by Sarah Harian
“I didn’t think about my future until they put me in handcuffs and shoved me in the back of the cop car.” The wind picks up, and snowflakes lick the window. “But even then, it didn’t occur to me what I was in for. I thought the truth would come out. I watched too many detective shows with Meghan. There had to be a trail that led to what really happened.”
“And if there was?”
“There’s a good possibility that I wouldn’t be liable for killing someone. If people knew the truth, that Nick forced me to be involved, there’d be a chance I’d end up acquitted. But that doesn’t change the fact that everyone else would still be dead.” I shake my head. “It’s strange to think that my involvement in the shooting really affected nothing except for my own damn life.”
“You don’t think the fact that that you survived the shooting changed anyone else’s life?”
I scoff. “How could it have?”
With his finger, he drags my chin away from the window until I’m looking at him. “I don’t think you give yourself enough credit.”
As he leans in, I shut my eyes and force myself to draw a blank so I experience nothing but his lips for a few brief moments. But it’s not enough.
We skip dinner, and he curls up next to me on my bed. I fall asleep in his arms and dream of the Compass Room.
We miss Compass Room launch and accidentally turn ourselves in too late. Escorted into a room by guards, Gemma stands in front of a whirring silver sphere the size a hot air balloon.
“Stop the Compass Room,” she yells. The whirring ceases. Behind her a door with a knob handle appears in the side of the sphere.
“Sorry we’re late,” I mumble bashfully.
Gemma opens the door, beyond her a meadow sparkling with dew drops and surrounded by wispy pine.
“In you go.”
I duck my head and hurry into the Compass Room. The door shuts with a loud boom. I turn, and it’s gone, the meadow endless.
I start to walk, the earth squelching with each step. I realize that this isn’t a meadow but a swamp, except when I draw my boots from the water, crimson drips from them. Something has been left in the grass ahead of me, and I start to run. An arm, severed at the shoulder, tendons like tentacles. And the skin—the skin is inked with brightly colored flowers.
I’m too late.
***
I wake up screaming in Casey’s arms. I guess we’re even now.
***
In the morning, Casey attempts to lighten the mood with a breakfast of omelets and homemade scones. Casey—domestic culinary sensation. I wouldn’t have guessed in a thousand years.
Wes takes his breakfast over by the coffee table, his tech equipment spread out on the surface and illuminated by a high-wattage desk lamp. His tablet records his work and broadcasts it live as a projection in front of him, like a digital magnifying glass.
The chips. Our chips. Two more bits of hardware to be placed inside mine and Casey’s brains.
Casey pushes a plate with an omelet and a scone toward me. “Thank you,” I mutter. He stares at my glass of orange juice. I wonder if he knows what’s in it.
“He’s been working on them for months, but slowly.” Maliyah sips her coffee, and then nods toward Wes. “Now I think he has motivation to finally complete the finishing touches.”
Wes, completely immersed in his work, doesn’t even realize we’re talking about him, or at least doesn’t act like it.
“He was a part of the design team for a lot of the Compass Room elements. All of the engineers were.”
I pick at my scone. Just because he has experience in CR design doesn’t necessarily make me comfortable with something Wes-made inserted into my brain. I have to continuously remind myself that I volunteered for this.
“Stop playing with your food. Eat it,” Casey orders like some overworked parent. I can’t help but smirk. I pop part of the scone into my mouth and it practically melts. Fucking Casey.
After breakfast, I do the dishes as Casey moves to the living room love seat, watching Wes and asking him questions. I join them when I’m finished.
“I was a low-level engineer,” Wes says when I’ve sat down. I’ve caught the middle of their conversation. “I had to guess a lot for myself. But in-house, it wasn’t like my superiors tried hard to hide stuff from us. They couldn’t—not when we were the ones running the Compass Room. I wasn’t immediately told about the backbone of the Compass Rooms’ purpose. Most mid- and lower-level engineers weren’t. But I began picking up on clues.”
“What kind of clues?” I ask.
“Demographics, for one. Take your room for example. It’s like the higher-ups thought, ‘Let’s just scatter these four white kids with six evenly-distributed-but-not-wholly-inclusive minorities.’”
Casey and I glance at each other at the same time, and I can see the gears in his head turning. He’s right.
“When would a politically correct rainbow like that ever happen in reality?”
“So what? Are you saying the way they chose who went into the Compass Rooms was fixed?”
Wes nods. “That’s why the inmates are separated by age. That’s why there is an even amount of criminals for each gender. If they could perfect the ‘evenness’ of the room by throwing one or two trans or queer people in the mix as well, they would. Subject control.”
A bad taste forms in the back of my throat. “Is that the reason you went rogue? Because you uncovered for yourself the real purpose of the Compass Rooms?”
He sighs, finger tracing the rim of his coffee cup. “You know, I wish. I wish I had enough courage to leave because of that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was recruited by Reprise after successfully hacking into their system, as I was ordered to by my superiors at the Division of Judicial Technology. And then Reprise retaliated by recruiting me because they were impressed. That’s when I began putting my feelers out. I was an undercover Reprise operative still working as a CR engineer.”
