The Wicked We Have Done

1

Four minutes before the beginning of my sentence, Mom breaks down.

I thought it’d be easier; she’s had so long to prepare herself. My punishment was decided at the same time as my incarceration—six months ago—and I’d only seen her sporadically through a filthy glass window. But now she sobs into one bony hand while holding Todd’s wrist tightly with the other. With enough squirming, he’s able to break loose and run to me.

I squat down to Todd’s height. He eyes my polyester hoodie. Reaching out with pudgy fingers, he pinches the zipper.

He’s only five. I remember some things from that age—moving into a house, going to my first harvest carnival—but not everything. I wonder how he’ll remember me.

“Promise you won’t forget about me, ’kay, sport?”

Awareness floods him. “Where you going, Evie?”

“Just to take some tests. They need to keep me for a while, though.” I run my fingers through his dark, fine hair.

“Can I come?”

The corner of my mouth twitches up. “Nah, it’s like being in time-out for a month.”

His eyes widen.

“They even take away your snack time.”

“They’re going to take away your snack time?”

I nod.

“But when you get back, we can have snack time together.”

“All the chocolate ice cream in the world.” I force a mechanical smile. “I love you.”

He leans in and plants a sticky kiss on my cheek. “Me more.”

I inhale. Baby shampoo. For a second I’m transported to my home with Mom and Todd, before the trial, before college. Beige carpets and sun-baked windows, pencil sketches, lead-stained fingers. When I can’t handle torturing myself any longer, I stand.

The departure room is bleak and stifling—charcoal walls and flickering lights—hardly bigger than my cell. You’d think they’d give me a few hours with the sun before sending me away.

But terrorists don’t deserve beautiful things.

The bad lighting does nothing to mask Mom’s paleness. She looks so much older than she did a year ago—the wrinkles in her face deeper, her short dark hair streaked with gray. She nods, and I do the bravest thing I’ve done in a while. I step forward and wrap my arms around her petite shoulders.

Her breath hitches. She shudders a sob as she squeezes me.

“Don’t,” I say. “I’ll be back in a month. A month and they’ll let me go.”

I will pretend for her that I’m going to make it out of the world’s most technologically precise death penalty. That I’m going to make it out of the Compass Room.

The door squeaks open behind me. Mom’s eyes widen, the shake of her head a violent shiver. “I’m not ready.”

“We’re on a schedule, Ma’am.”

“I always believed you.” Mom clings to me, desperate. “Remember that.”

I place my hands behind my back obediently, cold cuffs locking them into place. “I love you.” Each word drowns in her cries.

The guards pry me away, and the door to the departure room clangs shut right on top of Todd’s strangled holler of my name. The floor’s metal grate rattles beneath my feet as prison guards rush back and forth between departure rooms and cells.

Despite the words I fed my mother, I know I saw my family for the very last time.

My throat tightens, but there is no time to reflect. I had months to imagine this moment, months to mourn. That time is over, because today is the beginning of my inevitable execution in the Compass Room.

The guards march me to the next door over. One opens it and the other throws me inside, dragging me to a thin cot. Medical devices decorate the rack on the wall, and a woman in a lab coat sits next to me on a rolling chair. She reads a tablet in her hands.

“Evalyn.” Harsh florescent lights illuminate her vapid smile. My guards hover close to us as she types up something on her tablet.

“Just a few quick tests.” She picks a blood pressure monitor from the rack, plugging one end into her tablet. “Your arm, please.”

She documents the rest of my vitals as she plugs in every new device. “Any problems with the contraception shot?”

I’ve been given the shots regularly since my sentence was decided. Compass Room regulations. I’ll be mingling with the male inmates during my stay, and the last thing anyone wants is for us to be breeding.

I didn’t have a say in the matter either. Had to take the shot to get into the Compass Room. And it’s either the Compass Room or death row for a girl like me.

“No.”

“All right.” She places the tablet on the counter and snaps on a latex glove. “Go ahead and lie facedown.”

I do as I’m told. Her rubbery hands sweep across my neck.

“This will sting a little.” With the sound of pressurized air, the pain is instant, as though she’s slicing through the base of my skull with a knife. I jump and she holds me down.

“All done.”

I sit up, one shaking hand flying to the back of my neck. My fingers find the bump beneath my skin. “How does the chip get through?”

“Pardon me?”

“The skull, the blood barrier.” The thought is suddenly terrifying—the implant—a slow bullet driving through my brain matter.

She purses her lips, obviously annoyed with the question. “Think of it as a tiny drill remotely operated. Perfectly safe, I assure you.”

Normal people get all of the time and resources to research anything they want to implement on their body. I haven’t been given that luxury. I have to trust that some smart chip I’ve never had the chance to research isn’t going to scramble my brain.

She taps the screen on her tablet in a few different places, then hands it to me. “You know what to do.”

The contract. They gave me a hard copy to read over in my cell, along with a Bible. I’ve memorized it.

The contract, that is.

