The Academy (12 page)

Steel soon reached the T. He turned left toward the chapel. A few yards beyond the ladder rungs that led up to the common room he set about installing the camera and the reflector that triggered it. Fixing the reflector to something solid, and adjusting its surface to bounce the invisible laser light back perfectly, took far longer than Penny had suggested. Steel was approaching a full sweat when the lights flashed on and off in the connecting hallway.

“What was that?” a low voice said, speaking in a harsh, nervous tone.

“Something’s up with the electricity down here,” a second voice answered. “Keep moving.”

Steel had just, that very moment, managed to get the reflector into place, and so took an extra few seconds to stick it firmly where it belonged rather than start the whole process over again. With the camera now placed and ready, Steel judged that he no longer had enough time to make it to the common room ladder.

He could turn and run toward the chapel, but it was a long hallway—he would likely be both heard and seen. Reversing direction was out of the question as well: he would run into them. He spun once in a full circle, feeling as if the walls were moving in on him.

And then he looked up.

The four boys, all of them big, turned left, following the network of tunnels toward the chapel. The overhead lights flashing on and off had made them uneasy, and they moved quickly, their way lit by the pale beam of a flashlight held by the boy in the lead. He had a thick body and surprisingly big hands. His watchband was shiny metal. All four wore leather boat shoes, blue jeans, and school blazers.

They walked with their heads bent to avoid striking the tangle of pipes and wires suspended both from the tunnel ceiling and along the walls. They were almost certainly upperclassmen.

Had any one of them looked up a few yards past the iron-rung ladder to the common room, they would have seen a boy lying prone, tucked between the pipes and the ceiling, his face mushed down by two pipes, his mouth spread open, making his nose look something like a beak. His mouth being forced open in this way, he’d begun to drool; his tongue licked constantly at his lips, trying to catch a big glob of spit from falling. At last, the task proved impossible. A blob of clear saliva, roughly the size of a nickel, fell from the boy’s lip like a bomb, catching the last of the four boys below, squarely in the hair.

The boy made it several paces past the location where Steel was suspended before the spit slipped from his hair, sliding down onto the back of his neck. He slapped at it and then groaned, disgusted as he pulled his hand away.

“Gross! The pipes are leaking.” He flashed a look over his left shoulder and up toward the pipes. In the shifting shadows that resulted from the dim flashlight in the lead, the trailing boy failed to distinguish the soles of two shoes bent and wedged amid the pipes.

“Wait up,” he said, scrambling nervously to catch his buddies.

* * *

Steel exhaled for the first time in what felt like minutes. He didn’t dare move—not until the upperclassmen were long gone. He would lie atop the hot pipes as long as necessary, because getting down was not going to be easy or quiet.

He had the confirmation he’d come for. He hoped the camera had caught what he’d just seen. There was no way the headmaster wouldn’t believe him now. He felt sure one of the boys was Victor DesConte—he was up to something, roaming the school tunnels at all hours, avoiding being seen, using the chapel to—

Why?
Steel wondered. He had no idea what it was he was accusing the older boys of, beyond sneaking around—a crime for which he was now guilty.

When it sounded safe, he lowered his head down through the pipes and saw that he was alone in an empty tunnel. He swung a leg down and dropped. Rather than head in the direction of safety—either up the ladder into the common room, or down the adjoining tunnel toward the administration building—he started creeping toward the chapel, his back against the cool concrete wall. He told himself that if he heard anything he’d climb back up onto the top of the pipes, though an inner voice wondered if he’d have time for that. In all likelihood he’d be caught, a possibility that slowed him down.

He reached the rebar ladder leading up into the chapel, and hesitated. Up ahead he could make out a square hole in the roof of the tunnel. He checked it out: a rock wall shaft, like he was standing at the bottom of an old well, leading fifteen feet straight up. And now it made sense: this was the marble base of Sir David! At some point, years before, there must have been a secret access into the tunnels or a crypt by moving Sir David. The more modern concrete tunnels had been built around it, the statue cemented into place.

