A Vault of Sins (15 page)

“Swallow your fear, Evalyn.” Wes’s voice is strong, and finally something that I want to take seriously.

“What do I need to do?”

“Everything you did with the knife, you are going to do with the illusion. You are rewriting it. You are becoming the author.”

“How?” How do I disillusion myself? How do I pretend that what happened isn’t the truth?

“However you can.”

I blink, and suddenly it’s not just him and me. Meghan sits at the desk, and the trail is scattered with all of those boys. Masked and faceless, they are inhuman. They are unreal.

You are becoming the author.

Nick struts up to me, his eyes alive like blue fire. He is nearly salivating. I feel the gun to the back of my head as he pushes his own into my hands.

“Kill one of them. I don’t care who. Anyone. And I will spare her life and yours.”

You are the author.

I reimagine the situation before I play it out. Growing giddy, I realize this is what I’ve always wanted. A way to solve my mistake.

I meet Nick’s step until I’m level to him, eye to eye. I cup my hands before me. Half a second before he drops the gun into my waiting hands, I ball them into fists.

“Go fuck yourself.”

He doesn’t flinch, or frown, or scream in rage. He doesn’t evaporate like some wicked story villain, disappearing into the ether.

He cocks his eyebrow and smiles. “Too bad. I would have enjoyed sparing you.”

He nods to the boy behind me.

This is what would have happened if I’d chosen to defy Nick when he gave me instruction. With my faux suicide note written on the bathroom mirror, I’d still be to blame for Meghan and what happened in the faculty banquet. Nick wouldn’t have gotten exactly what he wanted. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, but with Meghan and me both dead, Nick would have gotten enough.

A green light flashes through the sky, and the boys and a sniffling Meghan disappear. The trees unwind themselves from the atmosphere, shriveling into nothing. The sunset scrapes itself from the sky at the same time an arctic wind nearly knocks me off my feet, and I shriek in shock.

My feet sink into the snow and I wrap my arms around myself, my eyes first darting to my abandoned coat and snowshoes, and then to Reprise and Casey off in the cloudy distance.

“Congratulations,” Wes says in my ear. “You just did the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do.”

“And w-w-what’s th-th-that?”

“You committed suicide, dumbass.”

***

If I’d taken on such a ballsy move in Compass Room C, nothing would have happened. But since I have an engineer chip in my head now, and if I’m not careful, I’ll end up doing the same thing that Gordon did to Blaise and Stella. Except I’ll do it to myself.

“I recreated the alternate situation,” I say on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and sipping a mug of cider laced with brandy. “I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.”

“You’re limiting yourself to the realms of reality,” Wes argues. “It doesn’t have to be choice A or choice B. With that chip in your head, you are completely rewriting the situation.”

I grind my teeth together. “Rewriting the situation . . . how the fuck am I supposed to do that?”

“You’ve been manipulating reality in your painting and you’re asking
me . . .”

“Don’t talk to me like you fucking know me,” I snap.

Wes raises his hands. “Alright, alright, Jesus. Why don’t you get some sleep, and we’ll work on this again in the morning.”

He doesn’t give me a chance to respond, leaving me in the common room beneath the dull yellow light of the lamp. Before me the fire crackles, and Piper works on her mural of us—her virtual corkboard of Compass Room candidates.

I’m tired.

It is beyond the physical sense of tired. Even the intangible parts of me—my thoughts and emotions—somehow ache. I down the rest of my drink as Casey sits next to me. He looks as exhausted as I must look, but manages a cockeyed grin, peeling away the top corners of my blanket to plant a warm kiss against my collarbone.

“I can’t fall asleep without you,” he whispers against my skin. “I feel like tonight is going to be a bad one for dreams.”

“I’ll be right there,” I assure him. With another kiss, he’s gone.

I watch Piper for several quiet minutes. I wonder if she realizes I’m in the common room before she looks back at me, twisting her blue braid around her finger. She bites her lip.

“What?” I ask. “You look like you want to tell me something.”

“I do, but I don’t know how.”

