“Three. Please tell me why Emma came to see you.”
“You know,” Zaza said, “any analyst would tell you that there’s way too many variables for the level of certainty you’re demonstrating now.”
“I just want to find her.”
Zaza sighed. “I bought some books from her—”
“You don’t have any classes,” Evan cut in. An S6—Honesty reflex.
“Fiction books, man.” He reached across his desk, holding copies of Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451. “I didn’t really know her that well.”
Evan’s eyes started to scan the room.
“I’m sorry, Evan. But can I give you a piece of advice, as a friend? Don’t get involved in this. Wherever Emma went—if she actually did go somewhere, like you’re saying—it’s for a good reason. And it’s just not gonna be good for you to get involved. Trust me.”
Evan didn’t answer. Usually, when people said “trust me,” there was another S3—Intention involved.
“I’m sure she just went for a phone call or something, and she’ll be back as soon as she’s done. She used to talk on the phone all the time—”
“Talk to who?” Evan sat up. There was a phone number at the top of Emma’s list of names.
Zaza shrugged. “I figured you’d know. Since you guys were so close.”
Evan looked straight into Zaza’s eyes before his gaze fell to the desk, then to the chair in front of it. Hanging unceremoniously from the back was a dark-purple-and-yellow windbreaker.
Evan stared at it. Zaza had come to mass less than a minute before the service started, with mud on his shoes. One minute after that, someone else came back. “What about Neesha Shah?”
In the wind leaking in through cracks in the walls, the flame of the candle swung, and Evan could feel it passing onto and off his face, but his expression didn’t change. He hadn’t modulated his emotional performance since he’d entered the room.
Zaza shifted uncomfortably, but before he could answer, Evan’s watch started to beep.
Zaza smiled and nodded to the door. “Time’s up. Hope there weren’t any breaks in the pattern. Variables are a bitch.”
emma donahue investigation.
neesha shah—year 4.
transcription by MONKEY voice-to-text software.
YANIS (Administration) _ Hello. Checking. Checking. Checking. Good. There it goes. Please say your name for our voice-to-text software.
NEESHA SHAH (Student) _ Your what.
Y _ Voice to text. Look. It prints what we say. As we say it.
NS _ Okay. Nee Shu Shaw.
Y _ Huh. Bad spelling. How long were you roommates with Emma.
NS _ Just this year.
Y _ Did you know her before this year.
NS _ I met her in year one. But we didn’t talk.
Y _ Why not.
NS _ I don’t know. She hung out with cool people. I didn’t.
Y _ Who did you hang out with.
NS _ C School kids. I guess.
Y _ C School kids aren’t cool.
NS _ We had different social groups.
Y _ Emma had a lot of friends around school.
NS _ I guess.
Y _ It’s kind of amazing actually how many people she speaks to in the last week. One. After another. After another. Do you know why that is.
NS _ You said it. She had a lot of friends.
Y _ What is she like. Normally. I have never met her.
NS _ She’s nice. Um. She slept a lot. Sometimes she was really hyper and laughed at her own jokes.
Y _ What about the other times.
NS _ Other times.
Y _ When she wasn’t feeling hyper. What was she. Sad.
NS _ Not really. Just quiet.
Y _ When was the last time you saw her.
NS _ At mass.
Y _ And before this.
NS _ In our dorm.
Y _ Did you go to the mass together.
NS _ No.
Y _ Why not.
NS _ She had to make a phone call.
Y _ What phone call.
NS _ I don’t know. She just said she had to . . . What.
Y _ Seven forty five. Emma walks from dorm to chapel. No phone call.
NS _ She probably used the phone on the way. In the human lounge.
Y _ Nope. No phone call . . . You look surprised. Is that what she told you . . . Neesha.
NS _ No. I was just getting confused.
Y _ Okay . . . A few people who spoke to her this afternoon said she was distressed. Did she seem that way to you.
NS _ No.
Y _ Do you have any idea what might be the cause of that distress.
NS _ No. She didn’t say anything to me.
Y _ Is that unusual.
NS _ I guess not.
Evan.
ZAZA WAS HALF right about the sweeps. They were easy to navigate. Twelve instructors and maintenance workers were assigned to each of the five schools. But they didn’t walk with a codified pattern. Or at least they thought they didn’t.
The staff members moved using a form of discrimination learning called win-stay, lose-shift. If a system sees an action generate a desired outcome, it will stay the course. If the strategy is unsuccessful, it will shift. It was the reason a game like rock-paper-scissors, despite its fifty-fifty mechanical probability, could be played with probabilistic skill. When a player ties or loses (66.6 percent odds), they rarely repeat that action, so playing the inverse action doubles an opponent’s odds of success. As long as staff members thought they were being successful in their search—and they were, almost every time they checked a dorm—they wouldn’t alter their strategy. They would continue in the same direction, making the safest place to avoid being seen exactly where they had just been.
Evan ran thirty feet down the second-floor hallway. A flashlight came down the stairs and he ducked left, pausing for sixty seconds, then following behind it to the stairwell. He used the wall to guide himself to the third floor and turned the corner into his hallway, where he froze.
