“I didn’t think anything was gonna come of it, but I could tell I was . . . slipping. When the school year started, I tried to get it together. I started taking Apex.” She nodded to Neesha. “And that helped for a little bit, but then I started taking it all the time. I thought having a boyfriend might help, but . . . nothing was working.”
Aiden shifted in his pew but didn’t say anything. The pit in his stomach turned to stone. That was how she felt about their relationship. It was a part of the “nothing.”
“On Day Twenty, Dr. Richardson approached me. She said I’d been doing really interesting work in class, and she wanted to talk more about it. And I didn’t understand that, because my grades were terrible, I wasn’t writing anything other than my journal, so I didn’t know what she was talking about. It ended up being therapy.” Emma said the last word cautiously. “She said I was depressed, and I needed help.”
Emma shifted uncomfortably against the altar. “Dr. Richardson seemed to be really interested in it, like it was really important, and it felt good, to have someone caring that much. So I started going, every day, sometimes twice a day. And it was helping, honestly. I’d never talked that much about how I felt. But the further we went, the better I got . . . the more she’d push it.
“On Day Thirty-Two, she asked if we could try to re-create some of the experiences I talked about. I didn’t really get it, so I said okay, but . . .” Emma choked up. “She’d gotten tapes . . . of my family, from back home. My dog. Old teachers . . . everything I had talked about, even some stuff that I hadn’t.”
Aiden felt cold air against his spine. His dad had asked him about videos he’d made for Coach Bryant. Which meant they were building files for everyone.
“She’d play them and force me to watch. When I tried to leave, she wouldn’t let me. So I had to just sit there and listen, and . . . she kept telling me that instead of trying to overcome them, I should try to get myself back to that place. So I could experience it again, so I could understand what sadness was. She said I had to know my emotions before I could control them.”
Every time she’d pause, the room would sit perfectly still. Aiden tried to focus on what she was saying, to take it seriously, but when it was silent for long enough, he couldn’t stop himself from drifting to the best moments they’d spent together—lying on her bed, sitting on the bleachers at the court—none of it had been real. He’d been an experiment for her, and a failed one at that. He held his face steady while she continued.
“I’d see Eddy,” she said, “every time I was leaving. He always had a counseling session after mine, but I couldn’t understand what he and Dr. Richardson talked about. He couldn’t communicate, so what good was therapy? But just from the way he acted when he saw her, the way he was around her, in that room . . . I knew she was doing something worse to him.
“I started staying late after my sessions, so I could try to see Eddy. I figured if I could talk to one other person who knew what I was going through, it would help me . . . I don’t know. And it did.” She looked over at Eddy; he didn’t look back. “He couldn’t talk, but I knew he could hear me, and he was trying so hard. He’d grab my hand, and I could tell from the way he squeezed it . . . that he was trying to tell me he could understand.
“It was weird, like he couldn’t figure out how to say or do anything with his face, but he knew what was going on. He kept motioning to my textbooks, so one day I opened one of mine up, and I started writing, and he started squeezing my arm, with the number of letters in every word. So I wrote, touch my shoulder, and he did.”
“He can read?” Aiden asked.
Emma nodded. “Then one day Dr. Richardson came out of her office and she saw us together, and she freaked. She said we should never speak, and should try to avoid being in the same place, because we’d ruin each other’s progress. That was when I knew that what she was doing to him was messed up. That he wasn’t like this when he came to school. She made him like this, and I could tell that Eddy was warning me—she was gonna start doing it to me too.
“So we had to find a secret way of talking to each other, something Dr. Richardson wouldn’t notice or understand. I realized, pretty early in my assessments—she didn’t know anything about the Bible. So I started scribbling Bible verses in the margins of magazines, with clues about where and what time to meet—and then I’d leave them on her table.”
“Wait,” Aiden interrupted. “You want us to believe he still has the Bible memorized?”
“He does,” she snapped. “And I don’t care what you believe.”
Aiden sat back.
“My therapy kept getting worse. Dr. Richardson would call me in three, four times a day, usually pulling me out of class. I knew it wasn’t normal, but I couldn’t talk to anybody about it. I tried to write about it, but she could read my journal, so . . . there was nowhere for me to hide.
“Last week, I collapsed in her office, after she showed me a video of my mom talking about me . . .” Emma choked, then caught herself. “Talking about me like I wasn’t there, or like I didn’t exist anymore. It was a real video. I don’t know where she got it. And then . . . when the video was done, she just picked up with it, laying into me, like she was my mom, and . . .” Emma stopped herself and swallowed, hard. “She apologized after, but . . . she didn’t mean it. I knew I’d stopped getting better, but she seemed to just be happier and happier. I told her I wanted to stop, but . . . she said I was making too much progress. And we couldn’t go back now.”
Emma cleared her throat. “I knew she wasn’t going to stop. That whatever she was doing, it wasn’t regular therapy. So I decided I had to get out. I figured if I had enough money I could pay some of the maintenance workers to let me go,” she said, turning to Neesha, “so that’s when I told you that we should try selling Apex.” She turned to Aiden. “And I convinced you to start buying.”
