The Wicked We Have Done

Praise for
The Wicked We Have Done

“Holy jawdropping creepy bots! Hot, funny, and terrifying. . . if
The Running Man
and
The Hunger Games
had a baby on steroids: this would be it. You will be glued to each amazingly horrifying page from beginning to end.”

— Molly McAdams,
New York Times
bestselling author

The Wicked We Have Done

Sarah Harian

I
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INTERMIX BOOKS

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE WICKED WE HAVE DONE

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / March 2014

Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Harian.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-15217-5

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1

Four minutes before the beginning of my sentence, Mom breaks down.

I thought it’d be easier; she’s had so long to prepare herself. My punishment was decided at the same time as my incarceration—six months ago—and I’d only seen her sporadically through a filthy glass window. But now she sobs into one bony hand while holding Todd’s wrist tightly with the other. With enough squirming, he’s able to break loose and run to me.

I squat down to Todd’s height. He eyes my polyester hoodie. Reaching out with pudgy fingers, he pinches the zipper.

He’s only five. I remember some things from that age—moving into a house, going to my first harvest carnival—but not everything. I wonder how he’ll remember me.

“Promise you won’t forget about me, ’kay, sport?”

Awareness floods him. “Where you going, Evie?”

“Just to take some tests. They need to keep me for a while, though.” I run my fingers through his dark, fine hair.

“Can I come?”

The corner of my mouth twitches up. “Nah, it’s like being in time-out for a month.”

His eyes widen.

“They even take away your snack time.”

“They’re going to take away your snack time?”

I nod.

“But when you get back, we can have snack time together.”

“All the chocolate ice cream in the world.” I force a mechanical smile. “I love you.”

He leans in and plants a sticky kiss on my cheek. “Me more.”

I inhale. Baby shampoo. For a second I’m transported to my home with Mom and Todd, before the trial, before college. Beige carpets and sun-baked windows, pencil sketches, lead-stained fingers. When I can’t handle torturing myself any longer, I stand.

The departure room is bleak and stifling—charcoal walls and flickering lights—hardly bigger than my cell. You’d think they’d give me a few hours with the sun before sending me away.

But terrorists don’t deserve beautiful things.

The bad lighting does nothing to mask Mom’s paleness. She looks so much older than she did a year ago—the wrinkles in her face deeper, her short dark hair streaked with gray. She nods, and I do the bravest thing I’ve done in a while. I step forward and wrap my arms around her petite shoulders.

Her breath hitches. She shudders a sob as she squeezes me.

“Don’t,” I say. “I’ll be back in a month. A month and they’ll let me go.”

I will pretend for her that I’m going to make it out of the world’s most technologically precise death penalty. That I’m going to make it out of the Compass Room.

The door squeaks open behind me. Mom’s eyes widen, the shake of her head a violent shiver. “I’m not ready.”

“We’re on a schedule, Ma’am.”

“I always believed you.” Mom clings to me, desperate. “Remember that.”

I place my hands behind my back obediently, cold cuffs locking them into place. “I love you.” Each word drowns in her cries.

The guards pry me away, and the door to the departure room clangs shut right on top of Todd’s strangled holler of my name. The floor’s metal grate rattles beneath my feet as prison guards rush back and forth between departure rooms and cells.

Despite the words I fed my mother, I know I saw my family for the very last time.

My throat tightens, but there is no time to reflect. I had months to imagine this moment, months to mourn. That time is over, because today is the beginning of my inevitable execution in the Compass Room.

The guards march me to the next door over. One opens it and the other throws me inside, dragging me to a thin cot. Medical devices decorate the rack on the wall, and a woman in a lab coat sits next to me on a rolling chair. She reads a tablet in her hands.

“Evalyn.” Harsh florescent lights illuminate her vapid smile. My guards hover close to us as she types up something on her tablet.

“Just a few quick tests.” She picks a blood pressure monitor from the rack, plugging one end into her tablet. “Your arm, please.”

She documents the rest of my vitals as she plugs in every new device. “Any problems with the contraception shot?”

I’ve been given the shots regularly since my sentence was decided. Compass Room regulations. I’ll be mingling with the male inmates during my stay, and the last thing anyone wants is for us to be breeding.

