A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

By who?

  Does it matter?

  Crawling leaves a trail of blood, thick and sticky, my insides betraying my escape, if this is an escape. This could just be an elaborate illusion, fizzling to nothing the moment the Bot stops reading my brain waves, the moment I die.

  I pound on the door with my fist. Again. Again. I reach higher, finding the silver bar. Pushing. The door gives away to another alarm.

  I’m doomed.

  I scream as the pain blinds me and open the door enough to sliver through. Outside looks just like the Compass Room, a forest empty of civilization, brush growing right up to the door.

  I crawl far enough into the brush, far enough to hide, and my body gives out entirely, seizing.

  Blood pours from me. I pretend it’s an illusion until the world wants to fall black.

  I let it.

  21

  At first I think I’m dead.

  I’ve become an apparition, a bodyless ghost moving through walls—endless cavernous tunnels that don’t smell earthly or natural, but sterile. Up ahead there’s a door with a little window, and a machine embedded into the rock. Two men in white lab coats stand in front of a screen. They hold coffee cups. One of them is screwing around on his phone.

  The other is paying attention to the screaming blonde girl on the screen. She’s strapped to a cot with wires running all over her body.

  I know the girl is in the room. My ghost knows everything.

  “What’s she watching now?” phone guy says.

  “Her boyfriend dying.”

  “Still?”

  “Yup.” The scientist slurps his coffee slowly.

  “How much longer? I gotta take the kids home from soccer. Terry’ll kill me if I’m not on time.”

  “I can keep an eye on her.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure, what the hell. It’s overtime, right? Plus, got orders to keep her reel playing until she cracks like an egg.”

  Phone guy chuckles. “If she’s like the others in C it won’t be too long.”

  “You’re right about that.” The scientist tips his cup back.

  On the screen, Stella yanks against her restraints, and her body convulses.

  22

  A man says my name. Don’t move. You aren’t supposed to be awake. I’ll fix yah up, I promise.

  I’ll fix yah up and they’ll never find you.

  More morphine? Here, shut your eyes. Everything will be numb in a bit.

  Everything. Let it take you away.

  23

  The man in the room screams. The scientists watch from the screen—a man and a woman. The woman takes furious notes on her tablet.

  “I guess now he knows how all of those women he raped felt.”

  “I guess . . . ,” says the woman

  “Maybe he’s being raped.”

  The woman stops her note taking. “You don’t know what he’s watching?”

  The man shrugs. “You’re asking me to remember everyone’s reels? I don’t put them together. I don’t really care either.”

  “That’s right, you’re just the surveillance guy.” The woman sounds annoyed.

  Several moments of silence pass between them. The woman looks up.

  “Wouldn’t that be dreadful?”

  “What?”

  “To be raped this way? Trapped in the dark, no way out, losing a part of you over and over.”

  “Fucker deserved it, after what he did. But yeah, I’d die.”

  “Did he?”

  The man and woman glance at the readings to the left, to the steady line that shrieks a single high-pitched note.

  “I think he just did,” he says. “I think he died.”

  “Goddamnit,” she says. “That wasn’t supposed to happen for another few weeks. Call it.”

  The woman turns away and struts down the dark hall.

  “What are you gonna do?” he says.

  “Tell Branam.”

  24

  The man hovers over me, his beard scraggly and gray. I know him from somewhere. Maybe one of my crazy dreams.

  “I know you.”

  “You’ve seen me. You don’t know me.”

  “Where?” My voice roughens the air like sandpaper. I remember. He was one of the hackers.

  “No questions. No questions now. How do you feel?”

  “Death. Like death.”

  “It may seem that way for some time.” Amid the cloudy parts of my vision, he feeds the tube through my arm—a syringe of yellow liquid.

  “You need to rest a little longer.”

  I want to fight him, claw at him.

  I don’t want to go back to sleep! I want to scream. The nightmares . . . if they take me again. If they take me back into that dungeon . . .

  25

  “She keeps asking for Valerie Crane.”

  “Crane?”

  “The girl’s rather resilient.”

  “Well then, break her. If she keeps asking for Valerie Crane, then give her Valerie. When she’s succumbed, then . . . well, you know what to do.”

  “What scenario should I use to kill off Crane?”

  “Be creative . . . no, wait a minute. Have her kill Valerie. Have her kill Valerie in the same way she committed her crime.”

  “For how long?”

  “Don’t. Keep it running all night.”

  “That could . . .”

  “I know exactly what it could do. Keep it running all night.”

  26

  The next time I wake, the man lets me stay awake, but not until I beg him, telling him what I’ve seen.

  My savior’s name is Job. Like the guy in the Bible.

  He looks like he could be that Job too. Nearing eighty, he doesn’t act like he’s some tech genius, more like a mountain man who hasn’t seen civilization in years.

  It takes me several lucid hours for me to realize that he’s a Reprise analyst.

  “Had to turn off the tracker in your chip. Heard chatter that it had been compromised.” He knocks against the wood of his dining table, a small gray slab. “Not as bulletproof as we thought it was. Yer lucky they didn’t kill you when they had the chance. They knew you were up to somethin’ the whole damn time you were inside that machine.”