Aiden’s whole body tensed. Their relationship was worse than nothing. It was another hustle.
“Dr. Richardson could tell I was up to something, so I started noticing maintenance workers hovering around me, all the time. Last week, that tall guy showed up—”
“Yanis,” Neesha said.
“Right. I think she brought him in just to keep an eye on me. I realized none of these guys are maintenance, and they never were. They’re security.”
“I was fucking right,” Aiden whispered.
“Then, on Day Forty, I passed Eddy on his way into a session, and he grabbed my wrist. I don’t know how I knew what he meant, but . . . I did. I waited thirty minutes, and then I doubled back. Eddy had propped the door to Dr. Richardson’s office open, so I went in. I didn’t see them, but I could hear him, whimpering, from somewhere inside of the office.
“There was another room—a room I didn’t know about. The door was hidden behind some of the books in her office, but it was cracked open. I looked in, and . . . I saw the next stage of the therapy.”
Aiden leaned closer. His palms were sweating.
“Eddy was sitting on a chair, in the middle of the room. There was a bunch of tubes running straight into his head, and . . . there were computers, and machines in a big cabinet where Dr. Richardson was sitting. Behind her, hooked up to the tubes, there was this . . . big, white, metal . . . funnel, going all the way up to the ceiling. I tried to stop myself, but . . . I gasped, and she saw me.
“She didn’t even look surprised or anything, almost like she knew I was going to be coming. She said it was a more advanced form of therapy, one the school itself had developed, that depended on reading some kind of . . . brain activity, or something.”
“Neural impulses,” Neesha whispered.
Emma shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
Zaza sat up. “What was the machine for?”
“She said it was the reason they built the school in the first place. This was the purpose of the Griou Research Center, but it wasn’t always called that. It was the Alo—I don’t remember, something wit
h an A. She didn’t tell me what it meant.”
“So it’s not the GRC.” Evan put it together immediately. “It’s the ARC. The arc.”
No one said a thing, but the mural loomed enormous over them, Noah’s ark flying away from the burning world.
“She didn’t tell me anything else about it.” Emma was speaking faster, rushing to get through it. “And she said I should go, because she had to finish Eddy’s session. But I know it has something to do with really bright lights, or something . . . because every time he sees bright, flashing lights, he freaks out, and . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry I don’t know any more than that. But whatever it is, I knew it’s what . . . did that to him.
“So I ran to my room, and I packed up like, three things, and . . . and . . . and I tried to get my half of the money from Zaza—and I went to church. I saw Dr. Richardson watching me, so I volunteered to do the candles. Then, as soon as I got to the back—” She winced. “I started to flicker the lights . . . because I knew it would cause a reaction from Eddy. I’d seen him freak out before, and I knew it would get everybody’s attention, especially Dr. Richardson’s.”
She ran her hand over Eddy’s head gently and leaned it in her direction. He hadn’t reacted during the entire story. He was unnaturally emotionless, so robotic, that his skin looked like it would be cold to the touch.
“Then, I just . . . faded into the chaos. Zaza didn’t have the money yet when I asked, so I took the envelope from your jacket”—she nodded to Neesha—“and I disappeared into the woods. I went to bribe a maintenance worker, but by that point, they were all looking for me. I couldn’t get over the fence without setting off warnings, so I came back to the one place I knew the instructors never went—the chapel.” She looked up, behind her, to the mural in the nave. “The flood. And I’ve been here ever since.”
“You managed to avoid them in here for a whole week?” Zaza asked.
Emma shook her head. “They’re not actually Christians. None of them. No one ever comes in here, except for mass. Whatever this place is, it’s just for show. And these stories”—she pointed to the murals on the wall—“they’re all wrong. It’s like they drew the murals without reading the actual Bible. This school isn’t Christian. It’s something else.”
“They’re not Christians,” Peter said slowly. “It’s not real therapy. There’s no real research. Then what is this place?”
Emma took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t know. But it’s not a school.”
They all sat breathless, the stale air of the misplaced chapel pressing down on them.
“It’s like . . . a human laboratory. Or a training facility, or something. They’re training us, and testing us, for something. That’s why they’re always evaluating us with everything, making us write in the journals . . . they’re trying to, I don’t know, make us supernatural or something.”
The room sat in silence. It was impossible to tell if people believed her, or if they were too stunned to respond.
“That’s why they recruited us,” Aiden said. “They were searching local news articles, looking for the most . . .”
“Evolved,” Emma said. “That’s the word she always used. She’d say she liked talking to me because I was evolved. . . .”
“Everybody gets bussed in,” Neesha said, staring at the back of a pew. “I bet no one even knows where we are.”
Peter sat up in the rearmost pew. “Why now?” he asked. “For the school. Why are they gonna start doing this shit now?”
“She wouldn’t have let me see it if she wasn’t going to do it to me,” Emma said quietly.
“But why you?” he asked.
“Does it matter?” Neesha asked.
“Yeah, it does. The school’s been open for twenty years; if they were torturing people with the ARC, we’d have known it by now.”
“We do know about it,” she said, pointing to Eddy.
