The Wicked We Have Done (13 page)

Which means that one of the other two could have already seen it, could be going through their test right now.

Or could be dead.

I bolt to the tunnel. Casey calls my name, but I don’t turn back around. I reach out and press my palm to the pink paint, the very real metal, and the numbers that read
12830
.

I slip through the tunnel of curled saplings. The path slopes downward.

Past the dense, dew-laden trees rests a wrought-iron gate. I open it, the noise of the hinge ripping through the quiet air. Hedges line the way.

A petite, boot-covered foot disappears behind the first corner of the maze. I scream Stella’s name.

The hedges are a one-way labyrinth. The sky darkens, not from the setting sun, but from ash—a paralyzed cloud blanketing the air above me.

Hedges shift to oak. The coal-black sky trickles downward like shredded lace. Before me, embedded into the side of the mountain, is a polished wooden door. The circular window mimics a crystal sundial. Vines creep over the wood like parasites, and the crack beneath the door coughs soot.

Heart racing, I grasp the handle and turn.

The door opens to an empty room. Wilted sunlight trickles through the dusty window, across the beams on which Stella stands. Before her is a fireplace set in stone, with a mantel hosting five frames. Pictures of people. A family, perhaps.

“You know I love you,” Stella says. “You know I’ll do anything to fix this. I’ve dreamt about you every night. All I want is for things to be like they used to.”

She speaks to a boy. He’s gaunt but handsome. Taking Stella’s face, he says, “Things will never be how they used to. It’s your fault. And you have to accept that.”

“No, Finn. You need to believe me. It wasn’t me. I’d never do anything to hurt you.” Her sob cracks through the empty air. “How could you even think that?” She’s angry now. “You know me. You know I’d never hurt you or your family!”

I take a step closer, and another. The floor turns to ash like a burned sheet of paper, gray petals curling away from each other. They rise from the ground and remain stagnant, as if they’re floating in water. I reach out and touch one. It disintegrates.

When Stella sees me, her eyebrows furrow together. “What are you doing here?” There is a clarity to her. She’s no longer chained by mania and fear.

“I’m getting you out of here. You don’t need to see him again.” I hold my hand out to her.

Bury it, burn it, break it into pieces. It always comes back
.

The mailbox. She was talking about the mailbox.

“You don’t owe him an explanation, Stella. He isn’t real.”

She wrings her hands in front of her and studies Finn. He seems as real as Casey’s father did. As Meghan. Stella reaches out and touches his chest.

“I know he feels real, but he isn’t. I promise you.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Finn says.

“I know, Evalyn.” A tear trickles down her cheek. “I know he’s full of lies. I know. He comes to me spouting these horrible things and it isn’t true. He isn’t true. But I make myself believe he is.”

The floating embers around us burn hotter. “Stella, we need to go now.”

“I wish he’d believe me.”

A green flash fills the room, and Finn is gone.

Stella screams and falls to her knees. At first I think the mania is back. But then she raises her hands. They’re charred black.

I race to her and drop down, grasping her wrists to hold her still. Her flesh is searing hot.

She shrieks.

“What’s burning you, Stella?
Talk to me!”

The smoldering spreads, eating up the flesh on her forearms and elbows. She falls to her back, writhing in agony. I search for water, for anything that will staunch the burning, but there’s only one empty room.

The bottom of her shirt turns to ash. Her arms aren’t the only part of her that’s charring. The skin on her stomach peels and blisters and boils.

She’s dying.

“What is doing this to you? Stella! Let me help you!”

Her shrieks turn to ragged, choked gasps, and her eyes roll to the back of her head. She claws at my shirt with her marred, twisted hands, but I can do nothing. The smell of cooked meat fills the room.

She blinks and finds me, and I know she no longer feels the pain. Her blonde curls fan from her head like a halo.

I see Meghan, dying alone. Dying with no one to help her.

The invisible fire has burned a crater beneath the cove of her rib cage. Any deeper and she’ll no longer be able to breathe. I speak while I still have her.

“I’m so sorry.” I doubted her. I never took her seriously, not even when she stumbled into camp looking like the devil had his way with her.

“Why?” The word leaves her mouth quiet and garbled.

I can’t answer her. All I can say is, “It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

Her body trembles as she tries to breathe, and her lungs refuse. Before my eyes she suffocates, and I keep lying to her. I keep telling her that everything is okay.

Everything is okay.

It’s okay
.

She’s gone.

I force down her eyelids with my fingers and wipe the sweat beneath my nose, contaminating my upper lip with the smell of her burned flesh.

My entire being down to my soul begins to shake. I shut my eyes and wait it out, wait for it to wash over me, rattling me until I’m flushed and dizzy.

When I open my eyes, the house and the ashes are gone. I kneel in a meadow, Stella lying before me. Sun streaks through the trees. A gust of wind cools the sweat on my forehead.

