A Vault of Sins (6 page)

Posted by CRDigger:
Prologue of my new fic, “Trials and Tragedy.” If enough people are into it, then I’ll continue!

There was only one thought on Evalyn’s mind when she woke up.

Murder.

She was one of the lucky ones, making it out of the Compass Room alive. All of those criminals she was with—they were wicked and useless.

All of them deserved to die. All of them needed to die.

Valerie and Casey weren’t supposed to make it out with her. They knew too much. They knew the one secret about her that was supposed to stay buried in the CR with all the dead.

There was only one other option. As soon as she was released back into the world as a free woman, she would find them, and kill them.

Posted by VengefulSweetheart:
OOOOHHH I love evil EI fics. Post more soon!!!! <3333

In the span of a couple of weeks, I finish my painting of Jace and start one of Tanner. He sits cross-legged on the ground at my rendition of our old campsite, the top of his head missing and all of our trigger objects floating from him.

“They’re brilliant, you know.”

I turn to Valerie and raise an eyebrow.

“Seriously. I had one guy—one of my best friends—design all my tattoos, but I’m willing to break the track record for you.”

“You want
me
to design your next tattoo?”

She smirks. “We’re still going to find a parlor, right?”

***

The evening before our adventure to the tattoo parlor, Valerie lies on the floor on her stomach with her tank top pulled up to her shoulder blades. I study the space I have to work with beside the sparrow nestled on a branch.

“You need water,” I decide.

“Water?” She hums in thought.

“The essence of life. And you have a lot of life on you.”

“You can’t do water well without white ink. And you can’t get anything with white ink if you’re going to someone even remotely incompetent.”

“Have you seen where we are? The nearest tattoo parlor is absolutely going to be filled with incompetent people.”

She huffs. “Fuck it. Let’s do it. But if the artist destroys my body, it’s all your fault, Ibarra.”

***

It’s daring and reckless to be seen together in the middle of the day, but the more time that passes, the more I’m forcing myself to face the truth. No matter how the media portrays us, being with Valerie makes me happy . . . happier than I’ve been in a while.

She feels the same way. “I honestly don’t care if anyone recognizes us and broadcasts us together. My claim to fame is the majority of the country loathing me because they think I’m a man-hater. My rep can’t get worse, even hanging out with a psychopathic serial killer.”

“Wait? You
don’t
hate all men?” I cry in faux-shock, flicking on my blinker to turn into the town of less than five thousand.

She chuckles. “Missed you, bitch.”

There’s a small, rundown strip mall near the end of town that I park in front of. We walk inside the tattoo shop. The parlor is empty except for an older gentleman—the artist. His day isn’t booked. Valerie asks if he’s ever booked, and he laughs. He doesn’t seem to recognize us.

Valerie goes first. I hand my sketch to the artist and explain exactly how the coloring should look as she lies stomach-down, shirtless. She rests her head on her hands like this is nothing exciting.

Valerie’s piece takes several hours. In the meantime I read her fan-fiction from my phone, even the raunchy and filthy stuff. Our artist wears an amused grin the entire time he works, and doesn’t even get frustrated when Valerie chuckles so deeply that her entire back vibrates.

I check out his work when he’s nearly finished. He’s done a tremendous job rendering the white ink for the falling water.

“I spent a lot of time with her in the creek.”

“Jace?”

Valerie nods, and sits up. “It’s like you knew or something.”

I shake my head. I didn’t know; neither of them told me. “Well then, I guess it was the perfect choice for ink.”

She smiles. “I guess it was.”

After the artist’s smoke break, I lie on the chair. He preps me and I tell him what I want and where I want it—along the inner side of my right bicep.

The needle presses into my skin and my eyes flutter shut. The pain is sharp, but not as fierce as I was expecting. It’s cleansing—necessary.

Since mine is text, the process takes only an hour. He wipes the excess ink away and I hold my arm out, reading the gorgeously crafted script. It’s perfect.

Valerie reads out loud “‘Someone for the end of the world.’ What does it mean?”

“It means that I made a mistake.” I touch the text, even though it stings. “We’re on the verge of our shitty lives being ruined every waking moment, and I ran.”

Her eyes glisten, and I hope to God she doesn’t start crying here, in this gruff, poorly lit tattoo parlor. “I’m telling you. Don’t ever run.”

