“It’s okay,” she told him. “I’m okay.”
“Yes!” Dr. Richardson was screaming. “This is it!”
This world was never big enough, but you still tried to make a place for me. He could hear the words in her voice. We all deserve forgiveness. So go now, you’re forgiven.
Her eyes closed once, and she drifted off. The mission was complete.
Evan took a deep breath, all that his chest could find, and exhaled every bit of it. He closed his eyes, cutting the images from his brain and ignoring the increasing intensity of shocks around him.
This wasn’t happening right now. This was a year ago. He controlled his proximity.
The video of Emma wasn’t happening now either. Now she was in an escape vehicle, rumbling away from the school. Mom was safe. Emma was safe. The mission was complete.
“What the fuck,” Dr. Richardson shouted back at him. “What the fuck is that, what happened?” She began to slam the side of the computer.
Squeezing his cells together, focusing in exactly the way he’d always been able to focus, Evan’s brain shot back to chess. The King’s Gambit, the Bobby Fischer cop-out, to load up all your pieces on the strong side to give the impression of a strategy, and then to reverse that strategy and attack the weak side. He remembered his last game against his mom, her rook-to-D4 move that had ultimately handed him the victory, the way she apologized for being so wrong, the way he apologized for always beating her.
Dr. Richardson spun on him. “No!” She slammed her hand on the glass screen behind her, nearly breaking it. “No, what happened to it? What are you doing?”
Evan glared back at her, simple pieces of the chessboard and their specific functions in his mind. He could hear the machine behind him slowing down.
“You did that on purpose?” Dr. Richardson asked. “You created that, then you took it away?”
Evan took several gasping breaths, refocusing on the simple pain in his head, and none throughout the rest of his body. Slowing, he inched his swelling eyes open, swallowing as he found Dr. Richardson’s figure in front of him.
“That was a real reading.” Her voice felt like it was being shouted across the back lawn at him. “Legitimate activity. We were so close, and then . . .” She grabbed him by the face. Forcing his eyes open. “Evan, answer me. The empathy you felt, right there? Was that a performance? Was that a controlled emotional reaction?”
He didn’t answer her, and she let his head fall back. She began moving around the room, out of focus in front of him. He could hear her writing, punching buttons on the computer, but the lights in the room stayed on.
“What are you doing?” he asked, still halfway suspended in a nightmare.
She didn’t answer. He felt her hands against the bottom of his chin, her thumb jarring a small hole open in his mouth. Something poked in between his lips, something hard, a straw.
“Drink,” she said. “It’s water.”
He did as she instructed, cold water splashing against his tongue. He sat in silence as she delicately, one by one, removed the wires from the top of his head.
When he opened his eyes again, her face was two feet from his own. “Congratulations,” she said. “You’ve just proven yourself worthy of legitimate development. You’ve earned yourself another six months.”
She released the binding, and he fell forward, collapsing onto the ground.
Limb by limb, he pulled himself back up.
“You’re going to let me go?” he said, the words slurring out.
“Oh God, no,” she said. “You just became my primary subject.”
He took a deep breath, and let it go. By the grace of Mom, he was alive.
Neesha.
THE WINDOW SMASHED open, sending shards of glass flying in every direction. The sound shot across the open lawn. All seven visible flashlights on the lawn spun toward them. Without thinking, Neesha took two steps into the window frame and leapt to the ground.
She hit the ground and rolled, then sprang to her feet, taking off away from the maintenance building and back toward the chapel. She could feel the flashlights following her, scanning around and past her. She cut across the rocky areas between paths and dove down to hide herself for a second, before standing to run again.
She was a hundred yards from the window when she saw another body ease its way out. One of the flashlights noticed, tracking the body on the way down.
“Ah!” she started screaming. “Ah! Ah!” the sound kicked off the mountains, reverberating too many times to form discernible words.
The flashlight whipped in her direction, away from Zaza. As soon as she saw Aiden drop from the window, she fell into the wild grass and froze.
Two staff members, headed for the base of the window from opposite directions, approaching the spot, slowing as they reached where Zaza’s and Aiden’s bodies were lying. She breathed silently, praying, as the flashlights converged. They disappeared for a moment into the ground, right on the spot where Zaza had fallen, before shooting back up toward each other. They panned inward, revealing each other in their gray maintenance suits, then across the grounds, and landed on the school bus. Silhouetted in their light, two hundred feet in front of them, Zaza and Aiden popped up off the ground, sprinting toward the bus.
“Ah!” she screamed, leaping up to run as well.
From the forest behind her, at least ten flashlights turned to expose the bus, bathing it in light, but too far away to see the detail. She led them back toward the bus, at least twenty feet ahead of them, panicked screaming now close enough to cut through its own reverberations. “Start the engine!”
The engine roared to life, the bus’s headlights washing over the grounds, the staff, and the exposed front gate. Ahead of her, she saw Zaza crash into the door of the bus, and watched as Emma wrestled him in.
The bus started to move, slowly, away from her. She was close enough to the maintenance workers that she could hear their footsteps behind her, around her, gaining on her. A dozen more flashlights had emerged on the lawn, screaming at the bus to stop.
The bus picked up speed, swerving inward toward where Neesha was running, and she picked up speed with it.
