Redemption Prep

by Samuel Miller

  Dr. Richardson scanned the rest of the room with her flashlight, mirrors and screens sending fragments of light bouncing around the circular room, revealing pieces of Neesha as she clung to the wall, ten feet above where the doctor stood.

  “Yes,” Emma said, but Dr. Richardson kept rotating, ninety, one hundred twenty, one hundred fifty degrees—

  “I am the light of the world,” Emma spat, and Dr. Richardson stopped, turning back to face her. Emma held up two fingers in a peace sign.

  “You are,” Dr. Richardson said. “Which is why you’re back. Can you imagine all the hard work we did together just disappearing? It would have been devastating. It would have set this school back . . . well, I can’t even tell you how long.”

  Emma continued to hold the peace sign up, strangely defiant, in Dr. Richardson’s direction, her eyes flittering back and forth between the doctor and the computer monitors on the wall.

  It wasn’t the monitors Emma was looking at, though, Neesha realized. It was her. Her heart leapt. It wasn’t a peace sign. It was the number two. Neesha used the strap of the camera to fasten the photos to its base.

  Dr. Richardson pushed a few buttons behind her, and the control panel buzzed awake. “Cute trick with the lights, but this room runs on a generator. I can’t risk drops in here.”

  She turned back to Emma, now silhouetted by the electronic glow behind her. “Others were starting to panic about never finding you, but I didn’t. No one else spent the time together that we spent; a connection like that doesn’t just break because of a bit of fear or confusion. I mean, what did you think you was going to happen to you, running away? Were you planning on devolving to the Emmalynn of two months ago? Sad but without purpose? Hating herself, just for the sake of it?”

  Emma was rocking back and forth in place, her fingers still holding a two in Dr. Richardson’s face.

  “Or did you think you were going to get better, somehow? Magically? People always seem to be so afraid when they get that close to themselves. And I understand; the closer the mirror, the more you can see the flaws—the pores in the skin, the hopelessness. But I knew eventually you’d figure it out, whether I had to explain it to you or not—”

  Dr. Richardson flipped another switch, and the ARC behind them began to glow blue, rumbling to life with a low-frequency hum. “You can’t escape the person that you are. You can only feed it. That’s how you grow.

  “And whether you know it or not, that’s why you’re back. We were getting closer to who you really are, and I don’t think you fully appreciated how important that work was.” Dr. Richardson turned around to reach behind the computer monitor. “You’re our savior, Emma. You just don’t know it yet.”

  “There’s only one savior,” Emma proclaimed boldly—too boldly, her voice loud enough to hear its cracks—and her two fingers became one. That was it, the signal. With Dr. Richardson’s head bent over a monitor, Neesha tossed the camera down, into Emma’s hands. Emma caught it and hid it quickly in her jacket.

  Dr. Richardson turned in time to see Emma’s hand go flying back up to her face. “Who’s that?”

  Emma swallowed. “Jesus Christ.”

  Dr. Richardson almost laughed. “Right. Whatever you want to call them.” She moved slowly to the ARC, running her fingers along its side. “While it warms up, what do you say we try a little therapy, huh? I suppose you can come too, Mr. Andrews.”

  Her hands on their backs, she led them out of the room, sliding the bookshelf shut until it closed with a thud, leaving Neesha alone in the soft blue glow of the ARC.

  Aiden.

  “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND,” Aiden said, standing tall in front of the group of maintenance men outside Dr. Richardson’s office. “I need to speak to her now.”

  “We’re in the middle of a maintenance sweep—”

  “—this is why there’s a sweep, dumbass.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I guarantee you, if you lean your head in there, tell her ‘Aiden Mallet wants to talk to you,’ she’s gonna say, ‘What the fuck took you so long to let him in.’ I swear to God.”

  There were nine maintenance workers milling in the Human Lounge and Dr. Richardson’s lobby, one stationed at each of the diverging hallways. The tallest one, with shaggy black hair and a thick beard, was standing over Aiden. RICK, according to his name tag. “It’s not happening.”

