The Wicked We Have Done (20 page)

“I didn’t call,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh no, no.” She glances to the cross and then back at me. “I was expecting you. Please come in.” As I climb the porch steps, she holds out her hand.

“I . . . Thank you. I’m sorry, I don’t know your—”

“You can call me Stefanie.”

“Stefanie. It’s nice to meet you.”

She takes me inside. The house smells like pine oil and lavender, the kitchen quaint, with blue curtains and a round walnut table. “Would you like anything? Tea, lemonade?”

“No, thank you.”

“I’m sorry if the cross bothered you,” she then says. I furrow my eyebrows in confusion. She continues. “People don’t understand. He broke my family in half.” She talks through the window at the cross like she’s talking to him. “My husband was a terrible man, but I can’t stop loving him.”

“I understand,” I say.

“I felt that you would.” Smiling, she asks, “So, are you ready to see him?”

My face flushes hot. “More than anything.”

She nods over her shoulder. “Down the hall.”

The floorboards creak beneath me, noise of the newscast trickling from the end room. I open the door.

He doesn’t see me at first, propped up in his hospital bed, a pint of ice cream resting in his lap, a large spoon hanging from his mouth. He’s transfixed on the TV and doesn’t notice me for so long that by the time he glances over, tears are already jetting down my cheeks.

Casey Hargrove: Extracted with injuries

The spoon falls from his mouth. I gasp a laugh and wipe my nose. “They didn’t tell me they moved you from the general hospital. I was waiting around in LA before Valerie told me you were here.”

A pause lingers between us. He gapes at me, jaw unhinged slightly.

“Did you need surgery?”

“Evalyn. What the hell are you doing on the other side of the room?”

Running to him, I take his face in my hands and kiss him. I keep my forehead on his when our lips part. “I thought I’d lost you.”

He grins. “Most of me is still here. Bullet missed my vital organs. Shattered my hip, though. Surgery was a bitch.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”

“You have a thing for gimps or something?”

I pull away.

His expression falls soft, serious. “How are
you
?”

Me?

“I’m terrified.” I respond. I know I shouldn’t be. Not right now. Only he should matter. He is alive and breathing in my arms. This—this is a triumph.

And I know that in order to live—to really live—I must work to carry this feeling for the rest of my life.

Two Weeks Later

Home

There are two things that I’m afraid of. I don’t mean the blanket of anxiety I carry from everyone in the world wanting to kill me. I mean real fear, the kind that knots my stomach and keeps me awake for countless hours at night. The first is the thought of someone hurting Casey or Valerie. We are all over the television stations, the public radio, the Internet.
Especially
the Internet. Comments under articles are filled with nothing but torture suggestions and death threats for us. Conspiracy theories also, but those are usually correct. That we conspired together to break the Compass Room, and by doing so, killed an innocent girl.

The other thing that scares the shit out of me is the idea of seeing Liam.

I’ve bought a phone contract with a brand-new number, but somehow Liam ends up with it. Maybe it was Mom who gave the number to him. Maybe she thought she was being helpful.

When I hear his voice over the phone for the first time, it is even. Alien. And yet my breath still catches in my throat, tightening into a painful lump that refuses to let me speak.

“Ev? You there?”

This isn’t like when I heard his voice in prison. I had forced myself to be numb to everything, believing that he wasn’t even real. But those walls I built then are breaking.

“I’m here.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. I sit at the kitchen island at Mom’s house, clutching the edge of the smooth marble so tightly that my knuckles are white.

“I need to see you,” he tells me.

***

I don’t know where it would be appropriate to meet Liam. Any place except for Mom’s house is too public, and home can’t be tainted by anything that will make me feel vulnerable. But I don’t have another choice.

I decide to wait out in the backyard for him. Barefoot, I push myself back and forth on the swing. I remember when Liam and I were still in high school, we used to make out right beneath these swings, his body over mine as the chains creaked above our heads.

The wood gate opens.

He finds me right away, like he knew I’d be here, on this swing.

