Free The Academy: Book 1 by Chad Leito

precious air. His eyes seemed to sear in the light surrounding him. Compared to the dark tomb he had just been in, this room was as bright as the sun. At first, he couldn’t see anything but blinding light.
                  He wretched in another breath of air and felt something cold and slimy run down his nose. Asa propped himself up on his knees and coughed and vomited. His face was still covered in mud from the lakebed and he had inhaled some of it into his lungs. He had an instinct to reach up and clean his face, but found that his hands were still locked securely in his handcuffs.
                  Blood was pounding in his temples as he hacked and spat up mucus and mud onto the floor below him. He flexed his back and shoulders and the handcuffs dug deep into his skin but he kept pulling. He was still gagging and forcing himself to inhale between bouts of coughing and retching up lake content from his breathing passages. His lungs were screaming, and he found that no amount of air satisfied him. Tears were streaming down his face as he continued to cough and breathe, too preoccupied with his own body to pay attention to his surroundings.
                  “Stop pulling on that! You’re going to break your wrists!”
                  The voice barely penetrated Asa’s consciousness. He had no idea whether it was a male or female, and he certainly didn’t know what the voice was telling him. In his gasps and gags he was only dimly aware that there was someone else beside him.
                  “Asa, stop!”
                  Still, Asa was in his own world. He had coughed up all obstructions from his throat and now he was bent over, enjoying the sacred air that surrounded him. His body had been pushed to its limits of oxygen deprivation and now, sitting there, churning in and out as much air as possible, trying to save himself from brain damage, Asa couldn’t use energy thinking about something as trifle as who was talking or why. He was beginning to feel better. The tears were slowing, he kept his eyes closed, and he wondered why his wrists were hurting so much.
                  “Asa! Stop it!”
                  Someone grabbed him and he went into frenzy, kicking and pulling and screaming and writhing on the floor. The hands were off of him, and then everything was quiet for a moment. He opened his eyes and looked at the room he was in.
    He was panting, and so was some one else. Asa saw the girl sitting against a wall, still chained to the weight plates that had dragged her to the bottom. Her face was bruised on the left side and her hair and clothes were drenched and muddy. Her green eyes locked with Asa’s.
    The floor was trampoline material that stretched the between the four walls and was held up by a series of springs surrounding. Asa looked down and watched as a trickle of blood dripped off his wrist and onto the trampoline. The droplet sat there for a moment before falling through the pours of the substance and onto hard tile situated half a foot below the trampoline. The blood droplet, along with all the water dripping off his and the girl’s bodies slid down a slope in the tile and then fell down a drain. Asa saw that the weights attached to him pulled the trampoline surface down so much that it touched the tile.
    The room was lit with small, circular pads in the ceiling. All of them glowed blue-white and seemed to be a part of the surface rather than a bulb attached to it. It was as though every once in a while the ceiling decided to glow. The ceiling itself was a mixture of swirling shades of brown, and was shiny on the surface.
    The walls were ornately and beautifully decorated with a mountainous theme running throughout the room. The walls themselves belonged in a museum. They were painted with pictures of goats standing high atop mountainous peaks, looking below at sprawling landscape as though admiring the