A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  Leaves crunch beneath my feet as I step through the forest, toward the noise of wood chopping. Still buried deep within the trees, I watch him closely. His jeans are slung low and every time he lifts the axe above his head, his thermal rises to reveal his scar-marred torso.

  I want to drown in him.

  He looks so normal. I could slink away now. I could slink away now and send a feed to Maliyah and Valerie and beg them to forget that I’ve come back from the dead.

  He stiffens. He knows I’m watching.

  His face goes still when his eyes catch mine. Dropping the axe, he walks around his stump, sits on it, and stares at me.

  This reaction, I wasn’t expecting. So cold, so calculated. Like he can’t trust that I’m really here.

  Twigs and dry grass and leaves snap beneath my feet. The earth has never been so loud. Crumpling his hands into fists, he presses them to his stomach and leans forward.

  We’re at a standstill.

  I want to run to him, to jump into his arms, but it’s not yet right for this moment.

  The screen door slams, and Piper cries, “Evalyn?”

  She’s broken the moment.

  Suddenly there is so much grief and confusion and shock in Casey’s expression. Because if Piper can see me, that means I’m not a vicious figment of Casey’s imagination. He isn’t going crazy.

  A tear trickles down his cheek. I can’t begin to pick up the pieces of him, because he still has yet to collapse.

  He falls onto his knees in the dirt. When I reach him, he wraps his arms around my thighs and presses his forehead to my hip. I’ve heard him cry before. I’ve heard him cry more times in the past year than some people hear their partners cry in a lifetime.

  But not like this.

  I steady myself on his shoulders as he releases the sobs into my jeans. My hands make fists around his flannel. Maybe I’m keeping him steady, maybe I’m keeping myself sane, because if I let go at all, I’ll never return. I’ll be an emotional mess for the rest of eternity.

  “I’ve been so wicked to you.” As I speak, tears trickle past my lips and into his hair. “Destroying you over and over.” I drop to him and he consumes me. My mouth finds his and when I taste him, the light of the universe fizzles out and pretends that neither of us are here.

  That is the way it must stay.

  ***

  “You’re distant,” says Maliyah.

  It takes a ridiculous amount of willpower to tear myself away from the living room window. She stands next to me, and we’re both leaning against the kitchen counter.

  I don’t refocus on her. Instead, I stare at the black liquid steaming inside the cup in my hands.

  “Casey’s waiting for you. He keeps glancing inside.”

  That’s right. I was supposed to grab coffee and return to him and Valerie on the porch. And now they’re both staring through the window, waiting for me as they lean against the railing. He says something to her. She responds with a weak smile and a wince as she shifts her body.

  She’s still healing.

  “I’m stalling,” I say.

  “I figured.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “I don’t want to press you even though I’m dying to.”

  I nod. “I’ve been trying to figure out the right words for the promise you need to make me.” I finally have the courage to look at her. She frowns. “I need you to promise that what I’m about to tell you stays between you and necessary members of Reprise. The public can’t find out. Valerie and Casey—they can’t find out because it would destroy them. I don’t want to cause anyone unnecessary pain until we know for certain.”

  Eager intrigue dances across her eyes. “Yes. Of course.”

  “I saw something.”

  I can tell she’s trying not to freak out. She ceases gnawing on her bottom lip to say, “Go on.”

  “When I passed through the Vault, I must have absorbed bits of information. A video feed of some sort.”

  “A video feed from the Compass Room?”

  I shake my head. “Not the Compass Room.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The Vault processes information in a mysterious way that can’t be used as evidence, right?”

  “Yes,” she agrees. “That’s why its information is so untouchable.”

  And why the sins of the CR engineers stay buried deep within the earth. Literally.

  “Even what I saw is confusing. But the weeks I had alone in the mountains . . .” Breaking my stream of thought, I sigh. This is it. “The logic behind how they kill people in the Compass Rooms is impossible to follow. Why would engineers choose to kill inmates in such brutal, horrifying ways?”

  “It’s part of the system,” says Maliyah. “That’s how Wes explained it to me. Living inmates need to see the gruesome deaths in order for their vulnerability to be revealed.”

  “But we saw many things that weren’t real. People rose from the dead in that Compass Room. But it wasn’t real. Why would engineers create such a gory mess if they could simply allude to it? Simply create an illusion of it?”

  Keeping her eyes trained on me, Maliyah sets her cup on the counter. “What are you saying?”

  “The only information I retrieved from the Vault were fragments of experiments. Experiments conducted on inmates who should have been killed by the Bots.”

  Maliyah sags with the weight of the news, pressing her hands flat against the marble. “Are you . . . are you saying that they’re still alive?”

  When I return my gaze to Valerie is when I break. I wish I didn’t. I’ve been carefully planning these words for weeks. All I want to do is release them, not struggle with them behind a mask of tears.

  “I don’t think so.” I suck in a breath, biting down on my sob before saying. “I hope to God they’re not alive.”

