all started seventy years ago—”
“Redemption opened twenty years ago,” Neesha corrected him.
Peter ignored her. “At the time, they hadn’t figured out exactly what kind of a school they were gonna be yet. They were experimenting with a lot of different ideas, teaching all kinds of crazy subjects. Sure, normal stuff, like biology and chemistry, but they also were experimenting with much darker shit. Telekinesis, torture techniques, mind control—”
“You’re making this impossible to believe,” Neesha interrupted again.
“Christ, have none of you ever heard a story before? Just let it breathe.” The leaves crunched under his feet. “As I was about to say, the school knew what they were teaching was bullshit—nobody actually knew how to do mind control—but people believed crazy shit back then. They could recruit gullible plebes to come study. That was, until one student changed everything. We’ll call him . . . Evan.”
Evan felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Evan wasn’t like the other kids. For one thing, he was way taller—seven feet, at least. He was weird, closed off, but superintelligent. Strangest of all, he spent most of his time in the forest, practicing techniques from class. A rumor started to go around school. Maybe Evan isn’t like us; maybe he’s an alien.
“One day in class, his teacher is in the middle of a lesson when she turns around to put some coffee on. She’s talking back over her shoulder, and before she knows it, she’s pouring the hot coffee all over herself. She tries to stop, but she can’t—Evan’s controlling her mind.”
Neesha groaned. “If you’re going to tell a story about mind control, the twist should be way scarier than coffee.”
“What happened then?” Evan asked quietly. He knew it was just a story, but he had no trouble picturing it in the halls and classrooms of Redemption.
“The school starts to run all kinds of tests on Evan. They give him growth hormones to stunt his development, they try to shock it out of him with electricity, but none of it works. The best they can do is put a light in his brain, that starts to blink when he’s controlling someone—”
“A light in his brain?” Neesha asked.
“Dude, this is super off the rails,” Zaza added.
“Shut up, I’m getting there. One day in the middle of mass, one of the female students, this popular Year Four—Emma, we’ll call her—stands up outta nowhere. Everybody’s confused, quiet—until she holds up a brick and starts smashing it against her skull. People freak out, her friends are grabbing her, trying to stop it, but she’s possessed by the force of God. She keeps smashing till her skull falls in, and she dies. And hiding in the back of the church, there’s Evan, controlling her mind.”
Evan glared at Peter. It felt like an accusation, Peter using the names he did. He’d never hurt Emma, even as a fictional character in a made-up story. Still, the pit of his stomach turned as if he had.
“The school realizes they’ve gotta do something about this, but what can they do? They can’t have him bashing kids’ heads in with bricks, but they also can’t kill him, or they’ll have killed the greatest scientific advancement of this century. So the best they can do, they decide, is to contain him. They put an electric shock fence around the school, like a bark collar for dogs, and send him into the forest to live on his own. And they never heard from him again. Or rather, they never saw him.”
A big gust of wind sent a swirl of leaves flying around them. The fog was turning into real moisture. Evan could feel it gathering on the front of his jacket.
“Twenty years later, the school’s thriving. There’s hundreds of kids here, they’re only teaching real science. That’s when this group of Year Ones—the Neeshas—decide to go camping. Nobody’s worried about it, right? Nobody’s been in the woods for years, why would there be anything scary out there?
“As they’re sitting there in their tent, one of them hears something, something big, a huge—” He snapped a thick branch with his hands and all four of them jumped. Everyone was really listening now. “In the distance, she sees a little red light, hovering toward them, fifteen feet off the ground.
“Without warning, she takes an iron rod from their tent and starts attacking her friends. She slugs one of them over the head so hard it knocks her out cold. The other two go sprinting toward the