A Vault of Sins (22 page)

I don’t want to die.

They don’t deserve me. Gemma doesn’t deserve me. I am selfish, not ready to commit to this. Not ready to never see Casey or Valerie again.

Todd, my mom.

I’m plummeting toward the Vault. I can feel its energy pulsing through me. This isn’t like the fear in the Compass Room. The fear in the Compass Room was volumeless, flat and empty like blank paper.

I’ve never felt fear like this, a nearly tangible emotional feeling, swelling in ripples of not only agony and horror, but hope and happiness and everything that allows fear to exist in the first place.

It will consume me. It will eat me alive.

Falling into the Vault, the raging emotions are unbearable. I will burst. I will burst if I’m here for a second longer. I sense the ground beneath the Vault, malleable like the hole I’m falling through.

I can bend it.

I can keep falling.

I must only be in the Vault for one second. Maybe two, blasting through the center as gravity rips me straight through the earth.

My body separates from me—not fluidly—it snaps away with a
pop
, a building block torn apart from its base. I float everywhere and nowhere at once. I am infinite. I am sorrow and terror and blinding joy.

My body returns.

The
crack
vibrates through me as oxygen is forced from my lungs.

Sprawled on the ground in the dark, I coax the air into me, choking as my ribcage refuses to expand, like it’s still not mine. Like it’s still not a part of me.

Vibrations thread me. My back arches, sharp pain a parasite, crunching my bones, sucking the life from me.

I want to scream. I open my mouth and blood trickles into it. With a trembling hand, a hand shaking too hard to be attached to my body, I attempt to wipe my face, instead smearing the sticky fluid across my lips, my nose, my cheeks.

I roll over, my body splitting right down the middle. I thought the burns and the knife had been agony. This . . . this . . .

I grow numb.

I’m dying.

I split a blob of mucus and blood onto the concrete.

The concrete.

My hands form into claws and I drag myself across the floor. My cough echoes through the pitch black cavern, and when I crane my neck, my muscles spasm and give out. But I’m up long enough to catch sight of the exit sign in bright red letters, far away on the other end of the hall.

Am I in the CR or the real world?

Amidst the harrowing pain, my mind toys with the idea of this being the tunnel to heaven. A dark quiet tunnel with a red EXIT sign at the end. Heaven is a mirror of one’s deepest desires. Beyond the sign for me would be Meghan. Casey too. Casey would be in heaven because time doesn’t exist in heaven. He would arrive there the moment I did.

This is the first time I’ve thought of heaven in a long while. Lately I’ve only thought of hell.

A siren rips through the tunnel.

My blood-slick hands grasp the ground and pull me. The lack of oxygen is dizzying—it’s impossible to feed myself with air. My ribs must be cracked.

Sharp, hot pain digs into my stomach as I press forward. The knife wound. Knife wounds and burns and blood running from my nose. Broken bones. My right eye goes dark. Half way to the door, shivers ravage my body and I must lie down. I must wait for them to pass. I wish I didn’t have to because inner Evalyn is screaming at outer Evalyn to move.

I shouldn’t be out here. I shouldn’t be out here in the real world.

I’ll be found any minute.

By who?

Does it matter?

Crawling leaves a trail of blood, thick and sticky, my insides betraying my escape, if this is an escape. This could just be an elaborate illusion, fizzling to nothing the moment the Bot stops reading my brain waves, the moment I die.

I pound on the door with my fist. Again. Again. I reach higher, finding the silver bar. Pushing. The door gives away to another alarm.

I’m doomed.

I scream as the pain blinds me and open the door enough to sliver through. Outside looks just like the Compass Room, a forest empty of civilization, brush growing right up to the door.

I crawl far enough into the brush, far enough to hide, and my body gives out entirely, seizing.

Blood pours from me. I pretend it’s an illusion until the world wants to fall black.

I let it.

At first I think I’m dead.

I’ve become an apparition, a bodyless ghost moving through walls—endless cavernous tunnels that don’t smell earthly or natural, but sterile. Up ahead there’s a door with a little window, and a machine embedded into the rock. Two men in white lab coats stand in front of a screen. They hold coffee cups. One of them is screwing around on his phone.

The other is paying attention to the screaming blonde girl on the screen. She’s strapped to a cot with wires running all over her body.

I know the girl is in the room. My ghost knows everything.

“What’s she watching now?” phone guy says.