  “They were tortured. Evalyn?” She grasps my shoulders in the same way Casey does when he’s trying to get my attention. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Not just tortured.” I shake my head rapidly. “Emotionally bled to death.” I gain my ground enough to formulate my thoughts, even though I can’t stop crying. “Which makes sense, right? Why kill off your prime subjects in an experiment? Why not make the world believe they’re dead so you can have the freedom to kill them as slowly as possible, documenting every second? It’s the perfect crime. The evidence—the research—all documented within a device that makes the information unattainable to anyone without a chip. I’ve seen it, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove anything.”

  “It’s okay.” She pulls me into a hug, and I collapse.

  “It’s not okay. It will never be okay.”

  “You’ve done an amazing thing—something unfathomably heroic. This is only the first step to exposing them.” She pulls away from me. “You know that, right?”

  “Please,” I beg. “You can’t say anything. Especially to Valerie. The truth . . .”

  “Will destroy her,” Maliyah finishes. “Evalyn? Look at me.”

  When I do, I am overwhelmed by peace. An assurance. It gives me the courage to tell her the rest of the news. “The Bots were Wes’s babies. He had to have known that they weren’t lethal, right?” I think of the horrible ways that some of us were killed inside of the Compass Room. Erity—Stella. “Where is he?”

  The color drains from Maliyah’s face as she comprehends my words. Has Wes been lying to her the entire time? “He left after returning Valerie.”

  “Something isn’t adding up.”

  “I’ll see if I can track him down. It has to be a misunderstanding.”

  “I hope so.”

  A calmness crosses her face. She nods toward the window. “Let me handle this. It isn’t your problem. Nothing is.” And then again, she tells me, “Go.”

  ***

  Our future here is blanketed by the unknown.

  On the porch, the three of us sit at the rickety wrought iron patio table. I scrape off the rust on my chair with my fingernail as the sun begins to
set. I can’t see it—the sun. Not tonight. Dense, black clouds hover across the sky, weightless. The light tried with all of its might to break through, but the muteness is impenetrable.

  To my right sits Casey. He holds my hand, our arms swinging gently back and forth between our chairs. His eyes are still rimmed with red. Piper completed the surgery on his hip weeks ago. He’s healed fine.

  I was absent for all of it.

  My time with Job still contains fibers of reality, but my day in the Compass Room with Valerie is nothing more than a dream. The only way I hang onto the truth of what we experienced is through her body, the stretched and angry patches of skin that now mar her flesh. My burns and stab wounds—even my cracked ribs—are nothing compared to them.

  “New tattoos,” she says calmly, the wind toying with her grown out hair—still short, but now a dull, dirty blonde instead of the platinum. She traces a pattern across her jacket, on top of the scars beneath. “Nothing is different. I grow old and my skin fills up.”

  “Someone should write fan-fiction on that statement,” I say.

  “A threesome.”

  “Of course.”

  “Will Casey’s penis still be massive?”

  Against all odds, my gorgeous boy manages to put aside his exhaustion to chuckle and blush all at once. “I read that one.”

  “Of course you did,” says Valerie.

  “Filthy.”

  I imagine myself in third person. “Evalyn Ibarra is attracted to brave warriors with battle scars.”

  Valerie snorts before snapping into seriousness, a seriousness I was hoping she’s avoid for the sake of my sanity. “Let’s talk about the real warrior, here. Evalyn, what was the Vault like?”

  I already have the lie formulated in my head, and it escapes me naturally. “All I can remember is code.”

  “Code?” she asks.

  “Numbers, letters, symbols. It must mean something, obviously. Wes will go over what I remember and see if he can make sense of anything.”

  Casey’s hazel eyes find mine as Valerie asks, “So nothing substantial, then? Nothing solid? Shit, girl. You almost died for code.”

  “I almost died for code,” I say, never leaving Casey’s eyes.

  He knows I’m lying. But he doesn’t say anything. He may know I’m not telling the truth, but he doesn’t know the reason behind the lie. Something tells me he trusts that it’s a good secret to keep.

  His eyes break from mine to stare across the valley as the sky darkens, transforming everything to a dull, dismal gray. “How long can we stand to hide here?” he asks.

  “As long as we need to?” says Valerie. “As long as it takes for us to find another path.”

  “Evalyn?” Casey squeezes my hand.

  How long can we stand to hide here? The world has spun off its axis. Gravity has dissipated and we should be dead and ice cold and floating off into space four times over. How do we re-enter our lives again? How can we attempt normality after the epic tumbles that should have destroyed us?

  We can’t. We are society’s sickness. We are a cancer.

  “It doesn’t matter.” A wind picks up, chilling my skin beneath the jacket and supple blankets surrounding me. It is the perfect night to lose myself in a boy, a friend, and a quiet place in the middle of a familiar forest. A forest with a face that continues to return to me.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m home.”

  Both of them seem to be okay with this answer. Valerie hums in approval, and Casey squeezes my hand.

  We’ve left our families. Mom thinks I’m dead. Valerie’s dad and sister think she’s dead. Something tells me we won’t be saying good-bye forever.

  There’s a way to fix this, and it begins with all of those criminals hidden deep within the ground.

  Sarah Harian received her M.F.A. from Fresno State University. She currently lives in the Sierra Nevadas with her husband and their dog and swears she’ll never live anywhere other than the forested mountains—they’re too inspiring. This is the second in the Chaos Theory series, following The Wicked We Have Done.