  Aiden looked from guard to guard around the room, all of them turned and focused on him. “You guys know what you’re protecting in there?”

  None of them said anything.

  “Oh, you’re all a part of it? You all believe in this torture shit?” He turned back to the bearded man. “Or just you?”

  They all turned away to ignore him. Aiden wandered back to the middle of the room, his chest heaving noticeably. None of the guards were checking on him; if he wanted to turn and go, admit that his plan was a flawed one, he could. But Emma was behind that door.

  He took one more deep breath.

  He turned and ran straight for the bearded man, catching him off guard with a huge right hook to his earlobe. The man buckled to his knees and then to the ground, clutching his head. Three guards from the room rushed over, lunging toward Aiden, but he used the fallen man’s body to shield himself.

  Instructors came rushing down the stairs behind him. “What are you doing?” one of them screamed, but Aiden didn’t hear it. He edged around two chairs toward the fireplaces, flames dancing on his face.

  “No!” one of the maintenance workers who entered the room shouted to the instructors. “Continue the sweep. Reece and I will handle this.” They edged around the perimeter, trapping Aiden in the corner, his back to the fire.

  Without waiting, Aiden launched at the nearest worker, but the man was ready, receiving his fist with a shoulder and curling Aiden over with a punch to the gut. He swung his left leg as Aiden fell, driving him back, stumbling, toward the fire. Aiden caught himself against the bottom of the fireplace just in time.

  “Stop! He’s a student,” an instructor shouted, loud enough to draw their attention, and Aiden dove for an upright chair, toppling it back into Rick. Rick recovered quickly, accepting a punch while wrapping his arms around Aiden in a firm bear hug, trapping him and cutting off air. The other worker came over and took his time setting up for a military-grade right hook. Aiden heard a crunching sound from his own jaw.

  “You’re killing him!” an instructor screamed. “He’s a boy!”

  “Shut up!” the bearded man spat at her. “You’ll wake the other students.” He dragged Aiden’s body to the middle of the lounge. “Bring him to his room.”

  Aiden rolled over to a hunch; the fire danced across a stream of blood pouring from the center of his face. He lifted his head slightly, woozy.

  This wasn’t his breaking point. Not yet.

  He pulled himself up and charged at the guards. Reaching for the backs of their heads, he managed to slam one into the doorway before tumbling off, completely out of control of his own body.

  “What the fuck!” the other screamed, and spun on him. Aiden rushed to his feet, dancing around the far edge of the room. Blood was pushing his hair back up out of his face; he felt himself smiling.

  It didn’t last long. The first worker grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. The other drove a straight kick into his back so hard that Aiden’s head snapped forward.

  They began to circle him. “Don’t make us hurt you any more, kid. Whatever this is, it’s not worth it.”

  The workers who had been guarding the exit doors had abandoned their posts. Three instructors huddled in a far corner together. Aiden’s vision was slipping in and out of focus. One more shot to the head, and he’d be out. He raised his hands to protect himself.

  From the hallways that converged on the Human Lounge, he heard running, banging, a voice shouting, muffled through the walls at first. The maintenance workers looked away from him, their hands dropping as the voice became clearer—“Fight! M
otherfuckers, there’s a fight!”

  Students began to stream onto the landings of every floor, rushing out from both directions to see what the commotion was. They filled in, faster and faster, the instructors trying to urge everyone back to sleep, but the students were too electrified to care. They formed an arena around him, four floors of landings, packed with students.

  To his right, Peter fought his way to the railing of the second-story landing. He’d come to Aiden’s rescue. He screamed down at him, “Go, buddy!”

  Aiden charged for the nearest guard. The students exploded with excitement.

