The Wicked We Have Done (5 page)

“Let me get this straight.” Casey massages his temples. “Erity found a knife out in the woods that was hers, and then stabbed you with it?”

“She was sacrificing Jace’s soul to the deity we saw. She was trying to gain power, maybe to escape the Compass Room,” I say.

“Great explanation, except for the fact that Erity’s deity doesn’t exist.”

“Do you have a better explanation for what we saw?” I snap.

Of course he doesn’t.

“How did she die?” Jace asks.

“Erity?”

She nods.

Casey and I exchange glances, and I return to my work.

“Don’t worry about it right now. Relax and let Evalyn clean you up,” Casey says.

I head to the lake and soak the underwear, wiping her clean for a final time. I rip off the least dingy part of her old T-shirt and use it to make a bandage. When I’m finished, I say, “All done. Try not to move your arm.”

“I don’t know if I can move anything,” she croaks.

“Jace, do you know if you saw anyone else make it out of the house?” I think of Tanner and wonder if I should even care about him.

“I was with Valerie and Erity,” Jace says. “That’s all I know.”

“Damn.” Casey gets up and walks toward the lake.

Jace breaks. A sob racks her body and I hold her down to keep her from moving too much, shushing her. She bites her lip.

“I wanted to die.” She sputters a cough. “For so long. I don’t want to anymore. I finally don’t want to and now it’s inevitable.”

I squeeze her arms. “Don’t say that. You know not everyone is going to die in here.”

She gives me a look that tells me she knows I’m only trying to make her feel better. The CR statistics are dooming for all of us. Some of the beta tests didn’t even harbor survivors.

It’s hard to imagine Jace hating life so much that she tried to take out a family in the process of taking out herself. I remember the video from the train—the decisions the court struggled with. Jace was drunk when she hit that family, but she was clinically depressed too.

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?” she croaks.

“Why did you want to die?”

Not the most appropriate question since I’ve only known the girl for a day, but we don’t have all the time in the world.

Beneath the snot and tears, she doesn’t appear offended.

Her head rolls to the side. “Life is so strange. I grew up numb and not a single person worried about me. It wasn’t until I felt alive that anyone started to care.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was a middle-class B student. My parents are together. People told me I was pretty. No one takes depression in pretty girls seriously. They think it’s angst, or a cry for attention. They think it’s ‘boy problems.’” She remains transfixed on the lake. “It was never boy problems.”

“Then I hit my low. I drove drunk and killed that family. When I came to in the hospital, I saw what death really was like.”

“It’s not pretty.”

“It wasn’t for that family,” she replies. “I’m sure it can be beautiful: the plane we pass into. But I’m not ready for it.”

My body flushes with heat. “I’m not either.”

“You ever been in love?” she asks me next.

I bite my lip hard and gaze at the mountains adjacent to us.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”

“Sure. I’ve been in love.”

“Were you in love when everything went to shit in your life?”

“I was.”

“He leave you?”

I part my lips, but no sound escapes me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s okay.”

“I would have liked to fall in love before I died. I would have liked to know how it felt.”

“Don’t romanticize it. It hurts. Even when things are good.”

She doesn’t say anything, and when the silence starts becoming uncomfortable, I realize she’s asleep.

I try to rest, but every time I see Erity ripping to pieces. My sentence here isn’t even close to being over. We have twenty-nine days left in a place that defies the laws of logic—a place filled with legitimate ghosts and gods that aren’t afraid to interact with us. To kill us.

The real mystery is how many days I have left, or who else I am going to have to watch die.

I stand, walking to the shore. Crouching, I splash my face and gulp down freezing water. It tastes like blood.

Maybe Casey’s right. Maybe I’ve died already, and this is hell.

***

Finally clean, Jace sleeps on one of the blankets. Even unconscious, she looks very afraid. My hunger pangs decide to act up. The fridge at the lodge was full of food. I wish I had eaten. I wish I had prepared myself for anything to happen.

Casey sits by the water with his hood up, staring across the lake at the mountain range. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I wonder if he’s praying for forgiveness before his own demon appears.