One month in the prison. I may be subject to injury at any point during my stay. And if the monitor—the monitor this nurse injected into me—reads that my emotional and hormonal reactions to any simulation I’m put through are imbalanced, I will be put to death.

The contract is much longer than a few clauses, but these are the ones that matter.

With my fingernail, I sign my name. I need out of this room.

“Bringing Ibarra down,” one of my guards says into his ear piece. He takes my arm.

“It’s a zoo out there,” the other says.

“No shit.”

They steer me into the hall. A girl exits an exam room up ahead, also cuffed and escorted. She wears the same thing as I do—an official Compass Room uniform, I guess. T-shirt and black hoodie. Gray cargo pants and Velcro boots. An interesting change to the orange I’m so used to.

Tears streak her face. She’s very pretty, with full lips and high cheekbones, skin that’s a little darker than mine, and childlike dimples. She can’t be any older than twenty.

I can’t remember who she is. The world knows. The Compass Room list has been announced, documentaries of our tragic lives flooding prime-time network television.

My guards follow the escorted girl to the elevator, our two groups stuffed uncomfortably close together as we descend to the lobby. The girl’s sniffling fills the car, and I wish she’d quit. Every damn noise from her tightens the invisible cord around my heart.

The doors open, and I follow her out.

A series of floor-length windows surround the lobby—grated and bulletproof, but somehow classy. Good ol’ federalized prison. A classy lobby for the worst of us cretins. Cells and living quarters reside beneath the ground. We are invisible. Endless. Until we are allowed on floor two for visitation.

Or departure.

Beyond the windows, a train with a direct track to the California Compass Rooms waits for us at the prison station.

I see the protestors through the panes, behind the fence surrounding the station walkway. They pound the chain link with their fists, their signs waving back and forth. Ready for us. Their shouts weasel their way through the bulletproof glass.

We join the line of convicts. Some tall jerk shoots me a teeth-grinding glare. He’s toned—no, more than toned. He could snap my neck in half in his sleep. His sleeves are rolled up, his bare arms freckled by the sun. All that bulk must have come from outdoor physical labor. His square jaw is clenched and not a muscle in his face even dares to twitch, which makes me wonder if he knows who I am, or if his expression is stuck that way. The guards on either side of him walk stiffly, as though they are secretly scared shitless to be near him. “Casey Hargrove, prisoner number 92354, male number five in Compass Room C. Accounted for,” his guard says as he presses his finger to his earpiece.

And then the guard escorting the girl with dimples. “Jacinda Glaser, prisoner number 48089, female number four in Compass Room C. Accounted for.”

“Evalyn Ibarra, prisoner number 39286, female number five in Compass Room C. Accounted for.”

I swear the space around me goes dead quiet for half a second. The doors open.

Vibrant sound gushes into the lobby like water through an empty canyon. I am numb. My guards drag me forward. Jacinda’s fists clench behind her back—delicate fingers and white knuckles.

I evade the wall of noise and tilt my head to the overcast sky—a final fuck you from the universe. When I bring myself back to earth, I wish I hadn’t.

Hundreds scream at us, thrusting boards with contradicting text against the fence.

Compass Rooms = Barbaric

Repent, Child of God

“You will burn in hell for what you’ve done!” someone shrieks.

A woman presses a photo of one of my victims to the chain link. She mouths my name. Evalyn.

It bounces through space, multiplying. Breeding. Evalyn. Evalyn. Evalyn.

The train waits, silent and magnetic—a silver bullet on tracks—ready to shoot us to California in a handful of hours.

I follow the line of prisoners to the turnstile. Jacinda places her thumb on a panel embedded into the arch of the station. A green light blinks brightly above her and she pushes through.

“Miss Ibarra, right thumb, please,” my guard says. I comply, and the turnstile unlocks.

“EVALYN.”

My name again, sharper and angrier than the others.

“I hope it hurts—I hope it fucking HURTS.”

I’m guided up the steps and into the train car.

Seats line the walls, steel cuff armrests waiting for us with open jaws. My guard clips my ear with some kind of listening device and walks me to my seat between Jacinda and a skinny runt of a boy with black, straight hair and Jeffrey Dahmer glasses. There are ten of us all together. Ten candidates between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.

Casey sits across from me. I tilt my head, challenging him. The other candidates are silent—unnaturally so. The cuffs snap over my wrists, and our guards leave.

I recognize two of my company. A girl with a bleach-blonde pixie cut and features that could carve glass sizes me up. Colorful tattoos linger at her pale wrists and disappear into her sleeves. Valerie Crane. Killed three guys and strung up their bodies. A glint of recognition rests in her eyes—she knows who I am, no doubt. We were in the same prison wing. I never spoke with her, though. No one fucked with Valerie Crane. I knew that much.

I also recognize another crazy bastard—an undergrad at some West Coast school. He’d been arrested for drugging and kidnapping several teens and torturing them to death. He was the only one out of his posse who had been caught. Pled innocent, though, with no motive. His name clicks—Gordon—pale and pointy-chinned under a mop of sandy hair.

