A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  His fingers slip beneath the hem of my shirt and caress my skin.

  The world wanted Nick and me to be lovers. If we were lovers, then my crime would make much more sense. The illusion is a conjuration of my memory and what the engineers want me to see. This is a test, the true past tucked away in my head. I think of the engineers beneath the ground.

  Let’s screw with her, one must be saying to the other. What they don’t know is that I can screw with them too.

  I keep my mind reverted from any scenario that could kill me, sweat prickling the back of my neck.

  “If past actions speak to true moral character,” Nick’s lips touch my neck in a way that makes me want to vomit, “then what about Gordon?”

  Nick’s hands tighten on my waist. It’s like he’s trying to squeeze my lack of remorse over Gordon’s death from me.

  It’s working.

  His blood on my hands.

  My hatred for him and what he did to Tanner.

  I can’t let this overpower me. My purpose in this room is bigger than this illusion.

  Gordon proved his evil to me when we were in the cave. When he kidnapped Casey and lured me into his lair. When he held a knife to my lips and tried to push it into my mouth. The Compass Room saw his evil then.

  I shut my eyes, painting my alternate reality. I imagine a chain falling from the ceiling of the cave, wrapping around Gordon’s throat. He sinks to his knees, face turning purple as he claws at the links with his fingers. His mouth foams, his eyes bulge from his head.

  This is what should have happened.

  This is what did happen, I force myself to believe.

  I open my eyes as Gordon’s body disintegrates before me, flesh and blood and muscle and bone melting into the earth.

  You are not my sin.

  I step forward, and Nick releases me. Walking to the beautiful girl with glassy eyes, I kneel before her and wipe the blood and brain matter away from her face.

  “And you, love, aren’t my sin either.” I glare up at Nick. “Show me my real crime!” I shout. “Show me Jason!”

  Jason Earhart—dean of the math department. The man I shot.

  Nick raises an eyebrow.

  The ground before me begins to ripple. I stay afloat, like I’m on a water bed. Meghan starts to sink, her arm the last to dip under, wrist flitting back, delicate fingers splaying. As though she is saying good-bye to me for the very last time.

  A man rises up through the dirt before it solidifies beneath him. His eyes are closed, his forehead nothing more than a gaping hole of red and cauliflower matter.

  Despair froths and bubbles inside of me. My mind works through the moments leading up to Jason’s death. The truth—the truth that everyone refused to believe during my trial.

  “Take the first shot. I don’t care who you kill, just kill one of them. And I won’t put a bullet in her head, or in yours.”

  I was a victim. And even if I refused to kill him, he was seated by the door. Someone else would have taken him out.

  It doesn’t excuse what I’ve done. Nothing will.

  “I’m sorry,” I say out loud. “For being so selfish. For thinking that Meghan’s life was more important than yours in the seconds that Nick had me fooled.”

  My throat closes as my heart fills with a dark ache. My eyes fall back to the earth. For once, I don’t want to win this by manipulating my illusion. I want to win with honesty. As much as I miss her, one life isn’t worth more than another. I miss Meghan, but everyone who died that day is missed by someone. We aren’t exchangeable.

  I look up. Nick is gone. Jason is gone.

  I speak my logic out loud.

  “I beat you.”

  I shouldn’t be teasing the dragon, but releasing the words into the air relieves a tightness in my chest, a tightness that’s existed since the shooting.

  I will break you.

  Up ahead, someone tramples through the forest loud and clumsily. I can hear ragged breathing from here. I roll off the bare path and into the brush just in time to see a boy appear.

  He’s out of shape—I can tell by the way he wheezes. But even red-faced, chubby, and terrified, I can tell he has a nice face. Pretty people always make it into the Compass Room, a forum rat once wrote, because people always want to believe that the beautiful are innocent, even when they’re obviously guilty as sin.

  Jackson Bright . . . what a fucking name. Charged with drowning two babies.

  I realize what he’s running from.

