A Vault of Sins (14 page)

“Evalyn. . . .”

“Shh!” I pause the clip and zoom in. There, standing in the shadow of the trees is none other than Gordon, watching the exchange between Blaise and his victim closely.

“Oh my God.”

“What? What is it?” Casey leans forward, like he’s trying to find what I’ve discovered for himself.

Blaise’s victim wasn’t originally violent toward him. Blaise literally dropped to his knees and begged for forgiveness, and his victim let him go. Except two minutes later, his victim returned to him, and shot him.

“I think . . . I think. . . .” Oh God. I don’t know what to think. I hope I’m not right. “What day did Jace’s victim come into camp?”

“I don’t remember. It was the night before Valerie was tested.”

How to find the clip I’m looking for . . . the exact moment.

I scan through the highlights. The time I’m looking for would fall under the clips including both me and Casey. God, there are so many of them. Finally, I find it.

I am painting on Casey, stripping, and then we’re practically grinding on each other half-naked. I press play when he’s on top of me, lips against my neck. I sense him stiffen next to me, so I glance around, realizing that we have company. Piper and Wes sit on the couches, watching the feed.

Casey kicks me gently in the leg. “Uhh . . . Evalyn.”

“They’ve already seen it before. Plus, you look great all turned on with your shirt off.”

He raises an eyebrow and I bite back my grin, turning back to the feed before I miss what I’m looking for.

“There,” I cry, hitting
PAUSE
. Across the creek, Gordon is lurking in the shadows, watching us.

“Is that . . . what the hell,” Casey says. “I
knew
he was around our camp the whole fucking time.”

But it’s more than that. It’s so much more. “I think I know what made our Compass Room glitch in the first place.”

***

“Are you sure about this?” asks Maliyah.

Everyone has gathered in the living room.

“No, no, of course I’m not sure. But it’s plausible, right?”

Wes stares down at his hands, bewilderment written all over his face. “Feed, replay montage.”

We’ve gathered all of the clips so they play in sync. Blaise’s death. Jace’s dead victim walking into our campsite. Stella’s death. Gordon is there each time.

“She’s right,” Wes says. “Holy shit, Evalyn is right. How did I miss this before?”

“Because you didn’t know that someone could be capable of interfering with the illusions of others.”

It was Gordon all along. Gordon, who had possessed the power of an engineer.

“It makes perfect sense.” Wes’s eyes dart between me and Casey. “The engineers—we were attempting to figure out what was going on, because we knew neither Blaise nor Stella were supposed to die. Gordon must have taken control of Stella’s and Blaise’s illusions after they were already activated . . .”

“But what about Jace’s?” Piper chimes in. “Her illusion wasn’t active when the girl walked into the campsite.”

Wes shakes his head. “I don’t know. I know there was a replica of Jace’s keys hidden close to your camp that Jace never found. Maybe . . . maybe Gordon figured out how to activate it. Maybe he was trying to kill her too, but failed.”

“That’s some serious speculation,” says Maliyah.

“But it makes sense.” Wes stands and begins to pace. “There was a reason why you could suddenly affect each other’s illusions when you couldn’t in the past. We were attempting to repair the Bots remotely after Stella died, because we had no idea what was going on, and we ended up fucking them up instead.”

“Which is why I conjured Meghan from Casey’s shovel so easily, and why every illusion after that point could be fluently altered by other criminals.” I take Casey’s hand. “We thought it was because we cared about each other so much.”

“Well, that didn’t help the situation. All of you created a community and were emotionally affected by the other trigger objects. If you hadn’t, the error would have probably gone completely unnoticed.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, there was another factor affecting those malfunctions, and we couldn’t find it. But it’s so obvious.” His finger shifts from me to the feed screen. “Gordon Ostheim. Somehow he manipulated the illusions, like an engineer.”

“He sicced them on people.” The Compass Room wasn’t just manually malfunctioning. Someone managed to cause chaos in the place that was supposed to eliminate it.

“What about the knives? Gordon also cut people with the knives when no one else could.” I remember when he sliced Casey’s face in the cave. And of course, when he killed Tanner. He was the only one able to use knives against human flesh. No one else could.

“That’s right. The only knives that didn’t dissolve were the ones that Gordon touched,” Piper muses. “Evalyn killed him with a knife that he had already manipulated to use on Tanner.”

My mind reverts back to the memory, and my stomach twists. At the same time, Wes quips, “Talk about poetic justice.”

