A Vault of Sins (16 page)

I point to his shovel that leans up against a near tree. “There.” I drop his hand and take a step back, and the anxiety eating away at me gnaws deeper than when I was being tested. I hate watching the illusion of Casey’s crime.

We stand at the edge of a clearing shrouded in shadow. Stretching from our feet is chunky gravel, beyond that, a beaten down truck. And beyond that, a shabby, red barn.

Illusions can be this complex. I remember Stella’s illusion that I had interrupted—the hedges and the house and the fire. All of that was a trick of our minds, and this is the same.

Quietly, I follow Casey into the barn. Feet scuffing against the dry dirt, I slink to the plank wall and wait in the shadow. This barn isn’t being used to house animals. It’s more of a workshop, with dusty tools and parts lying everywhere. One bare bulb hangs from the ceiling, the dingy yellow light illuminating a slumped figure on the ground. I know who she is just from meeting her only once. Stefanie Hargrove, Casey’s mother.

I watch Casey move toward her. He stares at her like he knows what she is—an illusion, and nothing more. But his face is still scrunched up, the corners of his mouth pulled down like he’s ready to lose his sanity. His fists are balled so tight that I can see his white knuckles from here.

“Mom?” he calls softly. “Mom?”

Dropping to his knees, he turns the body over.

Her head has been smashed in.

I force my fist against my mouth to silence my shock. Casey scrambles back, colliding with a work bench. Wrapping his arm around his legs, he shakes his head back and forth.

When a tear trickles down his cheek, I’m desperate to run to him.
It isn’t real, Casey. Don’t be fooled.
A sob catches in my throat.
Don’t interfere.

Don’t interfere.

“What’re you doing in here?” That voice. Casey’s father staggers into the barn, the shovel in his hand. I can smell him from here—he smells like a bar at three a.m. on a Saturday.

Casey opens his mouth, but no words escape him. He pushes himself back on his palms, cowering beneath the bench. Like he’s eight again. A baby.

His father juts his chin out, nodding toward his dead, mutilated wife. “She wouldn’t shut her fucking mouth. You know what happens when you don’t shut your fucking mouth.”

He’s a goddamn stereotype.

I blink and he’s hunched down by Casey, dragging him by his feet beneath the yellow light.

By his dead mother.

“Please
.”

Casey’s father raises the shovel above his head.
No
. I scream his name and his eyes flicker to mine before the metal head strikes his ribs.

This is all too familiar.

Wham
.

And again.

WHAM.

Casey gasps a sob, writhing on the ground. How can Wes and Maliyah and Piper do this? How can they allow this to play out and not stop it?

WHAM.

“STOP!” I scream.

His father aims for his skull.
Aims to crush
. Casey, in the forest, that shovel raised over his head. He had given up.

He’s giving up now.

I shut my eyes tight.
This isn’t a concoction of Casey’s past and fears. No. This is mine.

I allow myself to feel what Casey must be feeling. Constantly afraid of what his father is capable of. Desperate to protect his mother. The anxiety of another broken bone, another cut.

His father created chaos simply because he had the power to, but now the power is in my hands. I can make
anything
happen.

My fingers shift to claws. I imagine the feeling of warm flesh between my hands. A thick, meaty neck. I imagine what it would feel to break one.

Crack.

My eyes flutter open. His father’s head hangs at an unnatural angle, and he slumps to the ground.

This is mine, now. All of it. The rage inside of me thrives, visceral and hot. Casey gasps for breath on the ground, and I walk to him, kneeling down. I wrap my arms around him and shut my eyes, imagining the incineration of his past, that everything that screwed him up can burn down and blow away.

“Ev,” he whispers, tugging on my shirt. I look up.

The barn turns black, deep embers glowing hot red within the wood. And then it begins to flake away. Soon, we’re consumed by a whirlwind of ash before it evaporates into thin air, and we are back in the woods.

Casey relaxes and collapses beneath me, wheezing on each inhale.

“You okay? You hurt?” I feel around his ribs.

He winces. “Not too bad.”

“Remember, I lessened the impact of the blows,” Wes says in my ear.

“How nice of you,” I snarl. I force myself to breathe slowly. This isn’t Wes’s fault. I demanded to have them use me as part of the Compass Room infiltration. This is just part of the training process.

I wipe a tear from beneath Casey’s eye.

“I’m weak.” With glazed eyes, he stares up at the tree canopies above us. “I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do. All I could think about was him.”

I brush the hair from his eyes. I want to tell him that I know. That when surrounded by the illusion of the moment that defined me, it’s hard to stay focused on what I need to do. But Wes distracts me.

“Do you remember what you did, Evalyn?”

I relive my thought process. The way I broke his father’s neck had become such a real thing in my mind, like I had actually done it. And then the barn burning down . . . “An engineer uses his mind to play God. Anything is on the table.”

“Anything,” Wes repeats.

I think I understand now.

***

In the modified Compass Room, I watch the night where Casey kills his father. He comes home to their rickety shack of a house to see his mother with a new black eye, his father sitting at the table with a plate of processed noodles and ground beef in front of him. And a beer.

Each time, his father takes a sip of his beer, grimaces, and says, “You put something in this, didn’t you?”

I’m expecting Casey to be the one to speak up, but instead, it’s Stefanie. “No,” she mumbles, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

Casey’s dad stands up so quickly that he knocks his chair over. Holding the empty beer bottle in one hand, he stomps over to Stefanie and grabs her hair, flinging her against a tree. He breaks the bottle against the trunk and slowly begins to slice her up.