I didn’t have a say in the matter either. Had to take the shot to get into the Compass Room. And it’s either the Compass Room or death row for a girl like me.

“No.”

“All right.” She places the tablet on the counter and snaps on a latex glove. “Go ahead and lie facedown.”

I do as I’m told. Her rubbery hands sweep across my neck.

“This will sting a little.” With the sound of pressurized air, the pain is instant, as though she’s slicing through the base of my skull with a knife. I jump and she holds me down.

“All done.”

I sit up, one shaking hand flying to the back of my neck. My fingers find the bump beneath my skin. “How does the chip get through?”

“Pardon me?”

“The skull, the blood barrier.” The thought is suddenly terrifying—the implant—a slow bullet driving through my brain matter.

She purses her lips, obviously annoyed with the question. “Think of it as a tiny drill remotely operated. Perfectly safe, I assure you.”

Normal people get all of the time and resources to research anything they want to implement on their body. I haven’t been given that luxury. I have to trust that some smart chip I’ve never had the chance to research isn’t going to scramble my brain.

She taps the screen on her tablet in a few different places, then hands it to me. “You know what to do.”

The contract. They gave me a hard copy to read over in my cell, along with a Bible. I’ve memorized it.

The contract, that is.

One month in the prison. I may be subject to injury at any point during my stay. And if the monitor—the monitor this nurse injected into me—reads that my emotional and hormonal reactions to any simulation I’m put through are imbalanced, I will be put to death.

The contract is much longer than a few clauses, but these are the ones that matter.

With my fingernail, I sign my name. I need out of this room.

“Bringing Ibarra down,” one of my guards says into his ear piece. He takes my arm.

“It’s a zoo out there,” the other says.

“No shit.”

They steer me into the hall. A girl exits an exam room up ahead, also cuffed and escorted. She wears the same thing as I do—an official Compass Room uniform, I guess. T-shirt and black hoodie. Gray cargo pants and Velcro boots. An interesting change to the orange I’m so used to.

Tears streak her face. She’s very pretty, with full lips and high cheekbones, skin that’s a little darker than mine, and childlike dimples. She can’t be any older than twenty.

I can’t remember who she is. The world knows. The Compass Room list has been announced, documentaries of our tragic lives flooding prime-time network television.

My guards follow the escorted girl to the elevator, our two groups stuffed uncomfortably close together as we descend to the lobby. The girl’s sniffling fills the car, and I wish she’d quit. Every damn noise from her tightens the invisible cord around my heart.

The doors open, and I follow her out.

A series of floor-length windows surround the lobby—grated and bulletproof, but somehow classy. Good ol’ federalized prison. A classy lobby for the worst of us cretins. Cells and living quarters reside beneath the ground. We are invisible. Endless. Until we are allowed on floor two for visitation.

Or departure.

Beyond the windows, a train with a direct track to the California Compass Rooms waits for us at the prison station.

I see the protestors through the panes, behind the fence surrounding the station walkway. They pound the chain link with their fists, their signs waving back and forth. Ready for us. Their shouts weasel their way through the bulletproof glass.

We join the line of convicts. Some tall jerk shoots me a teeth-grinding glare. He’s toned—no, more than toned. He could snap my neck in half in his sleep. His sleeves are rolled up, his bare arms freckled by the sun. All that bulk must have come from outdoor physical labor. His square jaw is clenched and not a muscle in his face even dares to twitch, which makes me wonder if he knows who I am, or if his expression is stuck that way. The guards on either side of him walk stiffly, as though they are secretly scared shitless to be near him. “Casey Hargrove, prisoner number 92354, male number five in Compass Room C. Accounted for,” his guard says as he presses his finger to his earpiece.

And then the guard escorting the girl with dimples. “Jacinda Glaser, prisoner number 48089, female number four in Compass Room C. Accounted for.”

“Evalyn Ibarra, prisoner number 39286, female number five in Compass Room C. Accounted for.”

I swear the space around me goes dead quiet for half a second. The doors open.

Vibrant sound gushes into the lobby like water through an empty canyon. I am numb. My guards drag me forward. Jacinda’s fists clench behind her back—delicate fingers and white knuckles.

I evade the wall of noise and tilt my head to the overcast sky—a final
fuck you
from the universe. When I bring myself back to earth, I wish I hadn’t.

