The Wicked We Have Done (19 page)

BOOM.

The ground shakes as heat flares up behind us, and Valerie holds me tight. I turn my head enough to see orange flames eating away at the crunched metal, and a man on fire steps out of the car.

“GO!”
I scream.

Valerie and I jump up and run back the way we came, toward the monsters from my illusion.

One of them charges.

Not just one of them. The man I shot. Jason.

He isn’t real
.

I swing the shovel. On contact, his head explodes, gray matter flying everywhere, just like it flew from the back of his skull the first time I killed him.

Here we are, committing the same crimes to save our own asses.

“Holy
shit
!” Valerie screams.

I stop, shaking so badly the shovel drops to the ground, and clutch my torso.

“Ev? Ev, what is it?”

“Maybe we do deserve this.” I’m fighting so hard against death. I fell in love, and what’s it worth?

I’m still guilty as sin. I’ll always be.

Valerie grabs my shoulders. I can hear the howls of rage and agony from my rotting victims that lurk out in the forest.

“No one deserves this,” she says.
“No one.”
Maybe I’ve spent all of my empowerment on her, because she suddenly becomes as strong as I once was, strong enough to drag me along, back to our old camp. Back to the place where Casey and I were spit up from the ground, where the five of us spent a handful of peaceful days realizing that we weren’t thrown into a pit of hostile criminals. That the five of us were equally human.

The sky flashes green.

Module eight, disengaging.

The brightness of flame disappears behind us.

“It worked.”

“
It fucking worked!”
Valerie screams, and laughs.

We can still do this. We can get out of here tonight.

“Let’s go find Jace,” I say.

She takes my hand and we run, up the incline to where our old camp used to be. My legs burn and threaten to give out.

We near the clearing, the space around us still. No frightening illusions, no screams of terror.

“Jace!” Valerie soon chimes in. We call her name all of the way into the clearing, until we understand why she isn’t responding.

“No.” Releasing my hand, Valerie runs and drops to her knees near the motionless girl.

She screams.

The world becomes clouded. Fuzzy. I stumble to them, my blood pulsing in my ears. I kneel next to Jace, whose eyes are wide and terrified and lifeless, a bloody noose around her neck, her fingernails caked in blood from trying to claw her way free.

The other half of the noose hangs loosely, ripped wires sparking in the air. They killed her. They killed the most innocent, guilt-ridden, broken one of us.

Valerie screams and I cling to her, cradling her close to my chest. We were preparing for all of us to die—every last one. But no amount of preparation can help me with this—for living when Jace isn’t.

She finally wanted to live. She wanted to love.

“I did this.”

“No,” I sob.

“
I did this to her!”

The shriek dies and suddenly the prison is silent. The Compass Room has paused for once tonight, giving us a moment to grieve.

Half a minute to grieve.

Everything glows deep, vibrant green. Deeper than ever before.

The ground, the trees around us, even the dusky sky. Green bleeds from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The booming voice tells us,
Evacuation procedure in process. Please remain where you are.

Valerie collapses on top of Jace.

Evacuation procedure in process. Please remain where you are. Module one, disengaging.

I trace Jace’s cold lips, then coax her eyelids down. She is beautiful. Even in the green light, she is so beautiful.

Please remain where you are. Module two, disengaging.

“Find Casey.” Valerie rests her head on Jace’s chest. “You find him and you bring him back here.” Her voice trembles. “You make sure they don’t take him too.”

Casey.

“They’re telling us to stay put.”

“When have they stopped you before?”

. . . Module three, disengaging.

“I’ll be okay,” she whispers, cheek still pressed to Jace. “Go.”

“Valerie . . .”

“GO.”

. . . Module four, disengaging.

I leave the girls in the clearing and make my way through the green world. The voice continues to narrate as different modules, whatever they are, shut down.

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.

We broke the Compass Room.

Module seven, disengaging.

CANDIDATES CANNOT BE SAFELY EVACUATED UNTIL ALL MODULES ARE SHUT DOWN. PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.

I’m numb to the demanding voice. The prison has entirely succumbed to the harsh, alien light. It feels like hours before I wander through the second place where my desk showed up. My subconscious must have remembered. My subconscious needs him.

When I spot the desk, I find him slouched against a tree, his face a sickly white in the evacuation light. He smiles expectantly when I reach him.

My name slowly rolls off of his tongue.

Dropping to my knees, I pry his blood-soaked hands away from his stomach.

“God . . .”

“Shh,” he says.

“Please, please . . .”

“That boy shot me. . . . I was trying to run. He wanted to kill me.”

Blood squelches as I press my hand to his wound, trying to stop the flow.