***

When we return home a couple of hours later, we spray each other with antibacterial ointment and re-bandage. I make a salad and Valerie threatens that if I want her to eat, I need to make something junkier. So I make macaroni and cheese from a box.

“I’m not a chef.” I stir around the white, rubbery noodles. “I can’t bake you a cake or make you a pot roast.”

“Casey knows how to cook.”

I arch and eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

“He told me.” She hops up on the counter next to the stove with my tablet and flicks her finger across the screen.

“When?” I try my hardest not to sound jealous that Valerie knows something about Casey that I don’t.

She shrugs. “It came up at camp once. I think when we were experimenting with canned foods. But he could have just been saying that. SPAM can only impress a girl so much. Whoa,” she says in the same breath. “You just got a message.”

I frown, grabbing the tablet from her. The notification for the new message fills the screen. I tap OK.

It’s Rebel_W again.

Do you want to escape for good?

Who is this?
I type.

“What’s going on?” Valerie asks.

I shake my head as another message pops up.

It doesn’t matter who I am. It only matters what I can do.

“It’s the cryptic son of a bitch who led me to you.”

She slides off the counter to hover over my shoulder. “Wow. Tell him that he sounds too corny as fuck for me, thanks.”

“Assuming he’s a guy. Corny as fuck or not, he did know you were going to be at that bar, so he isn’t all full of shit.” I type:
The last thing you told me was a lie. I know you wanted to bring me to Val, but you broke your promise on the info that would save my ass. Why should I trust you?

He types,
Lie . . . you sure about that? How about you turn on your feed?

“What the hell?” Valerie grabs the tablet from my hands to read for herself.

“Jenna,” I murmur. “Activate news feed.”

The screen illuminates on the wall, and the breaking stories are listed in the news application.

CR Feed Leak Destroys Division of Judicial Technology’s Credibility, Brings Humanity to Inmates

Valerie and I sit on the bed as I play the feed and a pretty female reporter explains everything to us.

***

The real data for Room C was hacked. Footage has been released on a public domain called Reprise.

The hackers are anonymous, the owner of the domain anonymous. Right now, the government is doing everything that they can to find out who they are. At least, that’s what the news is saying.

The footage is comprised of hundreds of hours of us in the real Compass Room. Every single moment up close and personal. Somehow, the technology used to film us even captures the illusions we experienced, like it was interconnected with our experiences—a Bot, chip, and recording triangulation. The cameras must have been microscopic, hiding in trees and rocks and walls. Every second was documented. We run for our lives, make friends, make love, bleed . . . nothing was cut out. Now the entire world knows what it looks like when Evalyn Ibarra shits in the woods.

“We haven’t been able to view all of the footage for ourselves yet,” says an anchor, who sits at an oval table with her colleagues as though she’s in the middle of a debate. “But sources tell us that this footage fully explores the reasons as to why candidates within the Compass Room thought the simulations were glitching, and why they took action to get themselves extracted. These young men and women had grown to care about one another.”

The man sitting across from her chuckles. “I wouldn’t say
just
caring about each other.”

“What an asshole,” Valerie grumbles.

It’s difficult to comprehend that the man on television made a joke because he saw me having sex. “They . . . watched us.”

“The entire world has seen your tits, Ev. The entire world has seen
my
tits.”

“Not just our tits.”

“Welp.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “This is awkward.”

The breaking news story details everything they know about the leak. The hackers pulled the “highlights” and important moments to the front of their website, with several scenes showing that both Casey and I and Valerie and Jace were in evolving romantic relationships. They examine our community and the grief we carried over death, and the logic behind our belief that the Compass Room was actually malfunctioning.

“The Division of Judicial Technology has already called a press conference to address concerns about the feed, but word is that at this time, they are claiming this data isn’t a recording of anything taking place in the real world, but of the meta simulation the candidates went through . . .”

“How could
anyone
believe that bullshit!?” Valerie nearly screams.

By the time the story finishes, my mouth is dry.

“Everything,” she says.

“Everything,” I repeat.

“I don’t want to watch it with you, but I need to see.”

“Come.” I stand and she follows me into the kitchen, where I pour us two shots of tequila. We down them at once and I pour us another round.