I stand.

He’s terrified, but somehow in awe too. I walk over slowly, and when I make to hug him, the old Liam comes back. He holds me to his chest, his lips finding my forehead.

“Oh my God, Evalyn. I missed you so much.”

His hands slide to my jaw and tilt me up.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

“The news is saying that you and the two other survivors are building a case against the Compass Room because it malfunctioned.”

“And you believe us?” When he nods, I say, “The rest of the universe thinks we conspired to escape.”

His lips are dangerously close to mine. I know he wants to kiss me. I spent five years learning the language of his eyes.

“I regret ever doubting you. I
know
you, Evalyn. I know you better than anyone alive. I made the mistake of listening to the opinions of people who have no idea who you are. I could have fought harder for you during your trial. I should have.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t screw up. But I won’t do it again, not this time. I’m standing by your side until this is all over. I promise you.” He leans in to kiss me.

“Wait,” I gasp, stepping back.

He frowns in confusion.

I can’t be with someone who doesn’t understand what it’s like to see a person—no matter how guilty they are—get shredded before his eyes. I can’t be with someone who doesn’t understand what it’s like to have so much blood on his hands that he will never be able to wipe away.

And he may say now that leaving me was a mistake, but he still did it. The months ahead will be harder than those that have passed. I don’t think he’s prepared to love me unconditionally like he wants to.

There’s no way of explaining this, let alone explaining that I’ve developed feelings for a murderer whom I’ve known for all of a month.

So I say, “I need a lot of time to find the girl I used to be. I need to
start over
.”

He nods. There is nothing in that statement he can argue.

I’m not lying to him.

But I’m not telling the truth either.

Two Months Later

Washington, DC

When Casey has healed enough to leave home, we’re allowed our debrief.

In a DC conference room, Valerie, Casey, and I sit at one end of the lengthy polished table. At the other end stands Gemma Branam—creator of the Compass Room herself.

She isn’t what I’m expecting. She must be in her sixties, with gray hair to her shoulders and a kind, heart-shaped face.

Two of her underlings sit on either side of her. They all wear business suits.

In the center of the table, hovering feet above the polished oak, is one of the spheres from the Compass Room, called a Bot. Bots are the things that made illusions tangible. They also killed most of us. The Bots hid in many places—underground, in tree canopies, within boulder crevices. The closest Bot to a candidate was activated when that candidate saw his or her trigger object, sparking memories of the crime. The brain activity would determine what kind of illusion a Bot would create.

“Evalyn, please hold out your arm, wrist up,” Gemma says. “I promise it won’t hurt.”

As much as I want to defy her, I’m too curious. When I hold out my arm the Bot floats downward, flashing a red light onto my skin. I feel the trickle of warm liquid.

“Blood,” says Gemma.

Hair tickles my skin, followed by a soft weight. I think of cradling Meghan back in the cave.

“The Bots can project a thousand different senses, and kill in a thousand different ways. Sometimes a simple laser beam does the trick, other times, we need to use more radioactivity to make someone explode.”

She says it so lightly. My stomach twists.

Many kinds of Bots were used in the CR. The mechanical vines and nooses were considered Bots, as well as the tentacle that dragged me beneath the surface of the lake. “Bots also helped us on more complicated illusions when we needed to move you. Couldn’t let you get comfortable for too long.”

Out of nowhere, a wave of water splashes across the table. All three of us jump in our seats, startled.

They flooded the basin. They flooded it to get us out of the cottage, but the water wasn’t even real. Casey and I exchange glances. He’s pale.

“How?” I say. “I still can’t believe that some experiences weren’t real. My pants were wet for hours after the basin was flooded.”

Casey’s father’s blood was caked onto my hands, but I don’t say that out loud.

“Your Bot often communicated with the chip in your brain to make you believe that you saw and felt things that weren’t really there.”

The idea of this
communication
makes me feel all too powerless, even now. Valerie sneers. I think she feels the same.

“If illusions that tested us were triggered by objects, what about illusions that forced us to move around? What were they triggered by?”

