A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  He’s like me.

  The first time I had sex with him, we were dirty and weak and afraid.

  We’re still afraid, but I’m asking him not to be.

  What is unapologetic, uninhibited sex with Casey Hargrove like?

  “Earth to Evalyn?” He cocks his eyebrow. “I’m waiting.”

  “My sharp tongue turns you on, doesn’t it?”

  “What does that have to do with any—”

  “But shutting me up turns you on even more.”

  “I . . . wouldn’t say it turned me on more.” His eyes shift to deviance. “But I love the noise you make when you become incoherent.”

  “Then . . . umm . . .” How is this so hard? Why am I becoming tongue-tied? I’m never tongued-tied. “Make me incoherent. Hard.”

  He presses his lips together in a fine line. He’s trying hard not to laugh . . . I can tell. “Are you asking me to dominate you?”

  “No—yes?” Dominate me . . . does it have to be that word? Can’t I just formulate my desires by asking him to use all that muscle mass to throw me around?

  “You know, Ev, if you want me to take you in a way that makes you shut up, all you have to do is ask.”

  I bite my lower lip. “Yeah. That.”

  Now he does laugh.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Laugh at me!”

  “I’m only laughing because I’m finding you adorable, and I don’t really ever find you adorable.”

  “You don’t find me adorable?”

  “I find you tough, mouthy, and insanely hot, but not adorable.” He pushes himself away from the window and tugs off his shirt. I could stare at his body for hours and never become immune to it. It’s the kind of body that terrifies girls when the wrong type of guy is equipped with it. A body that could move mountains, a body scarred by domestic warfare. He could be straight out of a horror movie. Could. He’s a god to me.

  I kneel at the edge of the bed. He steps right up to me, dropping his head so the tips of our noses brush. “You trust me?”

  I capture my bottom lip with his, dragging my teeth slowly across it, reveling in his intake of breath. Breaking from him, I whisper, “Until I die.”

  A second later I’m thrown onto my stomach, my arms pinned behind my back. “How about now?”

  “Especially now.”

  When he fumbles with the clasp of my bra, he says. “Okay, okay. I think this moment proves that I really have no idea what I’m doing.”

  It’s my turn to laugh.

  He finally wins, and I pull my bra up to my wrists, keeping it tangled around my hands as I grip the edge of the mattress. He presses a kiss to the small of my back—hot lips and tongue and a moment of teeth.

  “Jesus, Ev, relax. Your knuckles are white.”

  “Screw me already and I will.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. Damn, I shouldn’t have said that. I swear it takes him a whole five minutes to drag my underwear down and over my ass. “I’m going to die before you finish this. I’ll be eighty-seven.”

  “Torturing you is a part of dominating you.”

  “I take it back. God, please, I take it back.”

  His chuckle is deep and sends vibrations through my entire body. His fingers trace the back of my thighs, quickly grasping and holding down my hips when I try to raise them for him.

  I’m about to scream in frustration, but I remember—I did ask for this.

  “Birth control,” he says. At least he plans on eventually getting to the sex.

  “Pill,” I nearly yell. The last thing I want to give him is another reason to stall.

  Sweet relief floods me when I hear the noise of his zipper. I roll over when he’s busy undressing. When he’s finished, he pulls me to him.

  Somehow this way, with him inside of me and my cheek pressed against a pillow, with eyes shut as I submit to every one of his movements—somehow, we’re both animal and machine. I moan, the repetition of his movement never ceases to fail me, a slow build, a rev, until he says, “I can’t . . . not like this. I need you facing me.”

  He flips me over. When he sinks into me again, I clench my thighs, holding him in place.

  He rests his forehead against mine.

  “I never stopped loving you. I tried, but I couldn’t.” I wrap my arms around his neck. He’s still inside of me. I’m killing him.

  He tries to hold himself together. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I have something to live for again, and it scares the shit out of me.”

  In between a series of heavy breaths, he says, “Take your own advice. Stop thinking about it,” gripping my hips and forcing me to move.

  I do what he says. I stop thinking.

  ***

  It’s been a long time since I’ve consciously forced myself to think about Compass Room C. Since I’ve made my decision to return I need to engage myself with those memories—remember my fight to survive. I need to remind myself why I’m doing this.

  I sit in front of the tablet projection and direct myself to the Reprise launch site for the feed of our CR. I watch the deaths. No particular order, but I watch all of them. I’m well aware that people are walking through the living room. I’m well aware of Casey giving me the look when he sees me. But I don’t stop.

  This machine, capable of malfunction, the demise of people I cared about—is only the beginning.

  Blaise . . . his death was the one I never saw.

  I punch in the settings for slow motion, watching closely as Blaise races through the woods after the lodge lit on fire. The orange glow from the burning wood faintly illuminates the screen. Out of nowhere, a man—maybe in his mid-twenties—appears, aims, and shoots him in the head.

  And that’s it.

  His death was so fast. So unexplainable.

  Wait.

  “What are you doing?” Casey sits down next to me.

  I hold up a finger. “One sec.” I rewind the feed.

