Chapter Ten

Aiden

The wicket gate automatically closed behind us as we entered the Academy.

I always thought it was misnamed. In every City, the Academy was more of a campus than a single building. Against the morning sun, nine identical towers circumscribed a calm, perfectly circular body of water, something between a pond and a lake. Rectangular walls cordoned off the entire campus from the rest of Mass City, although I could still faintly hear the grumblings of a city gradually waking up.

My head was cocked back nearly as far as my neck would allow as I marveled at the cylindrical towers, the tallest buildings in all of Polygon. Skinny and composed of simple, gray stone, one would never guess that the work being done inside of them was the most beautiful act of creativity I’d ever encountered.

Slightly below the midpoint of the towers, an open platform hung above the body of water, connected to each tower by way of a simple little bridge. From my angle, I couldn’t make out the top of the platform, but it looked to be made of grayish metal and was shaped exactly as the body of water beneath it.

A crisp breeze tickled my blouse, and I smiled at the smell of the Ocean.

Benjy yawned loudly enough to earn a look from me.

“What?” he asked innocently.

I eyed him up and down. He opted for a blue hoodie, khaki pants, and a black cap that he wore backward. They were an utterly unserious contrast to the sniper rifle slung behind his back. “You couldn’t have dressed a little more properly?”

“We’re on vacation! And I still have my Military pin on, Mom.”

I shook my head. “This is serious.”

Roderick silently took a couple of steps forward into the spacious campus. He waved at the only two people in sight, a pair of Military men standing idly by one of the towers. They calmly but surely shuffled over to us.

“Morning,” Roderick said. “I’m Lieutenant Roderick. These are Soldiers Aiden and Benjy. We’re here to see Poppy.”

After a brief moment of examining us, one of them said, “Third tower to your right. She came in a couple hours ago.”

“What, four a.m.?” Roderick asked.

The guardian nodded. “Not unusual for her. She’ll be on the fifth floor.”

I smiled.

Philosophers were weird in the best way.

“Thanks,” Roderick said, and he gestured for us to follow him.

The ground beneath us was the same as it was in the rest of the cities, which somehow bothered me. The transparent ground, exposing the guts of Polygon that connected everything to everything, didn’t belong here, where knowledge was being created. Here, there should’ve been flowers, and art, and music.

The entrance to the tower was a pair of arched, wooden swing doors, a deep maroon to contrast the stony gray in which they were embedded. Above each door’s handle was a painted humanoid lizard, green and scaly and salivating. Together, they held up an escutcheon shield that was colored solid white and blue, each color on one side of the shield’s diagonal.

“Philosophy of Knowledge,” I whispered excitedly.

Benjy put a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Don’t be so starstruck. We’re here for business, after all.”

“Alright, you two,” Roderick said, though I could hear in his voice that he didn’t mind our banter. “Let’s go.”

He opened the door, and we followed him into the tower. The grainy walls were lit by hundreds of candles, arranged so as to form vertical, serpentine patterns that crisscrossed at regular intervals all the way up to the high ceiling, above which I assumed was only the second floor.

I noted the Delivery Node on the far side of the room, where the walls met the floor. Through its bulbous, transparent shield, I saw that nothing was inside it.

“She’s already received the Letter,” I said. “Maybe she’ll be expecting us.”

“Hopefully she hasn’t read it yet,” Roderick replied. “I want her guard down. Come on.”

A spiral staircase stood in the center of the nearly barren room. Roderick took to it without another word, and Benjy and I followed his lead.

As my head rose above the first ceiling, I looked around as quickly as I could while we continued to climb. An elder man dressed in heavy winter clothing sat at an unmarked table, staring at an open book so intensely that I nearly mistook him for a statue. A young girl, maybe eight years old, sat in the corner, barefoot and reading a book of her own.

They didn’t bother to look up as we passed them by.

