A Vault of Sins (20 page)

As I walk, I try to tear my thoughts away from what I just witnessed to focus on Valerie.

What if I can’t find her? What if I do and they’ve already killed her off?

Cold sweat breaks out across the back of my neck that isn’t from walking. They must know how much I care about her from Compass Room C. Her death would be a worse punishment than prison. They know that.

“Please,” I pray. I pray to the engineers. I pray to God.

To anyone who will listen to me.

I make it to the top of the hill by nightfall. The trees receded about a mile ago, and the hump is crusted with granite. I look out across the valley. Everything is much grander than it should be, much more twisted and gnarled. Even the rock beneath me has hardened in a swirling pattern unlike anything I’ve seen before.

I gaze across the valley at the adjacent mountains. It’s like my heart refuses to beat again.

The mountains rise up into little peaks that defy gravity, jagged like broken teeth. Behind them, the sun glows orange, like I’m within walking distance from hell itself.

I start to cry.

“Fuck,” I whisper as tears slide down my face. Not even deep breaths can keep the panic away at this point.

The silence is broken by a scream. I hold my breath and wait for it to sound again. Filled with agony and hopelessness, it breaks the air again, and I nearly answer it with a scream myself.

Valerie.

Sliding down the rock, I move as fast as my feet will carry me. I slip and fall twice, banging up my knee and skinning the palms of my hands in the process. Blood soaks my pants, but I can’t stop now. I can’t stop until I hear . . .

Voices.

Down in the valley, under the eaves of the broad canopies again, there are voices, more than just one. Valerie’s still rings out above the others. “I don’t know what you want.” It’s a deep sob.

She screams again.

I sneak forward, pressing myself up against a tree when I near the camp. A girl with jet-black pigtails steps down on Valerie’s bare calf. I can see beneath the girl’s boot that Valerie’s skin has been burned clean off. Pigtails holds a smoldering stick in her hand.

Rage builds inside of me, but I have to be careful.

“Scream, little bitch,” she stomps on Valerie’s leg, and Val shrieks.

“Maybe you should stop,” says a boy who’s on his feet, staring off into the forest. He looks older—maybe in his mid-twenties. Out of panic, I can’t remember his name. His crime isn’t clicking with me either.

I recognize the girl now as Priscilla Banks, the boyfriend killer. Like Stella, although I doubt she’s as innocent as Stella was.

The girl cackles. “Oh what? Are you afraid they’ll kill me in front of you? That you’ll get my blood on you? I told you, I don’t give a damn if they want to kill me. All I want is Evalyn.” She steps down on Valerie’s leg again.

This is a trap for me.

“You’re fucking insane,” moans Valerie, which grants her a hard kick to the ribs. I wince.

“I don’t give a damn what you think!”

“She won’t come,” coughs Valerie. “Not for me. We don’t even like each other.”

“Liar!” screams Priscilla. She lets the scalding hot tree branch drop, burying the cherry tip of it into Valerie’s stomach.

Her tortured-filled scream breaks me in two, and I hardly have time to piece myself together again before I’m jumping out from behind the tree with my hands in the air.

Priscilla is beside herself in glee. The boy stands, the muscles in his arms flexing.

When Valerie recovers, she croaks, “Dammit, Evalyn.”

“I’m here,” I say gently, my heart pounding so hard that it threatens to rip straight from my chest. “Let her go.”

Priscilla steps off of Valerie, and with the bottom of her foot, kicks her hard in the hip so that she rolls toward the edge of the campsite. I can see the damage that the embers did to Valerie’s skin. I can see the gaping hole in her torso, smell the charred flesh.

The entire room is made up of the same nanotechnology as the knives. The engineers could have stopped this from happening.

I stop by Valerie, staring down at her, mentally formulating in my head how to bandage her up. How to fix her to the best of my ability. I remember the CR contract, I memorized it before I went into the room the first time. There was also the continuous use of it being brought up during the trial. Injuries were bound to happen in the Compass Room, but there is no distinct mention of life threatening ones.