I think of Stella floating in the clearest water I can imagine.

A hand rests on my shoulder. “I’m not giving up either,” Casey says.

My Sentence Was Old News Now.

I could tell when I started getting smacked around less than the day before.

Valerie was much more fun for the others to torment. Every time I saw her, her face was different phases of healing and broken, black and blue and crusted yellow. I had sympathy for her, but at the same time, she really needed to keep her hands to herself.

I watched the rallies on TV in the back of the packed rec room. There were mobs of people in DC, Los Angeles, and New York City protesting the Compass Rooms that would launch in less than a month.

They were a new wave of soldiers who disregarded science as truth. Even though the ability to measure morality had been proven, painted signs flashed within the crowds that said
we are not gods
and
your scientific method proves we are murderers
and
protect our children
.

“There’s still hope,” a girl next to me whispered. She had a kind face. I was taken aback but I didn’t want to show it, so instead I nodded and said, “Thanks.”

I knew hope was futile, though. Hope for what? That before I leave, the government would decide to listen to the hippies and this would all disappear? When had the government ever listened to the hippies?

But in truth, it wasn’t just the hippies who were protesting. It was pacifist Christians, Buddists, humanitarians, and libertarians who didn’t want to front the money to build the Compass Rooms in the first place. It was those who doubted the accuracy of scientists to be able to determine a moral compass. That would have never been conceivable twenty years ago, so it must not be true.

I closed my eyes, drowning in the heat of a stress fever that had come on a few days prior.

Someone turned up the volume. Maybe a guard, to torture me.

“Compass Rooms have caused outrage among several human rights groups. Scientists argue that the genes composing us aren’t malleable. Genes for unforgivable crimes such as murdering and raping exist from birth . . .

“. . . exterminating them early would mean less crime in the future.

“. . . what Compass Rooms attempt to uncover is whether these criminals have these genes or their crimes were one-time flukes.”

***

That night, I dreamt of suffocating darkness. I knew it was death. I lied on my back, my arms and legs splayed as though I were creating snow angels in the thick, tangible black. I allowed the screams of my victims to wash over me, blanket me. I would soon join them.

And then all dues would be paid.

9

I can’t take enough air into my body. Stella’s stench is too much.

“Deep breaths,” Casey urges as he cradles me. “Deep breaths. In and out.”

I’m trying. I’m opening my mouth but my lungs refuse to cooperate. Finally my throat relaxes, and I suck in a ragged gulp of oxygen.

My voice bursts to life, my sob scraping through the silence. I make fists around the fabric of his T-shirt and cry into his chest. I shriek and choke and cough and he doesn’t shush me. He doesn’t tell me that everything’s going to be all right. He holds me until I’ve expended myself, until the only muscles still working are the ones in my fingers that cling to his clothes.

Every thought rolling through my mind is an unconnected fragment.

Casey helps me to my feet and guides me away from the meadow. Nothing is familiar, and I know it isn’t because I’m disoriented from Stella’s death. I had been led to the house via hedges, and whether those hedges were an illusion or not, they’re no longer here.

We head up the hill in the hopes of finding Valerie, Jace, and Tanner, but the sun is at the wrong place in the sky. This isn’t the hill they’ll be on.

We’re turned around.

“This is wrong,” I tell Casey.

“I know,” he says. “The ground levels out over there. We can start heading west.”

Casey picks up his pace and I follow suit. When the ground flattens and the trees clear, we’re released into an unfamiliar meadow.

At the center, a desk with a red cracked seat rests, vines entwined around its legs, as if it’s been sitting here for years.

Bury it, burn it, break it into pieces. It always comes back.

One thing after another. No downtime. No mercy. The Compass Room is fed up with us today. It’s been too easy on us. Now it wants to see us writhe.

And I’m next.

“Casey.”

I’m already in his arms as he drags me back, away from the meadow and into the darkness of the forest.

“It will only chase us!” I cry.

He knows there’s no escaping, and yet he’s still trying to protect me.

I muster up enough strength to wriggle away from him and run back down to the meadow.

Objects trigger illusions—objects scattered within the woods that we can’t escape. They will bring back our crime. Our black mark.

It will just be Meghan. Meghan with a bullet through her brain, lying out in the woods somewhere.

I feel Casey’s presence behind me. I know he wants to reach out, to grab me and throw me over his shoulder and make a run for it.

I walk to the desk. There’s a break within the trees, where the light shines through, right upon the peeled plywood, the chunk taken out of the red seat.

It can’t be a replica. It’s too flawless to be a replica.

“A good psychopath gets off on knowing he’s unbreakable.”

Oh God.