The scenes on subsequent floors were similar, although the number of people on each ranged from two to five, always one adult and the rest children, usually quietly reading. Only when we passed the fourth floor did I hear quiet, measured conversation. Unlike the entrance, the walls on each floor were decorated with not only the same weaving streaks of candles, but also oval portrait paintings of men and women. Books, too, were sporadically placed on the floors, sometimes in stacks and sometimes alone—and some of those were open with no reader accompanying them.

I had to resist the urge to stop at each floor and close the neglected books. That wasn’t how bundles of knowledge should be treated. The Philosophers were worthy of admiration, for sure. But, judging from the ones I’d met, maybe their heads were so in the clouds that they forgot to keep track of the ground beneath their feet.

We stepped off the staircase as we approached the fifth floor and entered the room, where three people sat in stoic silence. Two young boys, around five and ten, sat in opposite corners, each dressed surprisingly formally but sprawled out on the dusty floor. The five-year-old lay on his belly, jittering back and forth with the buzzing energy that only a kid had. I couldn’t quite make out the words he was reading, but I saw a lot of question marks. The ten-year-old was on his side, a fist holding up to his head as his eyes darted across the page before him. From my angle, I could only see the red cover of the book, whose title read, On the Nature of Things.

In the middle of the room, a woman in a baggy black-and-white gown was scribbling frantic notes on a piece of parchment. Similar to what I’d seen on the other floors, she sat at a bland wooden table, but she was the first Philosopher who wasn’t reading or talking. Her hair was a sandy-brown mess of curls that fell down onto the table, and I noticed with amusement that it seemed to match her crinkled, oversized wardrobe.

I looked around for any poor open books, and I smiled approvingly that, although they were as sprawled around the room as on any other floor, none of their pages were exposed to the stale air of the tower.

No one reacted to our presence. After a few awkward seconds, Roderick delicately knocked a knuckle against the wall.

The woman jumped and turned to us.

I had to stop myself from gasping, because that would’ve been terribly impolite.

Poppy was either ninety years old, or forty with a condition. Her pale, leathery face was distressingly gaunt, all sunken cheekbones and bluish veins along her temples. Big glasses hung on her sharp nose, and her grossly large, hazel eyes darted as wildly as a cornered animal’s.

And a nasty, purple bruise painted her right cheek.

I saw that her cracked lips harbored bits of spittle in their corners as she opened her mouth to speak. “I don’t know!” she said…not loudly, but stressfully.

I quickly looked at the two boys, who idly looked toward us.

“We know the laws of physics,” the woman continued. Her voice was far more lively than her physique, I had to admit. “The Principles of Earth and Blood delivers them to us. But how do we know anything else? I don’t know!”

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Roderick put up a pair of calming hands. “My name is Roderick. I’m here on behalf of the Assembly. Are you Poppy?”

“Most days,” she answered flatly.

Roderick shot us a puzzled glance before turning back to the Philosopher. “Have you read the Letter that was sent out about what happened?”

“Yes, I used it as a bookmark!” Poppy said a little too loudly for comfort. “Cora’s dead, that boy, Winston, will face the Wolves!”

“Um, it’s ‘Kara’ and ‘Wyatt’, but close enough. Listen, your husband was seen at the same bar that the two of them visited the night that Kara died. Do you know what he was doing there?”

Poppy closed her eyes tightly and shook her head. When she opened them, her expression had gone cold. “How do we know that all objects fall at the same rate?”

“What? Poppy, if you could please—”

She stuck out a bony finger. “Because it says so in Principles! And when we test that idea in physical reality, it turns out to be true. Every time.” Poppy stood from her chair and walked towards us, her face contorting in manic excitement again. “Now, Mr. Roderick, what happens when a price goes up?”

She was surprisingly tall, standing slightly above Roderick as she came to a standstill. Roderick kept his cool, of course.

“What do you mean?”

“When the price of bread rises from one gold coin to two, how will people’s purchasing patterns respond?”