“Don’t you dare,” says Priscilla. “Get away from her.” She waves her fiery stick toward the tree to her left.

Defying her, I slowly squat next to Valerie.

“What did I say?”

My saliva grows thick in my mouth as I study the burn wound. The bitch seared straight to her muscle. “You won’t hurt me,” I say too confidently. I slide my backpack off of me and dive through the contents until I find the first aid kit. I’m about to unzip it before the bright hot ember of the stick is an inch away from my nose.

“Watch me,” Priscilla says.

I am over this detour.

I make a move and rip the stick from Priscilla’s hands, jumping to my feet and whipping the hot end toward her. She squeals and stumbles back, tripping over a root and landing on her ass.

It’s enough to get the boy she’s with to tackle me. He slams me up against the nearest tree and slaps me hard in the face.

Valerie yells again. My eyes sting and tear, and when I refocus, I finally realize who he is. Mitch Gretin.

“Master of the organized crime,” I say out loud, and laugh. “Where’s your kitty, Mitch?”

Mitch was some underling of a gang in charge of an operation to release all of the cats from a New York zoo simultaneously. It was supposed to gain the attention of the head zookeeper, who owed them money. They ended up killing four people. Mitch was the one who was caught.

He smiles viciously, leaning in so close to my face that he’s about a centimeter from kissing me. “I heard you had a mouth on you.”

“I’m pretty cute too.”

He pulls me back and slams me against the tree again. The air leaves my lungs, and I choke on nothing.

“Not that cute,” he says.

“Tie them both up,” says Priscilla. “I don’t want anyone getting ideas.”

Keeping my eyes locked on Mitch’s, I say, “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you have something that we all want, princess.”

Priscilla hands Mitch a cord of rope. Must have been in someone’s cabin.

Mitch places his thick hand on top of my head, shoving me onto my ass.

“Bring Crane over, I wanna be able to keep an eye on both of them at once.”

As shitty as this situation is, at least the criminals holding us hostage are dumber than a bag of bricks.

When Mitch is done tying me up, he stomps to Valerie, grabs her by her hair, and drags her over. Her hands grip his wrist tightly as she thrashes, and I think of the burns on her back, and the dirt now embedded into her wounds. Mitch flings her next to me. She’s sweaty and red in the face, eyes glazed like she’s about to lose consciousness.

“Stay with me,” I beg.

I listen to her wheeze as Mitch ties the knot tight around us. It would be easy to slip out of it if it weren’t for the three of these bastards watching us like hawks. The rope is a supply. I can tell that it isn’t made from the nanotechnology.

But the tree is. I can shrink it when they aren’t looking.

“They’re doing this on purpose,” Valerie slurs.

“I know.”

“I mean the engineers. Letting them torture me like this. We’re free game as far as they’re concerned.”

I bite the inside of my cheek until my mouth floods with a metallic taste. I know she’s right. They want us dead, and if that means dying by the hand of another inmate with a fiery stick, then so be it.

“Are you alright?” I choose to say.

“I can’t feel anything right now,” she whispers. “But that doesn’t matter. Why the fuck are you here, Evalyn? Why did you give yourself up?”

“Don’t say anything more,” I hiss, afraid she’s going to say something about Casey next. Neither she nor I can say anything that will give away the purpose of this operation. “Just trust me.”

I swallow as Priscilla heats up her stick again. Night hasn’t even fallen yet. Day one isn’t complete, but we were already supposed to be at the wall.

This isn’t how I’m going out.

“All you have to worry about is keeping yourself breathing,” I say, feigning confidence to the best of my ability.

Valerie exhales slowly through her pursed lips. A trickle of sweat races down her neck.

“Funny,” says Priscilla, cocking her head at the sky and smiling. “Funny how they’re not doing shit to stop this, ain’t it? Threats of death and moral arrows and all that crap.” She saunters over to us, raising the hot stick so it’s less than an inch from the hollow of my throat. I have a bad feeling that if I shift my body at all, she’ll burn me.

Her smile morphs into a Cheshire cat grin. “Nah. They just want you dead really,
really
badly.”