  I go back further, until I’m following Blaise through the woods. The man appeared earlier when Blaise was running through the forest. After he found his trigger object. All this time I never knew what it was, but I see it now. A set of speakers. I’d researched his crime after escaping the CR. He’d drunkenly turned down the music before his killing spree at the party.

  “Evalyn. . . .”

  “Shh!” I pause the clip and zoom in. There, standing in the shadow of the trees is none other than Gordon, watching the exchange between Blaise and his victim closely.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What? What is it?” Casey leans forward, like he’s trying to find what I’ve discovered for himself.

  Blaise’s victim wasn’t originally violent toward him. Blaise literally dropped to his knees and begged for forgiveness, and his victim let him go. Except two minutes later, his victim returned to him, and shot him.

  “I think . . . I think. . . .” Oh God. I don’t know what to think. I hope I’m not right. “What day did Jace’s victim come into camp?”

  “I don’t remember. It was the night before Valerie was tested.”

  How to find the clip I’m looking for . . . the exact moment.

  I scan through the highlights. The time I’m looking for would fall under the clips including both me and Casey. God, there are so many of them. Finally, I find it.

  I am painting on Casey, stripping, and then we’re practically grinding on each other half-naked. I press play when he’s on top of me, lips against my neck. I sense him stiffen next to me, so I glance around, realizing that we have company. Piper and Wes sit on the couches, watching the feed.

  Casey kicks me gently in the leg. “Uhh . . . Evalyn.”

  “They’ve already seen it before. Plus, you look great all turned on with your shirt off.”

  He raises an eyebrow and I bite back my grin, turning back to the feed before I miss what I’m looking for.

  “There,” I cry, hitting PAUSE. Across the creek, Go
rdon is lurking in the shadows, watching us.

  “Is that . . . what the hell,” Casey says. “I knew he was around our camp the whole fucking time.”

  But it’s more than that. It’s so much more. “I think I know what made our Compass Room glitch in the first place.”

  ***

  “Are you sure about this?” asks Maliyah.

  Everyone has gathered in the living room.

  “No, no, of course I’m not sure. But it’s plausible, right?”

  Wes stares down at his hands, bewilderment written all over his face. “Feed, replay montage.”

  We’ve gathered all of the clips so they play in sync. Blaise’s death. Jace’s dead victim walking into our campsite. Stella’s death. Gordon is there each time.

  “She’s right,” Wes says. “Holy shit, Evalyn is right. How did I miss this before?”

  “Because you didn’t know that someone could be capable of interfering with the illusions of others.”

  It was Gordon all along. Gordon, who had possessed the power of an engineer.

  “It makes perfect sense.” Wes’s eyes dart between me and Casey. “The engineers—we were attempting to figure out what was going on, because we knew neither Blaise nor Stella were supposed to die. Gordon must have taken control of Stella’s and Blaise’s illusions after they were already activated . . .”

  “But what about Jace’s?” Piper chimes in. “Her illusion wasn’t active when the girl walked into the campsite.”

  Wes shakes his head. “I don’t know. I know there was a replica of Jace’s keys hidden close to your camp that Jace never found. Maybe . . . maybe Gordon figured out how to activate it. Maybe he was trying to kill her too, but failed.”

  “That’s some serious speculation,” says Maliyah.

  “But it makes sense.” Wes stands and begins to pace. “There was a reason why you could suddenly affect each other’s illusions when you couldn’t in the past. We were attempting to repair the Bots remotely after Stella died, because we had no idea what was going on, and we ended up fucking them up instead.”

  “Which is why I conjured Meghan from Casey’s shovel so easily, and why every illusion after that point could be fluently altered by other criminals.” I take Casey’s hand. “We thought it was because we cared about each other so much.”

  “Well, that didn’t help the situation. All of you created a community and were emotionally affected by the other trigger objects. If you hadn’t, the error would have probably gone completely unnoticed.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, there was another factor affecting those malfunctions, and we couldn’t find it. But it’s so obvious.” His finger shifts from me to the feed screen. “Gordon Ostheim. Somehow he manipulated the illusions, like an engineer.”

  “He sicced them on people.” The Compass Room wasn’t just manually malfunctioning. Someone managed to cause chaos in the place that was supposed to eliminate it.

  “What about the knives? Gordon also cut people with the knives when no one else could.” I remember when he sliced Casey’s face in the cave. And of course, when he killed Tanner. He was the only one able to use knives against human flesh. No one else could.

  “That’s right. The only knives that didn’t dissolve were the ones that Gordon touched,” Piper muses. “Evalyn killed him with a knife that he had already manipulated to use on Tanner.”

  My mind reverts back to the memory, and my stomach twists. At the same time, Wes quips, “Talk about poetic justice.”

  “Wes?”

  “Thinking.” Wes presses his fist to his mouth as he stares at the feed. “The only way he could have done that was if he had an engineer chip.”

  “By accident?” Casey asks.

  Wes and I shake our heads at the same time. Nothing has been an accident.

  “Someone could have switched the chips sometime during distribution . . . an engineer,” Piper suggests.

  “But the question is why,” says Wes.

  Why would someone give the craziest one of us a chip that could kill us all?

