do I have any proof? Did anyone else see it? If he had poisoned me, they would probably have him locked up in a cell somewhere.
Asa liked this idea. He was calming down, feeling better. Life was a lot less stressful when you didn’t think that someone was trying to kill you. He relaxed a little and stopped thinking about the whole situation. He spent the next few hours playing with his suit. He put on the shoes that were in his trunk, and his black wristband.
He found out that the black rubber strips that went all the way around his armband were actually temperature control knobs. Whenever he rotated them around his forearm counterclockwise, his suit grew warmer. Whenever he rotated it clockwise, his suit grew colder. It was as though there were millions of microscopic heaters and air conditioning units laced all throughout the fabric. The power was incredible, he found that he could turn the temperature hot enough to burn him all over his body, or cold enough to make him gasp for air, as though he had just jumped into a frozen lake.
He looked out the giant panes of glass along the walls at the mountains surrounding, and was in the best mood since he had been pulled over by Harold Kensing. He had proven to himself that it would be reasonable to believe that Volkner and his other black-gummed friends weren’t trying to kill him. This took a huge weight off of his mind.
Asa heard Teddy kick his blankets off of himself in the bed below. The wooden ladder began to creek, as Teddy climbed up, so that he was face to face with Asa. Teddy was clad in his white suit, and had somehow found a way to extract a hood out of the back, which he was wearing. He didn’t say a word to Asa, didn’t even make an expression. Teddy simply reached up, and put a small, personal sized carton of white milk on Asa’s bed. Then, he climbed back down the ladder, and got into bed.
Confused, Asa picked up the carton of milk. It was in an opened cardboard box, and it still had milk in it. Asa wondered why Teddy brought it up. Maybe he thought that it was especially good and wanted me to try it. Maybe he opened it, started drinking it, and realized that he didn’t want the rest. Maybe he just didn’t want to throw the milk away.
Asa was wishing that he could just lean his head over the side of his bed and ask Teddy what the milk was for, when a dark thought slithered into his mind. Maybe he poisoned it.
Asa considered for a moment, then smirked and shrugged his shoulders. Teddy wouldn’t poison me. Besides, I thought that I was done having dark thoughts for a while.
He gulped down the entire container of milk in a few quick swallows. He held the carton atop his thigh, dangled his feet over the edge of his bed, and looked at the beautiful view out the window. The sunlight shimmered on the soft waves of the Moat. See? Nothing bad happened. You’re just a little paranoid.
That was when he saw it. Asa looked down at the milk carton, and saw that on the inside of the lip, the part that you would use to open it, there was a message scribbled in tiny, black ink. He held the carton closer to his face and read:
The guys with the black gums are trying to kill you!!! Poisoned the chicken & said don’t resuscitate. I saw him do it.
Asa’s heartbeat rose again, and he held the carton down as naturally as he could and tried to pretend that he hadn’t seen anything. What had Teddy seen, or heard? Asa’s face had gone pale. He was scared. Teddy had communicated with him, putting himself in danger. He half expected to hear the roar of machine guns take Teddy down. You’re always watched here. And, the mental security walls that Asa had worked hard to put up around himself to make himself feel safe had just all fallen. His mental attempt to make Volkner seem like he wasn’t a threat seemed silly to him, childish. Teddy had seen Volkner poison Asa. And hadn’t the nurse warned him, too? And McCoy: hadn’t he warned Asa?
The scariest part to Asa was how thoroughly he had convinced himself that he was safe. What else was he denying?
He used his thumb to smudge out the message that Teddy had written him while he gazed out at the mountains.
13
The Pet Cat
A couple hours later, Asa sat in the cafeteria. He was the only Fishie who didn’t have someone sitting across from him, and he felt painfully alone.
The polar bears had served the food (bovine shoulder in a mushroom sauce, mashed potatoes, and a thick French onion soup), and Asa, deciding that he would have to eat at some point, had sampled everything the moment he sat down to make sure that none of it would kill him. Blood hadn’t started running from his nose, and he hadn’t passed out. The food was good, but still, he was dismayed to be sitting alone.
The cafeteria was packed. Fishies sat on the side of the tables closest to the window, with four or five feet in between each student. Across from each Fishie, except for Asa, sat a graduate who was talking to the Fishie. They were leaning forward, and imparting wisdom. Asa was the only Fishie left out. It was just one more way that he was at a disadvantage.
He had been in the dormitory half an hour earlier when Thom had shouted, for the second time that day, to gather around.
“Alight. I hope you all are enjoying your rest tonight—I promise you, after today, the speed of things is going to pick up quite a bit. Get sleep while you can.
“You are about to be dismissed for dinner, but before it begins, I’d like to inform you of one more aspect of the Academy. Each student will have what we call a mentor. Your mentor will be like your privat
e teacher; it will be an authority figure and a mainstay of support while you are enduring this rigorous process.
“You’re mentor will be a graduate of the Academy—someone who has already gone through what you are about to attempt. Each Academy student has his or her own mentor, and each mentor only has one student. You’re mentor will stay with you, offering support, advice, and discipline, if necessary, for the remainder of your stay here in the Academy.
“Tonight at dinner, you will meet your mentor for the first time. Enter the cafeteria, and sit spread out as much as possible with your back facing the big window. The name of your mentor will appear on your armband, and your mentor will come sit down and join you.
“Still, the talking ban is in effect, so you may not communicate with your mentor. But, this gives you a unique opportunity—you get to listen. Just sit and listen; the powers that organize the Academy have thought that this would be best for you to receive information in an uninterrupted fashion, so try to find the value in it.
“Dismissed, soldiers. Go eat.”
As Asa ate, he thought that what Thom said was strange. Dismissed, soldiers. Soldiers? Why had he said soldiers?
Asa took another bite of beef, careful not to spill anything on his new, white suit. He glanced at his armband again, and saw, “Jul Conway,” written in. He guessed that it was the same Conway that he had met on the small fishing boat.
The cafeteria was filled with chattering voices all around. Teddy, Charlotte, Stridor: they all had mentors. Everyone did but Asa.
He took another bite and stared at the empty seat across from him.
After dinner, Asa thought that it would be a good idea for him to sleep, but found that he couldn’t. He was exhausted—he knew this: but still, his mind had too many questions for him to rest. He had an urge—similar to the one he had the day that he trekked out into the snow and the crow had saved him—to explore.