I’m so dizzy, I don’t know if I can manage to look up at him before I pass out. But I do. He waits at the edge of the clearing, dark hair catching in the unscathed sunshine. Bomber jacket, tight jeans. Even in the most angelic light I’ve seen in these woods, he is surrounded in darkness.

I could face a dying Meghan. I could face Casey’s father.

But now I run.

It isn’t in Nick’s nature to chase me. He isn’t like that. He’s the kind of person to appear and take part of your soul away from you like he’s playing chess.

So when he rematerializes
in front of me, I know I can’t do this. Not after Stella.

Even though I want to hide my thought from the chip that’s reading me, it blossoms right at the front of my mind.

I’m glad he’s dead.

I sink to my knees.

He cocks his head slowly. Maybe he’s concerned I’m not willing to put up a fight this time, that I’m not willing to play into his game.

The light halos him. I shut my eyes.

His footsteps are slow and carefully placed, but I can hear every one of them. There’s a lapse of silence between his last step and the moment he presses the cold mouth of a handgun to my temple.

“I bet you’re enjoying this, dying just like her. Like you think you’re some fucking martyr,” he spits.

I open my mouth to respond, to release my biting last words. I choke on them.

“You don’t deserve that, though. You deserve to wait.”

Footsteps scramble behind me. The pressure of the gun evaporates, and I open my eyes.

He’s gone.

Casey sweeps me into his arms and releases a shuddering breath. We don’t have to speak. The way he combs his fingers through my hair says,
You’re still with me
.

I turn and crush my lips against his
.

***

We finally find the spot where we left the rest of our group. The trees have unwound themselves from the vines, and the wall is no longer here.

But neither are Jace, Valerie, and Tanner. We call their names with no response.

“They could have gone searching for us.”

“We can’t stay here waiting.”

He places a hand on my waist. “We don’t have to.”

We know we’re close to the lake, so Casey and I make for that direction in order to ground ourselves. Reaching the shore is a relief, even if this place reminds me of the first trick the Compass Room played on me. We fill up on water, and then make for the only direction we haven’t gone yet.

East, toward the mountains.

Panic inches its way through me as the sun sets. We’ll be stuck in the cold, in the darkness, with only each other. At least the moon rises full, shedding enough light across the ground that we can find a path.

Casey and I don’t speak—the only thing I want to talk about is how lost I feel, how big this place is, how hungry I am.

I am starting to understand Valerie. Giving up, curling into a ball with this boy in my arms, sounds deliciously tempting.

“I think I’m starting to see things,” Casey says when we have to backtrack after running into too much brush.

“What kind of things?”

“My mom.”

“Your mom.”

He nods. I follow the direction he’s staring and spot her a handful of yards away. Jeans and a T-shirt, hair twisted into a bun. There isn’t enough light to see the similarities between her features and Casey’s.

“Follow me,” she urges.

“It could be a trap,” Casey says.

“We die if we’re supposed to die, right?”

“Okay, okay.”

Casey holds my hand tightly. He’s nervous. “This way.”

An actual path cuts through the trees in the direction she leads us before she disappears. We follow it for a couple hundred feet before entering a clearing occupied by a lone cottage.

From the outside it’s nothing more than a shack. Warmth spreads through me at the thought of what could be waiting for us.

“We need to be careful,” Casey warns.

I’m over being careful, and to prove it, I let go of his hand and race up the rickety steps. I trace the doorknob, grip, and turn.

“It’s open.”

The air inside the cottage is stale. There’s no electricity and no sink.

One room with a furnished bed and a stack of cabinets. Behind their doors we find provisions—some dry food and canned fish. Not in a million years would I have been caught dead eating anything like this, but now I could eat wet cardboard and enjoy it.

We find some soap, toothpaste, and brushes. I check outside and spot a water pump I missed upon entering.

We stuff ourselves with everything we can find, not bothering to ration.

“What were you thinking . . .” We sit cross-legged on the bed across from each other. “. . . when the gun was to my head?”

The moonlight reflects in his irises. “That either of us might die in the next several days. And I’ve been a selfish ass for the past two.”

“You have not. You’ve handled shit quite well, given the circumstances.”

“I’ve been feeling sorry for myself, Evalyn. I’ve been so busy feeling sorry for myself, and you could have died today.”

“I should have.”

“What?”

“I should have died today.”

He frowns.

“I’ll be like Stella. They’ll have their way with me before finishing me off.”

He cups the back of my neck and kisses me. His lips are rough and chapped and perfectly warm. We part, but he doesn’t let go.

“You
will not
be like Stella.”

“If I had died today, it would have been better for you,” I say. “For us to not get too involved.”

His lip twitches, and the light waltzes in his eyes, across mottled green and brown, mottled like his bruises but somehow much more beautiful. “What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

“You smell like fish.”