“Her boyfriend dying.”

“Still?”

“Yup.” The scientist slurps his coffee slowly.

“How much longer? I gotta take the kids home from soccer. Terry’ll kill me if I’m not on time.”

“I can keep an eye on her.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, what the hell. It’s overtime, right? Plus, got orders to keep her reel playing until she cracks like an egg.”

Phone guy chuckles. “If she’s like the others in C it won’t be too long.”

“You’re right about that.” The scientist tips his cup back.

On the screen, Stella yanks against her restraints, and her body convulses.

A man says my name.
Don’t move. You aren’t supposed to be awake. I’ll fix yah up, I promise.

I’ll fix yah up and they’ll never find you.

More morphine? Here, shut your eyes. Everything will be numb in a bit.

Everything. Let it take you away.

The man in the room screams. The scientists watch from the screen—a man and a woman. The woman takes furious notes on her tablet.

“I guess now he knows how all of those women he raped felt.”

“I guess . . . ,” says the woman

“Maybe he’s being raped.”

The woman stops her note taking. “You don’t know what he’s watching?”

The man shrugs. “You’re asking me to remember everyone’s reels? I don’t put them together. I don’t really care either.”

“That’s right, you’re just the surveillance guy.” The woman sounds annoyed.

Several moments of silence pass between them. The woman looks up.

“Wouldn’t that be dreadful?”

“What?”

“To be raped this way? Trapped in the dark, no way out, losing a part of you over and over.”

“Fucker deserved it, after what he did. But yeah, I’d die.”

“Did he?”

The man and woman glance at the readings to the left, to the steady line that shrieks a single high-pitched note.

“I think he just did,” he says. “I think he died.”

“Goddamnit,” she says. “That wasn’t supposed to happen for another few weeks. Call it.”

The woman turns away and struts down the dark hall.

“What are you gonna do?” he says.

“Tell Branam.”

The man hovers over me, his beard scraggly and gray. I know him from somewhere. Maybe one of my crazy dreams.

“I know you.”

“You’ve seen me. You don’t know me.”

“Where?” My voice roughens the air like sandpaper. I remember. He was one of the hackers.

“No questions. No questions now. How do you feel?”

“Death. Like death.”

“It may seem that way for some time.” Amid the cloudy parts of my vision, he feeds the tube through my arm—a syringe of yellow liquid.

“You need to rest a little longer.”

I want to fight him, claw at him.

I don’t want to go back to sleep!
I want to scream.
The nightmares . . . if they take me again. If they take me back into that dungeon . . .

“She keeps asking for Valerie Crane.”

“Crane?”

“The girl’s rather resilient.”

“Well then, break her. If she keeps asking for Valerie Crane, then give her Valerie. When she’s succumbed, then . . . well, you know what to do.”

“What scenario should I use to kill off Crane?”

“Be creative . . . no, wait a minute. Have
her
kill Valerie. Have her kill Valerie in the same way she committed her crime.”

“For how long?”

“Don’t. Keep it running all night.”

“That could . . .”

“I know exactly what it could do. Keep it running all night.”

The next time I wake, the man lets me stay awake, but not until I beg him, telling him what I’ve seen.

My savior’s name is Job. Like the guy in the Bible.

He looks like he could be
that
Job too. Nearing eighty, he doesn’t act like he’s some tech genius, more like a mountain man who hasn’t seen civilization in years.

It takes me several lucid hours for me to realize that he’s a Reprise analyst.

“Had to turn off the tracker in your chip. Heard chatter that it had been compromised.” He knocks against the wood of his dining table, a small gray slab. “Not as bulletproof as we thought it was. Yer lucky they didn’t kill you when they had the chance. They knew you were up to somethin’ the whole damn time you were inside that machine.”

I am lucky. I’m
goddamn
lucky.

Job won’t tell me where we are. All I have to decipher my location is the inside of this . . . shack. If it’s even a shack. It kind of reminds me of the place I woke up in inside the Compass Room, but luckily, it hasn’t collapsed on me yet.

The difference between this shack and the one in the Compass Room is that it has all of the amenities for a computer analyst—a feed, several tablets—even one of those cube-looking Bot things that Wes had. Yes, it has all of the amenities for a hacker, and yet it doesn’t have running water.

