Breaking the Gods

Chapter 5

Nico passed the entrance exam for the Heart of Liberty Boarding School for Special Needs Children with flying colors. During his entrance test he'd been moody, surly, and deliberately hostile toward the evaluators, much to the dismay of the satyr pretending to be his step-father. Nico was pretty sure he knew where the satyrs had gone wrong when trying to plant their agents there. No kid in their right mind wanted to be sent to a boarding school, let alone one for special needs children. They'd probably been all friendly and enthusiastic and cooperative. That was probably what blew their cover and got them rejected. They were too obviously trying to infiltrate the place to spy on it.

Nico got his photo taken for his student ID card that very same day. The next morning, he was in classes. Boring, boring classes. Something he hadn't been subjected to since he was ten. Somehow school hadn't seemed necessary after finding out he was the son of Hades. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it had been because it seemed like death was hanging over his head, and he wasn't going to have a future. Funny how little had changed. Nico had never even thought about what he wanted to be when he grew up. He wasn't even sure what jobs a child of the Underworld was qualified to do.

His first class was reading some story or another, which was all well and good, except Nico didn't read. So he passed the time instead examining the other students.

He quickly came to the conclusion that no one in his English class was a demigod except him. None of them had the look and he couldn't feel power coming off of any of them. He did notice something of interest, however. There was a sense of fear in the classroom. The students were all nervous about something, but Nico couldn't pinpoint what.

Their teacher wasn't any scarier than the average teacher. She was certainly less scary than Dr. Thorn had been. But it was something about her that the other students were worried about. They were trying too hard. Paying a little too much attention. And when mistakes were made, or there was something they didn't know, they were all more nervous than they should have been.

It didn't take him long to realize that there was a general aura of fear over the student population in almost every class, but in English it was the worst. At lunch on his second day there, he tried asking some of the other students about it.

"Kids who don't do well in English are most likely to be singled out for the Blue Ward," Hugo, a boy who he had English with told him.

"The Blue Ward?" asked Nico. "What's that?"

The other kids Nico was eating with all looked around nervously, like they were afraid someone was listening in, then leaned their heads toward the center of the table. A guy named Gene spoke in a hushed voice.

"It's where they send kids to do experiments on them."

"No, seriously," said Nico.

"He is serious," said Hugo. "If you get selected for the Blue Ward they really do experiment on you. The kids they choose for that program stay separate from the rest of us, because they don't want us knowing what they're doing, but we know, you know?"

Nico shook his head. "I really don't know."

"You can hear the screams sometimes at night," said a girl named Cally. "Kids from the Blue Ward screaming."

"That's when they experiment on them."

Nico considered this. Normally, he probably would have dismissed those claims as urban legends, and stupid ones at that. But something was being done to demigods to drive them insane. And if the demigods were the ones being sent to this Blue Ward then that would explain why kids who did poorly in English were sent there. Now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure why he hadn't been immediately sent to this Blue Ward since on his admissions forms, his dyslexia and ADHD had both been documented. Perhaps because there were plenty of non-demigods in the world with both dyslexia and ADHD and they didn't want any mixups?