“What happened?”

Module eighteen, shutting down.

He nods over my shoulder. A silver sphere rests in the grass.

“Turned into that.”

“Stay with me,” I plead. “I was so wrong. We shouldn’t have done this.”

Jace is dead.

Casey is breaking beneath my hands.

“So wrong.”

The green light fades, and the forest submits to twilight. I help lower him to the ground. He shuts his eyes.

This isn’t happening.

I shake him. “Can you hear me? Casey. Casey!”

His lips fall limply apart. “Don’t cry for me. Just stay.”

This is the end. Hot blood squelches past my fingers. He’s losing too much.

“You need to be brave.” He finds my hand and squeezes.

I dissolve into tears. “No.” I don’t want to be brave anymore. I was alone for too long, and now I have to go back. I’ve realized too late that this plan was a mistake. Without him, life on the outside will be solitary. And I will carry the burden of this place on my own.

“I don’t want to be brave.”

I sense his soul drifting. I push harder into his side, like I can keep his life pinned to the ground, keep him from floating away. His wet, ragged breath is far too shallow.

“Please, stay.”

My fingers slip from his hand to his cold, pulseless wrist.

“Casey?”

A spotlight illuminates his white, translucent skin. The wind picks up, a monster from above growling loudly, drowning his words.

“I’ll never leave you.” His voice evaporates to nothing, and his eyes glaze over.

I cry his name, voice mute beneath the roar of the monster.

Hands grasp my waist and yank me back. I scream and thrash until glove-covered fingers clasp over my mouth. Four figures in blue medic suits rush past me and kneel around him.

The man who holds me jabs something into my neck. My jaw aches.

Everything is soft and dark.

15

This place reeks of latex and disinfectant. Everything around me is blurry and white. White—unnaturally so. There is nothing so blindingly pure in nature. My head flops to the side, and I study my veiny hand where a taped needle pierces the skin of my wrist, feeding me clear liquid.

This isn’t the Compass Room.

I’m not awake for long before the nurse—the same one who had injected the monitor into my head—walks into the room.

“Miss Ibarra,” she says. “Good to see you awake.”

She hooks her tablet up to the monitors next to me.

“Let me upload your stats.” A few seconds go by. “Wonderful. Looks like everything’s okay.”

Wonderful. Okay. With one shaky hand I wipe the drool trailing down my chin.

“I made it out?”

Suddenly everything rushes back to me. The malfunction. The plan to get us out. Jace. Casey.
Casey
.

I choke back a gasp as the thought of him dying in my arms floods my entire being. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. One stupid decision after another and I’m killing everyone who ever loved me.

He loved me. Two fucking weeks and he said he loved me. And I destroyed him.

Tears burn in my eyes and I wish I could grieve, but the drugs work their way through my system, and the world—the clean-cut, whitewashed real world—is still a haze of stiff sheets and beeping machines.

“The remaining candidates were released early so the CR could be evaluated.”

“Candidates?”

She tilts her head to the right.

On the opposite side of the corridor, Valerie sits in bed with her knees to her chest. She’s fixated on the cup of green Jell-O in her hands.

She doesn’t notice I’m awake, not until my nurse leaves the room. We react at the same time, ripping the IVs from our arms and jumping out of our hospital beds. I almost fall on my face when my feet hit the linoleum. She stumbles and smacks into the wall.

We groggily limp toward each other, and when we meet, I throw my arms around her and sob into her shoulder, dragging her down to the ground with me.

Her skin is clammy and she smells like I do—of cheap soap and plastic.

“We made it out.” I breathe the words into her hair.

Her fingers close around the folds of my hospital gown, balling the fabric into her fists. The silent question is as clear as if she’d spoken it out loud.

Why does it still feel so unsafe?

“Everyone’s gone.” Her face crumples, like the thought is brand-new. She can’t hold herself upright, collapsing in front of me. I lean over her broken body, her broken soul, as she cries into the linoleum.

I killed them.

We should have stayed at camp. I’d clung so desperately to the idea of all of us leaving the Compass Room safely that it never occurred to me everything that could stem from my last-minute plan. In a truly just world, I would be the one to die while Jace had another chance. I was the one who kept proving myself to be a killer over and over in the Compass Room.

Jace—Jace finally wanted to live.

I took it away from her.

And Casey. Casey’s gone.

You should be numb to tragedy by now,
he had said.

I rest my head on top of Valerie’s back. I am wicked in its purest form. I had gathered hope in the darkest of places for the sake of destroying it.

You should be numb to tragedy by now.

Casey was right, but he was a little too early when he said it. Now I think I finally am.

