A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  “The shooting wasn’t the butterfly’s wings, Evalyn.” Piper speaks as though she can’t believe I haven’t figured it out yet. “While tragic, the United States is perfectly equipped to handle shootings and stop their ripple effect. They’re a part of life—expected. You, on the other hand—the world didn’t really know what to do with you. How could a perfectly normal human being be involved in such a horrible crime? Nick created a blip of chaos that resulted in a significantly different outcome than any other shooting.”

  “What do you mean, a different outcome? Everyone died and I got thrown in the Compass Room. Seems pretty standard to me.”

  “But you weren’t just thrown into the Compass Room, now were you? Without you in that room, Gordon would have killed off everyone, and he would have escaped. Engineers would have never known the cause of the glitch. If you had never been involved in the shooting, Casey and Valerie would be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  I feel like she’s trying to justify my crime, and I’m about to argue before she cuts me off.

  “I’m not saying that what happened wasn’t horrible. And I’m certainly not trying to tell you that it was a good thing you were involved in the shooting. I’m simply pointing out the cause and effect to everything, and while Nick was trying to reign havoc with his choice to use you, he created a few silver linings along the way. You created them.”

  “I’m not a savior.” I shake my head. “I’m not Reprise’s savior.”

  “You’re not a total monster either.” She cracks a smile. “Trust me, I’d be the one to know.”

  Turning back to the wall, I take a few steps back to soak in all of Nick’s ramblings—pages upon pages of the retelling of his sorry excuse for a life. His dissection of specific moments where he attempted to uncover the source of what fucked him up. He must have driven himself insane. No person could emerge from that kind of self-reflection unchanged.

  I think back to the moment when my life shifted dramatically. It isn’t when Piper thinks.

  “It wasn’t my part in the shooting that caused all of this.” I think back to the months before. “There was a morning at the end of my junior year, right after Liam’s birthday. Meghan cooked us breakfast and he bought me an easel, I remember thinking that my life was perfect. I let my guard down because I felt invincible, and—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. Even with her blue hair and the way she cocks her hip when she stands, she suddenly looks so much older. “It doesn’t matter what happened or why it did because we can’t change it. All that matters is what you can do now to save Valerie, right?”

  Valerie.

  “She’s going into the CR because of me.”

  “She’s going into the CR because Gemma wants her to burn.” Her eyes light with a rage that looks comical with her delicate features. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Savior or monster or whatever you are, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how you decide to fix this.” Her eyes lose focus, and her mouth drops open. When she snaps to, Piper says, “Sorry. Just got an idea for an awesome fic.”

  I roll my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

  As I trudge up the stairs, she calls, “You can thank me later.”

  I turn back to her, and she beams at me, like she knows deep down that this conversation didn’t go in my ear and out the other. I nod, and she nods.

  Then I make my way up to Casey’s bedroom.

  ***

  I can’t imagine my crime any other way.

  In my head, there are two choices—do what Nick says, or don’t. There’s no re-imagining beyond that point. After accidentally committing suicide two times in a row, I beg Wes to show me something else. The illusion is a concoction of the criminal’s past and what the engineer wants them to see, after all. In the Compass Room, I was shown scenarios with both Nick and Meghan. They can be different.

  But Wes won’t paint the scene differently. The only help he gives me is that he allows Casey into the mock box with me as a sort of moral support, but he isn’t allowed to help me in any way other than with his presence.

  The mock box looks the exact same as yesterday—the same part of the path, the same colorful sunset. We walk side by side through the woods, this time a different direction than before, and when the desk appears Casey backs up and gives me my space. Nick slinks from the shadows. Meghan and the boys magically appear, and just like last time, Nick offers me a gun. I dropped the habit of telling him to go fuck himself, but my mind still reverts to the scenario where I sacrifice my life for the sake of not being a villain. And bam, I’m dead. A green light flashes through the sky and the illusion sphere zips away, but Wes keeps the mock box running.

  “This is stupid,” I grumble, knowing very well that Wes can hear me.

