A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  “Just like they stopped you, right?” she spits, standing. She holds the ember to my jaw. I can feel the heat radiating, threatening my body. I begin to tremble, showing Priscilla my fear. “How did Gordon stay alive for so long?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  She taps the fire against my jaw; on instinct, I slam my head back into the tree in attempt to get away.

  “Tell me or you’ll wish they’d just take you already!”

  I begin to understand that glint. It is in the eyes of someone who lacks the feeling of guilt entirely.

  I press my lips together, beckoning the silence. She hisses on every exhale like a serpent. Then, when she can no long stand my lack of an answer, she shrieks and rams the entire stick through the top of my thigh.

  I scream until I taste blood.

  Tilting my head back, the sky becomes my savior again. I wait to succumb to numbness. It finds me when Priscilla walks away from the camp to cool down, leaving the stick protruding perpendicular from my leg.

  Closing my eyes, I imagine unreal clouds above me. I make them mine—floating tendrils of water and ice and air. I rip them apart like cotton candy.

  I return to the forest when night is falling, but there is still enough light to see the fissure in the sky. The parting of the water, the welcoming of the twilight.

  The corners of my mouth dare to turn up in awe.

  “What the hell you smiling for?” Mitch barks. He marches over, grips the branch, and pulls it from my leg.

  My eyes roll back to nothing.

  18

  I wake up to pain. Nothing I’ve ever felt before. My body knows it too—knows that it’s never experienced anything like this. It cannot function beneath it. It takes me a solid minute to move my leg a few inches, and when I do, I must bite down hard on my bottom lip to keep from crying out or bringing any attention to myself. The moment I do, I know Priscilla or Mitch will return to me. And who knows what they’ll try.

  I find Valerie’s fingers in the dirt, squeezing them. She returns the pressure. She’s awake. She rests her head against my shoulder, and I feel her breath very faintly against my neck.

  “We gonna die this time?”

  I’m lucid enough to know not to answer her. “How are you feeling?” I ask in the faintest of whispers, looking down at her stomach. Her wound is fiery red—inflamed—her shirt crusted with yellow.

  “Not so hot.”

  Mitch glances over at me. Sees my open eyes.

  “Hang in there,” I say in a full voice.

  “Prisc,” Mitch shouts. “They’re awake.”

  Priscilla comes tromping back from the dark with a meager stack of firewood. “Can’t see anything out there.” Beneath her surface whine rests something darker. Fear, maybe. “We don’t have enough for the fire tonight.”

  They’ll barely have enough to start it back up again. The fire is already dying.

  Mitch grunts. “I’m not made for this,” he says defiantly.

  I’m pretty sure that Valerie said the same thing during our Compass Room. But she still worked during the day. She cooked and stacked wood and helped our group live comfortably. Truth is: we never had a problem with the basic mechanics of survival.

  “You aren’t helping!” Priscilla growls. “You can’t be warm if you don’t help me gather.”

  “I’m not going to waste my time with shit like that,” Mitch says. He picks at his dirty fingernails in the remaining light of the fire. “I’m not here to play Boy Scout.”

  Priscilla groans in frustration. “You’re such a worthless fuck.”

  Mitch jumps to his feet. “Hey, bitch, don’t forget that without me, you wouldn’t have water.”

  Is this how we were supposed to act toward each other in here? Is this what most criminals do? Insult each other while breaking to the elements? It must be. I can see it now—being scared and alone in the dark. We’re vulnerable in the forest. It can bring out the worst in us.

  I had Casey and Jace from the very beginning. And I trusted them, even if Casey hated me from the start. Even though I told him that I didn’t trust him.

  “Maybe they’ll kill each other for us,” Valerie murmurs.

  Mitch swings around. “What was that?”

  I lace my fingers through Valerie’s and squeeze tight. A warning to not piss off the beast. But Mitch is distracted by something near the fire that flutters against the stone. Slowly he walks toward it, stooping to pick it up. It’s a piece of paper—no—a flyer. On the front is a picture of an alligator with an open jaw.