Gemma smirks, and I wish there were a way for me to wipe it off of her face. “Don’t think that you were alone the entire time. We were watching you, and specific illusions were my engineers attempting to either physically direct you somewhere or stimulate you emotionally for a more accurate chip reading.”

“You were
watching
us?” Valerie hisses. “When the Compass Room began to malfunction, you did nothing to stop it!”

“Oh, Miss Crane, don’t pretend that you know how this technology works,” Gemma chastises. “The CR system is far more complicated than you will ever, in your wildest dreams, be able to comprehend. The three of you jeopardized your lives and killed a fourth because of your refusal to listen to directions and your pathetic, destructive plan to escape.”

“Three people died because of your malfunction!” Valerie stands, her eyes lit in fury. I kick her beneath the table. The truth is, we aren’t supposed to give away that we thought Gordon’s and Tanner’s deaths were the fault of Compass Room engineers. Our lawyers don’t have enough damning evidence yet, and they don’t want Gemma to have a heads-up that they were planning on looking into those deaths.

My lawyer had found a patent involving dissolving metal that could be manipulated by nanotechnology. The description of its capabilities fit what we saw in the Compass Room perfectly. But we are still waiting for the paper trail to reveal itself, letting us know that this in fact is the technology used in the Compass Room.

If that is the case, than the warning alarm in the midst of the turquoise sky was because that technology had begun to fail when Gordon was able to cut me with a knife a few hours prior, and the engineers were trying to fix it before a candidate attempted to murder someone on top of the other malfunctions. At the very least, our lawyers can argue that we should have been removed from the Compass Room at that moment instead of after everyone had already been slaughtered by mistakes.

But Gemma isn’t fazed by Valerie’s assumption. In fact, she adds more fuel to our fire by admitting Valerie is right. “But two of those deaths were already deemed necessary, and the malfunction didn’t affect the outcome of Tanner’s or Gordon’s survival. Miss Glaser, on the other hand”—she points her finger at Valerie—“was entirely
your
fault.”

“How
dare
you.”

A thought comes to me. “Four deaths.”

Gemma raises an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“You act like the malfunction began when Casey and I made the Bot glitch.” I shake my head. “But you’re wrong. And you know you’re wrong too, if what you said is true. That engineers were watching us.”

Gemma frowns and shakes her head. “Miss Ibarra, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

So this is how the game is going to be played.

“Stella wasn’t supposed to die. I don’t think Blaise was supposed to either, but since I wasn’t with him, I can’t be sure. But I was with Stella. I saw the green light flash. The Bot burned her alive without a correlating illusion. The only thing she did was beg her boyfriend to believe her.
I saw it happen.
”

Gemma blinks and her lips twist into a conventional smile. “I’m afraid you are mistaken. Stella was supposed to die. It’s within our records.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, Evalyn. You are simply not willing to see the truth.” Her voice is soft and musical, making me hate her even more.

“How will you prove it?” It’s the first time Casey has spoken. He’s much calmer than either Valerie or me, but I blame that on the meds. He’s still in a lot of pain from his surgeries. “How will you prove that what you’re saying is true?”

Gemma forces another grin. She clasps her hands in front of her. “Well, because of this horrible debacle caused by the three of you, the Compass Room will be, for the first time, brought into the courtroom and dissected.”

“As it should be,” I say through clenched teeth.

“Then you will see everything, Miss Ibarra. Everything you thought to believe true and everything that actually holds truth. Everyone in that courtroom will see the data containing the dangerous spike your levels made when you killed Gordon in cold blood. They’ll see that it wasn’t just an act of self-defense.” Her shoulders relax. “And then you’ll be sentenced to death.”

Casey finds my hand and squeezes it hard. I think it’s to give me courage, but I no longer need it. Rage feeds by body, my soul. There is no more room for fear.

“And mark my words, I will drag you straight to hell with me.”

Valerie’s dangerous voice follows mine. “Count me in for that party.”