A Vault of Sins

by Sarah Harian

  I press my lips to his cheek. “Not the drain.”

  ***

  We burn through the snow.

  Bottle after bottle we empty in swirls and splatters, creating a mosaic of amber shapes across the melting ice. Every now and again I get the urge to take a swig from the open bottle in my hand, but Casey’s watching me closely.

  But it shouldn’t matter that he is watching. He’s right. I need to do this for myself.

  I know that quitting drinking isn’t going to be as easy as creating booze art in the snow. I know that in a handful of hours, I’m most likely going to regret this decision with every fiber of my being. I might even hate Casey for it. There’s no hopping in the car and driving to the store to get more. No matter how miserable I feel, it is over, and I must move on.

  Casey uncorks the last bottle—a cheap pinot noir. “Do the honors, ma’am.” He hands it to me.

  I take it, studying the bottle, the unfamiliar label. I remember what Piper told me a couple of nights ago as pages of Nick’s journal were illuminated across the wall.

  It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.

  I shake the bottle out, and crimson sinks into the snow.

  ***

  It is my nineteenth attempt at trying to control my illusion. Meghan whimpers at the desk, the boys stand around me in a semi-circle, and Nick hands me the gun.

  “I don’t care who you kill. Just kill one of them, and I’ll let her live.”

  My mind has been so clouded for the past five days, revolting in the absence of liquor. I didn’t think it would be this bad. Casey has had a constant eye on me, cuddling me through the insomnia, constantly handing me glasses of water throughout the day, as if he knows when I’ve broken out into a cold sweat.

  You don’t realize how addicted you are until you suddenly don’t have what you need.

  And right now I need three fingers on the rocks. Before I realize it, my mind is slipping again, reimagining what I have been for the past nineteen times. I am defying Nick, and Nick’s gunman will put a bullet in the back of my head.

  Nick sighs. “I really didn’t want to kill you, Evalyn.”

  No.

  He glances past me to the boy holding the gun to my head, and nods.

  Bang.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  It’s me pulling the trigger, and I can’t stop. Not even when my cartridge is empty.

  Click. Click. Click.

  The crimson beneath Nick’s body crawls across the dirt and seeps into the ground. His eyes are wide—lifeless and horrified, the whites stained red. Beneath snot and tears, Meghan gasps, her eyes darting from Nick to me, and I am filled with unbound, unapologetic joy for half a second before the simulation shuts down with a flash of green light, and I realize what I’ve done.

  I drop to my knees, and I begin to sob.

  It is exhaustion, withdrawal, and the fact that I just shot a man. Regardless of how evil he was, I felt fucking giddy. It is the fact that I have failed my twentieth attempt, and Valerie enters Compass Room J in seventeen days. It is wondering whether or not it would have been better if we all had died.

  “Don’t touch her, Casey,” I hear Wes say in my earpiece. “Just leave her alone.”

  I hold my hands in front of me and watch them tremble, balling them into fists when they refuse to remain still. I wait for instruction.

  “Don’t ever fucking do that again.” Wes sounds scared.

  “Am I showing immoral levels?” If I let the illusion show something that could incriminate me, the Bot could still finish me off in the Compass Room. I think back to the second of sheer joy after shooting the illusion of Nick.

  “Evalyn . . .”

  “Answer the goddamn question.”

  He doesn’t. I wait in silence and can practically feel Casey hovering behind me, wanting to pounce on me and wrap me in his arms, but he never gets the chance.

  “Get up,” Wes orders through the earpiece.

  I’m too tired to think to do anything other than obey his commands.

  “Back up, Casey,” Wes nearly growls. The desk materializes again.

  “I can’t,” I whisper.

  Nick slinks from the shadows and Meghan and the boys appear out of nowhere again. My scene recreates itself.

  “You can, and you will.”

  Nick drops the gun into my hands. “Kill one of them. I don’t care who, just kill one, and I’ll let Meghan live.”

