Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,4

dropping a small baggie of clear pills on the stump in place of the envelopes and turning to carve her way down the mountain.

“You’re making a mistake.” Zaza hadn’t moved behind her. “All this, for a couple grand? It’s not worth it.”

“Yeah, it is,” Neesha muttered to herself without looking back.

She took a wide route back to the chapel, wiping the forest off as she ran. Zaza was right, but not in the way he thought he was. He was right that it wasn’t worth it for the money. The extra cash was nice, to buy cigarettes off the maintenance workers or send money home to her mom for her sister’s birthday. But that wasn’t what made “all this” worth it—it was the trophy.

The Discovery Trophy was a four-foot, diamond-studded beaker that sat at the front of Dr. Yangborne’s classroom all year round. At the end of the year, it was awarded to the most innovative breakthrough in the C-School. More than just the physical award, it came with a full-ride scholarship to California-Berkeley, a full legal team to register and patent the product, and a commitment to find manufacturing. The students who won it were immediately elevated from senior high students to practicing chemists. Previous winners had gone on to be the heads of labs and CEOs of pharma companies. In her Year Two, she’d come in fourth, with a hormone booster she created from scratch; she refined it in her Year Three and finished in second. This year, she’d gone a completely different direction, synthesizing something new, effective, and useful.

And she was going to be able to prove it.

She slid into the first open seat she could find, five rows from the back and off the center aisle of the chapel. As soon as she sat, the organ ripped through the sanctuary, starting the music. Everything shook as the pipes screamed—the windows, the pews, the Bibles tucked into the seat backs. The overhead lights bowed into darkness for a moment, then popped back on. The whole complex was on an old grid, relying on two hundred miles of cable to get power from Salt Lake, so sometimes, when the draw got to be too much, electricity would dip in and out. Instructors had jokes for it; others had learned to ignore it entirely. Father Farke, for his part, used every blackout as an opportunity to shout, “Alas, his light has arrived!” Neesha wanted to remind him that, because the light was supposed to be constant and blackouts were a temporary interruption, it was actually the opposite—his light had disappeared.

The prelude ended, leaving everything in the church still once more. The whispering stopped and Father Farke made his way to the front to select a holy candle-lighting person. Emma had volunteered.

Emma loved this shit. She was one of the people at the school who was actually a Christian. Neesha had never been to church before Redemption and found the whole thing to be creepy. The chapel was far too big for the number of students, and every window had a still-frame Bible story stained into it—the American version of the stories, where the characters were white and the Middle East looked like Texarkana. The biggest mural, in the very front, was a forty-foot rendering of Noah’s ark, in which twelve super tall and super naked passengers flew a boat away from a raging flood. Craziest of all, clouds of smoke billowed from a source just out of the frame.

She assumed the choice to put it at the front of the church was some kind of warning to students. Come to mass or die in a fire.

Emma moved quickly, candle to candle, checking over her shoulder behind her. Neesha sat up, watching. Usually Emma was graceful, but tonight she looked uneasy. Behind her, a student let out a light moan, and Emma checked over her shoulder. The bells on top of the church rang out, and Emma leapt, nearly knocking over one of the candelabras.

As Father Farke moved into the announcements, Emma carried a single candle back up the aisle toward Neesha, slowly, to protect the fragile flame in her hands. She kept her eyes focused forward, past all the students who watched her, until she got to Neesha. She glanced to the right, ever so slightly, and she held up one finger in front of the candle. A question.

Neesha raised her hand to her face and scratched her nose, with one finger. Her answer.

It was the code they’d developed;