  I am lucky. I’m goddamn lucky.

  Job won’t tell me where we are. All I have to decipher my location is the inside of this . . . shack. If it’s even a shack. It kind of reminds me of the place I woke up in inside the Compass Room, but luckily, it hasn’t collapsed on me yet.

  The difference between this shack and the one in the Compass Room is that it has all of the amenities for a computer analyst—a feed, several tablets—even one of those cube-looking Bot things that Wes had. Yes, it has all of the amenities for a hacker, and yet it doesn’t have running water.

  He tells me that the Division of Judicial Technology is covering up everything. If I did fry their Vault, they aren’t telling the public. And they’ve gotten better at preventing leaks—Job’s been keeping an eye out. As far as the media is concerned, Compass Room J finished its full cycle without a single problem.

  Job orders me around brazenly, like I’m a grandchild he pretends to hate but who’s secretly his favorite. I’m not allowed to go outside unless I need to use the outhouse. He won’t let me eat anything except for salty venison broth, which is understandable, considering I’m even throwing that up.

  I can’t move. Not allowed to move for another couple of weeks. There are too many spots where he stitched me up himself, and he doesn’t want me ripping open.

  He hunts for his own food like we’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere. And we might very well be. I never learned where Compass Room J was located. We may still be in California, but may be somewhere else. Somewhere more desolate. I don’t even know if we’re near the Compass Room anymore. Every time I ask Job, he tells me to worry about things that are actually important, like getting better.

  “Should be dead,” he says while he’s slicing up his latest kil
l on the rickety kitchen table. “You just lie down for a few days and thank your Lord Jesus that you ain’t. You should be dead.”

  The one thing I do know is that Job was secretly placed by Reprise near the Compass Room in case of a situation like this—if something went wrong. Since I woke five days ago, we’ve been working together to figure out what actually happened to me.

  I must have passed through the hot white center of the Vault in a matter of seconds, which caused my body to go into shock when I landed in the emergency exit tunnel moments later.

  And then had those dreams.

  The only thing that Job knows about the dreams is that they haunted me during the sleep he induced on me while I was healing. He knows nothing else, because I don’t tell him. I think about them every night before I sleep, translating them to the best of my ability.

  I continue to come up with nothing.

  Job had been watching my tracker the entire time I was in the Compass Room. When he found me, he was sure I was a goner.

  “Yer lucky you had such tight control over the nanos,” he said. “If not, the Vault woulda sucked yah right up.”

  I’ve been faced with death too many times to count—way too many times. And yet, when it came for me, when it threatened to wrap its skeleton fingers around my soul, I was not any more prepared for it.

  This world has treated me like shit, but death, in all of its unknown and dark glory, still seems far worse than life.

  Finally, on day eight of lying in Job’s little shack without the sun, full on venison broth and nothing else, he tells me the news.

  “They all think you exploded. Blown up right in the center of the Vault, a million microscopic pieces of carbon.”

  I swish the broth around in my mouth before swallowing. “Who thinks I exploded?”

  “Everyone. The whole world. Only one who knows the truth is yours truly.” He saws into the leg of the deer and it cracks unpleasantly.

  “You and Reprise.”

  He shakes his head rapidly. “Can’t get the word to them. Too risky. The government is lookin’ for news just like that. News indicatin’ you’re still alive. If the message is intercepted—”

  My bowl clatters to the floor, broth spilling all over the rot panels of the floor. “Everyone.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m dead.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I cover my mouth, ready to vomit up the broth again. Not just Mom and Todd and Liam. Not just the media, but everyone. Maliyah and the team back at headquarters.

  Valerie. Casey.

  “How long? How long do we have to wait?”

  Job wipes his hand on his bloody apron and scratches his beard. “Keepin’ an ear out on chatter. When they’re convinced yer gone for good, then we’ll move. Maybe a week. Maybe a couple of months.” He frowns. “Don’t look so upset. They were gonna think you were dead if you actually died, yah know.”

  I wonder about Casey. Where he was when he found out. What he did. How he mourned for me.

  “It ain’t . . . it isn’t that,” I say. “I mean, I know that they would have.”

  “You thinkin’ ’bout that one boy.”

  I nod. “That one boy.”

  Job grunts, stacking flanks of raw, bloody meat on top of each other. “Then think ’bout how happy he’ll be when he finds out you ain’t minced Vault meat.”

  I wince. “You know how many times I left him? I’m the epitome of emotional herpes. Just when you think I’m gone . . .”

  He stares at me blankly, obviously not understanding my joke.

  I sigh. “Forget it.”

  “Yah think he won’t want you ‘cause yah like to flirt with death? Darlin’, he’ll only like you more.”

  I bite on my lip, but do a terrible job at masking my smile.

  “Yer as mysterious as a ghost, yah are. Mysterious and so dangerous the Grim Reaper don’t want nothin’ to do with you. That alone will drive a man wild.”

  I laugh. It’s a laugh that must drive me through the next couple of weeks.