“Come on!” Zaza was screaming to her from the doorway of the bus, hanging out to reach for her. “Come on—”
The sound of a gunshot reverberated across the campus. An instant later, the back window of the bus shattered.
“Don’t slow down,” she screamed back at him. There was the rip of another gunshot, and the aluminum siding of the bus crunched inward with a horrible shriek.
The bus jolted forward again, almost throwing Emma out of the side door. She reached for Neesha, grabbing her hands and linking them, trying to pull her forward, but the bus was moving too quickly, and the ground caught Neesha’s feet and yanked her backward.
“Fuck!” she heard Peter scream inside the bus, letting off the accelerator, throwing the bus’s momentum backward, shooting Neesha’s forward, crashing her into the side of the door and onto the bus.
“Go!” she screamed at him from the stairs. He slammed the accelerator to the floor and the bus rocketed forward as another shot shattered the right-side rearview mirror.
There was too much noise inside the bus and inside her own head for her to focus on any one piece of it, but she yanked herself up the stairs, toppling over Aiden as they swung the door all the way shut. They all crawled, heads down, into the center aisle.
Peter was behind the wheel, heading straight for the gate, ripping toward it at least forty miles an hour across the rocky ground. One more shot rippled behind them as the bus leapt for the gate. The bus shuddered as it hit the metal fencing, bounding slightly backward, rocking hard against its back wheels and then lurching forward.
Neesha fell into a seat of the bus and Emma collapsed on top of her in a hug. Out the window, the road outside of Redemption was barely distinguishable from the forest around it, but they flew through it with the intensity of a video game, fifty, sixty m
iles an hour over tiny creeks and jagged rock edges.
“You made it,” Emma said. “You made it—”
“Shit!” Peter shouted from the front. They’d just come around a bend, and in front of them was a massive bed of bushes and branches, directly in the middle of the road. The gravel disappeared into it, as though a tree had come to claim the road back.
“Is this a dead end?” Neesha asked.
“I don’t know—” Peter eased off the accelerator.
“Did you not turn, earlier, when—”
“There were no turns.”
Zaza stood behind him. “Do you wanna stop and . . .”
“Nope.” Peter shook his head. “We’re going through it.”
He hit the gas, banking right to try to avoid the root of the tree, but impact never came. They cleared effortlessly, immediately, as though the whole forest was painted on a curtain.
Peter eased the bus to a stop. Behind them, the bushes and trees had swung back to look perfectly intact. There was no road, no vehicle marks, not even any real dirt to sink into. It was concrete, made to look like a real forest. The school was completely hidden from the outside world.
“It’s like . . . it’s not even there,” Emma said.
“Where do we go now?” Peter asked from the driver’s seat.
Neesha turned around. There was a highway in front of them, stretching endlessly in both directions, as if reality had been set on a permanent loop. The only thing separating one mile from the next was a small handmade billboard, with a drooping cross painted in the middle. It read: YOU are the LIGHT of the WORLD.
“Forward,” Neesha said, and the bus rumbled away.
Acknowledgments
thank you.
writing this book has taken sixteen months,
& all the love that anyone around me can spare—
addison never questions all the stupid things we do; like sleeping in a trailer for two weeks & hiking up remote mountains in Utah.
my family never doubts the crazy stories i tell, or my ability to tell them.
caleb never reads a draft without sending me a few texts to gas me up.
my life mates never leave an idea unexplored or an opinion untested.
savannah never lets me spend more than sixty seconds with my head in the sand.
my band brothers never let me forget who i am & what we’re about.
my friends in LA never leave an evening unturned.
my friends around the country never leave my mind, not for more than a moment.
ben & harpercollins, joanna & new leaf, jason kuppermann—you’re worth breaking the format for. you’re wonderful & thoughtful & the reason my life has turned out as it has.
most of all, thank you to anyone & everyone who’s read a book, been to a book tour, or told a friend about it. i hope you’ll keep letting me do this for . . . ever.
About the Author
PHOTO CREDIT JADE EHLERS
SAMUEL MILLER, the author of A Lite Too Bright, was born and raised in Vermillion, South Dakota, and now resides in Los Angeles, where, in addition to writing, he directs music videos and coaches Little League baseball. He began writing his first novel while on tour in a fifteen-passenger van with the rock band Paradise Fears. Currently, he attends graduate school at the University of Southern California. He credits his existence entirely to two spectacular parents, three brothers, one sister, and the best and sweetest puppy dog on the whole planet, Addison.
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Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
REDEMPTION PREP. Copyright © 2020 by Samuel Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art © 2020 by Richard Clayton
Cover design by David Curtis
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Samuel, author.
Title: Redemption Prep / Samuel Miller.
Description: First edition. | New York : Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 13 up. | Audience: Grades 10-12. | Summary: Told in multiple voices, teens at a preparatory school for the exceptional in the forests of Utah uncover a larger mystery after a student disappears.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019026848 | ISBN 978-0-06-266203-3 (hardcover)
Subjects: CYAC: Missing persons—Fiction. | Preparatory schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M588 Red 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026848
Digital Edition APRIL 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-266205-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266203-3
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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Redemption Prep Page 27