I leave Jace for a moment to join him. He glances over at me and back to the lake when I sit, then says, “Why did you help her? Is it because you think a proclamation of your decency will earn you points?”

“That’s not—”

“Is that why you went to see if Salem was really dead when you could have been burned alive—to make a show of it? So anyone who is watching us could see that you’re not an awful human being?”

His words are searing, even though they shouldn’t be. I was used to this once. So why is Casey cutting away at my core like I haven’t built up any emotional walls?

“It doesn’t matter what we do in here. It matters what we’re feeling when we do it.” I turn to him. His face is hard, eyes bloodshot. Now, being close to him, is the first time I notice the freckles on his nose. He’d be good-looking if he weren’t so angry all the time.

“Two of us are dead. You think they were killed off solely because of their feelings?” he asks.

“Salem had no remorse for the girl he raped. Erity had a purely selfish motive for killing Jace.” My voice sinks to a bitter note. “So when I die, Casey, you can determine for yourself what was going through my head when they offed me. And
then
you can laugh at my petty attempts to help people. Until then, can you try and not hate me for every single thing that I do?”

His face softens, but it’s too late. I’m up and walking across the beach to Jace, my arms crossed tightly over my chest. But the conversation keeps my mind reeling. Why care about what happens to anyone in here? We’re all adults—adults who’ve done terrible things. We should just have to look out for ourselves at the final moment of our judgment.

However, when Jace wakes, I know I’ll never be able to follow through with my own reasoning.

“You didn’t have to take care of me,” she tells me weakly, “but I don’t know what would have happened if you didn’t. So thank you. Thank you for saving me even though I don’t deserve it.”

“You would have been okay no matter what.”

Her eyebrows scrunch together. “How do you know?”

I lie down next to her. “I don’t know a whole lot about Compass Rooms, but the one thing I do know is the penalty of death isn’t something that’s thrown around in here. You have to prove yourself wicked in order to die.”

“But what if I have already?” Jace questions, worry in her voice.

“Doubt it.” Pieces of the Compass Room’s possible logic fit together in my head. “I think that disintegrating blade was part of this place’s fail-safe.” I touch her shoulder gently. “It doesn’t want you dead. Not yet.”

She relaxes and smiles. “Thank you, Evalyn.”

The twisting horror that’s existed in my gut since the lodge burned down eases up with the gratification of helping Jace, even if it won’t matter in the long run.

She asks me questions all over again—how Erity died, which I try to honestly explain to the best of my ability.

And then the hard one—why they’re making us so miserable.

“They’re trying to scare us, I think,” I conjure up for her. “If the chip is measuring our emotion, maybe they’re trying to make us feel vulnerable.”

Actually, it makes damn good sense. Because of this I want to stay awake. I want to wait for another horror to find us, but it soon becomes impossible.

The next thing I know, I’m shivering so hard it hurts, and I can’t feel my nose.

Dawn is breaking.

Casey lies curled up on one side of Jace, I on the other. Together we’re doing our best keep her warm. My stomach clenches in pain. I sit up and rub at it.

“We need to find food.” Casey watches me from beneath his hood.

“Where?”

“We could go back to the house. Scavenge. I’m sure not everything burned down.”

I shake my head. “The walk is too far. I don’t think I have enough energy to make it, and I doubt Jace does either. I don’t want to leave her alone in the hopes of finding food when there probably isn’t any left untorched.”

He glances at her, and then back to me. “Maybe it’s better if we split. If we’re alone, we don’t have to see any more deaths.”

I swear his bottom lip trembles before he rolls to his other side.

“But I deserve it,” I say.

“Doesn’t mean I want your insides sprayed all over me.”

Point taken.

The air warms, and when the sun is at the highest point in the sky, it bakes us. I keep my sweatshirt on to avoid the burn, but I’m a sauna. Casey leaves for a bit to scout around the lake, and I distract myself by changing Jace’s bandage and making sure her cut isn’t infected.

“On the news they said that people like you do some things because you want to be in control.”