She shoves her hand forward.

I shriek.

The pain is bright and white hot. I can feel it all of the way through me, like the fire has eaten to my spine. When she pulls away, I can’t coax my lungs to expand. I choke on the stench of my own burning flesh.

I tilt my head up at the sky. We all do it. All the criminals in the Compass Room. It is to mock the engineers or pray to the engineers, to try and uncover what they’ll do next. I do it because this is the only way that I can breathe, staring at the sky, at those unearthly thunderheads laced with angelic feathery white.

Reimagine what you want to control.

My eyes flutter shut.

The stick is being used as a weapon against me when it shouldn’t be able to. How do I take control of something when it’s already acting out of its element?

Priscilla attacks my stomach, and I’m not prepared. This time, I’m caught too vulnerable to even scream. My entire body clenches up like it’s trying to repel the fire taking off layer upon layer of my skin.

“If you burn them too deep, they won’t feel anything,” says Mitch.

“Shut up,” Priscilla growls. “I know what I’m doing.”

“What
are
you doing?” Valerie croaks.

Something snaps behind Priscilla’s eyes. An awareness, like her desire to torture lessens just a little, and she sees the light again.

“I need to know how to do it.”

I run my tongue along the cracked skin of my lips. “Do what?”

“Beat the system.” A fevered glint rests in her eyes. I’ve seen that same look before. In Gordon, Nick, Salem. Reminiscent of evil, but I can’t place its purpose—what that look is trying to get from me.

“Get out of here.”

The pain is returning, searing like she’s still pressing the embers against me. It’s almost impossible to concentrate.

“I don’t understand what you want.”

She pushes the stick toward me again. “Don’t play stupid!”

“I can’t
change
the system for you. I don’t have some magical power just because I’ve been in here before.”

She squats down so she’s eye level with me, that wicked glint in her eye growing. “That’s not what I’m talking about, shithead.” She smacks me so hard on the temple that my eyes feel like they’re rolling around freely in their sockets.

“It isn’t a secret that you know how this system works better than anyone. You beat it once!”

“They can hear you,” I utter. “Everything that’s coming out of your mouth. Now they know that you want to escape the system unfairly. They’ll stop you.”

“Just like they stopped you, right?” she spits, standing. She holds the ember to my jaw. I can feel the heat radiating, threatening my body. I begin to tremble, showing Priscilla my fear. “How did Gordon stay alive for so long?”

“I—I don’t know.”

She taps the fire against my jaw; on instinct, I slam my head back into the tree in attempt to get away.

“Tell me or you’ll wish they’d just take you already!”

I begin to understand that glint. It is in the eyes of someone who lacks the feeling of guilt entirely.

I press my lips together, beckoning the silence. She hisses on every exhale like a serpent. Then, when she can no long stand my lack of an answer, she shrieks and rams the entire stick through the top of my thigh.

I scream until I taste blood.

Tilting my head back, the sky becomes my savior again. I wait to succumb to numbness. It finds me when Priscilla walks away from the camp to cool down, leaving the stick protruding perpendicular from my leg.

Closing my eyes, I imagine unreal clouds above me. I make them mine—floating tendrils of water and ice and air. I rip them apart like cotton candy.

I return to the forest when night is falling, but there is still enough light to see the fissure in the sky. The parting of the water, the welcoming of the twilight.

The corners of my mouth dare to turn up in awe.

“What the hell you smiling for?” Mitch barks. He marches over, grips the branch, and pulls it from my leg.

My eyes roll back to nothing.

I wake up to pain. Nothing I’ve ever felt before. My body knows it too—knows that it’s never experienced anything like this. It cannot function beneath it. It takes me a solid minute to move my leg a few inches, and when I do, I must bite down hard on my bottom lip to keep from crying out or bringing any attention to myself. The moment I do, I know Priscilla or Mitch will return to me. And who knows what they’ll try.

I find Valerie’s fingers in the dirt, squeezing them. She returns the pressure. She’s awake. She rests her head against my shoulder, and I feel her breath very faintly against my neck.