“If it failed with Eddy, why would they try it again?”
“Maybe it didn’t fail,” Evan offered.
Everyone turned to reexamine Eddy, focused on nothing at the front of the church. It was hard to view him as the positive outcome of an experiment.
“Still,” Peter argued, “that’s one person, at least four years ago. He might be thirty. Most of us are graduating in eight months; why do we think everybody’s suddenly in danger?”
“He’s right,” Zaza jumped in. “They’re not gonna start doing this to all of us. Which means we should go back, soon, and figure out what to do from there.”
“We can’t go back there!” Neesha protested.
“What else would we do? We can’t stay here,” Zaza said.
“They’re right,” Emma said quietly. “There’s nowhere to hide.”
Everyone was quiet for a minute, no one saying the worst part out loud: going back meant abandoning Emma.
Aiden took her in again, really looking at her, instead of the reflection of her he’d always seen. Her hair was matted and tangled, her eyes were creased, and her cheeks were red from crying. Her entire body looked weak.
Without thinking, he stood up and walked to the front of the chapel. Her saw her shoulders tighten as he sat next to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said before she could speak. “I was a shitty boyfriend. You were going through hell and I could only see how it was affecting me.”
Emma nodded. “You had a lot on your mind,” she said.
“But I didn’t have to. You always said that—I didn’t have to.” He stopped himself. “This isn’t about me. I just want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sure all you were getting out of our relationship was sex. . . .” He paused, letting her respond.
“Not really.” She winced. “That was pretty bad, too.”
He took a deep breath. “Right. Well, then I’m not sure what you were getting out of this. But I know I was taking too much.”
They sat in silence. “How was the game?” she finally asked, quietly.
He shrugged. “I barely played. I think Dirk’s gonna get drafted, and I’m . . .” He looked around. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen to me.”
They sat in silence for another long moment. He could feel the others watching them; he felt exposed, in front of this many people, but he couldn’t make it matter. “Okay.” He finally exhaled and pushed himself up. “Thanks again for . . . you know. Everything.”
He dropped himself back into the pew next to Peter, who leaned in immediately. “We gotta go back,” he whispered. “There’s nothing saying that the school is gonna do this to all of us, or any of us. But if they find out that we know, or that we know where she is . . .”
“Wait.” Neesha sat up at the front of the church. “Wait. Oh my God.”
She closed her eyes in concentration. Everyone else watched her in silence. “What?” Peter finally asked.
“They’re testing us, all the time. And recording all the results, right?”
Emma nodded.
“What if something happened recently that caused all of the results to get . . . dramatically better? Something that made them think that what they were doing was working—that we were ready, or whatever. That it was time to start using the ARC.”
She stared at Emma, who stared back, horrified.
“Holy shit,” Aiden said. “You’re right.” He reached into his pocket, and in front of them, he dropped the baggie of the remaining silver pills.
Neesha.
NEESHA REMEMBERED TWENTY-FOUR hours earlier, lying in her room, when she’d been paralyzed by fear that she might get kicked out. It was almost funny, thinking about all the things that seemed so serious and important then.
Scenes of her four years here played back in terrifying clarity. The free tuition, the insane curriculum, the global recruiting, the calls for exceptionalism, the emotional assessments, the meals and supplements—there was no reason for any of it unless there was some larger end the school was moving toward. It had always been there. There was always a voice, jus
t beyond all the instructors, whispering a direction, suggesting a plan for the students.
She thought Redemption was her escape, but it was the opposite. It was a cage, in a much larger reality. And she didn’t even know the worst of it. Her eyes drifted to Emma, seated with her eyes closed and her head rolled back against the altar. Emma had chased the same promise—new place, new life, the ability to be the best and the reward that came with it—and had fallen further into the trap.
Neesha walked cautiously to the front of the nave, sliding onto the ground next to Emma, taking her own piece of altar. It was a long moment before either of them said or did anything, just breathing the same air and staring forward at the same low-resolution, inky-black church, watching the spot where it disappeared into darkness. Finally, Emma let her hand fall softly onto Neesha’s. Neesha slid her fingers through Emma’s and squeezed.
“I’m sorry,” Emma said.
“You’re sorry?” Neesha almost rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I didn’t know . . . all of that was happening.”
“I’m really good at hiding stuff.”
Neesha swallowed. “You were trying to tell me. You were trying to tell me to focus less on that stupid trophy, and I didn’t . . . I should have said something.”
Emma shook her head. “I set you up. I shouldn’t have gotten you involved at all. I made you sell your project, then left you to take the blame. If they would have found out . . .” Her eyes fell to the floor in front of them. “When they find out. It’ll be even worse for you.”
Neesha tightened her hand around Emma’s, her grip so delicate Neesha was afraid squeezing might shatter it like glass. In every picture of Emma in Neesha’s head, the delicacy was an act, a false flag waved for attention and pity. Holding Emma’s hand and sitting this close, hearing her story and reading her journal, Neesha knew it wasn’t.
“It’s funny.” Emma’s eyes were puffy from crying but soft as always, as though she was mid-joke. “A few months ago, I thought I had problems.”
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