Roderick very gently and very subtly ran a hand against the gun by his waist. “They’ll buy less bread. Now, Poppy—”

She clapped her hands together rather loudly. “Exactly! Anyone with a drop of commonsense would say the same. But how—”

She leaned over in a coughing fit, grueling enough to make me wince.

“Are you alright?” Roderick asked.

Poppy put up a hand, and after a few more seconds, she wiped her mouth and returned to form. “I’m terribly sorry about that. Now, about this knowledge of prices.”

“No,” Roderick asserted. “Ma’am, we’re here to speak with you about very important matters. Maybe it’s best we find somewhere away from your apprentices?”

It seemed to dawn on her that we meant business—or at least, that Roderick did. She nodded in acquiescence. “Robert, Adam, stay here. I’ll be back soon, my boys.”

The two kids nodded absently and continued reading their books.

“To the place where the philosophies meet!” Poppy said, and she blew past us and took to the stairs.

“These are the people who you respect so much?” Benjy whispered from behind me as we returned to the stairwell.

“She’s unique,” I protested. “That’s not a crime.”

Benjy responded with a sarcastic chuckle.

I was breathing heavily after we ascended seven more floors, at which point Poppy led us into a vacant room that looked like the others, save for a door that looked just like the one at the tower’s entrance. Once she reached the door, she placed her hands on her knees and caught her breath.

“Ma’am, are you sure you’re alright?” Roderick asked cautiously. “We can take you to a doctor. You’re not in any trouble, I promise.”

“Already been. Doctor…can’t help…me. Just…one moment.” With a final, deep exhalation, Poppy stood up tall, shook herself from head to toe, and opened the doors.

I saw the eight other towers, but now I didn’t have to pull my head back to see their tops.

My legs suddenly felt like jelly.

As Benjy walked through the door, he shot me a smile and offered me a hand. I took it, and we walked carefully across the wooden bridge. It creaked and shuddered with every step, and I held onto Benjy and the loose guardrail made of rope with sweaty palms.

After only a few dozen, terrifying steps, we reached the metal platform.

Of all the times I’d visited Polygon’s Academies, I’d never actually come up here. Like the inside of the tower, it was rather unremarkable, except, of course, for the fact that we were standing so high in the air that if I looked down, I’d probably faint. The platform was silver where it wasn’t rusted over, which was disappointingly prevalent. Although it was difficult to see, the pull on my feet suggested that the platform was built so as to be concaved inwards very slightly, presumably to make it harder to fall over the edge.

And there were no guardrails around the platform’s perimeter.

Poppy walked a few steps further before sitting down cross-legged and staring ahead absently.

The three of us approached her but remained standing.

“Poppy,” Roderick began again, speaking loudly over the wind. “Who did that to you?”

“My cough?”

“No, your face,” Roderick answered patiently. “Someone hurt you. Was it Jared?”

Finally, she turned to Roderick, her thin eyebrows furrowed. “No! Don’t you say that! He’d never hurt me. He loves me.”

“Ma’am, if he did hurt you, you can tell us. We’d protect you. And he could go away so you’d never have to see him again.”

“It wasn’t him!” the Philosopher cried, and then looked as though she regretted opening her mouth. “He doesn’t hurt people anymore.”

“Who was it?”

She shook her head silently, rapidly, and incessantly.

“Poppy, you’re not helping your husband by remaining silent. Please, we’re just trying to understand what he was doing the night Kara died.”

“I don’t know!”

“Then, please, tell us who hit you.”

“Promise you’ll leave Jared alone.”

“I can’t promise you that, Poppy. But if he did nothing wrong, there’s no reason to worry.”

“I don’t know their names,” Poppy said, her eyes pained and pregnant with tears. “Please…just leave Jared alone…”

“Whose names?” Roderick asked.

“The men who hit me. They came to our house, when I was having evening tea, reading a delightful book.” Her expression shifted, and she was suddenly smiling. “Have you read The Mathematical Principles of Nat—”

“Poppy, please, focus. Where was Jared when they came? Did they break in?”