Stefanie’s screams are full of agony, and every time, it is too much for Casey. Every time, he tackles the illusion of his father, and his father pins him down and makes to drive the broken bottle through Casey’s face. Wes always has to stop the illusion.

“Jesus, you kids have active imaginations,” he says after our last try for the day.

Dinner is solemn. We eat in silence, and for once, Maliyah makes the meal. The food is good, but she’s not nearly the cook that Casey is. Casey’s too busy in his head to eat, chin propped up in his upturned palm as he glares at his untouched food. I guzzle three vodka tonics with dinner.

Wes theorizes what’s wrong. “As an engineer, I’m not emotionally attached to your crime, so it’s quite easy for me to control the illusion through reimagining what’s going to happen. I think the two of you have already reimagined these moments of your life so obsessively that your own thoughts are getting in the way.”

I think he’s right. With me, I’ve obsessed over what would have happened if I defied Nick. And with Casey, he imagines a world where he didn’t kill his dad and if his dad had ended up hurting his mother and Casey.

“You’re both stuck in the rut of reimagining your crime. And when you do that, you end up tricking the Bot into killing you. Casey can’t imagine anything other than his mother dying, so he loses control of the illusion. Both of you need to knock it off already, okay?” Flustered, Wes leaves the table, and I down the rest of my drink.

Later that night, I sit on the couch alone, drunkenly thinking of all of the ways this mission could kill either Casey or me if we can’t get our act together. Even with the help of the engineer chip, we aren’t safe from being murdered by the Bots in the Compass Room. Not if we can’t force our minds to reimagine illusions without something in the scene killing us. The stakes are too high, the game too dangerous, and the worry in my gut festers like a sickness. I need to get my mind off of it.

I slip into the bathroom when Casey’s in the shower. I watch his blurry body behind the steam before he wipes away the door and looks at me. “You gonna sit there and spy on me, or you gonna join me?”

“Am I allowed to this time?”

He smirks and opens the door for me, and I strip, leaving my clothes in a pile on the tiled floor.

After I douse myself in hot water, he holds me between the wall and his slick body, pressing his forehead to mine. His eyes are hungry fire, burning right through my train of thought. Finally, a few words stumble from my mouth. “What Wes said . . .”

He silences me with a kiss, his tongue sweeping across mine before he mutters against my lips, “Not in here. We don’t talk business in the shower.”

I arch into him, feeling the ridges of his scars against my abdomen. “What do we do in the shower then?”

He grips my ass and lifts me up, and I wrap my arms around his neck, legs around his waist. He guides me onto him and groans, and I revel in the feeling of him buried inside of me before gasping, “I’m really glad they fixed your hip.”

Wickedness flashes across his features, and as if to prove how uninjured he is, he holds me in place and bucks his hips.

My head rolls back as I lose myself to him.

***

In the morning, I wake up to an empty bed. The sky is clear, and I listen to the water stream off the roof and slap against the ground. Winter is melting.

I guzzle water and brush my teeth in the bathroom, and then make my way down to the kitchen, stopping suddenly in surprise. Casey has lined up all of the liquor bottles on the counter. He motions me into the kitchen.

“A little early for a cocktail party, don’t you think?” I try and joke with him.

He leans against the counter, his expression remaining flat. “I asked Maliyah if we could dump the bottles, and she said yes.”

I frown. “What? Why would she say yes? Why would you want to dump them?”

Suddenly his hands are on my waist, and he lifts me up and places me on the counter. I realize soon that this isn’t to patronize me. He wants us eye level. He rests his hands on either side of my hips and his eyes meet mine, so intensely serious that he steals the breath from me.

“I lived with two alcoholics. Dad was the abusive one, and Mom was the escapist. Every time he beat her she’d guzzle from the bottle of bourbon in the pantry. Thought I didn’t see her, but she was sloppy about it. Too hurt to really care.”

He thinks I’m addicted. My nose stings in embarrassment, and I try to swallow the lump in my throat so I can speak. So I can defend myself. “I haven’t . . . I haven’t been drinking that much.”

He nods. “I know you haven’t. Not lately. You’ve tapered off a ton since you first arrived up here. Yes, I know. I’ve been watching. I mean, Jesus Ev, the first week you’d polish off half a bottle a night.”

“But you said yourself I’m getting better!” My voice sounds childish and so unlike me. Am I panicking? Do I really need the booze that bad? I glance away from him and to the bottles lining the sink, my mind drifting to the usual screwdriver I have with breakfast.

Fuck
.

I try to shake myself out of it, but he takes my face between his palms and steadies me. “We are rescuing Valerie in a month. We’re already screwing up, Ev. We’re already behind on learning how to control the illusions. We have to be on the top of our game for the next four weeks in order to pull this off. Pour it down the drain for her. Pour it down the drain for Valerie.”

I feel the vibration of the tears dancing on the brim of my lower eyelids.

“And for me. And for yourself. Especially for yourself. There’s no reason to be drowning in liquor anymore. You have something to live for again, remember?”

I nod, and a tear trickles down my cheek. “I’m sorry.”

“No.” His voice is definitive, a knife cutting the space between him and me. “Don’t apologize to me. We do what we have to do to deal, right? It’s no one’s fault. I’m just here to help.” He squeezes my leg. “So tell me what I can do to help you fix this.”

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.