Redemption Prep

by Samuel Miller

  Neesha smiled painfully.

  “I wrote in my journal, This is the worst my life has ever been.” Emma shook a few tears out of her eyes. “I don’t know why I even thought it was a good idea to write that. It’s like I was trying to make it worse on purpose.” She sniveled and it echoed through the church.

  “Why do you think she picked you?” Neesha asked.

  “I don’t know . . .” Emma’s body had a small but constant rock back and forth. “Because I’m depressed, maybe. So if something happened to me, it wasn’t a total loss.”

  Neesha let the words sit, staring down at their thumbs. “What’ve you even been eating? And drinking?”

  “Communion bread,” Emma said, again trying a small laugh. “The body of Christ. And Eddy’s been bringing me water.”

  “That’s healthy.”

  “It’s getting pretty old.” Emma turned back to the defeated faces around the room. “I wish I’d never told you guys any of this.”

  Neesha felt Emma shaking softly, from withdrawal, or fear, or exhaustion, or cold, or all of it. She watched her for a moment, Emma’s dull white cheeks heaving with every earned breath. They couldn’t go back. Emma couldn’t go back. She needed help.

  “We have to get out of here,” Neesha whispered so only Emma heard her.

  Emma didn’t respond.

  “All of us,” she whispered again. “We have to get all of us out of here.”

  “I’ve spent five days trying to escape, just Eddy and me. Trust me, there’s no way out.”

  Neesha nodded. Evan had sat up in the front pew and was staring at them, or rather, staring at Emma. Peter and Aiden were silent, watching them from the third pew. They were all waiting for Emma to tell them what to do.

  “You know why I think the school picked you?” Neesha asked, again out of earshot of anyone around them, quiet enough to only exist in the tiny bubble they’d created.

  Emma shook her head.

  “Because everybody cares about you. And you know why I think that is?”

  Emma stared back at her, wet eyes unblinking.

  “Because you care about everybody. And that’s a fucking mystery, and a miracle, and probably the most evolved thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Emma almost smiled, looking at Neesha with her eyes barely open. “You’re crazy.”

  Neesha nodded a few times. “And that’s why we’re gonna get ourselves out of here. All of us. Tonight.”

  A few others around the room sat up, turning their faces toward hers. “Tonight?” Emma whispered in disbelief.

  “No way,” Zaza said, shaking his head. “No way, this can’t end well.”

  Neesha sat up, speaking directly to him. “So either we go back in there, put our heads down, pray we don’t get caught, and keep auditioning for them, day in and day out, hoping we can make it out on the other side . . . or we run like hell.”

  Zaza stared back for a moment before swallowing. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Tonight.”

  She looked up to Aiden, who was staring at the top of Emma’s head. “Fuck it. Tonight.” Behind him, Peter sat up and nodded. “Tonight.”

  Emma sat up. “What about them?” She jerked her head toward the door of the church.

  “Who?” Neesha asked.

  “Everyone else.”

  They followed Emma’s gaze down the center aisle, through the walls of the church, to the school, where hundreds of students were obediently gathering in their dorms, completely unaware that their lives were controlled and engineered for torture.

  “We get evidence,” Neesha said, more confidently than she felt.

  Emma shook her head. “How would we get evidence? There’s nothing, except . . .” She stopped.

  Neesha read her eyes. “Exactly.”

  They got wider. “I can’t . . . I can’t ask any of you to—”

  “I’ll do it.” Evan had been quiet for most of their time in the church. “I—I’ll g-go in there for you.”

  Emma swallowed, and with her last drop of remaining energy, she squeezed Neesha’s hand tighter.

  Part VII.

  The Flood.

  Aiden.

  BREATHING HEAVILY, AIDEN walked down the hallway, straight for the Human Lounge. There were a few extra maintenance workers moving up and down the halls, but Aiden had been out past curfew enough to understand how to avoid them. He took a moment to collect himself. Other than the crackling of the disappearing fire, the lounge was quiet.