“So much for keeping Casey your little secret.” She licks salt from her hand. “I guess running really was all for nothing. Now you seem like an even bigger bitch to the public than you would have if you had stayed with him.”

I inhale the second shot. “Won’t matter if the division can convince the public that this all happened in our heads.”

“Meta-sex is still sex, Evalyn.”

I pour myself a rum and coke. “Except we didn’t have meta-sex. We had real sex.”

“Tell that to the press.” Valerie sits on the couch with her phone and begins to watch the CR feeds for herself. It might be below freezing today, but I can’t stay inside.

Outside, I sit on the porch steps. This will probably be the only time I’ll have to look through these feeds before the government finds a way to take them down. It isn’t hard to find the Reprise site—it must be receiving a ridiculous amount of traffic right now. The main page hosts what the breaking story called the “highlights.”

The highlights are all of the monumental moments. Not just the deaths, but also our moments of vulnerability—when we were terrified, when we were hungry, when we were being seduced. They’re separated by individual, so some feeds are repeated twice. Many under mine and Casey’s names, for example. Many under Valerie’s and Jace’s.

I don’t know what compels me to be brave in this moment, but I click on a clip that overlaps me and Stella. Then I sit, drink my rum, and watch her die all over again.

Her death is more dramatic than I remember. She burns alive, and I scream so loudly in the recording that my speakers crackle. When she’s dead, Casey walks into the picture. He kneels behind me and wraps his arms around me. This is when I lose it, when all of the walls I built up around myself since Meghan’s death come crashing down. I shriek into Casey’s chest, sobbing until I’ve completely worn myself out, until I can hardly talk.

The video is a close-up bird’s-eye view of the death. I start the clip over and watch again, noticing something—someone—that I didn’t see when Stella had died in my arms in the Compass Room. The illusion of the house was blocking him.

Gordon.

He stands against a tree in a near meadow, arms crossed as he watches us, like he’s looking right through the illusion of the house. When Stella finally dies, he slinks into the darkness of the forest, going completely unnoticed by both me and Casey.

What a creep.

I move onto the next clip, watching video after video, instances I didn’t know about, like Valerie’s and Jace’s first kiss. Jace wakes up screaming, and Valerie—maybe in attempt to calm her—silences Jace’s mouth with her own. Jace releases a moan of relief, and I don’t think that it’s because she realizes she was only dreaming. It’s a relief of connection, a kiss after two weeks of fear, and two weeks of wanting her.

I back out of the clip, unable to watch another second. When I realize how ragged my breathing is, I try to control it, shutting my eyes.

But I keep seeing Jace’s face.

The sharp emotion of sheer anguish rips through me. She should be here right now. She should be alive and with Valerie.

I down the rest of my rum and begin opening the clips overlapping me and Tanner. First, the one where he finds our camp and tells the rest of us that Gordon was chasing him. Then, the one of me removing the splinter from his finger. The one of him stabbing Gordon to save me and Casey.

And finally the one where he dies and I kill Gordon.

I wonder what the world thinks of the way I brutally murdered him. Even if everyone believes it’s only a simulation, this clip proves that even after being sentenced to the CR, I was willing to kill again. And now I’m back in the real world instead of rotting in jail.

Tapping on the clip of Casey and me in the cabin, I watch myself run inside after our makeshift bath, dripping wet and very, very naked.

I try to study my own face as Casey and I have sex, and the hesitance that consumes my features. I’d be lying if I said that it was the best sex I’d ever had. It wasn’t even close. But the fact that we got that far without showering for two weeks in hell said something, right?

Or maybe we were just desperate to find a connection with someone before our lives were over.

Someone for the end of the world
.

Casey was my someone for the end of the world.

I watch us as we talk afterward, sweaty and still a little filthy even though we had tried to clean ourselves with soap and water from the outside well. My hair is a rat’s nest, but Casey strokes it like it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. I notice something about him now that I didn’t in that moment—that the tension in his face that he’d worn throughout almost all of our time in the Compass Room is completely erased. I can tell, even from my position as a fly on the wall, he’s mulling over every word pouring from my mouth about my past. I wonder what those thoughts consisted of—if he was trying to determine how a girl like me could end up in the Compass Room, if we could somehow have a future if we both made it out alive . . .