“Wes?”

“Thinking.” Wes presses his fist to his mouth as he stares at the feed. “The only way he could have done that was if he had an engineer chip.”

“By accident?” Casey asks.

Wes and I shake our heads at the same time. Nothing has been an accident.

“Someone could have switched the chips sometime during distribution . . . an engineer,” Piper suggests.

“But the question is why,” says Wes.

Why would someone give the craziest one of us a chip that could kill us all?

“Wes,” Maliyah says. “Get this information to all the other members of Reprise. We need to do some digging.”

Post by Ibarrove:
Continuation of “Forbidden Desire”

No one recognized her here. She was sure of it. She had picked up enough Spanish. She could look and sound like everyone else, wear a big sunhat and no one would glance at her twice. This was Mexico, and she could be a local—for the time being, at least.

He was a different story. He couldn’t slink into the culture and go unnoticed. But it was a risk that Evalyn was willing to risk.

She ordered two cervesas from the bar. It was dark inside, dark and hot, quite a different from the crisp, sunny weather outside.

She felt a hand slink around her waist, and then lips to her throat, sultry and demanding, licking the sweat from her skin as the bartender pretended not to watch them. “Not here,” she told Casey. “Not in public.”

“Don’t be so paranoid.” Lifting her skirt, a hand snuck to her thigh, right there in the bar, with everyone watching. “No one cares about us. We’re safe here.”

The storm has completely blown over us, leaving a blue sky in its wake. It’s warm enough for the top layer of snow to sparkle as it melts and slides off the tree canopies.

After a few days of watching spring return, Casey wakes me up early, just as the sun has risen over the mountains in the east. After the initial grumbling, and after we’ve thrown on our layers, we guzzle down coffee and strap on snowshoes, heading outside.

Everything is crystal—frozen drops, icicles—shimmering pinks and greens and blues in the morning. He takes my mittened hand and guides me up the hill, toward the clearing that I’d learned to manipulate the nanotechnology in.

He’s getting better at this whole snowshoeing thing—he hasn’t fallen over once. A few times he nearly loses his balance and I lean the other way, keeping him up, and we continue on our way, making zigzagging footprints across the white.

The sun rises burnt orange, and we stand in the middle of the clearing, sweaty and out of breath. I’m nearly wheezing. He pulls the glove from his hand, presses a finger to my lips, and says, “Listen.”

I hold my breath, listening for sound. “Birds.” They greet the sun with their voices. “Isn’t it still too cold?”

He shrugs. “They must know spring is right around the corner.”

He takes both of my hands, and I lean back and look up at the towering canopies. I don’t see them, but they sing. The fluttering harmonies remind me of being a kid and playing outside. It’s like I haven’t heard birds since then.

“This is real.” He squeezes my hands. “These woods, these sounds are all real. When I lived at home with my mom—with my parents—I’d use the woods to hide . . .” As his voice trails off, his eyes glass over and he keeps them glued to the brightening canopies above. I watch his lips open and close over and over again as he tries to find the right words. “They would always keep me grounded and remind me that I was just another part of the world. How many people were like me and ducked into nature to feel better?”

I wrap my arms around his waist. Even with all of our layers, I can feel his warmth.

“I made a choice that changed my life forever. I’d be locked up and would never be able to run from my problems like I used to. I wouldn’t be able to climb a tree and wait there until I stopped feeling so small. I
knew
that. But what I didn’t know was that they could take my sanctuary and turn it on me.”

He means the Compass Room. I had never known that Casey felt a connection with the woods as a kid, but I guess that’s not exactly something you think of telling someone unless there’s a reason, like now.

“I’m trying to trust it again.”

I think of the woods outside of my house in Pennsylvania, and the fear that clung to me when I woke up here and realized that I was surrounded by wilderness. We were tricked into that fear by a prison that merely resembled the woods. But this forest is nothing like the one we nearly died in.

“Why the woods?”

I ask Wes this question after we snowshoe back down the hill and everyone is awake. Casey cooks and I start another pot of coffee, setting a steaming cup in front of Wes and waiting anxiously for his response.

“Total virtual simulations were completely out of the question because your brain wasn’t tricked into believing it was reality. Simulations had to take place in the real world.”

“Why not an urban landscape, or something else?”

“We tried. In testing, I mean. We tried all kinds of different settings. With some criminals, it took less than a handful of minutes to read their morality, while others, the setting came into play. Especially you.”

