Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,7

felt his forehead smack against stone, and his world went cold.

The last thing he heard were the bells of the church, ringing out forever across the empty, warm, black space into which he was falling.

Neesha.

SHE FELT A pair of hands pull her from the ground and she swayed in small circles, blinking to find her vision. She must have rolled several feet, because she was behind the pews now. It had been such a violent moment, with no light and a hundred students trying to push past the bottleneck of the center aisle. She was pretty sure she’d been thrown to the ground but it was hard to know who was doing what on purpose; people were falling over each other.

“Are you okay?” It was Leia, one of her Chem School classmates, dragging Neesha to her feet. “We’re over here, come on.”

Cold air hit her face; someone had opened the back doors of the chapel and students were streaming out. She followed Leia to a pillar in the back of the chapel. A few of the other C-School kids were milling in the corner, trying to get a look at the front of the church.

“What the fuck?” someone asked. “Did Aiden just kill Eddy?”

“I think Eddy almost killed Aiden,” Leia said.

“Why was he freaking out?”

“Something about lights.”

“The lights?”

Neesha could barely hear them. There was a muffled ringing in her ears; her face was flushed with blood. Flashlights at the front of the sanctuary started flickering on, swirling light through the abstract shapes and colors of the room.

“Students, return to your dorms immediately,” Father Farke announced from the pulpit. “There will be no open campus this evening. Return to your dorms, immediately.”

Neesha looked to the front of the church, expecting to see Emma rushing in with concern. It was her boyfriend, after all. But Emma wasn’t there.

“Are you okay?” Leia had been watching her sway back and forth.

“I think I got kicked in the face.”

“Let’s have a cigarette, it’ll balance you out,” she said, and started leading them toward the door.

Neesha felt for them in her pocket, removed them, and then felt the pocket again. It was empty. She froze. The crowd continued to push them forward as she slapped at her pockets.

“What are you doing?” Leia asked. Several arms against her back prodded her forward, but instead she dropped to the floor.

“Get up!” Someone nudged her with their knee.

“What happened?” Leia crouched next to her.

“My envelope,” Neesha choked.

“Envelope?”

Neesha crawled out of the path of the students and felt blindly. “It’s gone.”

“What was in it?”

She didn’t respond.

“Neesha, what was in the envelope?” Leia grabbed her by the wrist and squeezed.

Systems crashed in her brain. Neesha went crawling back toward the center aisle, toward where she’d first hit the ground, but there were still students plowing toward the rear exit. “What the fuck are you doing?” disembodied voices shouted down at her; “Holy shit, get off the floor!” and “Are you okay?” from faces that she didn’t have time to notice. She went row by row, but the light from the candles didn’t reach the aisles so the floor beneath the pews was pitch-black shadow. The center aisle cleared out, and Neesha slumped against one of the pews.

“Would someone . . . take it?” Leia asked from the ground behind her.

Neesha swallowed. Yes, someone would take it, but only two people knew about it. Emma, but it was her money anyway. Which left—

She stood up abruptly. As the last few students left the church, she thought she might have seen a dark-purple-and-yellow hood go up as it disappeared into the fog.

Evan.

OF ALL EMMA’S patterns, the most important was the ten minutes she spent at the base of the school’s wooden cross, alone after mass.

The cross was forty-five feet tall. Its arms were so high that the constant wind and rain of the mountain had battered them into drooping downward in the middle. When you sat on the metal platform below, the cross appeared to stretch upward into the clouds, the light at its peak shining straight into heaven. Emma sat there alone every Thursday night, collapsed to her knees in front of it, transforming from the Emma of this world to the Emma of the next. When he pictured Emma in his head, this was how he saw her. This was where his mission had to begin.

He set his watch. He had thirty minutes to get back before the end of mass.

Inside the dorm, everything was quiet. The Goosebumps book was still