  Wes knew of one key change engineers made to the Compass Room. Trigger objects were no longer stationary. That flyer wasn’t there moments before.

  “What the hell?” Mitch whispers, still glaring at the flyer, as though its purpose will somehow list itself on the back of the brochure.

  Priscilla gasps, jumping to her feet. “Mitch,” she says warily.

  A low snarl. It nearly rumbles the earth behind me.

  Valerie exhales. I feel her quake next to me.

  “Mitch!”

  “What, what?” He cranes his neck. “It’s probably just a bobcat or something.” He turns toward the fire. “Nothing to—”

  His back stiffens and he drops the flyer. He’s finally connected the dots.

  The snarl purrs slowly and dangerously, a million pebbles falling onto a drum.

  “It’s nothing,” Mitch says.

  Priscilla’s eyes widen, and she screams.

  When the beast passes by the tree, its fur tickles my shoulder. Mitch’s test.

  This is Mitch’s test.

  Priscilla doesn’t wait for him, throwing her backpack over her shoulder and taking off into the woods. Mitch stands petrified as the cat completely ignores us and enters the circle of light. A jaguar, ready to pounce.

  “You run and it’ll only chase you,” I say.

  “Shut up!” He’s terrified. It’d be pathetic if his life wasn’t hanging in the balance.

  “You let us go and I’ll make it disappear.”

  He presses his back against a tree at the far end of the campsite. The color has drained from his face, and he trembles. “How?” the word is hardly audible.

  “Promise first.”

  “It’s going to kill me.”

  “Promise!”

  The cat arches its shoulders.

  “Alright!” he screams. “Alright.”

  “What are you doing?” Valerie hisses. “Just let it kill him!”

  I close my eyes. The scenario unravels in my mind like wound thread. There is something more desirable than Mitch on the outskirts of camp. I catch myself wondering what could be more desirable than a human, but then I remember. It doesn’t matter, because the cat isn’t real.

  The scenario doesn’t have to be logical; I just have to imagine it. The cat is distracted by a baby doe.

  It whips its head in my direction, yellow eyes glowing in the dark.

  “Shit,” whispers Valerie.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  It turns around in a full circle until it’s directly facing the two of us, releasing its high-pitched scream like a dying old woman. The cat prepares to pounce.

  “Evalyn!” Valerie cowers as much as she can into my shoulder. I keep my eyes open until the last moment, as it leaps to the right side of us. I hear its paws touch the ground, and the soft pad of them as the cat races off into the dark.

  Mitch is already running away.

  “Hey!” I scream. “Asshole.”

  “What was that?” Valerie’s trying to wriggle away from the ropes, albeit unsuccessfully. She cries out in pain the moment she moves, collapsing against the tree again. Her chest heaves up and down. “Evalyn, what did you—”

  “No.” I glance up toward the sky, trying to communicate that I don’t want to speak any of this out loud. Luckily for me, she gets it, her eyes brightening. Then she nods her head.

  But I may have already blown my cover. Without thinking, I told Mi
tch that I’d make his illusion disappear. Have the engineers caught onto me?

  Whether they have or not, I’m running out of time.

  I finally wrangle myself out of the rope. My leg screams in pain, which is actually nice, considering it distracts me from my other injuries. From the burns.

  Walking is a different story entirely. The second I make to stand on two feet, my leg gives out and my whole body trembles violently, threatening to turn to gelatin. I crawl over to my pack. “Think they gave us painkillers this time around?” I laugh.

  “Not fucking funny,” Valerie moans. She’s lying in the dirt next to the tree.

  When I retrieve our bags and crawl back to her, I yank out one of my water bottles, untwist it, and guzzle half of it down before handing it to Valerie. When she can’t even lift her arm to take the bottle, I finally gauge how much pain she’s in.

  “You’re playing this down,” I say. “How bad are you hurting?”

  “Playing it down? I’m practically screaming every two seconds.”

  “Valerie.”