He returned and climbed the rebar ladder slowly, his ears pricked for the slightest of sounds.

Voices. Muffled and at a distance, but clearly conversational. Several people were talking.

He stepped through to the tightly packed space housing the towering organ pipes and walked carefully toward the fabric screening. He peered into the chancel.

The four upperclassmen stood alongside the organ. DesConte was speaking, addressing whoever was sitting behind the organ, the player’s face still blocked by sheet music. Steel, eager to identify the player, moved slightly to his right, leading the way in the dark by carefully sliding his feet ahead. By doing so, he accidentally triggered a valve box that delivered forced air into one of the tall pipes. The resulting note, the lowest E-flat, erupted like a foghorn, shaking the floor beneath him.

He got his wish: Mr. Randolph’s head shot out from behind the sheet music.

“That wasn’t my doing,” Randolph said.

The four boys all looked over toward the pipe room.

Steel froze.

But with the pipe room dark, and the screen acting as a one-way window, he could see them, but they could not see him.

“Well? Have a look!” Randolph said.

Steel turned. He knew the way out of the small room, remembering the route. But he could also calculate DesConte’s speed. The upperclassman was going to come through the door to the pipe room at the same moment Steel would make the turn toward the ladder leading down into the tunnel. He was certain to be spotted.

Instead of running away, he stepped deeper into the dark room and felt his way around a row of towering pipes. The pipes ascended in rows mounted to small wooden platforms. Between each row of pipes was a narrow gap, but wide enough to allow a man to reach inside to make repairs. Wide enough for Steel to crawl inside. He pulled himself into the space, turned sideways, and, carefully avoiding the valve boxes, lay down. It was pitch dark in the space; a person would have to shine a flashlight to see him.

He heard DesConte burst through the hidden door, and caught a faint glimpse of the boy’s head as he made straight for the tunnels. The other three were fast on his heels. They rumbled down the ladder and flicked on the lights. Strange shadows, like tall black candles, filled the room. It looked alternately like a shark’s mouth and prison bars. With the boys off searching the tunnel, the only way to explain the sound of feet approaching was that Randolph had entered the pipe room himself. Then, through the narrow slits between pipes, Steel saw Randolph’s profile silhouetted against the screen. The man bent over. The E-flat sounded again, sounded loudly, Steel’s ear nearly pressing against the giant pipe. Steel thought his teeth might rattle out of his head. Randolph stood and patrolled down the line of pipes, heading for the end of the row. Was he going to check between the rows? Had he figured out where Steel was hiding? Steel had felt so confident that it would be nearly impossible to see him where he was, but suddenly he had no desire to test his theory.

He flattened himself further—stretched his arms over his head to make himself long and narrow. And he watched as Randolph did exactly as Steel had feared: came around the first row of pipes and glanced down through the space that separated one pipe from the next. For a brief second or two, Randolph and Steel were looking directly at each other. Randolph manually tripped a valve, and a low pipe sounded.

“Was that you?” It was DesConte speaking, having returned from the tunnel.

“Yes,” Randolph said, turning away from the end of the row. He had not given his eyes time to adjust. “Testing the box. Seems fine.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone was in here.”

“You think?”

“I know,” Randolph said. “Someone followed you.”

“Not possible.”

“At this school?
Anything
is possible. Okay…we’re going to cancel tonight. Get back down those tunnels and return to the movie before it ends. Who knows who that might have been?”

“Maybe your foot hit a pedal,” DesConte proposed. “I mean, it could have happened.”

“They are my feet, Mr. DesConte. I think I know where they were and what they were doing, and what is and is not possible.”

Steel heard the other three join DesConte. None spoke. Only DesConte.

“Yes, sir.”