  From RNC News Blog:

  The death toll of Compass Room J has been released.

  Only one prisoner survived the thirty-day simulation. Ryan McCadden, convicted of shooting a college peer, has emerged from the CR as a free man.

  Among those who died are two of America’s most hotly debated criminals, Valerie Crane and Evalyn Ibarra, the only two criminals in Compass Room history to experience the simulation twice. Both gained re-entry after the mishap within Compass Room C and the early extraction, and were promised freedom if they made it through J’s simulation.

  Both women had been executed by the end of day two.

  Gemma Branam will make a statement later this week.

  27

  Five weeks. I am alone with Job for five weeks. He protects me like a sacred treasure. While I’m not allowed to venture out into the woods alone or help him hunt, I pass my time by cleaning his dirty cabin that’s in desperate need of a scrub brush. I patch the leaky roof and wash the linens. When I’m not working, I watch the feed.

  Job was right. The world really does think I’m dead.

  My infiltration of the Vault—the true reason why I would have technically died—has been hidden by the Compass Room engineers.

  The world believes that Evalyn was finally taken down, like she should have been months ago.

  I nearly died. No one would ever learn the truth. There would be no possibility of redemption for me.

  Is redemption really necessary?

  My redemption is so interlaced with revenge that its execution would almost be too sweet. Death-by-chocolate sweet.

  The only other option is for me to go out like a candle. At least, I think it is. But I soon find out that I’m wrong, because there’s some sick kind of swampy middle ground that exists. I come to terms with this when I realize what I had “dreamt” during the month of my recovery.

  I think about mentioning this on the day of my initiation into Job’s lifestyle, my first time helping him with gutting an animal. He allows me outside to do so, the deer hung on a post near the cabin.

  “Why do you think Gemma’s lying to the public about me and Valerie, instead of letting the media know that we—or at least she—has escaped? What if we come back?”

  “I think she’s willin’ to risk it,” he says. “You escape her for the third time and she’ll have government agents watchin’ her like a hawk. It’s better just to say you’re dead and hope you’ll stay that way.”

  “You think I destroyed the Vault?”

  He shrugs. “They still ain’t sayin’ nothin’ on the news. We might never find out.”

  All of that data . . . gone. I don’t know if it will help or hinder Reprise. But I’m aware of the sick sense of victory it gives me, knowing that precious data could be unusable to further the technology.

  I slice the animal’s skin apart, right down the belly, but this is all that I can handle. A couple of years ago, if asked, I would have been down for an opportunity like this, joking and faux gagging the entire time.

  You gotta try everything once, right?

  Now, the image of the guts tumbling from the deer like spaghetti is too much, and I have to step away as saliva floods my mouth. I press the back of my hand to my nose.

  A conversation with Casey arises in my mind. I thought you would have become numb to tragedy by now.

  It doesn’t seem that way. Every step toward darkness is a crack in my emotional wall. I should become number. Stronger. But it’s as though my growth is unraveling.

  “Can’t stomach it?” Job asks.

  “I can’t stomach anything.”

  Or maybe it’s a sign from the universe that I shouldn’t be outside, because when I walk back into the shack, Job’s feed is beeping with a message. I run back out and scream for him to answer.

  It’s Maliyah.

  “It’s alright, girl,” Job says before he hits the accept button. “I thin
k it’s time for you to be in the picture.”

  I’m surprised when Maliyah’s expression doesn’t waver for a fraction of a section when she sees me on the other side of the feed. “I knew it,” she says flatly. “I knew it, and that’s why I called today.”

  “Hi,” I say awkwardly.

  She crosses her arms and purses her lips, studying me, like she’s still trying to figure out if I’m real or not. Very flatly, she says, “So how’s mountain life treating you?”

  “Been living it since I moved out on my own. Nothing’s changed.”

  “And how’s being dead treating you?”

  My lip twitches. “I’m tired of it.”

  “But afraid to come back to the land of the living?”

  I study my nails like the stakes really aren’t that high. “Yeah, kind of.”

  When Valerie pops into the picture, my eyes immediately begin to well up. She smirks. “Good to see you too.”

  “Where’s Casey?” I say immediately.

  “Want me to grab him?”

  “No,” I quickly say. “Not yet. Don’t tell him.” I take a deep breath to calm the ache, the desire to see his face. “I don’t want him to know until I’m home.”

  ***

  I’m familiar with the passing over the border ritual. I do not know how the hackers do it. I should ask, I should question. I should be concerned that I drink a potion that knocks me out and magically transports me to Canada.

  But I don’t.

  I have to force myself to trust. I have to force myself to be okay with it. And that’s alright. I need to begin trusting more often.

  I’m woken up in the back of a rusty old pickup truck. Like usual, it takes me about an hour to come through, and Job is patient with me the whole time, slowly coaxing me back to life. We’re in the middle of a forest, him and me. I recognize it as being the one right outside of the safe house.

  “You approach him alone, darlin’,” says Job when we near the lodge. “Just you. I’ll wait here.”

  I can only nod, because my insides are filled with so many raw nerve endings—it’s like I’m passing through the Vault again.