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 miles 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.