“Just spit it out.” I yawn. “I’m exhausted and need to go to bed soon anyway.”

I watch her try and formulate the words for solid moments, dragging her jaw back and forth as if that will somehow help her. “Nick’s journal. I’ve been reading through it. Digesting it over the past few weeks. Wanted to know if you cared to learn what I found.”

Nick’s journal. Piper really has everything on us. I should be begging for her to tell me. He had been my obsession in prison after all, and I’d been stuck in a cell with limited information, only capable of dissecting his fascination with chaos theory with all of the knowledge I had on the topic.

Which was very, very limited.

“The cops had this journal, right?” I ask.

She nods. “Nothing in here that really acquits you. In fact, he never mentioned his plan at all.”

I stand and drop my blanket, walking to the wall, where pages of Nick’s journal are projected. I begin to read them out of order. He rambles about nothing—about
everything
—science and religions and philosophy. I can’t make sense of any of it.

“Before the shooting, I asked him if his grand plan had something to do with chaos theory.”

“And he said, yes, I’m guessing.”

I nod. “I never understood it though. Not fully.” I pace in front of the wall. “I thought that if I understood, I’d get a sense of closure, but the furthest I ever got was that the shooting was the first domino. He wanted to create a legacy—”

“Stop,” she says.

I stare at her, too exhausted to attempt to figure out what she means by the command.

“You can’t try and make sense of him. Nick was psychotic and everything he did was because he was sick. Nothing more. I know, trust me. I’ve studied far too many people and I know a delusional psychopath when I see one.”

I glance back at the pages—a map of Nick and his delusions.

“He’d been different since he was a child, and he was very aware of this. Before anything else, before his plan to kill himself had even fully formed in his mind I’m sure, he used chaos theory to dissect his own life. Cause and effect. Why did he feel different? What caused him to have such dark, twisted thoughts and desires? There had to be a reason. A key.”

I read one page:

A few days before my fifth birthday, I got into the kitchen cabinet and spilled bleach all over the floor. Mom wiped it up with her hand and smeared it across my face. She told me it was what I got for not listening to her. I remember the burning. I remember acknowledging as an almost-five-year-old that I may never see again as I sat in my room alone and tried to wipe away the bleach with the arm of my teddy bear. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t be able to see the candles on my cake. I wouldn’t know where to blow and I wouldn’t extinguish them all in one puff, and then my birthday wish wouldn’t come true.

My eyes dart to the next page.

Alone in my room . . . she never came and apologized . . . I could have fantasized about killing her. Did I?

My birthday wish was that the house would catch fire while she was asleep and she’d know what it was like to burn, just like I did. . . .

. . . It couldn’t have started here . . .

“Nick broke his life down into fractals, and then those fractals into more pieces, trying to understand what made him the way that he was. Theoretically, he was using chaos theory to evaluate his own life. He was trying to find the random, miniscule event that turned him into the monster he was very aware he had become. And when he couldn’t, it was as though he needed to utilize all of that information he had dedicated his life to learning.”

I know what the butterfly effect is. It’s part of chaos theory, a seemingly random event that could trigger a much larger event in the future. The flapping of butterfly wings could cause a hurricane on another continent several weeks later. “So Nick fabricated an act of terror to create his butterfly wings in the hopes that he would initiate some massive, groundbreaking event?”

“The shooting wasn’t the butterfly’s wings, Evalyn.” Piper speaks as though she can’t believe I haven’t figured it out yet. “While tragic, the United States is perfectly equipped to handle shootings and stop their ripple effect. They’re a part of life—expected. You, on the other hand—the world didn’t really know what to do with you. How could a perfectly normal human being be involved in such a horrible crime? Nick created a blip of chaos that resulted in a significantly different outcome than any other shooting.”

“What do you mean, a different outcome? Everyone died and I got thrown in the Compass Room. Seems pretty standard to me.”

“But you weren’t just thrown into the Compass Room, now were you? Without you in that room, Gordon would have killed off everyone, and he would have escaped. Engineers would have never known the cause of the glitch. If you had never been involved in the shooting, Casey and Valerie would be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

I feel like she’s trying to justify my crime, and I’m about to argue before she cuts me off.