  “He’s not going to kill you,” Wes says. “Why? Because that’s not what happened. Don’t look at Nick. Don’t even think about Nick. Where’s Meghan?”

  Meghan trembles at the desk. She hiccups a sob.

  “What is she doing, Evalyn? Talk to me.”

  “She’s sitting in the desk.”

  “What is she holding?”

  Holding? “Nothing. She isn’t holding anything.”

  “Wrong. Look again.”

  Beneath the table, Meghan clutches a gun.

  “How does this scenario play out, Evalyn?”

  “Meghan has a gun. Meghan has a gun,” I mutter beneath my breath.

  “What did you just say?” says Nick. His hand shoots up, and he clutches my throat. I grit my teeth, and his nostrils flare. He squeezes.

  She ends you.

  Shots spray through the air, and Nick’s grip loosens. He slumps to the ground in front of me, and I glanced around at the blood-spattered forest, the bodies in black clothing with their limbs splayed.

  Meghan marches in front of the desk and flings the gun into the near brush and then extends her hand to me. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  For a brief moment, I second-guess my reality. Maybe it’s because I’m on the brink of being delusional, but I believe that we did it. I’m alive and Meghan’s alive and we beat this. Spilled blood is where blood should have spilled. The innocent have escaped and Meghan is a hero.

  I try to take her hand, but her skin is ghostly between my fingers. She’s gone.

  “Congratulations, Evalyn,” Wes says.

  My arm remains extended, fingers clutching the air where her hand should be.

  Somehow, this doesn’t feel like a victory.

  From RNC News Blog:

  Gemma Branam, Compass Room creator, addressed the public Friday morning:

  We are aware of the concerns many Americans have regarding the Division of Judicial Technology infringing upon the rights and safety of inmates. This is mostly due to the confusion surrounding the trial of Compass Room C.

  The Division of Judicial Technology stands by their statement that the simulation is virtual, and any speculation regarding malfunctions that kill moral inmates is simply untrue. Our systems are more accurate than ever, and our team remains composed of highly-trained engineers, doctors, and psychologists.

  As we prepare for the launch of Compass Room J, please keep in mind the good of this system—that it allows those deserving to have a second chance.

  Thank you.

  14

  I’ve come to master controlling my illusion.

  It’s become easier the more I separate myself from the idea that there could have only been two outcomes. Wes is right. This is all about imagination. It is taking control of the illusion and setting it down gently, so to speak, so that no one ends up dead.

  Most importantly, I need to manipulate the illusion in a way that doesn’t set off warning bells to the engineers watching me. They need to be convinced that there is nothing strange about the hardware in my head.

  Everything is about focus. It’s about reimagining without letting the dichotomy of kill or be killed get in my way.

  As we train, I try out different scenarios like pairs of shoes. One time, Nick orders me dead, but there are no bullets in the gun. Another time, I get him to use the same language that he did when I was in Compass Room C, when he let me go.

  “You don’t deserve to die like her,” he hisses. “You deserve to wait.”

  The trick is to slip
through the Compass Room like a moral inmate long enough to get to the Vault and get Valerie out without raising serious suspicions. Nothing fancy. I just need to have mastered enough engineer skills to not get myself killed.

  As I succeed at getting the hang of it, Casey fails over and over.

  Every time, he allows his fear to get in the way. His father breaks out into an alcoholic rage, and his mother dies. Stefanie’s throat is slit and Stefanie’s head is beaten in and Stefanie gets a broken bottle to the stomach. Casey is wilting. He insists on continuing to try, but the bags beneath his eyes have become permanent within a week’s time. And I must wake him up from his nightmares countless times throughout each night.

  In the early evening, two weeks before Valerie enters the Compass Room, Stefanie is beaten with a dining room chair as Casey tries to stop it. I am tired of watching him slowly crumble beneath insanity. This isn’t fair.