  “You have a unique creative power, having both the criminal and engineer chips. It’s fascinating. The illusion sphere is trying to calculate your levels while simultaneously trying to listen to the way you paint the situation.”

  “My unique creative power isn’t going to matter at all if I accidentally kill myself!”

  His sigh is audible. “How about you let Casey try?”

  Casey and I exchange glances. He’s leaning up against a near tree with his arms crossed.

  “You want me to stay?” I ask.

  He thinks about it for a moment. “Better to make it as realistic as possible, and since you’ll be with me in the Compass Room, it’s better for you to stay.”

  I nod and stretch out my hand. He takes it and we start to walk.

  We veer from the trail and head up a near hill. It’s hard to imagine that the ground beneath us is billions of particles manipulated to appear like dirt. That the warmth of the air and the smell of summer are artificial—conjured by the mock box.

  I point to his shovel that leans up against a near tree. “There.” I drop his hand and take a step back, and the anxiety eating away at me gnaws deeper than when I was being tested. I hate watching the illusion of Casey’s crime.

  We stand at the edge of a clearing shrouded in shadow. Stretching from our feet is chunky gravel, beyond that, a beaten down truck. And beyond that, a shabby, red barn.

  Illusions can be this complex. I remember Stella’s illusion that I had interrupted—the hedges and the house and the fire. All of that was a trick of our minds, and this is the same.

  Quietly, I follow Casey into the barn. Feet scuffing against the dry dirt, I slink to the plank wall and wait in the shadow. This barn isn’t being used to house animals. It’s more of a workshop, with dusty tools and parts lying everywhere. One bare bulb hangs from the ceiling, the dingy yellow light illuminating a slumped figure on the ground. I know who she is just from meeting her only once. Stefanie Hargrove, Casey’s mother.

  I watch Casey move toward her. He stares at her like he knows what she is—an illusion, and nothing more. But his face is still scrunched up, the corners of his mouth pulled down like he’s ready to lose his sanity. His fists are balled so tight that I can see his white knuckles from here.

  “Mom?” he calls softly. “Mom?”

  Dropping to his knees, he turns the body over.

  Her head has been smashed in.

  I force my fist against my mouth to silence my shock. Casey scrambles back, colliding with a work bench. Wrapping his arm around his legs, he shakes his head back and forth.

  When a tear trickles down his cheek, I’m desperate to run to him. It isn’t real, Casey. Don’t be fooled. A sob catches in my throat. Don’t interfere.

  Don’t interfere.

  “What’re you doing in here?” That voice. Casey’s father staggers into the barn, the shovel in his hand. I can smell him from here—he smells like a bar at three a.m. on a Saturday.

  Casey opens his mouth, but no words escape him. He pushes himself back on his palms, cowering beneath the bench. Like he’s eight again. A baby.

  His father juts his chin out, nodding toward his dead, mutilated wife. “She wouldn’t
shut her fucking mouth. You know what happens when you don’t shut your fucking mouth.”

  He’s a goddamn stereotype.

  I blink and he’s hunched down by Casey, dragging him by his feet beneath the yellow light.

  By his dead mother.

  “Please.”

  Casey’s father raises the shovel above his head. No. I scream his name and his eyes flicker to mine before the metal head strikes his ribs.

  This is all too familiar.

  Wham.

  And again.

  WHAM.

  Casey gasps a sob, writhing on the ground. How can Wes and Maliyah and Piper do this? How can they allow this to play out and not stop it?

  WHAM.

  “STOP!” I scream.

  His father aims for his skull. Aims to crush. Casey, in the forest, that shovel raised over his head. He had given up.

  He’s giving up now.

  I shut my eyes tight. This isn’t a concoction of Casey’s past and fears. No. This is mine.

  I allow myself to feel what Casey must be feeling. Constantly afraid of what his father is capable of. Desperate to protect his mother. The anxiety of another broken bone, another cut.