I nearly choke mid-coffee-slurp. I lower my mug. “Me?”

“The longer you fought to survive in the wild, the more violent you became.”

His words trigger the memory of Stella, after she’d become crazed by her time alone in the woods.
This place is patiently waiting to peel back the layers of your skin and claw out your insides.
This place—a combination of our deepest sins and the dark forest.

“The lack of civilization changed subjects’ thought processes tremendously.”

“They wanted to see what we’d do when we had the power to make our own rules?” I question.

“That sounds about right.” Wes takes another sip of coffee.

The simple logistics of the Compass Room makes sense. The simulation is a dance of triggers—an object that forces us to remember key aspects of our crime that may not have surfaced during our trial—the way I perceived Nick, for instance. The real relationship Casey had with his father. The created illusion would use that. But regardless of what Wes is saying, it seems like enough without this whole show of the woods.

“Why would they want to see what would happen when we were outside civilization?”

“I told you that CRs have a greater purpose than just figuring out if you cretins are good or evil. The question is what that purpose is. And that’s what Reprise is trying to find out.”

Reprise believes that the Division of Judicial Technology was collecting data on us—data that required facing our sins in the wild—judgment and amped survival instincts. I take a moment to try and see through the eyes of a high-level engineer, and what they would have seen watching us in the midst of our simulation.

Four of us fell in love way too quickly. Stella went crazy. Gordon got the power trip he always wanted. I became more violent—blood-thirsty even.

I glance to Casey, hard at work over the stove. Casey—from the beginning, when he held me up by my neck and threatened me, to the end—it was like he learned to separate himself from all of that pent up anger.

Then again, I see him in a light that makes me biased.

I turn back to Wes. “So how the hell do I get inside that Vault and find out?”

Wes grins. “We start training today.”

***

Training. Not like training for a marathon. Not like training for a job. Piper was clever in not telling me what the project in the woods was when I asked, probably because she knew I’d freak out.

We have to snowshoe to the construction site. Maliyah, Piper, and Wes lead the way as Casey and I walk behind them. He squeezes my hand, and I wonder if he’s as nauseous as me.

When the trees clear, we walk into a frozen tundra. The land is barren for a mile at least, and on either side of us are a series of vehicles, cabins, and portable shelters.

Reprise.

We can’t be more than a mile away from the base, and it’s insane to think they’ve been here all along in their little snowy community, working in the cold. Handfuls of hackers dressed in arctic gear walk to and from portables. Others snowshoe across the tundra, their gadgets illuminating the snow in bursts of neon blue and green, like they’re taking readings of some sort. The ones who pass us always shoot a smile at me and Casey, their faces red, lips chapped. I’ve never seen these people before in my life, and yet they know exactly who we are. I know that mine and Casey’s journey is somehow already embedded into this mysterious wintery project, even though I have no idea what these people are working on, or what I’m even looking at.

A bearded man walks up to us and shakes Maliyah’s hand. “Is it ready?” she asks.

“Laid it out last night. Thank the heavens it didn’t snow or we’d all be in for a world of pain.”

Maliyah looks back at Casey and me and my throat starts to close, panic building in the pit of my stomach. Call it intuition.

Wes pulls two small black objects from his bag and hands one to both me and Casey. Earpieces. He and Piper both pull on a pair of black gloves. When they wave their hands in front of themselves, a virtual screen appears, showing the same image of what we’re standing on—a white tundra. “This is how I’ll watch you,” says Wes.

“I know this may feel like we’re throwing a lot on you at once,” Maliyah says. “But it’s much easier to learn kinesthetically. Now, who would like to go first?”

I stare at her dumbfounded, and I have a feeling that Casey is doing the same thing, since he isn’t speaking.

Finally, I utter, “Go first in what, exactly?”

Her smile is more of a cringe. “Go first in testing out our little homemade Compass Room.”

***

The Bot isn’t capable of killing me
.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is just a test. A completely non-lethal test.

I walk across the field of snow. Clouds have coated the sky, and the dismal gray is foreboding. I look back right as the wind picks up, tugging my coat tighter around me with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other.

Through my earpiece, I hear Wes’s voice: “Testing.”

“Loud and clear.”

“Don’t be alarmed, no matter what happens. But if you panic, or you need the simulation to stop, code word is piña colada.”

“Can I sing it?”

“Sure, smart ass.”

Casey paces back and forth in the snow, which looks a little ridiculous with his snowshoes strapped on.