  As Casey’s father raises the chair over her again, I take control. Right before the chair slams into her body, it shatters into a million pieces. Wood shards skew his father’s body right before the illusion evaporates.

  When they meet my own, Casey’s eyes are filled with both fury and relief.

  “Time to call it a day.” I try to sound hopeful, but my voice is saturated in dejection.

  Maliyah cooks again that night.

  When Casey’s in the shower, Maliyah, Wes, Piper, and I huddle around the coffee table. I try to keep my nerves in check, but I’m on the brink of a panic attack.

  “He can’t go in like this,” I argue beneath my breath. I know Casey’s in the shower, but that doesn’t keep me from being paranoid that he can somehow overhear us. “Not only is he about to go fucking insane from watching his mother die over and over again, but I’m not going to take him on a mission to save Valerie only to have him die on me.”

  “Evalyn’s right.” Piper nods solemnly. “He’s too emotionally invested with what he did and can’t detach himself enough from images of his crime to change the scenario. If he went into the Compass Room now with the engineer chip in his head, he’d end up killing himself.”

  “But he won’t let Evalyn go in alone,” Maliyah argues. “And we can’t force him to stay.”

  I think of him up in the shower, and my mind travels to our shower together. How he held me up like he’d never been injured.

  “Yes we can,” I say.

  I’d be betraying him. Again. I promised him that we’d do everything together from here on out. But I can’t risk his life because of my decision to go back into the Compass Room.

  “Reprise fixed Casey’s hip, yes?”

  The three of them exchange glances, and they all nod.

  “Well then, unfix it.”

  ***

  He doesn’t know I’ve entered the room. I watch as he leans against the windowsill, staring out into nothing but darkness. He wears only a towel wrapped around his waist, droplets of water clinging to his skin. I wait unmoving because I want to watch him for as long as I can until he realizes he isn’t alone, like I’ll be able to see a part of him that he normally wouldn’t let me.

  All I see is defeat.

  “I know you’re there.”

  I release the breath I’ve been holding. “We’re going to take a break. From training, I mean.”

  With his back to me, he says, “We can’t take a break. Two weeks, Ev. All we have is two weeks.”

  “It’s not worth the risk.”

  Breaking his stony stance, he marches to the closet. I wait, listening to the movement of his body as he changes, and when he returns he’s dressed in a T-shirt and sweatpants. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  “You can’t act like you know how I’m handling this—”

  “Casey, look at me.”

  He does, but I can’t see anything other than the dark bags beneath his eyes and the way he looks so much paler than he did a week ago, even though the weather is warming up. He’s trying to close himself off so I can’t see the anguish that has etched its way through him. But I don’t need to see it. I know it’s there.

  “You have been reliving your fears. You haven’t been able to stop your dad from beating you to death or from beating your mom right in front of you. If you don’t have a break, this will destroy you.”

  His features flicker with understanding, but only briefly. He lies down right in the middle of the bed and stretches his limbs out, like he’s going to start making snow angles on top of the duvet. He continues to give me the silent treatment as I sit on the bed next to him.

  “It’s okay, you know. To hurt like that. It’s okay to acknowledge that watching this reimagination of what could have happened rips you to pieces inside. I wish I felt that way.”

  His hand brushes across mine.

  “When I think about the shooting—when I imagine it, I feel only anger and betrayal. I feel like I was the victim. Nick ruined my life above everyone else’s.”

  “You don’t seem that selfish, though,” he says. “Ever since the Compass Room, you’ve been putting others in front of yourself.”

  I squeeze his hand. “Maybe I’m trying to rebalance myself.”

  I lie down next to him, and he turns on his side toward me. “I have to get the hang of the chip, Ev. I need to keep you safe in there.”

  “Then take a break with me,” I offer. “Because this continuous mental torture isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  After seconds of silence between us, he finally nods. He reaches out to me and I curl into him, knowing he’ll never have to see his dad beat Stefanie again.