He tells me that the Division of Judicial Technology is covering up everything. If I did fry their Vault, they aren’t telling the public. And they’ve gotten better at preventing leaks—Job’s been keeping an eye out. As far as the media is concerned, Compass Room J finished its full cycle without a single problem.

Job orders me around brazenly, like I’m a grandchild he pretends to hate but who’s secretly his favorite. I’m not allowed to go outside unless I need to use the outhouse. He won’t let me eat anything except for salty venison broth, which is understandable, considering I’m even throwing that up.

I can’t move. Not allowed to move for another couple of weeks. There are too many spots where he stitched me up himself, and he doesn’t want me ripping open.

He hunts for his own food like we’re in the middle of goddamn nowhere. And we might very well be. I never learned where Compass Room J was located. We may still be in California, but may be somewhere else. Somewhere more desolate. I don’t even know if we’re
near
the Compass Room anymore. Every time I ask Job, he tells me to worry about things that are actually important, like getting better.

“Should be dead,” he says while he’s slicing up his latest kill on the rickety kitchen table. “You just lie down for a few days and thank your Lord Jesus that you ain’t. You should be dead.”

The one thing I do know is that Job was secretly placed by Reprise near the Compass Room in case of a situation like this—if something went wrong. Since I woke five days ago, we’ve been working together to figure out what actually happened to me.

I must have passed through the hot white center of the Vault in a matter of seconds, which caused my body to go into shock when I landed in the emergency exit tunnel moments later.

And then had those dreams.

The only thing that Job knows about the dreams is that they haunted me during the sleep he induced on me while I was healing. He knows nothing else, because I don’t tell him. I think about them every night before I sleep, translating them to the best of my ability.

I continue to come up with nothing.

Job had been watching my tracker the entire time I was in the Compass Room. When he found me, he was sure I was a goner.

“Yer lucky you had such tight control over the nanos,” he said. “If not, the Vault woulda sucked yah right up.”

I’ve been faced with death too many times to count—way too many times. And yet, when it came for me, when it threatened to wrap its skeleton fingers around my soul, I was not any more prepared for it.

This world has treated me like shit, but death, in all of its unknown and dark glory, still seems far worse than life.

Finally, on day eight of lying in Job’s little shack without the sun, full on venison broth and nothing else, he tells me the news.

“They all think you exploded. Blown up right in the center of the Vault, a million microscopic pieces of carbon.”

I swish the broth around in my mouth before swallowing. “Who thinks I exploded?”

“Everyone. The whole world. Only one who knows the truth is yours truly.” He saws into the leg of the deer and it cracks unpleasantly.

“You and Reprise.”

He shakes his head rapidly. “Can’t get the word to them. Too risky. The government is lookin’ for news just like that. News indicatin’ you’re still alive. If the message is intercepted—”

My bowl clatters to the floor, broth spilling all over the rot panels of the floor. “Everyone.”

“I believe so.”

“Everyone thinks I’m dead.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I cover my mouth, ready to vomit up the broth again. Not just Mom and Todd and Liam. Not just the media, but everyone. Maliyah and the team back at headquarters.

Valerie. Casey.

“How long? How long do we have to wait?”

Job wipes his hand on his bloody apron and scratches his beard. “Keepin’ an ear out on chatter. When they’re convinced yer gone for good, then we’ll move. Maybe a week. Maybe a couple of months.” He frowns. “Don’t look so upset. They were gonna think you were dead if you actually died, yah know.”

I wonder about Casey. Where he was when he found out. What he did. How he mourned for me.

“It ain’t . . . it isn’t that,” I say. “I mean, I know that they would have.”

“You thinkin’ ’bout that one boy.”

I nod. “That one boy.”

Job grunts, stacking flanks of raw, bloody meat on top of each other. “Then think ’bout how happy he’ll be when he finds out you ain’t minced Vault meat.”

I wince. “You know how many times I left him? I’m the epitome of emotional herpes. Just when you think I’m gone . . .”

He stares at me blankly, obviously not understanding my joke.

I sigh. “Forget it.”

“Yah think he won’t want you ‘cause yah like to flirt with death? Darlin’, he’ll only like you more.”

I bite on my lip, but do a terrible job at masking my smile.

“Yer as mysterious as a ghost, yah are. Mysterious and so dangerous the Grim Reaper don’t want nothin’ to do with you. That alone will drive a man wild.”

I laugh. It’s a laugh that must drive me through the next couple of weeks.