A Vault of Sins (19 page)

Posted by DreamsnIllusions:
Can the rumors be true!? EI turning herself in???

Posted by TimtheTheorist:
Don’t believe everything you hear. There hasn’t been any official news release stating that she’s in custody

Posted by Nine Lives:
The CR is launching tomorrow. If it isn’t a hoax, then we have to know by tonight. Won’t we? That’s a tight timeline for rumor to contain any truth.

Posted by Nine Lives:
I retract my previous statement. News blogs are all saying the same thing.

EI’s turned herself in, and she’s entering the CR tomorrow.

Posted by DreamsnIllusions:
OH MY GOD.

Posted by Nine Lives:
She’s in my thoughts, and I wish her the best.

I think we all do.

I wake up to the hard, cold earth.

My mind is fuzzy, but immediately upon gaining consciousness, I know where I am. We’ve rehearsed this verbally a million and one times, but the reality of my return is still volatile. My head rolls to the right, and I lift my hand to see my wristlet snapped securely into place.

I cough and sit up, attempting to keep my world at a standstill.

Sirens sound in the distance. It’s early morning. I begin to shiver.

What am I doing?

I’m making everything okay. I’m saving a friend’s life. I’m uncovering the truth of the Compass Room to reveal to the world. It won’t bring inmates back to life, but it’s the only kind of justice I’m capable of giving them.

That’s what I’m doing, and I’m the only person who can complete this task.

Remember that, Evalyn.

The trampling of footsteps sounds behind me.

Don’t turn around.

“Freeze!” A man hollers. Like I could move in the first place.

I’m shoved onto my face, my hands dragged behind my back.

I turn my head enough to catch a glimpse of a vest with yellow lettering: FBI.

A voice behind me sends a chill down my spine. “Talk about last damn minute,” Gemma Branam spits. “Your contract was about to be null.”

I’m not fighting, but the guy holding me pulls me back and slams me against the ground.

“Should we bring her back to the prison?” one of the agents asks.

“We’re out of time,” says Gemma. “And the media will be hell to deal with. Drug her here.”

Gemma’s cold boot presses against my back. I grit my teeth to hold back my groan.

“Think you’re being clever, don’t you?”

“Damn fucking clever,” I hiss.

“You’ll be finished in the first couple of hours.”

A hard boot connects with my side.

I squeeze my eyes shut and cry out.

Gemma snaps on a pair of gloves. “I feel sorry for you, Evalyn. I really do. I wish you’d finally own up to what you did two years ago. Take responsibility. Be remorseful.”

The chuckle bubbling from my mouth surprises even me. But why not play into the demon persona that everyone wants me to?

“You will see soon,” my voice is thick and gravelly, “just how much I really can own.”

I can own the sins of anyone. Lock them up and hold them within me to make all hell break loose in your Compass Room.

Just you watch, Gemma.

It’s enough for her to grip my neck forcefully. But my eyes are already shut.

She won’t have the satisfaction of watching me drift off to sleep.

The next time I wake, it takes me a good, long while to figure out where I am. My mouth is dry. My brain feels ready to implode in my head. The room is dark. When I’m conscious enough, I throw the itchy blanket from me and sit up, rubbing my eyes.

I’m awake. I blink, staring out the dingy window before me. Nothing but forest. At the foot of my bed is a bag, but its flat and folded up. Empty.

The walls of my room are made with panels of rotten pine. The air smells musty and wet. Finally, I register what is happening—where I am. This isn’t like the room I woke up in with Jace.

My feet touch the ground. Above me is nothing more than a low, leaking ceiling.

I’m alone.

“I’m alone,” I say out loud, and then in the same breath, “Hello?”

Suddenly my duties—my responsibilities—all come swarming back to me in a hectic burst. Enter the Compass Room. Find Valerie. Infiltrate the Vault. Get the fuck out.

“Valerie.” My eyes dart around the room, like she’s suddenly going to appear out of nowhere.

I jump to my feet and shake out my hands, as though that will help me expel the drugs from my body. Running to the door, I throw it open.

Cold, misty air rushes over my body. I step outside.

The sky is gray—not flat like a sheet, but scattered with brooding thunderheads and white, frothy clouds. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, especially not with a heavy mist hanging low to the ground as well. It’s as though the whole forest is desperate to be covered in water. The trees past the clearing are massive, old. So gnarled that they don’t even look like they belong in this world.

I turn around and take a step back, and then another, getting a good look at the place I woke up in. A single-story shack that looks as though it’s been sitting here for a century, moss piling on top of the rickety roof. I glance to my left and my right, and then I turn in a full circle.

There’s no one else here.