  As Peter had pointed out, most of Aiden’s life had been a low-stakes experiment. He tried to remember a time when he’d felt anywhere close to this nervous, or this helpless, and the best he could come up with were bad tournament losses and poorly attended birthday parties. When he was twelve, there was a day that his parents thought he might have pneumonia, but it turned out to just be a cold. Candy shit, as Peter called it.

  But not tonight. He knocked on Dr. Richardson’s door.

  It took several minutes, but she answered, poking her head out slightly. “Aiden?”

  “I need to talk to you—”

  “Why aren’t you in your dorm room, Mr. Mallet? Are you confused?”

  “Something happened.”

  Aiden looked past her into the office—the four men crowded around her desk were the heads of the four schools, as well as Father Farke.

  “It’s past curfew, Mr. Mallet. If you need me to call someone to escort you to—”

  “It’s about Emma.” The men inside the room exchanged glances.

  “What about—”

  “We found her.”

  Neesha.

  “WHAT LANGUAGES DO you speak?”

  The boy in the dorm, Lai, shrugged. “English and Mandarin?”

  “Peter,” she whispered, and he came rushing down the hall toward them.

  “We have a very important responsibility for you,” Peter picked up immediately.

  “Why are you speaking Mandarin?” Lai interrupted him.

  “So it’s private,” Peter responded.

  Lai’s eyes widened.

  Neesha tried the door across the hallway, prepping Peter for his next private conversation. If there were only English speakers in the dorm, they skipped it and moved on to the next, so as not to risk being overheard by the English-speaking staff. Almost everyone asked why Peter was speaking their native tongue. No one questioned their request.

  “—but you need to start exactly at two a.m., not a second before or after. Can you handle that?” she heard Peter telling Lai, in the last dorm on the top floor of D4.

  “Two a.m.?” Lai asked, in English.

  “Right,” Peter slipped. “Two a.m.”

  “What happens at two a.m.?”

  Neesha shot upward, the voice behind her pouring cold water down her back. A maintenance worker stood ten feet behind them. “What are you doing out of your dorms?”

  “Oh, yes, what up? What up, what up?” Peter said, trying to shut the door.

  The maintenance worker caught it with his foot. “And what happens at two a.m.?”

  “A homework thing, we’re trying to link up our study schedules.”

  “Of course,” he said, pointing to Lai. “I’m sure he won’t have any problems explaining it to me, then. What did these two instruct you to do at two a.m.?”

  Lai was the last person she wanted to trust to lie for them. One time Lai read a poem for a girl he liked on the intercom when he was supposed to be giving a speech for class parliamentarian. Lai was completely transparent.

  His eyes shot back and forth between the three of them. “In my home country,” Lai started, his accent strangely strong, “we have a, uh, a—what do you call it in this country, Peter?” He switched to Mandarin; Neesha couldn’t understand it, but guessed the rough translation would be, “What the fuck am I supposed to say?”

  “Um, I guess the best translation would be . . . energy-based study session. Like a . . .” Peter switched to Mandarin, and Lai nodded.

  “We believe tha
t we must channel our collective Shōki to communicate through aura and create Kami no Ki for ourselves and our studies. So we both study . . . at two a.m.”

  The maintenance worker looked confused. “Well, it’s past curfew.”

  “Our fault,” Neesha said, patting him on the back. “Just wanted to make sure we got it right.”

  He stared back for a moment, before swimming out from under her hand and heading straight for the stairwell.

  Peter turned to her immediately. “We don’t have time. You have to go. I’ll get as many of these people as I can.”

  Neesha nodded. “Good work, Lai,” she said, throwing her hood up. “That Buddhist shit really does sound like nonsense.”

  Lai glared at them. “That wasn’t Buddhism, motherfuckers, it was Dragon Ball Z. Now get out of my room before you get me in trouble.”

  Aiden.

  TEN MEN FOLLOWED Dr. Richardson as they walked, joining up along the way after they heard her radio command. At the back, a confused Yanis walked alone, speaking to no one.

  “What were you doing out here?” Dr. Richardson asked as they approached the church.