“We gonna die this time?”

I’m lucid enough to know not to answer her. “How are you feeling?” I ask in the faintest of whispers, looking down at her stomach. Her wound is fiery red—inflamed—her shirt crusted with yellow.

“Not so hot.”

Mitch glances over at me. Sees my open eyes.

“Hang in there,” I say in a full voice.

“Prisc,” Mitch shouts. “They’re awake.”

Priscilla comes tromping back from the dark with a meager stack of firewood. “Can’t see anything out there.” Beneath her surface whine rests something darker. Fear, maybe. “We don’t have enough for the fire tonight.”

They’ll barely have enough to start it back up again. The fire is already dying.

Mitch grunts. “I’m not made for this,” he says defiantly.

I’m pretty sure that Valerie said the same thing during our Compass Room. But she still worked during the day. She cooked and stacked wood and helped our group live comfortably. Truth is: we never had a problem with the basic mechanics of survival.

“You aren’t helping!” Priscilla growls. “You can’t be warm if you don’t help me gather.”

“I’m not going to waste my time with shit like that,” Mitch says. He picks at his dirty fingernails in the remaining light of the fire. “I’m not here to play Boy Scout.”

Priscilla groans in frustration. “You’re such a worthless fuck.”

Mitch jumps to his feet. “Hey, bitch, don’t forget that without me, you wouldn’t have water.”

Is this how we were supposed to act toward each other in here? Is this what most criminals do? Insult each other while breaking to the elements? It must be. I can see it now—being scared and alone in the dark. We’re vulnerable in the forest. It can bring out the worst in us.

I had Casey and Jace from the very beginning. And I trusted them, even if Casey hated me from the start. Even though I told him that I
didn’t
trust him.

“Maybe they’ll kill each other for us,” Valerie murmurs.

Mitch swings around. “What was that?”

I lace my fingers through Valerie’s and squeeze tight. A warning to not piss off the beast. But Mitch is distracted by something near the fire that flutters against the stone. Slowly he walks toward it, stooping to pick it up. It’s a piece of paper—no—a flyer. On the front is a picture of an alligator with an open jaw.

Wes knew of one key change engineers made to the Compass Room. Trigger objects were no longer stationary. That flyer wasn’t there moments before.

“What the hell?” Mitch whispers, still glaring at the flyer, as though its purpose will somehow list itself on the back of the brochure.

Priscilla gasps, jumping to her feet. “Mitch,” she says warily.

A low snarl. It nearly rumbles the earth behind me.

Valerie exhales. I feel her quake next to me.

“Mitch!”

“What, what?” He cranes his neck. “It’s probably just a bobcat or something.” He turns toward the fire. “Nothing to—”

His back stiffens and he drops the flyer. He’s finally connected the dots.

The snarl purrs slowly and dangerously, a million pebbles falling onto a drum.

“It’s nothing,” Mitch says.

Priscilla’s eyes widen, and she screams.

When the beast passes by the tree, its fur tickles my shoulder. Mitch’s test.

This is Mitch’s test.

Priscilla doesn’t wait for him, throwing her backpack over her shoulder and taking off into the woods. Mitch stands petrified as the cat completely ignores us and enters the circle of light. A jaguar, ready to pounce.

“You run and it’ll only chase you,” I say.

“Shut up!” He’s terrified. It’d be pathetic if his life wasn’t hanging in the balance.

“You let us go and I’ll make it disappear.”

He presses his back against a tree at the far end of the campsite. The color has drained from his face, and he trembles. “How?” the word is hardly audible.

“Promise first.”

“It’s going to kill me.”

“Promise!”

The cat arches its shoulders.

“Alright!” he screams. “Alright.”

“What are you doing?” Valerie hisses. “Just let it kill him!”

I close my eyes. The scenario unravels in my mind like wound thread. There is something more desirable than Mitch on the outskirts of camp. I catch myself wondering what could be more desirable than a human, but then I remember. It doesn’t matter, because the cat isn’t real.

The scenario doesn’t have to be logical; I just have to imagine it. The cat is distracted by a baby doe.