“I’m not saying that what happened wasn’t horrible. And I’m certainly not trying to tell you that it was a good thing you were involved in the shooting. I’m simply pointing out the cause and effect to everything, and while Nick was trying to reign havoc with his choice to use you, he created a few silver linings along the way.
You
created them.”

“I’m not a savior.” I shake my head. “I’m not Reprise’s savior.”

“You’re not a total monster either.” She cracks a smile. “Trust me, I’d be the one to know.”

Turning back to the wall, I take a few steps back to soak in all of Nick’s ramblings—pages upon pages of the retelling of his sorry excuse for a life. His dissection of specific moments where he attempted to uncover the source of what fucked him up. He must have driven himself insane. No person could emerge from that kind of self-reflection unchanged.

I think back to the moment when my life shifted dramatically. It isn’t when Piper thinks.

“It wasn’t my part in the shooting that caused all of this.” I think back to the months before. “There was a morning at the end of my junior year, right after Liam’s birthday. Meghan cooked us breakfast and he bought me an easel, I remember thinking that my life was perfect. I let my guard down because I felt invincible, and—”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. Even with her blue hair and the way she cocks her hip when she stands, she suddenly looks so much older. “It doesn’t matter what happened or why it did because we can’t change it. All that matters is what you can do now to save Valerie, right?”

Valerie.

“She’s going into the CR because of me.”

“She’s going into the CR because Gemma wants her to burn.” Her eyes light with a rage that looks comical with her delicate features. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Savior or monster or whatever you are, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is how you decide to fix this.” Her eyes lose focus, and her mouth drops open. When she snaps to, Piper says, “Sorry. Just got an idea for an awesome fic.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

As I trudge up the stairs, she calls, “You can thank me later.”

I turn back to her, and she beams at me, like she knows deep down that this conversation didn’t go in my ear and out the other. I nod, and she nods.

Then I make my way up to Casey’s bedroom.

***

I can’t imagine my crime any other way.

In my head, there are two choices—do what Nick says, or don’t. There’s no re-imagining beyond that point. After accidentally committing suicide two times in a row, I beg Wes to show me something else. The illusion is a concoction of the criminal’s past and what the engineer wants them to see, after all. In the Compass Room, I was shown scenarios with both Nick and Meghan. They can be different.

But Wes won’t paint the scene differently. The only help he gives me is that he allows Casey into the mock box with me as a sort of moral support, but he isn’t allowed to help me in any way other than with his presence.

The mock box looks the exact same as yesterday—the same part of the path, the same colorful sunset. We walk side by side through the woods, this time a different direction than before, and when the desk appears Casey backs up and gives me my space. Nick slinks from the shadows. Meghan and the boys magically appear, and just like last time, Nick offers me a gun. I dropped the habit of telling him to go fuck himself, but my mind still reverts to the scenario where I sacrifice my life for the sake of not being a villain. And bam, I’m dead. A green light flashes through the sky and the illusion sphere zips away, but Wes keeps the mock box running.

“This is stupid,” I grumble, knowing very well that Wes can hear me.

“You have a unique creative power, having both the criminal and engineer chips. It’s fascinating. The illusion sphere is trying to calculate your levels while simultaneously trying to listen to the way you paint the situation.”

“My unique creative power isn’t going to matter at all if I accidentally kill myself!”

His sigh is audible. “How about you let Casey try?”

Casey and I exchange glances. He’s leaning up against a near tree with his arms crossed.

“You want me to stay?” I ask.

He thinks about it for a moment. “Better to make it as realistic as possible, and since you’ll be with me in the Compass Room, it’s better for you to stay.”

I nod and stretch out my hand. He takes it and we start to walk.

We veer from the trail and head up a near hill. It’s hard to imagine that the ground beneath us is billions of particles manipulated to appear like dirt. That the warmth of the air and the smell of summer are artificial—conjured by the mock box.