  Water rushes down the hill. The roar of the jet mutes Jackson’s holler. It is supernatural, defying the laws of physics, racing to Jackson like a frenzied serpent sloshing over the earth like real water should. It is out to get him, to drown him like he drowned those children. He drops to his knees. “Please!” he screams. Please, what? Have mercy? Give me a second chance? Kill me already?

  I don’t know if Jackson killed those kids. I don’t know if he deserves to live. But I don’t have time to debate his moral compass.

  I’ve only had to take on Valerie’s and Casey’s crimes. I never imagined what it would be like to take on the crimes of others, crimes that were more twisted than those derived from vengeance.

  Holding him down beneath the water. Squeezing the air from him. The life from him.

  I think of Todd, letting my mind fall to the thought of becoming enough of a monster to hold him down and watch the life leave his eyes. The thought of Jackson being evil enough to do something this inexplicably wicked distracts me, and I can’t think clearly enough to control the illusion.

  The roar of the jet thunders. Trunks of the trees crack and groan as the water sweeps by them. The violent tide shrieks the call of death itself. I shut my eyes tight the moment before it washes over him.

  I hear his screams until they’re muffled by water. I duck behind a tree and cover my face with my hands. I can’t watch this. Minutes pass, the water continuing to rumble through the forest. Finally it lets up, but I wait until the last trickles dissipate.

  Emerging from my hiding spot, I turn toward the direction of the water to see Jackson lying on the ground, face blue and bloated. I think of running to him, but I know better. He’s dead.

  These woods have cost me too much time.

  I swallow the bile in the back of my throat and continue up the hill, Jackson’s screams ringing through my head. He died by suffocation, right? He had to. I wonder how the Bot managed to pull that off. How could a Bot manage to drown him when the water was merely an illusion?

  As I walk, I try to tear my thoughts away from what I just witnessed to focus on Valerie.

  What if I can’t find her? What if I do and they’ve already killed her off?

  Cold sweat breaks out across the back of my neck that isn’t from walking. They must know how much I care about her from Compass Room C. Her death would be a worse punishment than prison. They know that.

  “Please,” I pray. I pray to the engineers. I pray to God.

  To anyone who will listen to me.

  I make it to the top of the hill by nightfall. The trees receded about a mile ago, and the hump is crusted with granite. I look out across the valley. Everything is much grander than it should be, much more twisted and gnarled. Even the rock beneath me has hardened in a swirling pattern unlike anything I’ve seen before.

  I gaze across the valley at the adjacent mountains. It’s like my heart refuses to beat again.

  The mountains rise up into little peaks that defy gravity, jagged like broken teeth. Behind them, the sun glows orange, like I’m within walking distance from hell itself.

  I start to cry.

  “Fuck,” I whisper as tears slide down my face. Not even deep breaths can keep the panic away at this point.

  The silence is broken by a scream. I hold my breath and wait for it to sound again. Filled with agony and hopelessness, it breaks the air again, and I nearly answer it with a scream myself.

  Valerie.

  Sliding down the rock, I move as fa
st as my feet will carry me. I slip and fall twice, banging up my knee and skinning the palms of my hands in the process. Blood soaks my pants, but I can’t stop now. I can’t stop until I hear . . .

  Voices.

  Down in the valley, under the eaves of the broad canopies again, there are voices, more than just one. Valerie’s still rings out above the others. “I don’t know what you want.” It’s a deep sob.

  She screams again.

  I sneak forward, pressing myself up against a tree when I near the camp. A girl with jet-black pigtails steps down on Valerie’s bare calf. I can see beneath the girl’s boot that Valerie’s skin has been burned clean off. Pigtails holds a smoldering stick in her hand.

  Rage builds inside of me, but I have to be careful.

  “Scream, little bitch,” she stomps on Valerie’s leg, and Val shrieks.

  “Maybe you should stop,” says a boy who’s on his feet, staring off into the forest. He looks older—maybe in his mid-twenties. Out of panic, I can’t remember his name. His crime isn’t clicking with me either.

  I recognize the girl now as Priscilla Banks, the boyfriend killer. Like Stella, although I doubt she’s as innocent as Stella was.