“Shit,” I hiss, running back into the shack. Did my team and I really think the Compass Room would start out the same as last time? This room could be revised beyond measure after we majorly fucked up the last one. And one way we fucked it up was making alliances from the get-go.

I can’t keep track of how many times the word
shit
spews from my mouth in a hectic whisper. I shake open the bag and glance inside of it. Nothing. I open the cabinets lining the walls one by one. They’re chock-full of possibly everything I would need to survive in the woods. Canned goods and fire starters, blankets and a tarp. There’s even a boxed-up tent. I open up the cabinet with the tools—or weapons, if I were to think that way.

I pick up a knife and press the tip into my finger as hard as I can. The blade disintegrates.

This time, they’re making me choose what to take and what to leave. How the Compass Room is
supposed
to work is that it doesn’t matter what supplies you have or don’t have. If you are supposed to stay alive, then you will. Of course, I’m knowledgeable enough to disregard the lie that the engineers feed us. I know this is a test, and that the data collected far outweighs any inmate’s safety. I need to be prepared for anything.

I leave the water filter. Last time, we all drank from the streams and the lake with no issue. I do take two full one-liter water bottles though, and the lightest, most calorie-dense food that I can find. Hopefully I’ll be out of here in a handful of hours and won’t need it. I steal a blanket and a tarp, but I leave the tent. The axe is too heavy, but I stuff my pockets with several folding knives. I also take a lighter and a first aid kit.

I pray that Valerie stays where she is, hopefully tucked away in a little shack like me. She has to know that I’m in the room with her. We were exposed to the news the last time we entered the Room.

The moment I think this, the ground begins to shake, and the roof above me cracks. I duck just as a plank from the ceiling crashes down next to me.

The floor splits. I heave the backpack over my head and sprint toward the open door, escaping just as half the roof collapses.

I stumble and fall, scrambling around as the hungry ground swallows the entire disintegrating shack.

With one hand I rub at my eyes as I press the other to my pounding heart. Was that the nanotech, or an illusion? I thought I’d be able to tell the difference, but everything just looks
real
.

Everything is real. This isn’t a dream or a test. I’m back.

I have to follow my own senses. There is no Tanner to feed my theories to. No Casey to argue with. My eyes sting and I think of the feed, recording every uneven breath, every tear. I need to find Valerie before shit gets too out of hand. All directions look equally ominous. In fact, they all look identical.

She could be anywhere in this room. This room could be as big as last time, or not. It could be bigger.

I decide to go right, into the thick forest, through the huge fairy-tale trees.

Into the dark.

I am in control. I pick myself off of the ground, pull the straps of my backpack tight, and begin to walk.

***

For hours, I walk to the sound of nothing but my own footsteps. Once in a while, a chill runs down my body that I can’t counter, filling me with terror. This is nothing like Compass Room C. This place is silent and uneventful. From the moment I woke up in Compass Room C, I was around inmates. I always had companions. I always had someone to talk to.

“You’re okay, Evalyn,” I say out loud to myself. I wonder if any engineers are listening. I do something I haven’t done in a long while. I begin to sing.

It’s a really stupid song—something Meghan and I used to sing out loud when we were in our PJs on a Saturday night with nothing to do other than get drunk and listen to really terrible top twenty hits.

Baby it’s a feelin’

That’s nothin’ more than dreamin’

God, it was a horrendous song. Todd could write something better.

The snap of a twig sounds to my right. I jerk my head in that direction, staring at nothing but the dark overgrowth between the gnarled, twisted trees.

You and me,

And eternity. . . .

I look forward again, my entire body turning to ice.

He appears only seconds after I spot the desk. Before me, in his bomber jacket and jeans, stands Nick. His arms are dropped into a V in front of him, and in his clasped hands, he holds a gun. This gun became my burden.

He is unmoving—statuesque like a picture, a hologram.

I blink and he is ten feet closer. The gun is in my hand and Nick is suddenly behind me, breathing down my neck. His movements remind me of my nightmares, nonsensical and ghostly. I’m trapped as he holds me against him like a lover. My stomach convulses.

His words are ice and fire all at once. “You did this.”

The noise of terror fills the air—nails on a chalkboard, violin strings gone wrong. The off-key screech shatters every one of my nerves like glass.

Meghan and Gordon lie on the ground, corpses disfigured with the wounds they died by. Their eyes are like marbles, glassy and clouded.

“No,” I croak.

“You did this. You did this to both of them.”

Control it
.

Meghan still bleeds. Crimson crawls across the ground toward me and Nick. Nick, who touches me in a way so unlike him. Demanding, yet soft and intimate.

“So it would be possible that Evalyn was having an affair with Nick?”

“Objection, your honor! Total speculation!”

The thought had already been planted into the minds of the jury. Evalyn was spending more time with Meghan in order to fuck her boyfriend.

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?