I shrug. “Why make the switch?”
“Money,” he says. “Money is a great motivator. Wish I had taken initiative back then to figure it out for myself. I’d been working for the division since I was twenty. That’s when I graduated with my PhD. And I had no idea of the real truth. I didn’t even know the truth about you until I began to listen.”
“What about me?”
“That you were innocent.”
“I wasn’t innocent.”
He scoffs. “Not innocent but not liable for your involvement with the shooting. Whatever you want to call it.”
“Wait.” I take a deep breath in attempt to clear my mind, wishing for an extra shot of vodka in my orange juice. “They knew?”
He laughs at this. “They knew? Of course they knew! Your CR may have malfunctioned, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t people who uncovered exactly what was going through your head.” He leans back in his seat. “Gemma being one of them.”
“If Gemma knows that I didn’t conspire with Nick, then why does she want to take me down so badly?”
“You broke her Compass Room! You broke her Compass Room after you killed someone in it, and then when she tried to quiet you with a free pass, you took her to court. That’s why she wants to take you down. It has nothing to do with what happened during the shooting—whether you are innocent or guilty.”
“So placing us back in the CR . . .”
“Strictly revenge.”
I try to swallow, but my throat is dry. All I’m thinking of is Valerie.
“Wes, we can’t fuck this up.”
He nods. “I know.”
***
For the rest of the day, Wes works, and Casey and I help Maliyah and Piper with chores around the house. Outside, the blizzard continues, and I think of the mysterious members of Reprise out there somewhere in the woods, working on their project. Neither Maliyah nor Piper seem concerned though, and I busy myself with dusting and helping Casey stack wood near the fireplace.
Wes sets up this contraption around the couch that kind of reminds me of being at a dentist’s office, except instead of a bright white light shining down on my teeth, an eerie blue light shines on my brain.
I sit completely still, the feed before me illuminating a three dimensional image of my brain. It creeps me the hell out, especially seeing the chip lodged within it, like a bullet sunken deep within my gray matter.
Piper snaps on her latex gloves as Wes carefully loads the pressurized syringe with the chip. It’s the same process as when I was being prepped for the Compass Room.
I stare at my brain on the wall, the hardware nestled inside my head. Soon, there will be two. Two chips impossible to remove.
“Are you ready?” Piper asks.
I grind my teeth together before saying, “Let’s do this.”
Casey’s paled considerably since I’ve sat down. He kneels before me, taking my hand. “You don’t have to do this. I can go in by myself.”
“I can go in by myself.”
He frowns.
“Together or not at all. That’s your motto, remember?”
“Drop your head forward, please,” Piper asks.
I squeeze Casey’s hand, and do as she says. She sweeps the hair from my neck, presses the device to my head, and with the sound of pressurized air, my skin splits.
“Oww. Fuck. It hurts worse the second time.”
“It’s because you know what to expect.”
“All done!” Piper removes her hands from my neck and I look up, watching on the screen as the chip begins to dig its way into my brain.
Wes picks up his tablet. “If my calculations are correct, then the chip should wind up about half a centimeter away from your other one.”
“If? And what if your calculations aren’t correct?”
Wes shrugs. “I fry your brain.”
“Not funny,” Casey says darkly.
“Don’t worry, lover boy.” Wes’s attention returns to his tablet, and he taps the screen a few times. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Will you be able to read it the same way as my inmate chip, uncovering all of the secrets within the head of Evalyn Ibarra?” I wink.
“Like everything she likes to masturbate to?” he replies without a beat of hesitance.
“Hilarious,” Casey drawls.
Luckily for me, he really does know what he’s doing. My brain doesn’t end up fried, and Casey’s injection goes just as smoothly.
When everything is cleaned up, I sit on the couch and Wes hands me the knife. “We’ll have to try it now.”
“Try what?”
“Controlling the nanotechnology.”
“Try how?”
He paces in front of me. “Normally, the kind of control takes an engineer months to learn.”
“And you think I can master it in a handful of weeks?”
“You’re the perfect candidate.”
“Oh, that’s why! Thanks for clarifying, jackass.”
Piper smirks. “Sarcastic little one, isn’t she?”
“What kind of creative tasks were you performing right before the shooting?” Wes asks me. “What are you working on, even here?”
“Painting?” I say dumbly.
“More than that—describe what painting is.”
It takes a few seconds before what he’s asking finally clicks. “Taking a reality and rendering it.”
“Changing it,” says Wes. “Right. Our engineers with more creative minds always grasped Compass Room control easiest. I think you’ll be able to as well.”
“What about me?” Casey asks.
“What about you, omelet boy?”
Omelet boy? Casey mouths.
“Maybe food is as creative as painting.”
Casey frowns. “That isn’t reassuring.”
“How do we find out if you’re right?” I ask.
Wes shrugs. “Let’s see tomorrow, shall we?”
From RNC News Blog:
New witness evidence proves that the family and boyfriend of Evalyn Ibarra played no part in her disappearance.