  His father created chaos simply because he had the power to, but now the power is in my hands. I can make anything happen.

  My fingers shift to claws. I imagine the feeling of warm flesh between my hands. A thick, meaty neck. I imagine what it would feel to break one.

  Crack.

  My eyes flutter open. His father’s head hangs at an unnatural angle, and he slumps to the ground.

  This is mine, now. All of it. The rage inside of me thrives, visceral and hot. Casey gasps for breath on the ground, and I walk to him, kneeling down. I wrap my arms around him and shut my eyes, imagining the incineration of his past, that everything that screwed him up can burn down and blow away.

  “Ev,” he whispers, tugging on my shirt. I look up.

  The barn turns black, deep embers glowing hot red within the wood. And then it begins to flake away. Soon, we’re consumed by a whirlwind of ash before it evaporates into thin air, and we are back in the woods.

  Casey relaxes and collapses beneath me, wheezing on each inhale.

  “You okay? You hurt?” I feel around his ribs.

  He winces. “Not too bad.”

  “Remember, I lessened the impact of the blows,” Wes says in my ear.

  “How nice of you,” I snarl. I force myself to breathe slowly. This isn’t Wes’s fault. I demanded to have them use me as part of the Compass Room infiltration. This is just part of the training process.

  I wipe a tear from beneath Casey’s eye.

  “I’m weak.” With glazed eyes, he stares up at the tree canopies above us. “I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do. All I could think about was him.”

  I brush the hair from his eyes. I want to tell him that I know. That when surrounded by the illusion of the moment that defined me, it’s hard to stay focused on what I need to do. But Wes distracts me.

  “Do you remember what you did, Evalyn?”

  I relive my thought process. The way I broke his father’s neck had become such a real thing in my mind, like I had actually done it. And then the barn burning down . . . “An engineer uses his mind to play God. Anything is on the table.”

  “Anything,” Wes repeats.

  I think I understand now.

  ***

  In the modified Compass Room, I watch the night where Casey kills his father. He comes home to their rickety shack of a house to see his mother with a new black eye, his father sitting at the table with a plate of processed noodles and ground beef in front of him. And a beer.

  Each time, his father takes a sip of his beer, grimaces, and says, “You put something in this, didn’t you?”

  I’m expecting Casey to be the one to speak up, but instead, it’s Stefanie. “No,” she mumbles, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

  Casey’s dad stands up so quickly that he knocks his chair over. Holding the empty beer bottle in one hand, he stomps over to Stefanie and grabs her hair, flinging her against a tree. He breaks the bottle against the trunk and slowly begins to slice her up.

  Stefanie’s screams are full of agony, and every time, it is too much for Casey. Every time, he tackles the illusion of his father, and his father pins him down and makes to drive the broken bottle through Casey’s face. Wes always has to stop the illusion.

  “Jesus, you kids have active imaginations,” he says after our last try for the day.

  Dinner is solemn. We eat in silence, and for once, Maliyah makes the meal. The food is good, but she’s not nearly the cook that Casey is. Casey’s too busy in his head to eat, chin propped up in his upturned palm as he glares at his untouched food. I guzzle three vodka tonics with dinner.

  Wes theorizes what’s wrong. “As an engineer, I’m not emotionally attached to your crime, so it’s quite easy for me to control the illusion through reimagining what’s going to happen. I think the two of you have already reimagined these moments of your life so obsessively that your own thoughts are getting in the way.”

  I think he’s right. With me, I’ve obsessed over what would have happened if I defied Nick. And with Casey, he imagines a world where he didn’t kill his dad and if his dad had ended up hurting his mother and Casey.

  “You’re both stuck in the rut of reimagining your crime. And when you do that, you end up tricking the Bot into killing you. Casey can’t imagine anything other than his mother dying, so he loses control of the illusion. Both of you need to knock it off already, okay?” Flustered, Wes leaves the table, and I down the rest of my drink.