“Into the tunnels. Keep an eye out for anyone hiding, though I would bet we’ve lost whoever it was. Exit at the common room. Head to the auditorium for the end of the movie. I want you seen by other kids when the movie lets out. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And next time…well, we’d all better be more careful. I do not enjoy the thought of someone following you. You’d better come in twos from now on. We can’t afford all four of you being caught at once. We’ve put too much into this operation.”

Operation
, Steel noted. He’d been right! Something was up with DesConte and the other three.

“We’re on it.”

“Go,” Randolph said.

The boys took off down the ladder and through the tunnel. A moment later the pale light from the tunnel entrance switched off. But Randolph had not moved. His silhouette squatted. Another loud blast of a ship’s horn—Randolph had triggered the valve on the farthest pipe. Steel watched as one by one the small metal arms of the valve mechanisms that were attached to the wooden bellows boxes moved toward him. Each time, a different low note, bone-jarring in volume and intensity, filled him. Randolph moved down the line—a line that came right to Steel. If he didn’t move at least a few inches, his body and limbs would block a pipe’s mechanics and prevent the note from sounding. It was as if Randolph had sensed him lying back there, and now couldn’t leave without testing his suspicions.

As the metal valve arms moved box to box, Randolph tripping each in succession, Steel lifted into a sideways push-up, supported only by the fingers of his left hand and the toe of his right foot. The valve below his elbow moved cleanly—the low note groaned. Then a valve beneath his armpit. The next was to be directly beneath his rib cage. He arched as high as he could to give the valve clearance, bending himself awkwardly and painfully. The metal arm jumped with the release of forced air. Yet another note roared—deafening him. Next were his hips, then his knees. Valve by valve, Steel contorted his body to accommodate the movement of the mechanism.

Randolph worked his way down the entire row, hesitating on the last and final note. There he paused, as if debating saying something into the darkness. A warning? An announcement?

But at last he stood and left the pipe room. As he switched off the organ, the system sighed—a release of pent-up air like an inanimate gasp.

Steel relaxed and lay back down. He waited several minutes, waited until silence had filled the chapel, waited for his own pulse to subside.

An operation.

He could hardly wait to tell Kaileigh.

Steel left Tuesday night study hall at 9:30 p.m., puzzled and confused. Not by homework—he never had any trouble with homework—but by Kaileigh. Since the events of Saturday night, he’d tried several times to get her off by herself. He had so much to tell her. At first he’d thought she was not picking up on his signals, but then it became clear there was nothing wrong with the signals; there was something wrong with Kaileigh. She wasn’t having anything to do with him. She sat on the opposite side of the classroom; looked the other way if he actually managed to catch her eye, itself a rarity.

In his typically numb-brain way, it had taken him nearly three days to trace her avoidance of him back to
Harry Potter
. He’d left the seat next to her empty, which was apparently an unforgivable offense. All the coolest discoveries in the world apparently couldn’t excuse him from causing her humiliation and embarrassment. Worse, he couldn’t even get close enough to her to apologize.

There was so much to tell, to think about, that he found his school studies—typically a breeze—something of a chore. Not a challenge, not hardly, but reading was time consuming; homework had to be completed, no matter how easy. Adding to his frustration, study hall lasted two hours, and even the most difficult night of assignments rarely took him more than an hour to complete, leaving him with way too much time on his hands, confined to a shared desk in what by day was the art room. He usually took advantage of the surplus time by getting ahead on his reading, but since his adventure in the pipe room he’d had trouble focusing. Having perfect recollection wasn’t always such a good thing.

He’d tried to signal Kaileigh several times during study hall. He couldn’t see how she might have missed him, but she hadn’t returned so much as a nose flare in his direction, so he gave up any thought of walking back to the dorms with her. The study hall monitor released them. Steel hung back, avoiding the first wave of kids who charged the door, secretly hoping he might connect with Kaileigh. But looking around, he realized he’d missed her somehow. Again. He headed off with the other stragglers and soon found himself alone, leaving the main building out through the post office door. He passed through the covered passageway and took the stairs down to the field level, the backside of the dormitories.

“Psst!”

