Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,23
hand over his barely existent hair. “What else do you want?”
“What?”
“You said first. What do you want second?”
Neesha felt her fists clench again. “I want to know what Emma told you to do tonight.”
Zaza’s face collapsed to the center in confusion, his eyes almost crossing. “She . . . told me to meet her at the well? Ten minutes before mass? Then you showed up. That’s it.”
“Where is she now?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I don’t even—I barely know her.”
Neesha sat on her own bed across from him. She could taste her saliva, heavy and acidic. “Then what are you doing here?”
His eyes glanced back and forth. “I wanted to warn you about something. This kid came to my dorm during the sweep, Evan Andrews. Do you know who he is?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, well. He’s very creepy. He knew she was missing before the sweep, and he knew she came to my dorm tonight.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because he asked about you, too.”
Neesha shrugged. “I’m a popular person.”
“You’re not taking this seriously. I think he was following her for a long time, and he definitely knows more than he was telling me.” Zaza dropped his voice. “She was in a hurry earlier, when she stopped by. That’s when she was asking for half the money.”
“Why didn’t you give it to her?”
“I didn’t have it from Aiden yet. But something was weird about tonight. Don’t you think?”
Neesha rocked on the bed, staring at the spot where earlier that night, Emma had come gliding into the room, faster than usual. “Can you please handle this one?” she’d said. “I need you tonight, Neesha.” The more times she heard it in her head, the more it sounded like bullshit. Something was wrong, she’d felt it the whole time, the rains coming at sunset to bring the flood, she should have listened.
Neesha exhaled. “Yeah. Something was weird.”
“Do you think it has something to do with Apex?”
Neesha winced at the mention of the project, then nodded again.
“Okay. If you have any more, you should probably hide it. Or dump it.”
“Yeah, right, and let someone else walk off with the Discovery—”
“Just until Emma’s back.”
The wind outside picked up, and she heard her mom again: We’re all with you now. She pulled her shoes from under her bed, and a black hoodie from her closet.
“Where are you going?” Zaza asked.
“Take your shiny-ass coat off,” she said, tossing him a second hoodie. “And follow me.”
The only lights in the hallway this late at night were the exit signs at the ends of the halls. They ran quietly around the wide edge of the dormitories with their hoods up—Human to P-School to C-School—and turned inward to the academic building. She pulled a key from her back pocket.
“You got a key?”
“I’m an exceptional student,” Neesha whispered, and they slipped inside.
The Chemical Sciences building was one of the only sites of disorder on Redemption’s otherwise geometric campus. There were so many small offices, miniature laboratories, special packaging rooms, freezers, and holding spaces made out of converted storage pods that the hallways had to be built with sharp corners and random turns. There were overhead fluorescents, but they were hung so high that their light barely reached the ground. Instead, various shades of neon lights poked out of different classrooms and labs, occasionally staining the hallway red or blue. Creepiest of all, the school had adorned the hallways and laboratories with statues of dead-white-guy genius types throughout, by far the scariest-looking genre of human. Albert Einstein smiled at the entrance; René Descartes beckoned outside the bathroom, and Isaac Newton glared down with fury upon Dr. Yangborne’s chemistry classroom.
Neesha wheeled an old cart from the very back of the closet, covered with a thick white cloth. She peeled back the cloth to reveal a harmless-looking setup of a few vacuum flasks, cardboard boxes, and an ancient hot plate. She took two Redemption Prep water bottles from the bottom of the cart and tossed them to Zaza. “We’re bringing those back.”
He popped the lid off one of them. “Whoa.” It was full to the brim with tiny silver beads.
“That’s a five-thousand-dollar water bottle.”
Zaza examined the inside of the bottle, astonished. “What is it, even?”
“What’s what?”
“This. Apex?”
Neesha’s constant motion slowed. “We’ve been in class together for four years. You just bought five hundred of them. You don’t know what it is?”
Zaza shrugged. “I do O-Chem, not drugs. And my nana didn’t believe in medicine.”
Neesha went back to work, unscrewing a vacuum