  “Looking for her,” Aiden said, trying to hold himself together. “I thought I saw her after mass, so I followed, and . . .”

  “And you spoke to her?” Dr. Richardson was a few steps ahead of the rest, walking faster and faster as they neared the building. “Or you think you spoke to her?” She was speaking loudly, Aiden could tell, to try to prove she was skeptical, but the ten men behind her proved she believed him more than she was letting on.

  Fifty feet from the church, Aiden veered right, toward the forest. “I did,” he said. “I guess she’s been hiding out here. She said she was afraid of something in the school.”

  Dr. Richardson didn’t react.

  “I was trying to convince her to come back,” he said. “But she wouldn’t. So I just told her I was going to go get her some food and come back—”

  “Shh.” Dr. Richardson stopped. The men behind them did as well.

  “Over there,” Aiden said, pointing. “There’s a wide tree—she was hiding behind it.”

  Dr. Richardson advanced ahead of him, rounding the wide tree, and looking back quickly, disappointed. “This tree?”

  “I swear she was here . . . wait.” He pointed to a tree nearby. A yellow cardigan was balled up at the base. “That’s hers! That’s what she was wearing.”

  Aiden watched the recognition wash over Dr. Richardson. “Okay,” she said. “Spread out, everyone. Make increasingly larger perimeters; a few of you go out deep into the forest and start working backward.”

  The men nodded and dispersed as she had commanded. “Emma!” the maintenance worker next to her began to shout, but Dr. Richardson threw her hand over his mouth and nearly wrestled him to the ground.

  “Don’t shout her name, moron.” She noticed Aiden watching and loosened her grip. “We wouldn’t want to create unnecessary panic over what is most likely a student’s wild imagination.”

  Evan.

  EVAN PLUGGED IN the code to Dr. Richardson’s office from memory. As soon as the lock lit green, he motioned to the hooded figure waiting in the phone booth. She came rushing over.

  “Go,” he whispered. “We don’t have very long.”

  Emma stood rooted to the spot, staring at the sliver of light spilling out from the door.

  “Emma, now.”

  “I’m sorry, I—” She looked around her for a way out. “I can’t go in there. I don’t even know you.”

  “If you don’t move, what happened to you will happen to all your friends,” Evan said, as a matter of fact.

  Emma took a deep breath and slid sideways into the room. Evan followed, checking to be sure the lobby was empty behind them.

  The office was still: four bookshelves that looked untouched; two additional tables, each covered with miscellaneous papers and folders that looked frozen there by time. On Dr. Richardson’s desk sat an hourglass, a few framed photos of her with scientist types, a prototype Macintosh computer, and an electronic apparatus that looked like a baby car battery.

  “Where’s the back room?” he asked, wandering around the edges of the room, feeling along the walls and shelves.

  “The door was over there.” Emma nodded toward one of the walls with several bookshelves against it. “I—I think one of these things opens up . . . I thought there was gonna be a door . . .” Emma stammered to a stop. “I don’t remember exactly.”

  Evan kept his eyes moving around the room, establishing patterns and searching for breaks. A number of the shelves contained multiple copies of the same book, including one row entirely reserved for a book called Evolutionary Design. One of the copies in the middle stuck out, so Evan pulled it. Nothing happened.

  “Where was the crease to the door?” Evan asked, more urgently.

  “I walked in right here.” Emma retraced her steps. “And she was standing . . . God, I don’t know. Over there?” She signaled vaguely toward an even wider area of the wall.

  The photos on the shelves were turned in alternating directions, so every other photo faced away from the one next to it. Evan tried turning some of them, but nothing happened.

  “Do you remember what angle you could see it from? Or what was in front of the door?”

  “I can’t,” Emma said desperately. “I think I blocked it out.”