He’d failed to account for a variable. Emma was the one who was missing. There were ten gray suits outside her door. Evan swallowed and walked toward them.
He could hear Neesha answering questions inside her room. There were flashes exploding outward as staff members took pictures. Through the sliver of her door, he saw a huge shadow. Yanis was standing over Neesha, pressing her with questions.
“Evan Andrews.”
Dr. Richardson was on the edge of the group. She was taller than most of them, and unlike the suits to her right and left, she wasn’t wearing a mask or cover of any kind. The skin of her face was pulled back tightly over her skeletal structure. Her lips were barely visible and always pursed, which made her look to Evan like an amphibian. Every time she spoke, regardless of where she was looking, it felt like her voice was coming downward, from on high. “Where have you been? It’s well past the announcement of the sweep.”
“I—I was i-in the . . . the . . .”
She frowned. “Is that a stutter?”
He swallowed. “I was on a walk. I didn’t realize it was a sweep.”
“Really? You didn’t notice the blaring sirens and bright red lights?” She nodded to his door and he unlocked it. She followed him and pointed to the bed. “Sit.”
Dr. Richardson closed the door behind them. He’d taken a class with her last year, everybody had to in their Year One, on foundations of psychology and morality. She’d described the work he did as “theoretically correct, but practically confused.” She always seemed disappointed in him but he couldn’t understand why.
“Where were you tonight, really?” she hissed.
“I—I told you. I was outside.”
She didn’t believe him. She scanned the room with her flashlight, jumping between the Utah Jazz basketball posters. He could see the tack on the corner of one had popped out, the top of the poster curling under against the wall, and his hands seized on the bed behind him.
“When was the last time you saw Emma?” she said, assessing his response out of the corner of her eye.
“Just leaving for mass.”
“How did she look?”
“Normal.”
“Did she say anything?”
“N-no.”
“When did your stutter come back?”
“It’s not back.”
“It’s psychogenic, remember. It doesn’t have anything to do with your mechanics; it is not your body’s natural state. You’re choosing the blockage.”
“I know.”
“You just have to more consciously consider the connection between your thoughts and the way you express them.”
“I know.”
“The beautiful part about follies of our thoughts is that we have the power to change them.”
“I know.”
She smiled sadly down at him. “Then why do you still stutter?”
A passing gray maintenance suit bumped the door and for a moment, Emma’s room was visible again. He could see the empty spot on her desk where her journal had once been.
Dr. Richardson pushed the door shut completely. “Is there anything you want me to know about?” she asked. She’d noticed the unrest in his hands. He was accidentally feeding her S2—Subtext.
“No.”
“Your testimonial journal,” she said, her back still turned. “You don’t want me to read it?”
“No, you can read it.”
“Students are so precious about their journals.” She shook her head. “They forget, they’re written for the staff. We’re supposed to be using them to evaluate your progress. What would be the point if we couldn’t read them?”
“You can.”
“And yet, they also rarely tell us anything we don’t already know.”
Evan could feel his throat closing. Dr. Richardson was getting closer to the walls and looking over every few seconds. She knew something she wasn’t telling him. She was probing deeper with every new item she found; nothing in the closet but the same solid-colored, JCPenney zip-ups; nothing under the bed but a crate of art supplies and Post-it notes, nothing on the walls but his fragile basketball posters, starting to slip—
“John Stockton,” she said.
“What?”
“You love John Stockton.” She gestured with the beam of her flashlight. “The posters. It is not enough to see John Stockton once? You must see him five times? A John Stockton for every wall, and two for the desk?”
Evan nodded, his tongue still drowning in saliva.
“Why do you love him so much?”
“He’s good at basketball.”
“Does he have a stutter?”
“No, no. Just good at basketball.”
She turned her flashlight onto the ground and crouched to his level. “Your progress is slipping here, Evan. Something is creating a blockage, something you can’t even see yourself. And we have to find it and kill it; otherwise you won’t be able to move forward. Have you been taking your supplements with lunch?”
“Yes.”
“You know those aren’t optional; we need those to keep your bodies healthy in the environment.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been doing assessments with Dr. Edwards?”
“Yes.”
She pulled a Post-it note and pen from her pocket, quick scratching and signing at the bottom, holding it out to him by a single finger. “Give this to him tomorrow. You’re going to do assessments with me now, and we’re going to fix whatever it is that’s happening in you.”
Robert, Evan Andrews is going to check in with me. Thanks, C.R.
“Let us know if you hear anything about Emma, okay? You’re the light of the world, Evan.”
“Thanks,” he said, but she was already out the door. For a moment, Evan sat in silence, looking poster to poster, Stockton to Stockton, waiting for the final click of the door and for the sounds of the hallway to disappear.