  She grimaces. “Don’t baby me. You aren’t helping.”

  I sigh, but I don’t argue. I help her drink the rest of the bottle of water I already have open. I try lifting her shirt up, but with the blood and pus, it’s impossible. She hisses when the fabric peels away from the clots.

  “Shit. Stop!”

  “I thought you said not to baby you.”

  She glares in response.

  I open the second bottle of water, very carefully tipping it over. When the trickle hits her wound, she groans behind gritted teeth. I see how deep the burn really is.

  “Oh God,” I whisper, but I’m not quiet enough.

  “What is it?”

  I can’t say anything, because if I open my mouth I might puke everywhere. She shouldn’t be conscious right now. Either that or her adrenaline must still be kicked in. The water glides over nothing but cooked muscle. The edges are inflamed—everything is inflamed—a handful of hours and it might already be infected.

  There’s a second wound on her back, just as bad and encrusted with dirt and sand. She screams into her knees as I wash her, finally loosening up the destroyed shirt to tug it over her head.

  I have to hurry. There’s no telling if Mitch or Priscilla will gain the guts to come back here to retrieve the stuff they left at camp, or come back here for us.

  In the first aid kit I find a laughable amount of antibacterial ointment.

  “Save it,” she murmurs. “I can’t handle you scraping that stuff over me right now.”

  There’s no point in arguing because this amount of ointment won’t do jack-shit for her. The gauze is enough to dress her maybe twice. She tells me to wait on that too.

  “Water first,” she says. “A stream, a lake . . . anything.”

  “We don’t know if one is close by.”

  “Well, then, let’s pray.” It’s the first time Valerie has ever suggested anything spiritual in order to keep us safe.

  I zip up both bags and heave them as gracefully as I can over my shoulders before I help her to her feet. In her bra and jeans, she limps away from camp. I follow her into the woods. “At least that bitch didn’t burn off my tattoos,” she says. It’s supposed to be funny, but it isn’t. Not with the gaping holes in her back, her torso. Clusters of yellow and black and plasma red paint her like tattoos themselves.

  Sweat prickles the back of my neck and my head swims when I think of walking any distance on this leg. I wonder if I’ll pass out before we make it to water. I can’t. I grip the straps of both bags so tightly that my fingernails bite into my palms. Whether she believes it or not, Valerie is here because of me. I have to do everything to protect her, even if that means die trying.

  Fuck the Vault. I need to get her out of here.

  ***

  After a mile or so of insufferable pain, treading in the dark under the most physical agony I’ve ever felt in my life, we come across a creek. Dropping my bag, I hobble along the bank until I find a pool that looks relatively deep. I fall into the water, the relief immediate. I cry out as the freezing cold washes away the fire threaded through my skin.

  Valerie sinks slowly, kneeling in the pool. Her voice cracks in a sob, but she quickly pulls herself together and rests her forehead against the steep bank.

  The ice cold glow of dawn may be more frightening than the night. Day one is gone. What must my team be thinking? I was supposed to be at the wall with her hours ago. Wes is reading the location of my engineer chip—he’ll see that I’m not even close to the edge of it.

  I hope to God they’re keeping Casey in the dark. I’d hate for him to be worrying.

  I wonder how many inmates have died. Three were taken on the first night in our Compass Room. I remember reading a post in the CR Collective about how the first few days of most are bloodbaths.

  Valerie and I sit in the creek in silence. The only thing audible over the rush of the water is her labored breathing. I can’t tell her about the plan in here. I just have to hope that she’ll comply when I ask her to start moving again.

  I had hoped that the water would clean her up and cool her down enough so that her burns would look more manageable, but I’m very disappointed in the progress, because there is none. She lies on a tarp as I sit next to her, both of us in our soaking underwear. I stare at the monstrous gaping hole in her stomach.

  “I’m not that undesirable, am I?” she jokes.

  I shake my head. “Trying to figure out what to do with you.”

