Read The Academy: Book 2 for Free Online Page A

him. He came onto the entryway, and his eyes found Asa’s. Asa glared back the other student; they had developed a strong dislike for one another towards the end of last semester.
                  Shashowt spat on the ground and began to clamber down to his own dwelling. Asa cursed Shashowt in a quiet breath and climbed up to his dwelling.
                  The circle entryway was icy, and the wooden door handle had frost standing out on it. Asa reached out his hand, turned, and pushed the door open.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
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                  Asa stepped inside his dwelling, and tapped his foot against the doorjamb, knocking loose the chunks of ice lodged in the sole of his shoe. Because of Teddy, the dwelling was much more inhabitable than Asa thought it might be last semester, when he started carving it out of stone. Like computers and architecture, Teddy had a knack for aesthetics, and the small room was a prime example of this.
                  The walls were periodically carpeted with wide, thick animal furs of assorted colors (brown, black, yellow, white), cut into various geometric shapes. Asa’s favorite flanked the vented kitchen stove—a sheep’s skin cut into a fluffy, white heart. Pure of heart was the phrase that always came to Asa’s mind when he saw it. In the past two weeks, Teddy had traded and rearranged furniture in between Asa’s dwelling, his own, and the secret compartment above Asa’s dwelling. Now, a wooden wicker chair, a stone coffee table, and a wooden stool with a small back were arranged in the middle of the room: Because Teddy had not been sleeping lately, he had more time to experiment with things like wood carving. As Asa walked in, there was a roaring fire in a cutout in the wall on his right side. The flames gave off so much warmth that Asa found himself turning down the heat on his suit as he grew accustomed to the temperature. Next to this cutout was a bathtub (above which was the secret compartment that Asa and Teddy carved out last semester, in case Asa ever needed a place to hide), and a small bathroom with a stone toilet installed.
                  Asa found that living in the dwelling wasn’t as hard as he had thought. The Academy had gone against its word and supplied the dwellings with stoves, plumbing, and a common room a short fly away to another portion of the mountainside; in this common room, the second semester students could watch television (on Academy approved channels—this included soundless recordings of sports games without commercials, and old movies), play-ping pong, exercise, and get food from a 24 hour cafeteria.
                  The common room was a source of anxiety for Asa. Shortly after the last end of semester ceremony, one of the televisions was broken by a student that had slammed into it after she tripped while playing a rigorous ping-pong game. The raccoons came and replaced the television promptly, and set the old one aside to be thrown away later. Teddy stole this broken TV, and Asa was constantly worried that he was going to be killed for the crime.
                  Though Teddy had been working hard at decorating Asa’s main dwelling, he seldom spent time there. He would briefly stop by to drop off or pick up furniture, or pass through so that he could crawl within the watery tunnel over the bathtub that led to Asa’s secret compartment, where Teddy now slept. He hadn’t stayed more than a few minutes in the main dwelling since the day that he and Asa buried Harold Kensing’s body.
                  Now, for the first time in weeks, he was there. He stood next to the stove; meat was sizzling over a large, iron skillet. His back was turned to the door, and he hadn’t heard Asa enter. Teddy was chopping up vegetables on a cutting board with an enormous knife.
                  For a fleeting moment, Asa