Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,39

surprised. None of them showed their faces.

“Here.” Peter handed him the camera. “Get a picture.”

Aiden nodded and leaned out of the break in the bleachers. He could hear Peter breathing excitedly behind him. He balanced himself, waiting for a few of the hooded figures to turn in his direction. The snap and hiss of the camera rang out across the court, but none of them moved. Aiden crouched back down into the hole. “What do we do now?”

Another set of footsteps approached the gate. Aiden watched for them, but no one entered. Instead, a mass of figures huddled behind the fence. They weren’t wearing the black hoodies; they were in gray suits. Footsteps crunched around Aiden and Peter as the figures spread out around the fenced-in area. “Those aren’t students,” he whispered. “They’re maintenance.”

Peter’s body language had changed. He was nervous now, gripping the bottom of the bleacher in front of them. “Why would they come out here?” he asked. “What are they doing?”

One of the maintenance workers had entered the court and was walking straight up to the group in the center. They noticed him approaching and began to shuffle, their heads snapping around anxiously. As they turned, Aiden noticed beneath one of their hoods a thick pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

“On my signal, we run,” Peter whispered, nodding to a hole in the fence behind them. He’d picked this spot on purpose, Aiden realized. It came with an exit strategy.

“All of you.” The maintenance worker on the court started to speak. “Stay exactly where you are. Put your hands on the ground—”

“Now!” Peter screamed. The hoods in the center of the court must have heard the voice and thought it was one of their own, because they scattered on his command. Around them, the gray suits sprang into action, blocking the exits, angling toward the other hooded students. Aiden stared in horror as a maintenance worker in the center sprang after the escaping hood with the glasses, reaching for his belt, and pointed a small device.

“Let’s go!” Peter grabbed him and pulled, but just before he turned, he saw it. Tiny lines flew from the man’s hand at the hooded figure, connecting with their back and gripping them in shock, sending them crashing and convulsing down to the wet ground.

Aiden took off, forcing his way through the fence, slicing the back of his neck against an exposed edge. He ignored it, sprinting away down the only path he could see in front of him. He could hear Peter a few steps behind, and another set of footsteps behind that. “Stop!” a voice barked, but Aiden was faster than any maintenance worker. He sprinted farther away from the court and into the darkness. He could still hear shouting over his shoulder, but it got quieter, and eventually the only footsteps he could hear were his own.

He slowed himself to a stop, turning to check his position. In the distance, he could see the yellow light at the top of the wooden cross, and even farther than that, the school. The first cut of the forest was only a few feet away. There were no flashlights near him, and all the sound was a million miles away.

He fell back onto a rock, panting. Whoever it was who showed up tonight, they weren’t regular students. The way they dressed, the way they acted, Peter was right. They were organized.

And the men in the gray suits, they were dressed as maintenance workers, but that wasn’t their job tonight. They looked more like riot control. One of them fired a taser at a student. He’d often thought the school had too many maintenance workers—they were always overstaffing functions and referring them to situations where they weren’t necessary. Maybe some of them weren’t maintenance workers at all. Maybe they were security. But why wouldn’t the school just say that?

He reached for his bag, unsure of how to log all this information into his theories page. Did what happened tonight have something to do with Emma? Or was it something else, something much larger that he’d stumbled into? His hand found the corner of the bag and swept to the other corner, past his notebook.

The Apex was gone.

Evan.

THE DRIP-DRIP-DRIP ON the window of late-arriving rain kept him awake, lying in his bed.

The vines of notes sprawled across his wall were starting to inch together, growing so thick with details that they threatened to fall inward, bringing the whole system down.

His clock ticked past 10:00 p.m. and