  Evan stopped. At the end, there was a photo with an old man, not in an office, but in a living room. Dr. Richardson wasn’t wearing her usual pantsuit, or any kind of formal attire—her pants were flannel, pajamas. This photo wasn’t a scientific accomplishment; it was personal. Evan tried to pull it down, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Behind him, Emma had started to cry softly into her hand. “I’m sorry, I swear it’s—it’s somewhere in here—”

  “I believe you,” Evan said, without turning from the bookshelf. Near the bottom, hidden between several frames, was an inconspicuous wooden cross. But it wasn’t a normal cross; it was shaped to match the tall one outside, its outstretched arms drooping downward at the center. He tried to pick it up, but it wouldn’t budge. It was fixed to the shelf. He placed his hand over it and felt the top collapse beneath his palm—a button. As he pulled his hand back, the top of the cross began to glow yellow, illuminating the phrase carved at the bottom: I am the Light of the World.

  From behind the wall in front of him, he heard a loud metal click, and release.

  Behind one of the bookshelves, a small break in the wall formed. Without a word, he and Emma rushed to it, placing their fingers inside the crack and yanking backward. Wheels under the shelf slid back easily, leaving a small opening in the wall.

  Aiden.

  AS THE MEN fanned out through the woods in front of him, Aiden walked slow circles around the outside, maintaining his panic while looking for nothing in particular. Most of the men were far enough away that they were only visible by traces of their flashlights, but one flashlight was clearly within his line of sight—Dr. Richardson hovered close enough that Aiden could still hear her breathing. She’d given up looking and turned her attention to him.

  “I spoke to her myself, you know,” she volunteered, over the crunching of leaves and the snapping of twigs. “On the phone. From Kansas.”

  He didn’t respond, letting his panicked breaths fill the holes in the conversation.

  “I suppose she could have lied to us.” He could hear her moving closer, angling toward him. “She could have called from inside the school or something, but we have cameras for that.”

  Aiden kept his eyes moving, determined not to focus for too long on any fixed spot, as his manufactured panic began to legitimize.

  “In fact, we have cameras for everything. So if I was wondering why someone might go out to the woods, in search of a person who was already found. . . .”

  Even though it was cold, sweat formed across Aiden’s forehead. It was getting harder to avoid Dr. Richardson’s stare.

  She sto
pped walking and the woods went quiet. “Why do you keep looking back at the church?”

  Aiden froze, fixing his eyes forward at Dr. Richardson’s feet, away from the church. After a few seconds, her feet began to move.

  “Where are you going?” he asked as Dr. Richardson passed him, but the answer was obvious.

  “I’m just curious. . . .” She moved toward the church.

  “But she’s not in there!” Aiden rushed after her. “She was out here, that’s where I talked to her!”

  “Well, maybe she went in,” Dr. Richardson said, walking faster.

  Aiden sprinted in front of her, heading her off at the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said desperately. “You know, for spiritual reasons.”

  Dr. Richardson smiled. “We have to check everywhere. Trust me, that’s what your Lord would want, too.”

  Brushing his shoulder as she passed, Dr. Richardson jogged up the stairs. Giving her a moment to get ahead, Aiden turned to follow, sliding through the twelve-foot double doors and clicking them shut behind his back. It was completely dark in the church, and Aiden positioned himself squarely in front of the doors, the church’s only exit. Dr. Richardson’s voice caught in his ears—your Lord.

  He couldn’t see it, but he could hear Dr. Richardson advancing down the center aisle. She turned on her flashlight and its beam barely found the surfaces around the room. The paintings on the wall glowed dimly in whatever white light could reach them, and the illumination pivoted with Dr. Richardson’s body, slowly, back and forth. She began moving more slowly, looking up and down every pew. Aiden stayed frozen in the back, squeezing the metal bar of the door behind him with the strength of the Apex in his system, when he heard it—

  “Oooh.” A muffled cry rang out from the front of the sanctuary. Aiden swallowed hard.

  Dr. Richardson froze. “Eddy?” she asked quietly. There was no response. She was about a hundred feet away, near the front of the center aisle, but Aiden could see Dr. Richardson’s face curl slowly into a smile in the second before her flashlight went out. A second later, the flashlight came back on. Then off again. Then on again.