Almus Academy is a destroyed school whose surviving people and institutional memory help shape the First Public Academy. Its importance lies not only in what the school once provided, but in the contrast between its destruction and Selfia’s attempt to create a broader educational system from its remnants. Almus therefore functions as both a remembered place and a political precedent: a damaged institution whose survivors carry its practices, relationships, and unresolved losses into a new national project.

The Original School and Its Educational Model

Almus Academy is recalled as a school equipped with advanced resources, including virtual reality. Leona contrasts its technological environment with the automated schooling Jack experienced, in which a robot taught every subject and education had largely been mechanized to avoid paying human teachers. That comparison establishes Almus as more than a conventional school: it belongs to a society where education is shaped by technology, access, and institutional priorities.

Selfia’s proposed public system is described as being modeled partly on Almus but designed to be more inclusive. The intended reform rejects fully automated instruction in favor of actual human teachers, classrooms, and students from different walks of life. Almus thus serves as a reference point for educational quality while also marking the limitations that the new academy is meant to overcome. Its legacy is preserved, but not treated as a finished model.

Destruction and Survivors

Almus Academy was destroyed before the opening of its successor, and the destruction left its faculty and students scattered among the survivors of the wider catastrophe. The new institution employs teachers from Almus who lived through that destruction, making the public academy a continuation built through survival rather than a clean institutional replacement.

The surviving staff are deliberately diverse. Peter, the cyborg who had previously helped Victor and Brigid measure Jack for an old armor set, now teaches metalworking at the new academy. Brigid also works there. Other teachers include a former police officer, a reformed meth maker, a disowned noblewoman, and additional Almus teachers who survived the school’s destruction. Their backgrounds turn the academy into a visible argument for social inclusion: education is no longer reserved for a narrow class or a uniform professional type, but is staffed by people marked by radically different histories.

Madam Hightower, Almus Academy’s former principal, is another living link between the destroyed school and its successor. When she meets Jack after the academy’s public announcement, she expresses sorrow that they could not speak during the ceremony and happiness at seeing another of her students alive. Her response makes Almus’s destruction personal rather than merely historical. The school survives in the recognition shared by its former principal and students, even when its original buildings and routines no longer exist.

Almus in the Wider Plot

Almus’s survivors are connected to the military and political structures that emerge around Jack. Jessica explains that the people from Gamma Station possess combat experience and have completed SERE, OCDTS, and STARs training, the Special Tactics and Rescue training required of all Checkmate agents. Because Almus’s former personnel and students appear within this broader network of trained survivors, the school’s legacy is not limited to classrooms; its people also participate in the armed and clandestine struggles reshaping the world.

The school’s memory follows Jack through his transformation from an outsider into a king. After his marriage to Selfia and coronation, he is confined to a luxurious room and allowed only limited visitors, including Kamila, Ada, and scheduled playtime with Leona and Celeste. Later, he moves through the city with security, a child, a chauffeur, and official duties, yet still feels hollow. Against that royal confinement and emotional estrangement, Almus represents an earlier social world organized around learning, teachers, students, and shared institutional life rather than ceremonial isolation.

The academy’s public opening is part of a carefully managed royal schedule. Selfia is to announce the institution, Celeste is to be revealed publicly to generate interest, and the event is followed by a museum opening, a meeting with investors, and a visit to El Gato Negro. The school is therefore introduced simultaneously as an educational reform and as a public spectacle through which the monarchy seeks to generate political and social momentum.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

Almus Academy’s strongest narrative function is its conversion from a place into a legacy. Its buildings are gone, but its survivors reappear as teachers, agents, and witnesses. The new public academy carries forward the human element that Jack’s automated schooling lacked, while expanding upon Almus by aiming to include people from all walks of life and to produce more academics who can effect change from the bottom upward.

The school also embodies the book’s tension between protection and control. Jack’s movements are restricted after his coronation, official information is handled through secure procedures, and even paper folders are treated as safer than hackable tablets or compromised Intellipads. Against this culture of surveillance, security, and managed visibility, the academy offers a different kind of institution: one whose stated purpose is to distribute knowledge. Its teachers’ varied histories and its predecessor’s destruction prevent that ideal from appearing innocent, but they make education a material response to violence rather than an abstract slogan.

When Lita von Strongarm later appears in gold-and-white armor and kneels before Jack as she welcomes him to the Theocracy, the narrative has already established how former institutions and their survivors are carried into new political arrangements. Almus belongs to that same pattern of continuity through rupture. It is remembered as a damaged school, represented through the people who survived it, and transformed into the precedent for a more inclusive public future.