  The guard closest was still focused on the students, and without turning, took a jab straight to the face, backing into the other guard, and giving Aiden an angle to slide past, continuing to fight with his back to the fire. The other guards were slow to advance, exchanging wild glances with each other. One shot a look to the instructors, who were panicked and hiding in the corner. “Do someth—”

  But Aiden was on him, crashing a fist down just in time to catch his chin, again landing a punch without taking one, causing the crowd to go crazy and the workers to recoil as a unit, none of them sure whether they were even allowed to touch Aiden with this many students around.

  One of the maintenance workers had turned to crowd control. “Go back to your dorms,” he shouted at the wall of students, at least a hundred. “Return to your dorms immediately, or everyone will be—”

  Their screaming swallowed his sentence. Aiden had run straight for another one of the guards, ducking a punch and driving him backward to the ground. Aiden continued to bulldoze over him, landing on his feet at the other end.

  Rick had given up on trying to de-escalate the situation or trying to handle Aiden with care. He turned on Aiden just as he regained his balance and threw a hard left hook into the side of Aiden’s gut. He ran at Aiden again, catching Aiden’s fall by driving a knee into his chest. He finished by grabbing Aiden by the shoulders and throwing him back into the center of the four workers. Aiden’s head snapped back, twisting and popping joints in his neck that had never bent before. Every joint and muscle that was used to holding him in place had begun to cave, shredding like thin plastic stretched over old toothpicks.

  He tried a massive swing at one of the workers, and it missed without even being ducked. The worker twisted Aiden’s arm back around his body, subduing him until Aiden managed to drive the worker off him with a kick to the shin and then one to the gut. Every time he lunged at them, their unwillingness to fight eased up, and they began to try harder. With every punch he got less responsible and less in control; the maintenance workers seemed to only be getting angrier, punching with less abandon; he could feel his joints giving up—

  “What’s happening here?”

  Aiden froze first, and the guards stiffened. From the bottom up, students began to quiet, their screaming rapidly disintegrating to a heavy silence.

  Dr. Richardson walked into the Human Lounge, horrified. “What is happening to this school? Mr. Mallet,” she said, walking straight for them. “What has gotten into you?” She grabbed Aiden by the shoulders. He felt a small pinch where her right hand gripped his shoulder; he tried to squirm but she gripped him tighter. “You need help,” she said, and the edges of her face immediately began to swim outward, into the light from the fire. His whole body began to feel warm, and his limbs got heavy. His body folded involuntarily into the outstretched arm of a security guard, and he flowed with the movement toward the door.

  By the time he was passing Dr. Richardson’s office, it was impossible for him to delineate one detail of the physical world from another. He was pretty sure the hallway was empty, but there might have been people everywhere. He thought he saw the light go out in Dr. Richardson’s waiting room, but it might have been a light going out in his head.

  “Where are we taking him?” someone asked. “Her office?”

  “No, she said the chamber in the GRC.”

  Aiden felt his consciousness slipping.

  “What the fuck?” That voice was Dr. Richardson’s. “Where did they go?”

  “He’s right here—”

  “Not him!” she was screaming. “The other two students in here, where did they go?”

  Aiden’s brain was completely clogged, everything shutting down; the last thing he heard was Dr. Richardson screaming, “Lock it down! Lock the whole fucking school down!”

  Evan.

  HIS FEET WERE tired; his chest was aching. He’d just come inches from being tortured and spent long enough there to rationalize the fact that it was going to happen to him. He was flying through the hallways of the school, one false prediction or missed calculation away from falling right back into it. But the only thing Evan could think about was his right hand, alive with Emma’s inside it, her soft skin fusing to his, her whole existence curling into his palm.

  She wasn’t speaking, or even really breathing loudly, but kept up every step of the way, trusting his instinct, watching his feet as he moved. “Are you okay?” he’d asked when they’d started to run, and she’d nodded.

  He’d never navigated a sweep in the dark before, without at least lawn and safety lights; this one had dozens of variables. There would be more people than usual. The electronic locks of the school would be down; the mechanical locks would almost certainly be in use. They sprinted inward, away from the noise and commotion, toward the GRC, but the doors inward were locked. Instead, they followed back out, taking a hallway toward the C-School. Noticing flashlights from both directions, they fell back into an empty girls’ bathroom.