I stiffen. “Do you think that’s why I’m helping you?”

“I don’t think the news knows everything.”

“You shouldn’t trust me so easily.”

Her face is surprisingly blank, heart-shaped lips pulled into a frown. “You’re right,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to.”

I almost expect her to finish with,
so there
.

Casey returns a couple of hours later. No paths leading anywhere else around the lake, no signs of others. No food.

“Maybe we’ve already failed and they’re letting us starve to death,” he says.

We bake, neither of us saying a word. I’m beginning to wonder if I was wrong in thinking our deaths would be triggered by something monumental, like Salem’s and Erity’s. Maybe Casey’s right, and we’ll fry here until we waste away.

Casey and I make one more weak attempt to find food. Rolling up our pants, we wade into the water and scan the crystal surface for fish. It isn’t even like we have any means of catching them, but knowing they are there will at least give us some motive to find a way.

We search until Casey says, “I have a problem with people causing violence for no reason.”

At first, I don’t understand why he of all people is telling me this. But then I realize that this must be an excuse for his initial hatred of me.

“I’ve suffered already for what I’ve done, if it makes you feel any better.”

“Suffered
already
?”

“Will suffer until I die in this miserable place.” I walk forward, the cool water relaxing my muscles, a bed of pebbles massaging my feet.

“So you have no desire to repent at all? No desire to ask for forgiveness or to admit that you fucked up and you want to be a better person?”

I catch a shimmer out of the corner of my eye, but it’s the reflection of the setting sun. Casey has stopped moving forward. He stares at me, waiting for an answer.

“Repentance is a privilege,” I say. “Some people don’t deserve it.”

He pauses, like he’s trying to unravel my logic. “So if you don’t want to repent and you know you’re going to die in here, why are you helping me try to find food?”

This boy is not going to give up. “Jace has a good chance of making it out. You . . . maybe. You kind of act like you have a hero complex. I can see our great justice system finding that redeeming.”

He narrows his eyes at me, like he can’t figure out if I’m feeding him lies or not. Or maybe because he knows that I kind of just insulted him. I smile, a gesture of truce.

He doesn’t smile back. “There are no fish.”

I tread toward the shore. “I guess we can begin waiting for night, then.”

The sun falls and the drastic change in temperature washes through the air, this time colder than last night. It’s impossibly cold for how hot it was during the day, so cold our breath escapes us in white puffs even before the sun has extinguished itself completely below the mountains.

I could gather branches to build a fire since we were given lighters. Boiled pine needles would be more sustenance than nothing at all. But then I think of all of the energy it would take to haul wood, and I forfeit the idea.

“D-don’t worry about me,” Jace says between chattering teeth when Casey and I discuss the best way to keep her warm. “My shoulder isn’t infected. I’m as s-screwed as the two of you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I tell her. “I’ll sleep on one side of you, Casey on the other.”

“Promise you’ll cuddle?” She giggles. She actually giggles. The hunger must be getting to her.

“I think she’s serious,” Casey says. I catch his eye. He’s smiling.

“Both of you are lunatics.” I bury myself beneath the covers and huddle close to Jace.

***

Third day, no food.

The good thing is that Jace’s shoulder is getting better, but now her biggest worry isn’t infection.

She still hurts too much to move around a lot and spends the day cloaked in a blanket, sleeping through the hunger. I wake her up sporadically to feed her water, and when I’m not doing that, Casey and I lie in the shallow water by the shoreline because it’s so damn hot, staring out at the sparkling surface. We don’t speak for hours.

I study my reflection. My cheeks are hollow, my face so thin that my nose—for once in my life—is too big for me. This transformation probably happened when I was in prison.

Once upon a time, I was proud of my looks. My eyebrows were too thick, my nose too long. My eyes were a few shades darker than my skin—the color of boring—but I still owned all of it.

Once upon a time, self-confidence wasn’t a struggle of mine.

When the sun falls, Casey says, “I didn’t think this would be the way I’d die in here.”

I laugh, the movement of my mouth splitting my lips farther. “It’s not funny. I’m sorry.”