It whips its head in my direction, yellow eyes glowing in the dark.

“Shit,” whispers Valerie.

“It’s okay,” I say.

It turns around in a full circle until it’s directly facing the two of us, releasing its high-pitched scream like a dying old woman. The cat prepares to pounce.

“Evalyn!” Valerie cowers as much as she can into my shoulder. I keep my eyes open until the last moment, as it leaps to the right side of us. I hear its paws touch the ground, and the soft pad of them as the cat races off into the dark.

Mitch is already running away.

“Hey!” I scream. “Asshole.”

“What was that?” Valerie’s trying to wriggle away from the ropes, albeit unsuccessfully. She cries out in pain the moment she moves, collapsing against the tree again. Her chest heaves up and down. “Evalyn, what did you—”

“No.” I glance up toward the sky, trying to communicate that I don’t want to speak any of this out loud. Luckily for me, she gets it, her eyes brightening. Then she nods her head.

But I may have already blown my cover. Without thinking, I told Mitch that I’d make his illusion disappear. Have the engineers caught onto me?

Whether they have or not, I’m running out of time.

I finally wrangle myself out of the rope. My leg screams in pain, which is actually nice, considering it distracts me from my other injuries. From the burns.

Walking is a different story entirely. The second I make to stand on two feet, my leg gives out and my whole body trembles violently, threatening to turn to gelatin. I crawl over to my pack. “Think they gave us painkillers this time around?” I laugh.

“Not fucking funny,” Valerie moans. She’s lying in the dirt next to the tree.

When I retrieve our bags and crawl back to her, I yank out one of my water bottles, untwist it, and guzzle half of it down before handing it to Valerie. When she can’t even lift her arm to take the bottle, I finally gauge how much pain she’s in.

“You’re playing this down,” I say. “How bad are you hurting?”

“Playing it down? I’m practically screaming every two seconds.”

“Valerie.”

She grimaces. “Don’t baby me. You aren’t helping.”

I sigh, but I don’t argue. I help her drink the rest of the bottle of water I already have open. I try lifting her shirt up, but with the blood and pus, it’s impossible. She hisses when the fabric peels away from the clots.

“Shit. Stop!”

“I thought you said not to baby you.”

She glares in response.

I open the second bottle of water, very carefully tipping it over. When the trickle hits her wound, she groans behind gritted teeth. I see how deep the burn really is.

“Oh God,” I whisper, but I’m not quiet enough.

“What is it?”

I can’t say anything, because if I open my mouth I might puke everywhere. She shouldn’t be conscious right now. Either that or her adrenaline must still be kicked in. The water glides over nothing but cooked muscle. The edges are inflamed—everything is inflamed—a handful of hours and it might already be infected.

There’s a second wound on her back, just as bad and encrusted with dirt and sand. She screams into her knees as I wash her, finally loosening up the destroyed shirt to tug it over her head.

I have to hurry. There’s no telling if Mitch or Priscilla will gain the guts to come back here to retrieve the stuff they left at camp, or come back here for us.

In the first aid kit I find a laughable amount of antibacterial ointment.

“Save it,” she murmurs. “I can’t handle you scraping that stuff over me right now.”

There’s no point in arguing because this amount of ointment won’t do jack-shit for her. The gauze is enough to dress her maybe twice. She tells me to wait on that too.

“Water first,” she says. “A stream, a lake . . . anything.”

“We don’t know if one is close by.”

“Well, then, let’s pray.” It’s the first time Valerie has ever suggested anything spiritual in order to keep us safe.

I zip up both bags and heave them as gracefully as I can over my shoulders before I help her to her feet. In her bra and jeans, she limps away from camp. I follow her into the woods. “At least that bitch didn’t burn off my tattoos,” she says. It’s supposed to be funny, but it isn’t. Not with the gaping holes in her back, her torso. Clusters of yellow and black and plasma red paint her like tattoos themselves.