  Later that night, I sit on the couch alone, drunkenly thinking of all of the ways this mission could kill either Casey or me if we can’t get our act together. Even with the help of the engineer chip, we aren’t safe from being murdered by the Bots in the Compass Room. Not if we can’t force our minds to reimagine illusions without something in the scene killing us. The stakes are too high, the game too dangerous, and the worry in my gut festers like a sickness. I need to get my mind off of it.

  I slip into the bathroom when Casey’s in the shower. I watch his blurry body behind the steam before he wipes away the door and looks at me. “You gonna sit there and spy on me, or you gonna join me?”

  “Am I allowed to this time?”

  He smirks and opens the door for me, and I strip, leaving my clothes in a pile on the tiled floor.

  After I douse myself in hot water, he holds me between the wall and his slick body, pressing his forehead to mine. His eyes are hungry fire, burning right through my train of thought. Finally, a few words stumble from my mouth. “What Wes said . . .”

  He silences me with a kiss, his tongue sweeping across mine before he mutters against my lips, “Not in here. We don’t talk business in the shower.”

  I arch into him, feeling the ridges of his scars against my abdomen. “What do we do in the shower then?”

  He grips my ass and lifts me up, and I wrap my arms around his neck, legs around his waist. He guides me onto him and groans, and I revel in the feeling of him buried inside of me before gasping, “I’m really glad they fixed your hip.”

  Wickedness flashes across his features, and as if to prove how uninjured he is, he holds me in place and bucks his hips.

  My head rolls back as I lose myself to him.

  ***

  In the morning, I wake up to an empty bed. The sky is clear, and I listen to the water stream off the roof and slap against the ground. Winter is melting.

  I guzzle water and brush my teeth in the bathroom, and then make my way down to the kitchen, stopping suddenly in surprise. Casey has lined up all of the liquor bottles on the counter. He motions me into the kitchen.

  “A little early for a cocktail party, don’t you think?” I try and joke with him.

  He leans against the counter, his expression remaining flat. “I asked Maliyah if we could dump the bottles, and she said yes.
”

  I frown. “What? Why would she say yes? Why would you want to dump them?”

  Suddenly his hands are on my waist, and he lifts me up and places me on the counter. I realize soon that this isn’t to patronize me. He wants us eye level. He rests his hands on either side of my hips and his eyes meet mine, so intensely serious that he steals the breath from me.

  “I lived with two alcoholics. Dad was the abusive one, and Mom was the escapist. Every time he beat her she’d guzzle from the bottle of bourbon in the pantry. Thought I didn’t see her, but she was sloppy about it. Too hurt to really care.”

  He thinks I’m addicted. My nose stings in embarrassment, and I try to swallow the lump in my throat so I can speak. So I can defend myself. “I haven’t . . . I haven’t been drinking that much.”

  He nods. “I know you haven’t. Not lately. You’ve tapered off a ton since you first arrived up here. Yes, I know. I’ve been watching. I mean, Jesus Ev, the first week you’d polish off half a bottle a night.”

  “But you said yourself I’m getting better!” My voice sounds childish and so unlike me. Am I panicking? Do I really need the booze that bad? I glance away from him and to the bottles lining the sink, my mind drifting to the usual screwdriver I have with breakfast.

  Fuck.

  I try to shake myself out of it, but he takes my face between his palms and steadies me. “We are rescuing Valerie in a month. We’re already screwing up, Ev. We’re already behind on learning how to control the illusions. We have to be on the top of our game for the next four weeks in order to pull this off. Pour it down the drain for her. Pour it down the drain for Valerie.”

  I feel the vibration of the tears dancing on the brim of my lower eyelids.

  “And for me. And for yourself. Especially for yourself. There’s no reason to be drowning in liquor anymore. You have something to live for again, remember?”

  I nod, and a tear trickles down my cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” His voice is definitive, a knife cutting the space between him and me. “Don’t apologize to me. We do what we have to do to deal, right? It’s no one’s fault. I’m just here to help.” He squeezes my leg. “So tell me what I can do to help you fix this.”