Last night, investigators finally released evidence of feed lines between Ibarra and her mother, Clara Ibarra, proving that Evalyn had not contacted her mother in several days.
Clara released a statement earlier this week validating this evidence. “I do not know the whereabouts of my daughter,” she said. “But wherever she is, I hope she’s safe.”
Liam Calaway, Evalyn’s boyfriend, who played a key witness in her shooting trial last year, was at his office in Chicago during the time when police believe she disappeared.
While evidence draws attention to the fact that Hargrove and Ibarra disappeared within a few weeks of each other, there is no solid proof that they are together.
When Calaway was asked if he believed Hargrove kidnapped Ibarra and is holding her hostage, he responded, “Perhaps it is possible, but I don’t know Casey. I don’t know his intentions or what he’s capable of.”
Viewer and reader feedback indicate that the public is more likely to believe that Ibarra found the means of kidnapping Hargrove instead of the other way around. Casey’s mother, Stefanie Hargrove, has yet to comment.
12
I interrupt his teeth brushing.
I’m supposed to be in bed by now, or at least, I already had my time in the bathroom. The back of my neck still aches, a reminder that our little vacation up here in Reprise-land isn’t going to last forever. The storm will end and we will get to work again. We’ll risk our necks to save a friend, and when that time comes, we won’t be in the mood for flirting or teasing or patience.
He spits out the wad of toothpaste in his mouth and looks at me through the mirror.
“I’m done. I’m done playing this game with you.”
His eyebrows furrow.
“That little stint you and I had in the Compass Room, in the cottage before the flood. That’s not going to do it for me. I don’t want to wait anymore. I can’t play games like this, pretending this is our first time, pretending to be coy for the sake of being coy. You’re killing me.”
He turns to me, leaning back. His palms are pressed against the porcelain of the sink, and I make out the veins ribboning his forearms before my attention returns to his face and the dangerous glint in his eyes. This is the Casey I met, the Casey I taunted before he pinned me to the wall back in the lodge. The Casey who likes control. Is he still in control when I demand something like this? Can two people be in control at once?
I remember my conversation with Valerie, about Casey not being able to connect with girls before me, not being able to give himself up because he was screwed up. “Unless,” I begin, my mind reeling. “Unless you don’t want me that close. Unless that one night happened only because we were at the end of our rope and it really was just sex for the sake of sex.”
He pushes himself away from the sink faster than the words leave my mouth, grabbing my shoulders—his standard Casey move—and steering me toward the wall. My breath leaves me as my back collides with it. His mouth is so close to mine that I can taste his toothpaste. “Never. It was never just sex.”
“Why?”
He bares his teeth as he attempts to control himself. “Don’t.”
“You can’t tell me don’t, like I’m not going to get it. Like I’m not going to get you.”
He says my name with just enough loathing to send a shiver down my spine, but not enough to detract me. It’s like the gold flecks in his eyes have caught on fire. I’m on the brink of being burned.
“I know enough of the why.” I arch away from the wall until my breasts are pressed firmly against his chest. I lift my jaw until his lips barely brush mine. “I know you were worried about the demon you think is somewhere inside of you. And you isolated yourself from girls. Why was I different
?”
“Why is it so important that you know?”
The corners of my mouth rise, and I work that wicked streak in me for all it’s worth, fingers grazing the band of his flannel pants, dipping beneath the elastic to find hot, smooth skin.
He doesn’t even blink.
“Because you’re a stubborn bastard, Casey. And I want you to get over it. I want to break you in and understand you like I don’t even understand myself. I want to feel you inside of me so many times that all I have to do is shut my eyes to remember exactly what it’s like to be beneath you. Let me in. Let me have you.”
I can’t comprehend the amount of time that passes between us before his hands leave my shoulders. The tips of his fingers trail over my collarbone, skimming my breasts before he drops them. “Lift your arms.” His words are both surrender and victory. I’m getting what I want, but as much as my last words were an order, they were also my melting point. Our weaknesses and strengths are colliding.
I lift my arms.
He grasps the bottom hem of my shirt and tugs it over my head, throwing it behind him. Shooing the staticky hair from my face, I’m half-distracted as he takes my right arm, straightens it, and pushes it up against the wall.
He’s reading.
He hasn’t seen my tattoo yet. Every time I’ve been in a tank top around him, it’s been dark.
He understands. He remembers. My someone for the end of the world is him. His eyes find mine again and they hold a million questions. Why would I run away and brand myself with something that is ours? Because I was never planning on leaving him forever. And no matter how my future unfolds, no matter what happens to us, our defining moment will be inked to me for the rest of my life.
He kisses my collarbone, tongue leaving a wet trail down my shoulder and to the permanent cursive words on my skin. Every nerve ending inside me sizzles. His hands find my ass and he hoists me up. I wrap my legs around his waist as he carries me out of the bathroom and down the hall.
“I’m topless!”
“Like you care,” he mumbles into my neck. Soon we’re in his room with the door shut, and he throws me onto the bed, crawling on top of me. He is fevered and primal, pinning my arms above my head and asking, “Is this what you want?”