Sweat prickles the back of my neck and my head swims when I think of walking any distance on this leg. I wonder if I’ll pass out before we make it to water. I can’t. I grip the straps of both bags so tightly that my fingernails bite into my palms. Whether she believes it or not, Valerie is here because of me. I have to do everything to protect her, even if that means die trying.

Fuck the Vault. I need to get her out of here.

***

After a mile or so of insufferable pain, treading in the dark under the most physical agony I’ve ever felt in my life, we come across a creek. Dropping my bag, I hobble along the bank until I find a pool that looks relatively deep. I fall into the water, the relief immediate. I cry out as the freezing cold washes away the fire threaded through my skin.

Valerie sinks slowly, kneeling in the pool. Her voice cracks in a sob, but she quickly pulls herself together and rests her forehead against the steep bank.

The ice cold glow of dawn may be more frightening than the night. Day one is gone. What must my team be thinking? I was supposed to be at the wall with her
hours
ago. Wes is reading the location of my engineer chip—he’ll see that I’m not even close to the edge of it.

I hope to God they’re keeping Casey in the dark. I’d hate for him to be worrying.

I wonder how many inmates have died. Three were taken on the first night in our Compass Room. I remember reading a post in the CR Collective about how the first few days of most are bloodbaths.

Valerie and I sit in the creek in silence. The only thing audible over the rush of the water is her labored breathing. I can’t tell her about the plan in here. I just have to hope that she’ll comply when I ask her to start moving again.

I had hoped that the water would clean her up and cool her down enough so that her burns would look more manageable, but I’m very disappointed in the progress, because there is none. She lies on a tarp as I sit next to her, both of us in our soaking underwear. I stare at the monstrous gaping hole in her stomach.

“I’m not that undesirable, am I?” she jokes.

I shake my head. “Trying to figure out what to do with you.”

She starts to argue, but she doesn’t have enough strength to fight me when I use all of the antibiotic ointment from both our first aid kits on her. She moans weakly every time I touch her burns, but I need to do it. I’m stingy with the gauze, using just enough to wrap over her once, just enough to hold her over for however long it takes to reach the wall. Then, I tend to myself.

Applying any pressure at all to my leg sends a trickle of crimson over the flesh of my thigh. I bury my face in my hands for a handful of seconds, giving me a moment to grieve over the situation. I don’t have time for this, not if I want to get out of here alive.

I leave my leg as is and wrap it, hoping for the best but knowing it’s next to impossible. Infection didn’t exist in the last Compass Room, whether it was because we were lucky or the engineers made it so. Judging by Valerie’s wound, I know that isn’t the case this time around.

While my burns suck, they’re nothing compared to Valerie’s, so I do my best not to hiss or sigh when wrapping them. Pain and exhaustion ravishing us, we eat a meager amount of cold meat from a can. We need to get moving again.

“No,” she whispers. My eyes drop to her face, and I follow her gaze across the forest floor, to the shattered porcelain doll.

The tree branches creak above my head. I know that noise. It’s not from the wind.

Looking up at the dead swinging above my head, I whimper. “Oh no.”

Valerie, hardly awake next to me, holds her arms out and flat against the tarp on either side of her. She is pale and sweating, dark circles blotching her eye sockets. She couldn’t be more vulnerable.

Her crime has found us.

I try to stay calm. This should be easy. I just need to take control like I have been. I try to clear my head but the pain is too bright.

She shuts her eyes. “I needed it, Ev. I needed revenge. I was so blinded—I knew I wouldn’t be able to see past what they’d done until they were gone.”

Against my will, my teeth begin to chatter, my eyes blinded by frustration. I try to reimagine Valerie’s crime, but my fear is getting the best of me.

“Once upon a time, I let it happen. Did you know that?”

One of the boys kicks his legs, struggling.

As numb as I feel, I can’t help the tears. They pour from me like she’s already dead.

I shake my head.

“Veda went to a party with her ex. He was such a creep. He had her wrapped around his finger so tightly I couldn’t pull her off, not even when I told her to not go.

“She went anyway. She went and she called me crying three hours later because she was wasted and he left her there, but I didn’t pick up.”