  The girl cackles. “Oh what? Are you afraid they’ll kill me in front of you? That you’ll get my blood on you? I told you, I don’t give a damn if they want to kill me. All I want is Evalyn.” She steps down on Valerie’s leg again.

  This is a trap for me.

  “You’re fucking insane,” moans Valerie, which grants her a hard kick to the ribs. I wince.

  “I don’t give a damn what you think!”

  “She won’t come,” coughs Valerie. “Not for me. We don’t even like each other.”

  “Liar!” screams Priscilla. She lets the scalding hot tree branch drop, burying the cherry tip of it into Valerie’s stomach.

  Her tortured-filled scream breaks me in two, and I hardly have time to piece myself together again before I’m jumping out from behind the tree with my hands in the air.

  Priscilla is beside herself in glee. The boy stands, the muscles in his arms flexing.

  When Valerie recovers, she croaks, “Dammit, Evalyn.”

  “I’m here,” I say gently, my heart pounding so hard that it threatens to rip straight from my chest. “Let her go.”

  Priscilla steps off of Valerie, and with the bottom of her foot, kicks her hard in the hip so that she rolls toward the edge of the campsite. I can see the damage that the embers did to Valerie’s skin. I can see the gaping hole in her torso, smell the charred flesh.

  The entire room is made up of the same nanotechnology as the knives. The engineers could have stopped this from happening.

  I stop by Valerie, staring down at her, mentally formulating in my head how to bandage her up. How to fix her to the best of my ability. I remember the CR contract, I memorized it before I went into the room the first time. There was also the continuous use of it being brought up during the trial. Injuries were bound to happen in the Compass Room, but there is no distinct mention of life threatening ones.

  “Don’t you dare,” says Priscilla. “Get away from her.” She waves her fiery stick toward the tree to her left.

  Defying her, I slowly squat next to Valerie.

  “What did I say?”

  My saliva grows thick in my mouth as I study the burn wound. The bitch seared straight to her muscle. “You won’t hurt me,” I say too confidently. I slide my backpack off of me and dive through the contents until I find the first aid kit. I’m about to unzip it before the bright hot ember of the stick is an inch away from my nose.

  “Watch me,” Priscilla says.

  I am over this detour.

  I make a move and rip the stick from Priscilla’s hands, jumping to my feet and whipping the hot end toward her. She squeals and stumbles back, tripping over a root and landing on her ass.

  It’s enough to get the boy she’s with to tackle me. He slams me up against the nearest tree and slaps me hard in the face.

  Valerie yells again. My eyes sting and tear, and when I refocus, I finally realize who he is. Mitch Gretin.

  “Master of the organized crime,” I say out loud, and laugh. “Where’s your kitty, Mitch?”

  Mitch was some underling of a gang in charge of an operation to release all of the cats from a New York zoo simultaneously. It was supposed to gain the attention of the head zookeeper, who owed them money. They ended up killing four people. Mitch was the one who was caught.

  He smiles viciously, leaning in so close to my face that he’s about a centimeter from kissing me. “I heard you had a mouth on you.”

  “I’m pretty cute too.”

  He pulls me back and slams me against the tree again. The air leaves my lungs, and I choke on nothing.

  “Not that cute,” he says.

  “Tie them both up,” says Priscilla. “I don’t want anyone getting ideas.”

  Keeping my eyes locked on Mitch’s, I say, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you have something that we all want, princess.”

  Priscilla hands Mitch a cord of rope. Must have been in someone’s cabin.

  Mitch places his thick hand on top of my head, shoving me onto my ass.

  “Bring Crane over, I wanna be able to keep an eye on both of them at once.”

  As shitty as this situation is, at least the criminals holding us hostage are dumber than a bag of bricks.

  When Mitch is done tying me up, he stomps to Valerie, grabs her by her hair, and drags her over. Her hands grip his wrist tightly as she thrashes, and I think of the burns on her back, and the dirt now embedded into her wounds. Mitch flings her next to me. She’s sweaty and red in the face, eyes glazed like she’s about to lose consciousness.