“This is all my fault,” I whisper.

I sit up when I feel her straighten beneath me. Her eyes are bloodshot, but somehow, after everything, I also see determination.

“No, Evalyn.” She takes both my hands in hers as a tear trickles down her cheek. “The only thing you’re guilty of is caring about all of us enough to not want to see us die. Promise me that you’ll never blame yourself for their deaths. You didn’t kill them.”

She squeezes my hands out of urgency.

“They did.”

***

I’m given back the clothes I checked into the prison wearing—a floral button-up and jeans that are much too big for me. But they’ll work.

A federal agent clips a thin titanium tracking bracelet around my wrist. I may be out of the Compass Room, but the water’s about to start boiling. I’ll be on probation until the events within the CR have been thoroughly investigated. Then I’ll be retried.

I don’t know what exactly I’ll be tried for, and I won’t until I have my debrief with a CR official. I might have to sit through a trial of the shooting again, but instead of a Compass Room, my sentencing will be different. Maybe better, maybe worse.

Or the crimes I committed in the Compass Room may be piled on top of the shooting.

The only thing that can redeem me now is the data on my thoughts and emotions stored in the CR files. If the Compass Room read me as redeemable, then perhaps I won’t be sentenced to death.

But the odds aren’t in my favor. Especially after killing someone in the place that was supposed to judge my morality.

The only thing I can do now is enjoy the few fleeting moments of freedom that I have.

The federal hospital in Los Angeles has a strict no-visitors-allowed policy, so I don’t see Mom until I’m released.

Valerie and I walk side by side out onto the lawn, where my family waits. Mom has a bouquet of flowers in one hand and holds the arm of one wriggly Todd in the other. She can’t keep him still when he sees me, so she lets him go. I drop to my knees, and he collides with me.

He’s laughing. Todd’s laughing.

“I’m never letting you go again, okay?” I kiss his pudgy little cheek over and over. “Never ever.”

He tugs on a lock of my hair. “Ice cream.”

I grin. “Every day.”

When I stand, Mom hugs me tight. I don’t want her to say anything, because this is enough. When she’s soaked through the shoulder of my shirt, I whisper, “I love you,” into her hair.

A car door slams. People run onto the grass, and a young woman shrieks. I pull away from Mom and turn toward the commotion, where a girl with golden curls and a face exactly like Valerie’s runs across the grass. She jumps into Valerie’s arms. The sisters are laughing and crying, and her twin is saying, “You did it. You did it. I knew you’d never leave me.”

A balding man waits patiently until the girls finish. He carries a child in his arms.

When Valerie sees him she instantly sobers up. Her sister takes the child and the man says something I don’t expect.

“Are you all right?”

Her face scrunches up, and instantly, she shifts from a twenty-five-year-old woman into a little girl.

“No, Dad.”

He pulls her close and holds her, pressing his lips to her forehead. She grips the back of his shirt until her knuckles are white. This must have been so hard for them, for her dad and my mom and the loved ones of all the other candidates, to harbor the doubt for a month and wait, wait, wait, hoping.

Praying.

Valerie turns to the little boy and reaches out, taking him from her sister.

“Say hello to your aunt, Charlie.”

He wraps his arms around her neck, and Valerie says, “He’s beautiful,” burying her nose in his blond curls.

Mom taps me on the shoulder to gain my attention. She hands me my tablet. “I met with an agent before I got to see you. He uploaded some information. Said you would be interested in taking a look at it.”

I uncover what she’s referring to, opening the file. I read the headline. It’s a summary of all the deaths in our Compass Room.

My hands tremble in rage. How cruel for an agent to think I’d need to relive the deaths of my fellow inmates. Salem Ramirez is the first on the list. Execution
,
it reads.

Erity Lin: Execution

Blaise Wilson: Execution

Stella Devereux: Execution

My fingers tighten around the tablet as tears threaten to spill. “Liars,” I hiss.

Tanner Saito: In-Room Homicide

Gordon Ostheim: In-Room Homicide

Jacinda Glaser: Malfunction

I turn the page. The tablet slips from my hands.

“Evalyn?” my mother says.

Nothing could have prepared me for this.

I sink to my knees and contain nothing inside me—nothing. Every moment spent with him bursts from my chest. His lips on mine, his arms around me. The way he began to say my name when the meaning of the word transformed from ally to something more.

The way he held me as Meghan died.

His expression when he told me that he loved me.

Sobs consume me, and I collapse on the grass.

Valerie finds me. She must have read the document. She must know, because as she holds me, she says softly, “Oh my God, Ev.”

“Oh my God.”

