Higher Institute of Villainous Education Read Online Free PDF Page A

her straight in the eye. ‘Yes,’ he said smiling. ‘You seem to have taken the words right out of my mouth, Contessa.’
    The Contessa looked hard at Otto, eyes narrowed, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Oh, I can do much worse than that, Mr Malpense, believe me.’ They stood staring at each other for a couple of seconds before the smile magically reappeared on her face and she turned back to the rest of the group. ‘Come along, children. As usual at H.I.V.E. we have much to do and not enough time.’ And with that she opened the doors and swept out of the room.
    Wing watched her leave and turned to Otto. ‘My father once told me that only the foolish man pulls on the tiger’s tail as it dangles from the tree.’ It was the first time that Otto had seen him smile.
    Otto grinned at Wing. ‘True, but how else do you find out if it’s a tiger at all?’

    They walked out on to a wide catwalk that curved off into the distance around the walls of another enormous floodlit cavern. Far below them, the cavern floor was covered by an octagonal-glass-panelled dome which appeared to be filled with hundreds of rows of different plants and trees. Above them, an ancient formation of huge stalactites hung from the cavern ceiling like an upside-down forest, glittering in the floodlights.
    ‘H.I.V.E. is an almost entirely self-sufficient facility,’ the Contessa explained, gesturing to the strange structure below. ‘The Hydroponics facility you can see here is used to grow many different kinds of plants, some of which are used to satisfy our own food requirements and some of which have different, more . . . exotic properties.’
    She moved off along the catwalk, the group in tow. Otto realised that there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the island, and surely not all of their food supplies could be produced here. Which meant that there must be some way of secretly ferrying large shipments of supplies to the island, even if they hadn’t seen it yet.
    The Contessa continued along the catwalk, her heels clicking on the metal, the group dutifully following along behind her.
    ‘I wonder how it was possible to build such a facility without attracting the attention of others?’ Wing asked, looking around the interior of the cavern. ‘Such construction would surely require many hundreds of workers. How could such a project be kept secret?’
    ‘Perhaps they never left the island when construction was complete,’ Otto replied.
    Wing raised an eyebrow. ‘A true job for life.’
    ‘Or a life for a job,’ Otto countered. He wouldn’t be at all surprised, given the emphasis on total secrecy, if H.I.V.E. offered an ‘aggressive’ retirement package for lower level employees. Here, being fired was probably a term that was taken a little too literally.
    They turned into a corridor that branched off from the catwalk, burrowing into the rock. They were descending now and it was not long before they came out into another smaller cave that seemed to serve as a junction with corridors leading from it in all directions. As they moved towards the centre of the cave a bizarre sound blared out, seeming to come from everywhere at once.
    MWAH, MWAAAAH, MWAH!!!! It sounded like three notes being played on a trumpet, very loudly.
    And then all hell broke loose.
    Children started to stream out of the corridors, chattering and laughing. They all wore the colour-coded jumpsuits that the Contessa had talked about but that was the only thing uniform about them. Dr. Nero had said that the students came from all over the world, and he was not exaggerating. Every skin tone, hairstyle, shape and size seemed to be represented in the crowd, and the range of different accents that Otto could make out was staggering. The snatches of conversation that he could overhear were not particularly normal either.
    ‘. . . why we need to learn lockpicking when we have plastic explosives . . .’
    ‘. . . and he says ‘‘Plutonium?’’ and we all