  She starts to argue, but she doesn’t have enough strength to fight me when I use all of the antibiotic ointment from both our first aid kits on her. She moans weakly every time I touch her burns, but I need to do it. I’m stingy with the gauze, using just enough to wrap over her once, just enough to hold her over for however long it takes to reach the wall. Then, I tend to myself.

  Applying any pressure at all to my leg sends a trickle of crimson over the flesh of my thigh. I bury my face in my hands for a handful of seconds, giving me a moment to grieve over the situation. I don’t have time for this, not if I want to get out of here alive.

  I leave my leg as is and wrap it, hoping for the best but knowing it’s next to impossible. Infection didn’t exist in the last Compass Room, whether it was because we were lucky or the engineers made it so. Judging by Valerie’s wound, I know that isn’t the case this time around.

  While my burns suck, they’re nothing compared to Valerie’s, so I do my best not to hiss or sigh when wrapping them. Pain and exhaustion ravishing us, we eat a meager amount of cold meat from a can. We need to get moving again.

  “No,” she whispers. My eyes drop to her face, and I follow her gaze across the forest floor, to the shattered porcelain doll.

  The tree branches creak above my head. I know that noise. It’s not from the wind.

  Looking up at the dead swinging above my head, I whimper. “Oh no.”

  Valerie, hardly awake next to me, holds her arms out and flat against the tarp on either side of her. She is pale and sweating, dark circles blotching her eye sockets. She couldn’t be more vulnerable.

  Her crime has found us.

  I try to stay calm. This should be easy. I just need to take control like I have been. I try to clear my head but the pain is too bright.

  She shuts her eyes. “I needed it, Ev. I needed revenge. I was so blinded—I knew I wouldn’t be able to see past what they’d done until they were gone.”

  Against my will, my teeth begin to chatter, my eyes blinded by frustration. I try to reimagine Valerie’s crime, but my fear is getting the best of me.

  “Once upon a time, I let it happen. Did you know that?”

  One of the boys kicks his legs, struggling.

  As numb as I feel, I can’t help the tears. They pour from me like she’s already dead.

  I shake my head.

  “Veda went to a party with her ex. He was such a creep. He had her wrapped around his finger so tightly I
couldn’t pull her off, not even when I told her to not go.

  “She went anyway. She went and she called me crying three hours later because she was wasted and he left her there, but I didn’t pick up.”

  The boys keep kicking. They drift back and forth.

  “I let it happen, Evalyn, but it wasn’t my fault. Once, those distinctions were impossible to make. But I forced myself to make them, because that was the only way I could kill them.”

  I find it. The image of her crime unfolds in my head. The three swinging bodies turn into three empty nooses that unravel before us when I imagine a world where Valerie wouldn’t have felt the need to end their lives. Where Veda could party and not have to worry.

  It’s unorthodox. I’m not reimagining the illusion at hand, but it works. Soon, the nooses evaporate to nothing.

  She begins to hyperventilate. I notice the first rapid movements of her chest. The way her body rises and falls must be ripping apart her forming scabs. I rest my hand against her chest.

  She rolls over and releases a wretched cough. When she opens her hand, it’s covered in yellow phlegm laced in blood.

  “What’s wrong with you?” She can’t be suffering from the inside so quickly. Panic clutches my throat.

  “The illusions may not kill me, but they’re finding other ways to.”

  Brush rustles to my left and I snap to attention, scanning the forest.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re not alone.” I nod to the woman who’s watching us. She’s fair with jet-black hair, disheveled and filthy. A gash decorates her eyebrow, dry blood plastered to the side of her face.

  “Gia.” Valerie whispers.

  “She’s an arsonist.” I remember studying her.

  “Goddamnit.” Valerie’s head falls back. “I’m sick of fire people.”

  I’m sick of any people. If Gia’s at all like Mitch and Priscilla, we’re so fucked. She doesn’t seem threatening—at least, not yet. She approaches us coyly, her eyes big and glued to Valerie’s back, like she’s enthralled with the burns. She licks her lower lip slowly, and her eyes dart to me. “Hi.”