Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,12
minds with exceptional skills—fifteen- to twenty-year-olds—and trained them. When they realized the armies of young scientists they were training were much more valuable than the research, the five labs became the five schools: Chem (C-School), Brain (B-School), Physical (P-School), Robotics, and Human Sciences. Each school built its own facility, with classrooms, a lounge, a library, and a dormitory. On the back lawn, they built housing for the staff, housing for the maintenance workers, and a chapel, to ensure that the school’s mission stayed rooted firmly in Christianity.
Other than the geography and the layout, Redemption was just like Spring Hill High School in Montpelier, where Evan had gone for two semesters. There were 940 students. There was a basketball team and a theater. There were bathrooms that always smelled terrible, and required classes nobody wanted to take. There was a lunchroom, surrounded by student lockers, right in the center of the GRC.
Only one light was on in the Human School as Evan passed through, in the lobby of the school’s head instructor, Dr. Richardson. She had an office just off the lounge, with her own waiting room and phone booth. Eddy sat alone in the waiting area outside.
Evan kept his head down and continued through the P-School gym, and waited at the entrance to the GRC, a ten-foot, vacuum-sealed door with an iron bar across the front, locking it in place. The GRC’s locking system was interconnected and exact. All five doors would open on staff-member request at one of the terminals, for five minutes exactly, before they relocked. They weren’t separate locks either. The same metal piping ran through the walls of the circular building, locking them simultaneously.
Moments later, Dr. Simon and Aiden emerged on the other side of the lunchroom, and the metal bars over the doors released. Evan slipped inside behind them and set his watch.
Taking the four-digit combination to a locker by watching someone wasn’t difficult. Most people’s hands block the combination numbers themselves, but that’s not really what you’re looking for. Instead, you set your eyes on one single, recognizable dial marking, and watch its movement with every turn. Then after they leave, you take the final number, where their combination ended, and you re-create the pattern backward from the final number. Emma’s final number was twenty-two, backward fifteen to thirty-seven, forward eight to twenty-nine, backward twenty-nine to fifty-eight.
Fifty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-seven, twenty-two. The locker clicked open effortlessly.
Emma’s locker was still full.
In the center, there was an uneven stack of textbooks, magazines, and lined notebooks. He picked them up, one by one. She drew in pencil in the margins, mostly abstract phrases stylized and dotted with illustration. You’re just a kid, she’d written on the first page of her The Art of Feeling textbook, the j’s and i’s and apostrophes replaced by stars. There was a single Holy Life magazine at the bottom, worn at its creases. The address printed on the back was to Cynthia Richardson—Dr. Richardson—at an address in Black Rock, Utah. He thumbed through it, watching the margins, and stopped on the second to last page. Emma had scribbled a Bible verse: Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to sit firm against the devil. —Matthew 7:20. Evan ripped it from the magazine and held it briefly to his chest.
He traced the titles of the textbooks again. Into Feeling, her compassion training book; The Art of Understanding, the paperback they used in her Applications of Empathy class; and Richard Simmons’ Never Give Up: Inspirations, Reflections, Stories of Hope by Richard Simmons, for her Inspiration in the New Millennium elective.
He stopped. If they’d been set back in order, based on her classes that day, The Art of Feeling should have been on the bottom. He pulled it out again.
When he gripped the book by its cover and shook the edges, a small page fell from the center, exactly what he’d been looking for. He recognized it before it even hit the floor. He’d seen Emma writing on this same crumpled piece of paper dozens of times. He’d tried a few times to get close enough to read it, but Emma was always more cautious when this paper was exposed. He picked it up carefully. Without unfolding it, he could read the name at the bottom. It was written hastily in black marker and underlined twice.
Zaza Galbia.
Aiden.
“KEEP LOOKING FORWARD,” Dr. Simon said, his fingers pressed under Aiden’s jaw. “Let me know if you experience any pain.”
“I swear to God,” Aiden