In each photo, John Stockton was perfectly focused. Whether he was bouncing the basketball, or leaning forward to throw it, or high-fiving with Karl Malone, he always stared forward with singular, objective, uninhibited focus. John Stockton wasn’t distracted by the noise of the world, the grinding of its motion, the expectations of his coaches, the opinions of his teammates, the size of his opponents. This was the source of his greatness—not what he saw, but his ability to see. Evan loved that about him, even if he’d never watched a basketball game in his life.
He went to the largest poster, on the wall across from his desk, and reached for the tacks at the top, pulling it down and rolling it into a small cylindrical container. He repeated this for the other four posters, carefully placing the tacks in a plastic casing. Taking a flashlight from the bottom drawer, he turned his attention to the far wall.
Sprawled about before him, interweaving and overlapping, was a system of string, Post-it notes, and photos from last year’s registry. It stretched from one wall to the next, bending in the corners, weighed down by meticulous detail. First, in the corner above his desk, he found the photo of Zaza from last year’s yearbook. There was only one note beneath it: basketball stats. Evan traced the line back to the center of the far wall, holding a single Post-it. Day 37. 2:30p outside C-School dorm. He added, Day 40. 7:30p zaza dorm. Nothing in the school buildings, nothing in the Human dorm, nothing suggesting a monetary exchange. Emma never read books, and she wasn’t carrying any when she’d returned to her dorm earlier. Their interests were incompatible and showed no signs of a social friendship. Evan followed the line back to Zaza. Below basketball stats, he added adidas jacket.
Anyone at Redemption who interacted with Emma received a breakout section of the wall. There was so much detail in Neesha Shah’s section of the map that she’d necessitated her own wall, near the door. He traced his finger to corresponding dates. Day 37. 2:50p neesha dorm. He added, Day 40. 7:40p neesha dorm. Every time she talked to Zaza, she talked to Neesha immediately after. A pattern.
He tacked the list of students at the center of the converging lines, each name aligning with one of the outward-branching strings. He copied the phone number from the top of the list onto a Post-it, and placed it on the phone calls section of the board. Zaza was right, Emma had made a dozen phone calls from Dr. Richardson’s lobby. Now he knew the number she was calling.
Evan turned and, after double-locking the closed door, pulled open the top of his backpack and removed the soft, leather-bound testimonial journal. He took the Bible quote she’d scribbled in the magazine and pinned it in the center of the board, then sat, a flashlight in his mouth, and began to read, stopping only to notice the peaceful, focused look on Emma’s face in the middle of the madness.
Neesha.
ACROSS THE CEILING of her room, Neesha watched as the red lights clicked off and the yellow light of the back lawn started to leak through the window once again.
The school had cleared out Emma’s side of the room; all the textbooks, piles of clothes, and photos on her wall had been loaded into trash bags and carried out by maintenance workers. The footsteps outside died down, the siren was turned off, and the school returned to its normal resting state.
Neesha lay alone, shivering under her covers. She hadn’t slept in a room by herself since the third grade, when her family had to clear out their attic after she got chicken pox. She hated the feeling of it. Every sound was magnified; every change in the wind felt like the violins that brought in the start of the horror movie.
It was well after midnight, at least six hours since mass, and no one had seen Emma. The school had locked everything down, searched all possible areas, and still, the bed across the room was empty. Five hours ago, when Yanis the maintenance man had been in here with his MONKEY machine, she was sure it was some kind of miscommunication—Emma wandered too far for a cigarette, Emma ran off with Aiden, Emma was playing a weird prank. But five hours later, any hope of that had disappeared. Even before meeting Zaza in the woods, something
about tonight had felt off. Now, two hours past midnight, it was evident something had happened, something terrible, and Neesha couldn’t stop thinking about the worst possibility—that Emma was the something.
Emma had lied to her. There was no phone call before mass. Which meant there was no reason for Neesha to make the drop tonight, unless there was. Unless everything that had happened tonight, starting with Zaza, was part of Emma’s plan: get Neesha involved, then disappear. If the school was closing in, now Neesha would be completely liable. Whatever punishment had been meant for Emma, it was coming for her now.
There was a soft knock on her door.
It was so quiet she tried to ignore it at first, but thirty seconds later, it happened again, four quick raps and then silence. She slid out from her bed and clicked the door open.
Zaza stood in the hallway, the hood of the same Adidas jacket thrown over his head.
“Can I come in?”
Her heartbeat doubled, surging with rage and pushing blood into her fingers. She turned to let him pass, and as she watched him enter, casually, as if nothing had happened, she felt the full chill of the night sweeping in with him.
As soon as the door latched shut behind him, she sprang, throwing her right palm upward at his nose.
“Ah, fuck!” Zaza went tumbling backward onto Emma’s bed, clutching his face. “What’s that about?”
“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you,” she said, taking another step over him.
Blood seeped its way out around his hands, thick streams rushing down the bright yellow stripe on his sleeves. She watched for a moment as he struggled to plug it, helpless against the speed and strength. She pulled a few tissues from the desk and handed them over, keeping her distance.
“That’s a myth, you know,” he said, his voice more nasal than usual. “You can’t kill someone like that. The skull bones are too strong.”
Redemption Prep Page 6