  “Okay,” he said, checking his watch and counting backward from when he’d seen the last staff member go flying by. “We’ve got forty seconds for them to make it through this hallway.”

  “Then where are we going?” she asked, her voice perfect even when it was leaking out around the tears welled up in her throat.

  “You’re going home,” he said.

  She sat in silence, staring at the door, panting, but not releasing his hand. She was squeezing her eyes up into tiny balls. “Thank you,” she whispered, and squeezed his hand tighter. His whole world stopped turning. His watch started beeping.

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

  They ran laterally, through the second cut of academic buildings around the school, away from Human Sciences, through the theater, through the P-School, and then out to the gym. If this was a traditional sweep, there wouldn’t be anyone even checking on this level of buildings, but this wasn’t a sweep anymore. It was a manhunt. Still, he didn’t have any choice but to trust the pattern, that the unoccupied places would stay unoccupied, even today. He left a new wave of adrenaline as they hit the gym—below, the stands were perfectly quiet.

  A single maintenance worker was walking wider circles around the gym’s exit door, but not wide enough to allow them to sneak in behind him without being seen or heard as he turned. Evan surveyed the area for an advantage, remembering the small breaks in the bleachers of the student sections, and the bottles of alcohol usually stashed below them. Silently, he led Emma to the area, and instructed her to lie atop one of the bleachers.

  Evan returned to the front of the stands, staring at the maintenance worker, waiting for him to make the farthest turn of his circle. “Oh, shit!” Evan whispered, purposefully loud enough, and sprinted away from the door.

  “Hey! Stop!” The maintenance man dutifully charged after them, making the long run from his post to the area behind the stands, just in time to watch their tiny bodies go shuffling through the bleachers and out the other side. They sprinted to the door, a hundred feet closer, and before he realized their plan, they were exploding onto the back lawn.

  Evan guided them out into the fog. All the flashlights across the lawn had successfully descended upon the door to Human Sciences, but none of them had noticed the students sneaking away from it. The fog, and the uninterrupted darkness, had given them the perfect camouflage. They cowered against the
edges of the wild grass to make themselves small, supporting each other’s hands, and as they rounded the maintenance shed, they noticed a yellow glimmer of light. A school bus was parked behind the shed.

  In the front row, he saw Eddy, seated alone.

  Emma shook her hand free and raced up the bus steps as soon as the door opened, swallowing Eddy in an embrace. “You did it,” she whispered to him. Eddy had been tasked with hiding behind the maintenance shed and waiting until Peter and Aiden stole a vehicle.

  From behind them, Peter came jogging up. “Pretty nice ride, right?” he said, slapping the bus. “Nobody even noticed it’s missing.”

  He looked into the bus, then back to Evan. His face fell. “Aiden’s not getting out,” he said seriously. “But he just saved your asses.”

  He scaled the stairs, two at a time, and took a seat behind the wheel. Evan didn’t move.

  “Let’s go, buddy,” he said. “Time to get the fuck out of here.”

  Evan watched as Emma cradled Eddy’s face, holding it against her own, crying over a smile. Emma wouldn’t leave until they knew they’d be able to get a photo, to save everyone. Emma made her love for everyone else more important than herself. That was her power.

  “What about Neesha?” Evan asked quietly.

  Peter and Emma both looked at him.

  “She’s still in the office,” Emma whispered. “If she’s not caught already.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Peter said. “We’re gonna have to come back for her another day.”

  From where they were standing, he could see the gate, unlocked and unelectrified, vulnerable. They’d done it. He’d done it. He’d saved Emma, and now he was going to escape with her. But if all love was important, then he couldn’t forget about the love that he had been shown tonight, the most important love, from the person who had sacrificed the most for him and vouched for him when no one else would.