“He wasn’t home. He’s always so busy, my Jared. Yes, they broke in. But they only hit me once, and then they left.”

“Can you remember anything about them? Anything particular? Did they say anything to you?”

She flinched, hunched her head, and mumbled incoherently to herself.

“Poppy.”

“Yes and no! They had tattoos on their necks. Pretty little things…artwork, really. Water droplets…tears, maybe. Why are they so sad, I wonder? Why is anyone sad? What does it mean to be—”

“Hurricane gang members,” Roderick said. “I’m sorry that that happened to you, Poppy. Are you aware of your husband’s past associations with the Hurricanes? Surely, you must be. Had he been in contact with them before your encounter with these thugs?”

“I know, I know! But Jared’s changed. He’s a good man.”

“Again: to your knowledge, has he kept in touch with the Hurricanes?”

“No, he’d never do that. He’s a good man, a good man.”

“Did you tell Jared who attacked you?”

“Yes! ”

“How did he react?”

“Oh! He…said he was very sorry, but that everything would be alright.”

Roderick put his hands on his waist. “Do you remember how many days ago you were attacked?”

“It was only yesterday.”

Roderick turned to Benjy and me. “Do you have any questions for her?”

I shook my head, but Benjy raised his hand. “Yeah, I do. Hey, Poppy, what did Jared do when he was a Hurricane? You said he doesn’t hurt people anymore. What’s he told you about his days slinging drugs across the water?”

“We don’t talk about his old life!”

Poppy tried to rise to her feet, but she was clearly struggling. Roderick went to help her, which she accepted.

“I’m sorry, I want to return to my work,” she said weakly. “Please...”

As I watched her, emaciated and struggling to stand, a thought occurred to me. “You said you’ve gone to the doctor. Did they say what’s wr—did they diagnose you?”

She shook her head at me. “They don’t know. How could they? It’s not in Principles!”

“Poppy,” Roderick said calmly, still holding her. “Let me take you back to your, um, office. We’ll leave you be.”

“Will you talk to Jared, too?”

“Yes, we will,” Roderick said, as he escorted the Philosopher of Knowledge back inside. “I don’t mean to sound confrontational, but it would look very bad if he avoided us. I hope you know that.”

“Yes, yes. Now, the problem of how we know anything. Roger, you said your name was?”

“She’s full of shit,” Benjy said, as the three of us regrouped at the entrance to the Academy. “That was all an act.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I retorted. “I can tell.”

“I think she really is that…quirky,” Roderick said, squinting his eyes at the tower in which Poppy studied. “But that doesn’t mean she was entirely honest with us. A few days after Kara’s killed, some Hurricanes decide to rough up Jared’s wife? That’s got to mean something. Intimidation, maybe? But why after Kara’s death?”

“I say we confront Jared now, before the Wolves toss Wyatt’s head off a mountaintop,” Benjy said heatedly.

“I’m thinking,” Roderick said, shaking his head. “Let’s say the Hurricanes are somehow involved. That means, whether we approach them or Jared first, we’re giving up our hand.”

“Poppy’s gonna tell her husband we interrogated her,” Benjy said. “Let’s get to him before that.”

Roderick pursed his lips and turned his eyes to me. “What do you think, Aiden?”

I was thrown back at that. Why would he care what I thought? “I agree with Benjy. Let’s talk to Jared, before he knows we’re looking for him.”

And I really, really don’t want to face a bunch of gangsters.

“It’s settled, then,” Roderick said. “Hopefully Jared’s in the City’s Law Sector. We’ll talk to him and then head back to the City’s Fortress, so I can send a Letter to Maura.”

As we left the Academy, I turned back to bask in the Philosophers’ den one last time.

I thought about my choices in life, and how I ended up in the Military. Doubt crept in, but I shook it off. Not the time. We had a friend to save.

I’ll be back, I thought as I rested my eyes momentarily on each tower. And maybe I’ll stay.