He jumped with the sound. It had come from the shadows of the base of the stairs to his left. He couldn’t see anyone.

“Psst!”

DesConte?
he wondered.
Kaileigh?
He backed nervously away from the steps.

“Steven!”

A girl’s voice. But Kaileigh never addressed him by his proper name. Was she so mad at him that she wouldn’t even use his nickname? If so, he had real problems. This was new territory.

A door opened to the passageway up the stairs, spreading light and making noise. He had to make a decision. Whoever it was obviously didn’t feel like showing herself.

Steel gathered his courage and moved toward the dark—toward the voice. Deep in the corner, where the brick of the stairs met the brick of the building, he discerned a figure standing. A blob of blackness in the gray.

“Closer,” she said.

Definitely not Kaileigh. Too tall, for one thing. He stepped deeper into the dark, his eyes quickly adjusting to the low light. And now he saw who it was.

“Nell? Nell Campbell?”

“Shhh!” She reached out and grabbed him—though exactly how she managed to reach across such a considerable distance puzzled him.

“What’s going on?” he croaked out.

She held on to him. He could smell a flowery scent, could feel blood pulsing frantically at his ears. His eyes stung. Her grip was strong as she pulled him right next to her—he could feel the warmth of her body, though they didn’t exactly touch—and she spun him around so that his back was to the bricks, and her form—a woman’s form—loomed between him and the light spilling across the fields beyond. For the briefest of moments he thought she meant to kiss him. His head swooned. He had no idea what to do, what was expected of him, and yet…he kind of wanted it to happen. This was a new discovery as well.

“I can’t be seen talking to you,” she said. Her breath smelled sweet, like lemonade or ginger ale.

“Ah…okay.”

“And I…well…I
care
about you.”

He found the lump in his throat too thick to push air past. He couldn’t speak.

“Care about your staying in school.”

“What?” That didn’t sound good.

“You’re studying Chinese.”

“Mandarin,” he said. “So what?”

“With Zeke Goddard.”

“Yeah?” How did she know any of this? He remembered her from the ga-ga bleachers, the way she’d cheered for him. Now she’d cornered him and was standing so close he could hear her breathing, could see the silhouette of her rib cage expanding and collapsing, like she’d been running. Or was nervous.
Or anxious
, he realized.

“I’m the student aide to Mrs. Jian.”

Had he known that? he wondered. It wasn’t as if he could
forget
anything, so he assumed he had not known it in the first place, but something told him that a girl like Nell Campbell could make him forget things—a novel and intriguing thought. He tried to open his mind to that concept.

“So?” he said, thinking how stupid a thing it was to say. He might have said any number of things, but that was what came out of his mouth.

“Zeke Goddard cheats.”

“What?”

“He cheats. On his homework. On tests. He’s a cheater.”

“Zeke? But I just met him. He seems like a—”

“That’s the point. Why do you think I’m talking to you like this?” She glanced over her shoulder as if afraid someone might see them.

“Well…honestly, I was wondering about that.”

“Mrs. Jian tricked Zeke. She suspected he’d been cheating, but couldn’t prove it, so she devised a trap, and he took the bait. The point is, if you’re studying with him for the quiz, which I think you are—” At this point, Steel nodded. “And you have the kind of memory everyone says you have—”

“Who’s talking about me?”

“Certain people. I can’t talk about that now. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”

This comment of hers puzzled him all the more. What people? Why couldn’t she tell him? Who
was
she?

“The point is, you have to unlearn whatever Zeke has told you. You’re studying for the quiz, right?”

“Sort of,” he said. “I don’t…studying…” He couldn’t figure out how to say it without sounding arrogant.

“If you’re caught cheating along with Zeke—the thing is—then they won’t—then they can’t—and you’re perfect for this. I know I’m not making any sense. I’m not, am I?” She bent over to come down the few inches to his height. He supposed she was trying to look him in the eyes, although in the dark that wasn’t going to happen. “This is so frustrating.”