  “Wes,” Maliyah says. “Get this information to all the other members of Reprise. We need to do some digging.”

  Post by Ibarrove: Continuation of “Forbidden Desire”

  No one recognized her here. She was sure of it. She had picked up enough Spanish. She could look and sound like everyone else, wear a big sunhat and no one would glance at her twice. This was Mexico, and she could be a local—for the time being, at least.

  He was a different story. He couldn’t slink into the culture and go unnoticed. But it was a risk that Evalyn was willing to risk.

  She ordered two cervesas from the bar. It was dark inside, dark and hot, quite a different from the crisp, sunny weather outside.

  She felt a hand slink around her waist, and then lips to her throat, sultry and demanding, licking the sweat from her skin as the bartender pretended not to watch them. “Not here,” she told Casey. “Not in public.”

  “Don’t be so paranoid.” Lifting her skirt, a hand snuck to her thigh, right there in the bar, with everyone watching. “No one cares about us. We’re safe here.”

  13

  The storm has completely blown over us, leaving a blue sky in its wake. It’s warm enough for the top layer of snow to sparkle as it melts and slides off the tree canopies.

  After a few days of watching spring return, Casey wakes me up early, just as the sun has risen over the mountains in the east. After the initial grumbling, and after we’ve thrown on our layers, we guzzle down coffee and strap on snowshoes, heading outside.

  Everything is crystal—frozen drops, icicles—shimmering pinks and greens and blues in the morning. He takes my mittened hand and guides me up the hill, toward the clearing that I’d learned to manipulate the nanotechnology in.

  He’s getting better at this whole snowshoeing thing—he hasn’t fallen over once. A few times he nearly loses his balance and I lean the other way, keeping him up, and we continue on our way, making zigzagging footprints across the white.

  The sun rises burnt orange, and we stand in the middle of the clearing, sweaty and out of breath. I’m nearly wheezing. He pulls the glove from his hand, presses a finger to my lips, and says, “Listen.”

  I hold my breath, listening for sound. “Birds.” They greet the sun with their voices. “Isn’t it still too cold?”

  He shrugs. “They must know spring is right around the corner.”

  He takes both of my hands, and I lean back and look up at the towering canopies. I don’t see them, but they sing. The fluttering harmonies remind me of being a kid and playing outside. It’s like I haven’t heard birds since then.

  “This is real.” He squeezes my hands. “These woods, these sounds are all real. When I lived at home with my mom—with my parents—I’d use the woods to hide . . .” As his voice trails off, his eyes glass over and he keeps them glued to the brightening canopies above. I watch his lips open and close over and over again as he tries to find the right words. “They would always keep me grounded and remind me that I was just another part of the world. How many people were like me and ducked into nature to feel better?”

  I wrap my arms around his waist. Even with all of our layers, I can feel his warmth.

  “I made a choice that changed my life forever. I’d be locked up and would never be able to run from my problems like I used to. I wouldn’t be able to climb a tree and wait there until I stopped feeling so small. I knew that. But what I didn’t know was that they could take my sanctuary and turn it on me.”

  He means the Compass Room. I had never known that Casey felt a connection with the woods as a kid, but I guess that’s not exactly something you think of telling someone unless there’s a reason, like now.

  “I’m trying to trust it again.”

  I think of the woods outside of my house in Pennsylvania, and the fear that clung to me when I woke up here and realized that I was surrounded by wilderness. We were tricked into that fear by a p
rison that merely resembled the woods. But this forest is nothing like the one we nearly died in.

  “Why the woods?”

  I ask Wes this question after we snowshoe back down the hill and everyone is awake. Casey cooks and I start another pot of coffee, setting a steaming cup in front of Wes and waiting anxiously for his response.

  “Total virtual simulations were completely out of the question because your brain wasn’t tricked into believing it was reality. Simulations had to take place in the real world.”

  “Why not an urban landscape, or something else?”

  “We tried. In testing, I mean. We tried all kinds of different settings. With some criminals, it took less than a handful of minutes to read their morality, while others, the setting came into play. Especially you.”

  I nearly choke mid-coffee-slurp. I lower my mug. “Me?”

  “The longer you fought to survive in the wild, the more violent you became.”

  His words trigger the memory of Stella, after she’d become crazed by her time alone in the woods. This place is patiently waiting to peel back the layers of your skin and claw out your insides. This place—a combination of our deepest sins and the dark forest.

  “The lack of civilization changed subjects’ thought processes tremendously.”

  “They wanted to see what we’d do when we had the power to make our own rules?” I question.

  “That sounds about right.” Wes takes another sip of coffee.

  The simple logistics of the Compass Room makes sense. The simulation is a dance of triggers—an object that forces us to remember key aspects of our crime that may not have surfaced during our trial—the way I perceived Nick, for instance. The real relationship Casey had with his father. The created illusion would use that. But regardless of what Wes is saying, it seems like enough without this whole show of the woods.

  “Why would they want to see what would happen when we were outside civilization?”

  “I told you that CRs have a greater purpose than just figuring out if you cretins are good or evil. The question is what that purpose is. And that’s what Reprise is trying to find out.”