  ***

  In the four days of not training, my body adjusts miserably to sobriety. I spend most of my time in bed with Casey, exhausted but never able to sleep, haunted my semi-lucid dreams of all the different ways I can reimagine my crime so the Bot doesn’t kill me. I have countless nightmares of Valerie dying. She appears the moment I close my eyes, and when I wake, I realize I’ve been asleep for only minutes. I chug water. I eat white bread. I throw up almost every night. I don’t know if it’s the withdrawal or the nerves.

  Finally, Wes and I make plans to revisit the mock box in the middle of the night. I dress and sneak out of the bedroom without waking Casey, meeting him in the common room before we head out. The night is clear and the air bitter cold. I tuck my chin close to my chest as we hike up to the clearing.

  The preparation is the same. As I push in my earpiece and walk to the middle of the snowy field, Wes retrieves his gear from a nearby shed. The forest swirls around me, the sky a bright blue this time. It’s a hot day in the mock box. I sigh in relief, and remove my jacket and snowshoes.

  “Today is a play day,” he says.

  “That sounds pleasantly misleading.”

  “We won’t be fooling around with manipulating illusions. Instead, you’ll be attempting to control your surroundings.”

  “Like the knife.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Whatever you want,” says Wes. “It is your time to have free reign on this little fake world.”

  “Thanks for the specific directions,” I mumble dryly, and start to walk.

  It is the first time I study the details of the mock box knowing fully well what it is. In the Compass Room, I thought we were in the wilderness. The wilderness surrounded the wall, but the forest we were in was only a replica created through the altering of particles. To think that the trees surrounding me are human made—I can hardly fathom how that’s even possible.

  With the engineer chip, I have become the author of illusion. I am capable of re-imagining whatever aspect of my crime the Bot wishes to throw at me.

  But I am a painter of the world.

  Eyeing the massive pine tree in front of me, I reach upward toward the top of it with my fingers splayed. I stand like that for several minutes as I try and remember what I’d done to change the state of the blade. There’d been a connection between me and the p
articles. I’d felt them.

  I think of my paintings, the way I took something real and turned the image into something that was mine.

  I sense it registering, succumbing to me, and the top of the tree begins to bend. The sound of the groaning wood fills the forest as I force the tree to bow to me. I reach until my muscles ache, my arm begging me to relax. I reach until the bristly top of the pine tree brushes my fingers.

  “Good,” says Wes.

  “So technically, I could make a unicorn appear and fly through the air.” I release the tree and it whips back. I twist it like a cloth, and the bark crunches as it corkscrews.

  “Theoretically, sure,” he says. “Whether the state of the human mind is actually capable of that kind of rendering, I’m incredibly doubtful.”

  Thinking that it would be adorable of me to defy him, I try. Damn, do I try. But the closest I can get is turning the sky into a rainbow spectrum, so I give up on that endeavor and practice things that are going to be useful to me in the Compass Room.

  “Hold on,” Wes says. “Don’t freak out. I’m going to change the landscape.”

  With a loud rumble, suddenly the ground shifts. I gasp as I rise, and instead of standing on a path in a small valley like I was, I am on top of a hill looking over the entirety of the mock box—a small section of woods surrounded by the same titanium wall that circled Compass Room C. It is my platform to work.

  Until morning, I learn how to master my world—most importantly, the ground. My most god-like move is that finally, after hours of practice, I manage to crack the earth into two. The bottomless black stares back at me menacingly.

  “How far does that crevice go down?”

  “Not that far . . . it’s only an optical illusion.”

  “The nanotechnology can’t dig beneath the actual ground.”

  “Right,” he says. “Interestingly enough, the ground beneath the Compass Rooms have been scooped out quite a lot. The bed of nanotechnology is thick under the prison. Just remember that in case you want to . . . I don’t know . . .”

  I will the earth to push itself back together like play dough. “Sink into the ground? Sounds fun.”