Again he felt his throat constrict. “For me too,” he gasped. “Who are you talking about? You said ‘they.’ Who do you mean?”

“You’ll find out,” she said.

“How?”

“Not if you cheat. If you cheat…who knows? They might expel you.”

“I’m not cheating!”

“But it’ll look that way. To them. It’ll be a black mark against you.”

“Who?”

“I want…I like you, you see? The way you think. The way your mind works. You’re perfect for this.”

“For what?”

“I can’t say. It’s not for me to say. It’s up to them. When you’re ready. I imagine that’s sooner than you think. But you must not get yourself in trouble. Not this kind of trouble. It could all be over before it begins, and that’s just not right. You’ve got to forget everything Zeke has told you, although I suppose for you that’s impossible, so maybe you actually have to first remember everything Zeke has helped you with, and then figure out some way to block it, or replace it, or something. I could tutor you, I suppose. That’s it! Ask Mrs. Jian if you can work with a tutor. That would be me. Then I can help you. Please. Okay? Just ask her for help. Why didn’t I think of this before?”

His head swam as his perfect recall allowed him to review everything she’d just said. He couldn’t form the right question.

“You are freaking me out,” he said.

“Steel?” It was a voice beyond Nell Campbell. A girl’s voice. Kaileigh’s voice.

He ducked his head around and past Nell.

Kaileigh looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

Then he understood the paralyzed expression she wore: Nell Campbell was still holding Steel by the arms, and he could only imagine how it must look to Kaileigh—the two of them hiding in the shadows, Nell standing about one inch from him. Leaning over him.

“Kai!” he said, calling out.

But she turned away, her curtain of hair swinging and hiding her face. A face he didn’t have to see to know how to read.

Nell placed her hand over his mouth and shushed him. The contact—her hand on his lips—startled Steel, and yet it wasn’t unpleasant.

“Are you kissing my hand?” she said, pulling it away.

“No! I…ah…”

“Eew,” she said, stepping back. “Who was that?”

“A friend.”

“Augustine. Kaileigh Augustine.”

“Yes.”

“She can’t say anything about this—about our talking. If Mrs. Jian finds out I warned you…if it looks like I was trying to stop you from cheating—”

“But I’m not cheating!”

“It’ll ruin everything. They’ll never ask you.”

“Who? Never ask what?”

“I didn’t say that…didn’t mean to say that. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Go find your friend. Hurry. Tell her—I don’t know what to tell her—but tell her something. Make this right.”

“Who’s going to invite me to what?”

“Are you listening to anything I said?”

“I remember
everything
you said.” He nearly added:
This is me we’re talking about
.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, sounding deeply concerned.

“It’s all right. I’ll figure out something. And I’ll ask for help in Mandarin. I’ll do everything you told me to do.”

“You can trust me,” she said.

He hadn’t even considered he might not be able to trust her. The idea threw him. He couldn’t trust DesConte. Or Randolph.

“I want to trust you,” he said, almost begging. “But how am I supposed to? You tell me all this stuff that doesn’t make any sense, and then…I don’t know. What? Just go on faith?”

“Yes, that’s it: faith—and patience,” she said. “You have to have patience, too. But ultimately it’s worth it. I promise you, it’s worth it.”

“By the way…” She stepped forward and hugged him. “Congratulations on making the team.”

“What are you talking about?” Steel croaked out, his voice catching as he felt her press against him.

“The Spartans,” she said. “They posted it after dinner. You’re a reserve!”

He felt a rush of heat, conflicted as to what caused it.
He’d made the team! As a reserve, but still!
How had he missed that? He had gone through two more tryouts and was waiting to find out if he’d made it. He felt like screaming.

Nell turned and hurried away.

He stood there, his head spinning. Nell Campbell had just hugged him.
The
Nell Campbell.

Maybe he was dreaming. He hit his fist against the brick. It hurt something fierce. No, not dreaming.

So what was going on?