He laughs. Oh, does he laugh. I forgot what that noise sounded like.

When sunlight first starts to filter through the windows, I go outside and fill the basin with water from the pump. It’s still so cold, but I want nothing more than to be clean.

He joins me to brush his teeth, and when he leaves, I strip off my sweatshirt and hang it on the porch and then remove the rest of my clothes and toss them into the filled basin.

I know he’s watching me while I wash my clothes completely naked. Using soap from the cabinet, I take my time scrubbing down each garment and rinsing it, even though I’m shaking. As I hang them up near my sweatshirt, I spot him staring at me through the window. His gaze flickers down to my breasts for a split second. I turn away from him and step into the water.

Casey walks outside. “I think you like washing in front of me.”

I bite my lip. “I think you might be right.”

“Do you want help with the pump?”

“That would be nice,” I say nonchalantly.

I can tell he’s trying not to stare as he stoops near me and pumps water into the basin. I cup my hands beneath the stream, dump the water over my shoulders, and soap up as quickly as possible. There’s no way this can be sexy. I’m more than likely like a shivering, wet dog. I splash him in attempt to lessen the awkwardness.

“If a water fight is what you want, Ibarra, I can bring it.”

“I’d rather you take your clothes off and join me.”

I don’t have to ask twice. Still hunched over, he takes off his shirt. Then he reaches out, cups the back of my thigh, and plants a kiss on my hipbone.

I whisper his name and suddenly he’s in the basin with me, his pants still on. His mouth crushes mine. I fumble with the button of his pants and slide them off.

“Why are we doing this out here again?” he asks.

I grin and pick up the bar of soap from the water, rubbing it over his chest. When he’s rinsed off, we run inside. There are no towels, so we rub ourselves dry with one of the blankets from the bed. I tie my hair up.

He pulls me onto his lap. I trace my finger across his forehead, swiping the hair from his face.

“I don’t mind my last memories being you,” I say.

I wish I knew him better. I wish we had the opportunity of a coffee date without the threat of our lives hanging over us, and I could hear him laugh when I crack stupid jokes. We’d talk about the places we’ve traveled and the college classes we’ve taken so far. Maybe we’d decide that the other person is nice, but not quite right, and we’d never get to this part. He closes the distance between us and presses his lips to my bare shoulder.

No matter what, it wouldn’t be like this.

It would be without some pervert engineer watching us, if this were happening after a hot bath at my apartment or a nice hotel. I’d smell like lavender, not sweat and laundry soap.

We’ll never have that.

This will be the only Casey I’ll ever know.

His tongue glides over my throat, and he falls back onto the bed. When I lie on him, he rolls me over until he’s on top, his fingers tracing the inside of my thigh.

He rests his forehead on mine, our rapid breaths dancing with each other. Boldly meeting my eyes, he says, “We’re making it out of here,” and then he pushes himself inside me.

It’s like we’ve been lovers forever. I arch my back as he drags his fingers down my spine. With every thrust I feel him weaken, becoming malleable, like he was after his test when he was bruised and bloody and broken. But this surrender is different. He isn’t surrendering his life. He’s surrendering to me.

We roll over, and I sit up. I trace his lips, and he opens his mouth and drags his teeth across my finger.

I move on top of him and his eyes flutter shut, his breaths shortening to match mine. He grips my hips, begging me to slow down before he loses it. With the pads of his thumbs, he draws light circles on my skin.

I haven’t been this vulnerable with a person in a year. No one has wanted me to feel this vulnerable with them.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I slide off of him and lie on my back, trying to disengage the feeling of him inside me. “I . . . uhh . . .”

“It’s been a while,” he says. It’s kind of cute that he thinks he’s the one at fault here, like he isn’t good in bed. I actually wish he were bad, because this, this familiarity, as if we know each other’s bodies so well, isn’t right.

“I’m not adjusted to being with someone is all. It’s . . . It’s too much.”

He turns on his side, fingers finding my inner thigh. “How about this?”

The energy from his hand is fire and ice at once. “Okay,” I whisper.

He lowers his head until his lips barely brush mine, his hand creeping higher up my leg. I say his name, and he slides his fingers inside of me, his face above my own and just out of reach.

He watches me the whole time, as his hand keeps the perfect rhythm, and before long I’m unraveling beneath him, every muscle clenching. He covers my mouth with his, like he’s trying to feel my orgasm himself.

The way he relaxes afterward tells me it might have worked.

He leaves the bed once to wash his clothes and hang them like mine, and for the rest of the day we lie in our new bed naked, facing each other as we talk about our childhood, high school, and college.

I like it. I like pretending that, for a morning and afternoon, we’re normal.

He grew up in Tennessee, but moved to Illinois with his parents when he was thirteen. He’s an only child, and experienced half a semester of college, where he planned to major in construction management.