“
Oh my God.
”

***

I have to take a guard with me everywhere I go. It’s a complimentary federal guard at least, but he doesn’t seem thrilled that I’m making him walk everywhere.

The public wasn’t too happy concerning the agreement of our freedom. The media’s made us out to be monsters, deviants who misused the system to get out alive. And the world is eating it up.

Living in fear isn’t exactly freedom. But I guess I’ll take it, for now.

“I can get a car for you, Miss Ibarra,” my guard suggests. He wears a black suit in the near-hundred-degree Los Angeles weather. Sweat drips from his red face.

“I’m fine, thank you. It’s a short walk.”

After Mom gave me the clothes and belongings she brought for me, she and Todd took the train home. I told her I still had some things to do. A few loose ends to tie.

An ash tree stretches toward the sky in the center of a small, shaded park. Compass Room victims are scattered here by default, close to CR labs and headquarters. There are no plaques, no signs that suggest what this place is or who these people are. The government refuses to memorialize the evil. But there are flower wreaths, notes, and pictures. People never stop loving.

I stand at the edge of the park. A breeze catches my hair and cools the sweat on the back of my neck. I’m about to walk toward the tree when a horn beeps behind me. I turn. Valerie sits in the driver’s seat of a Porsche, her guard on the passenger’s side. She slides her aviators down her nose.

“Nice ride,” I say.

“Thank-you gift from Dad.”

“Thank you for what?”

“Not dying. Why are you walking?”

“Wanted some time to think.”

“Well, I’m headed out. I wanted to see if I could give you a lift.”

It’s strange that we’re having such a casual conversation.

“I’m headed to the—”

“I know where you’re headed,” she says. “You left the front of the hospital before a correspondent came outside searching for you. They moved him home.”

“Home?”

“It’s where his mom wanted him. She signed some paperwork and boom, he was hers.”

“Like, Illinois home?”

She raises her watch. “The next train leaves in fifteen. What do you say?”

***

Both of our huge guards are crammed into the backseat of Valerie’s Porsche. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.

When we arrive at the station, mine (his official name is James) actually gives a sigh of relief before opening the door and stretching his legs.

I touch Valerie’s shoulder. “When am I going to see you?”

She gives me a crooked smile and shakes her head. “Don’t know. Maybe gonna try and get my master’s between now and the time those fuckers bring us to court.”

“You know that if you need anything before then—”

“Trust me, Ev. You’ll be getting phone calls every week until the day I die, which may be soon, according to how important having a guard with me all the time was stressed.”

“Don’t joke like that with me.”

“But seriously.” Her face softens. “I’ll see you soon.”

I lean in and kiss her on the cheek. “Call me when you make it home.” I climb out and close the door behind me, bending down and meeting her eyes that have grown exponentially serious in the past few seconds.

“Let me know how Illinois goes. It’s going to be hard.”

“I know.”

***

My private car on the train is almost too quiet. I feel like I’m obligated to make small talk with James. Luckily for me, right when I’m about to ask him if he has any kids, his cell rings and he’s on it for the remainder of the trip, pacing the opposite side of the car where I can’t hear him. I gaze out the window for a bit, the hills rolling along. Finding my phone, I scroll through the national headlines.

Compass Room Mishap

Star Death Penalty Machine Hopeless or Hindered?

Secrets Behind CR Glitch Revealed: Criminals Tamper With System

Terrorist Evalyn Ibarra Back on the Loose: Are Your Children Safe?

I click off the screen, suddenly tired, more tired than I should feel well fed, well rested, and dressed in nice clothes. On a safe train. I can’t shake the butterflies in my stomach, and they’re so distracting that the only thing left to do is lean back and shut my eyes.

When we arrive at the Jefferson County Station four hours later, a car waits for us. My foot taps nervously on the floor as we roll through the countryside. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. I ask the driver how much longer. He replies with, “Almost,” as we turn onto a dirt road.

His mother’s house is cookie-cutter country, with flower boxes beneath the windowsills and a porch with a rocking chair. It’s almost unbearable. There’s a huge oak out front with a tire swing.

“Would you like me to wait here, Miss Ibarra?”

“Yes, please,” I reply, half-distracted as I slip from the car and close the door behind me.

The wind toys with the hem of my sundress. I’m frozen in apprehension at the memorial before me. A beautiful, white-stained cross leans against the tree. A single cabbage rose is threaded through the hook in the center of it.

My throat tightens, and I swallow.

The screen door slams. I recognize Casey’s mother from the illusion he and I shared in the CR. She’s dressed in dark jeans and a floral blouse. She’s beautiful and young.