  “Stay with me,” I beg.

  I listen to her wheeze as Mitch ties the knot tight around us. It would be easy to slip out of it if it weren’t for the three of these bastards watching us like hawks. The rope is a supply. I can tell that it isn’t made from the nanotechnology.

  But the tree is. I can shrink it when they aren’t looking.

  “They’re doing this on purpose,” Valerie slurs.

  “I know.”

  “I mean the engineers. Letting them torture me like this. We’re free game as far as they’re concerned.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek until my mouth floods with a metallic taste. I know she’s right. They want us dead, and if that means dying by the hand of another inmate with a fiery stick, then so be it.

  “Are you alright?” I choose to say.

  “I can’t feel anything right now,” she whispers. “But that doesn’t matter. Why the fuck are you here, Evalyn? Why did you give yourself up?”

  “Don’t say anything more,” I hiss, afraid she’s going to say something about Casey next. Neither she nor I can say anything that will give away the purpose of this operation. “Just trust me.”

  I swallow as Priscilla heats up her stick again. Night hasn’t even fallen yet. Day one isn’t complete, but we were already supposed to be at the wall.

  This isn’t how I’m going out.

  “All you have to worry about is keeping yourself breathing,” I say, feigning confidence to the best of my ability.

  Valerie exhales slowly through her pursed lips. A trickle of sweat races down her neck.

  “Funny,” says Priscilla, cocking her head at the sky and smiling. “Funny how they’re not doing shit to stop this, ain’t it? Threats of death and moral arrows and all that crap.” She saunters over to us, raising the hot stick so it’s less than an inch from the hollow of my throat. I have a bad feeling that if I shift my body at all, she’ll burn me.

  Her smile morphs into a Cheshire cat grin. “Nah. They just want you dead really, really badly.”

  She shoves her hand forward.

  I shriek.

  The pain is bright and white hot. I can feel it all of the way through me, like the fire has eaten to my spine. When she pulls away, I can’t coax my lun
gs to expand. I choke on the stench of my own burning flesh.

  I tilt my head up at the sky. We all do it. All the criminals in the Compass Room. It is to mock the engineers or pray to the engineers, to try and uncover what they’ll do next. I do it because this is the only way that I can breathe, staring at the sky, at those unearthly thunderheads laced with angelic feathery white.

  Reimagine what you want to control.

  My eyes flutter shut.

  The stick is being used as a weapon against me when it shouldn’t be able to. How do I take control of something when it’s already acting out of its element?

  Priscilla attacks my stomach, and I’m not prepared. This time, I’m caught too vulnerable to even scream. My entire body clenches up like it’s trying to repel the fire taking off layer upon layer of my skin.

  “If you burn them too deep, they won’t feel anything,” says Mitch.

  “Shut up,” Priscilla growls. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “What are you doing?” Valerie croaks.

  Something snaps behind Priscilla’s eyes. An awareness, like her desire to torture lessens just a little, and she sees the light again.

  “I need to know how to do it.”

  I run my tongue along the cracked skin of my lips. “Do what?”

  “Beat the system.” A fevered glint rests in her eyes. I’ve seen that same look before. In Gordon, Nick, Salem. Reminiscent of evil, but I can’t place its purpose—what that look is trying to get from me.

  “Get out of here.”

  The pain is returning, searing like she’s still pressing the embers against me. It’s almost impossible to concentrate.

  “I don’t understand what you want.”

  She pushes the stick toward me again. “Don’t play stupid!”

  “I can’t change the system for you. I don’t have some magical power just because I’ve been in here before.”

  She squats down so she’s eye level with me, that wicked glint in her eye growing. “That’s not what I’m talking about, shithead.” She smacks me so hard on the temple that my eyes feel like they’re rolling around freely in their sockets.

  “It isn’t a secret that you know how this system works better than anyone. You beat it once!”

  “They can hear you,” I utter. “Everything that’s coming out of your mouth. Now they know that you want to escape the system unfairly. They’ll stop you.”