Hundreds scream at us, thrusting boards with contradicting text against the fence.

Compass Rooms = Barbaric

Repent, Child of God

“You will burn in hell for what you’ve done!” someone shrieks.

A woman presses a photo of one of my victims to the chain link. She mouths my name.
Evalyn
.

It bounces through space, multiplying. Breeding. Evalyn. Evalyn. Evalyn.

The train waits, silent and magnetic—a silver bullet on tracks—ready to shoot us to California in a handful of hours.

I follow the line of prisoners to the turnstile. Jacinda places her thumb on a panel embedded into the arch of the station. A green light blinks brightly above her and she pushes through.

“Miss Ibarra, right thumb, please,” my guard says. I comply, and the turnstile unlocks.

“EVALYN
.”

My name again, sharper and angrier than the others.

“I hope it hurts—I hope it fucking HURTS.”

I’m guided up the steps and into the train car.

Seats line the walls, steel cuff armrests waiting for us with open jaws. My guard clips my ear with some kind of listening device and walks me to my seat between Jacinda and a skinny runt of a boy with black, straight hair and Jeffrey Dahmer glasses. There are ten of us all together. Ten candidates between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.

Casey sits across from me. I tilt my head, challenging him. The other candidates are silent—unnaturally so. The cuffs snap over my wrists, and our guards leave.

I recognize two of my company. A girl with a bleach-blonde pixie cut and features that could carve glass sizes me up. Colorful tattoos linger at her pale wrists and disappear into her sleeves. Valerie Crane. Killed three guys and strung up their bodies. A glint of recognition rests in her eyes—she knows who I am, no doubt. We were in the same prison wing. I never spoke with her, though. No one fucked with Valerie Crane. I knew that much.

I also recognize another crazy bastard—an undergrad at some West Coast school. He’d been arrested for drugging and kidnapping several teens and torturing them to death. He was the only one out of his posse who had been caught. Pled innocent, though, with no motive. His name clicks—Gordon—pale and pointy-chinned under a mop of sandy hair.

Wearing a smug grin, he says, “Seems the ladies are a bit more infamous than the gentlemen.” He scans the room, pausing on each of the women.

“Go fuck yourself.” Valerie’s eyes roll to the ceiling, like she’s bored with him.

Next to me, Jacinda smiles.

The quiet rumble beneath us builds as the train takes off. We have no windows, only a row of televisions imbedded into the can-like walls above our seats. They showcase the logo of Flight Express, a corporate chain of high-speed trains. Apparently they have a contract with the federal prison system.

The silence continues. Sociopaths and serial killers are the antitheses of good conversationalists. I lean back in my seat, close my eyes, and wait.

Fifteen years ago, government scientists manufactured an accurate test for morality—an obstacle course, where the simulations within proved whether a candidate was good or evil. It was named a Compass Room.

For ten years, the CR was tested over and over. Criminals were placed inside for a month to see if the CR correctly identified the true threats to humanity. I remember one case. A big, gruff-looking man by the name of Marcus Greene who had accidently killed a family drunk driving, and a petite, middle-aged woman named Fonda Harrington—a psychopath who slaughtered three of her children. The Compass Room successfully pinpointed Fonda as the threat. Over and over again, the CR correctly identified the evil, but even so, the case to implement the rooms continued to be rejected.

A terrorist attack finally convinced the Supreme Court. All charged in the bombing were forced to undergo the Compass Room’s exam. And they were all found to be, as reporters said on the news, “morally tarnished.”

After the law passed, engineers updated the Rooms to kill the wicked. They became the most accurate form of the death penalty ever created.

Other than the fact that they’re built in the middle of experimental wilderness, the public knows very little about Compass Rooms. They know that, through technology, brain waves of the candidates are measured during a simulation. Reactions are evaluated, and like a needle on a compass, the test determines the true morality—the true internal clockwork—of the criminal. If necessary, an execution takes place.

An average of two-point-five inmates survive each CR. Not the best odds.

Survivors are under strict contract to not discuss the details of the simulation. And they all keep their mouths shut, because keeping their contract means a life free of prison. It’s the way the government justifies Compass Rooms in the first place—a month of the simulation is less expensive for society than a lifetime in jail.