“This is just a test,” I say out loud. Kind of for myself, and kind of in the hopes that Wes will re-clarify.

“Just a test,” says Wes. “All lethal aspects of the Bot have been terminated.”

“But it can still beat me up.”

“Technically, although I’ve turned down the violence levels tremendously compared to what they are in the Compass Room.”

I can’t help but guffaw. This feels like a video game.

“Okay. Ready, Evalyn?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The howl of the wind picks up in the distance, and I have to plug my other ear to listen to Wes.

“Look down at your feet,” he says.

I do. My boots are securely snapped into the snowshoes and caked with ice.

“You’re standing on the same nanotechnology used in the Compass Room.”

“Okay,” I respond warily.

“It’s called a mock box, and I’m about to show you why.”

Beneath my snowshoes, the ground transforms. Snow dissolves to dirt and spreads from me in all directions. Trees sprout upward. They don’t grow like trees, but form like the blade—pixelated pieces locking into place. The mock box paints a world of granite boulders and jagged alpine mountains, of a clear sunset sky. Orange burns to purple and blue, casting the warm forest in shadow.

I exhale, fear inside of me revving up like a motor. My mind remembers this place and screams at me to run.

Run
.

“Holy shit,” I whisper.

“I’m right here,” says Wes. “Right here. You okay?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I’m fine.”

“You remember your safe word?”

“Safe word.” My laugh sounds hollow. “I’m guessing this won’t be as kinky as most situations that require safe words.”

“Most definitely not.” There’s no humor in his voice. “Okay, so it used to be that once a trigger object popped up, it remained in its location until the end of the simulation. That was until you manipulated the system by using old trigger objects. Now, their appearance and disappearance is completely dependent upon the engineer.”

“Why did they used to leave the old objects?”

“Laziness. Managing a room is mentally exhausting, which you’ll soon find out. Take off your snowshoes.”

I want to ask more questions to keep him talking and ease the swelling anxiety in my abdomen. I crouch down and unsnap my snowshoes, my legs turning to jelly the second I step out of them. I unbutton my coat and let it fall to the ground. “So I made the engineers have to work harder? Well, that’s at least an accomplishment.”

“Start walking forward.”

“So demanding.” I do as he asks.

“You’ve worked on controlling the nanotech in the knife already, so today, we’re going to focus on controlling illusions.”

I pause amid the sliver of a trail in the darkening forest. “Engineers can do that?”

“The same way they can control the environment. Reimagining the illusion.”

My heartbeat thrums in my throat. “Reimagine the illusion?”

“Remember when Casey’s father appeared, and he chased the two of you and beat him with a shovel? That was the engineers manipulating the illusion to do exactly that.”

“Why?”

“They wanted to see how violently you’d react in order to save him, Evalyn.”

The engineers are capable of rendering illusions to fit the scenario just to see what would happen. I skate through the memory of Wes telling me about the conspiracy. The Compass Room is about collecting data. The scenarios we were put through didn’t just determine whether or not we were moral or evil. They served the division’s agenda in every moment.

I imagine those engineers within their lair beneath the ground, the walls covered in screens like the one Wes is in front of now, watching Casey and I as his father marched down the hill toward us, shovel in hand. Maybe they were reading our levels already and knew I’d do anything to protect Casey, even if it meant killing a man who wasn’t even real. Maybe one engineer whispered to the other, “Let’s see what she does.”

And with a blink of his eyes, he used the chip in his brain to manipulate the illusion to beat the shit out of Casey.

But it made no sense. If engineers could manipulate the illusions, surely they could have saved the people who weren’t supposed to die, like Blaise and Stella.

Right?

I want to ask him, but he distracts me. I’m sidetracked by the object in front of me. The desk blocking the path—the peeling plywood and cracked chair.

I know how this works now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t stop it.

“Relax, Evalyn.”

“You relax,” I say through gritted teeth.

“We’re keeping track of your levels. You’re panicking. There’s no reason to be so frightened.”

I want to scream at him.
No reason to panic?
“Don’t fucking tell me when I can and cannot panic, asshole. You’ve never been in a Compass Room.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry, I’m just trying to calm you down.”

But then Nick appears, and it’s impossible to calm down.

How long has it been since Compass Room C? Seven, eight months? Eight months since I’ve last seen him, in the flesh. Or the illusion of the flesh. He has become a character in my mind, a cartoon, and facing him again seems so wrong. So unnatural.