Wearing a smug grin, he says, “Seems the ladies are a bit more infamous than the gentlemen.” He scans the room, pausing on each of the women.

“Go fuck yourself.” Valerie’s eyes roll to the ceiling, like she’s bored with him.

Next to me, Jacinda smiles.

The quiet rumble beneath us builds as the train takes off. We have no windows, only a row of televisions imbedded into the can-like walls above our seats. They showcase the logo of Flight Express, a corporate chain of high-speed trains. Apparently they have a contract with the federal prison system.

The silence continues. Sociopaths and serial killers are the antitheses of good conversationalists. I lean back in my seat, close my eyes, and wait.

Fifteen years ago, government scientists manufactured an accurate test for morality—an obstacle course, where the simulations within proved whether a candidate was good or evil. It was named a Compass Room.

For ten years, the CR was tested over and over. Criminals were placed inside for a month to see if the CR correctly identified the true threats to humanity. I remember one case. A big, gruff-looking man by the name of Marcus Greene who had accidently killed a family drunk driving, and a petite, middle-aged woman named Fonda Harrington—a psychopath who slaughtered three of her children. The Compass Room successfully pinpointed Fonda as the threat. Over and over again, the CR correctly identified the evil, but even so, the case to implement the rooms continued to be rejected.

A terrorist attack finally convinced the Supreme Court. All charged in the bombing were forced to undergo the Compass Room’s exam. And they were all found to be, as reporters said on the news, “morally tarnished.”

After the law passed, engineers updated the Rooms to kill the wicked. They became the most accurate form of the death penalty ever created.

Other than the fact that they’re built in the middle of experimental wilderness, the public knows very little about Compass Rooms. They know that, through technology, brain waves of the candidates are measured during a simulation. Reactions are evaluated, and like a needle on a compass, the test determines the true morality—the true internal clockwork—of the criminal. If necessary, an execution takes place.

An average of two-point-five inmates survive each CR. Not the best odds.

Survivors are under strict contract to not discuss the details of the simulation. And they all keep their mouths shut, because keeping their contract means a life free of prison. It’s the way the government justifies Compass Rooms in the first place—a month of the simulation is less expensive for society than a lifetime in jail.

Two more CRs are running in simulation with ours, one for those aged twenty-six to forty, and another for forty years and older. It’s why there were so many protestors at the prison today. The CRs have never run simultaneously before, and their existence is still relatively new. People always fight against new ethical technology. Perhaps the hype will die down in a few years when they start to realize that their tax dollars won’t be going toward feeding those who should be dead anyway.

But maybe not.

A chime sounds in my ear, and my eyes flutter open. On the TV screen, a smiling woman with rimmed glasses has replaced the Flight Train logo.

“Good morning, Compass Room candidates.”

A few prisoners sneer in disgust, including Casey. All for good reason. It’s like we’re in line at a theme park, our cabin a waiting room for some science-fiction ride with lasers and flying ships.

“Allow me to verbally prepare you before your simulation begins. The moment we left the station, your one-month sentence began.”

My heart speeds up.

“All of you have passed your mandated exam and signed your contract. You each have a monitor that will calculate your emotion and hormones. It cannot invade any other aspect of your chemistry.”

The back of my neck prickles when I think of the chip burrowing deeper and deeper into my brain matter.

“How nice of them,” Valerie spits, her eyes glued to the screen.

“Also, a reminder: you will be on constant watch by CR staff at all times within your simulation, even if it may not be evident to you. Your physical choices and interaction with other inmates will be matched with your internal calculations to determine your morality status.”

Every action we make—under the radar.

“Your train will arrive at your destination in approximately one-point-seven hours.”

And with that, she disappears. But she isn’t replaced by the Flight Train logo. Instead, a documentary rolls.

A documentary of us.

There is no narrative, simply a series of news coverage clips starting with Casey’s crime. A boy who buried his father alive.

Reporters detail the night of the murder, Casey’s mug shot, and his trial. Casey himself pled guilty to the crime while his mother, his aunt, and his closest friends claimed he was being blackmailed. The evidence was nonexistent, the murder weapon—a shovel—never found.

Casey’s true moral compass remains a mystery.

I peel myself away from the television to study him. Fists clenched, he stares at the screen with hooded eyes. Gordon’s beside himself with wicked amusement. Valerie, after watching for a bit, rolls her head toward the cabin wall.

“Why are they doing this?” the kid with the Dahmer glasses whispers, loud enough for me and maybe the boy next to him to hear. “What’s the purpose of this footage?”

I glance at him. He can’t possibly be older than eighteen. Hell, if I didn’t know the Compass Room had an age minimum, I’d guess he was fourteen. His glasses are sliding down his nose. He juts his chin upward until they fall back into place.

I don’t know if he’s actually expecting an answer, but I respond anyway. “Either to shame us, or to bring us up to date since we’re going to be interacting.”

He scoffs. “Well, obviously. But why footage of our trials?”

“To increase tension. Make us skeptical of each other.”

He wiggles his nose around. “Dammit, I have an itch.”

“I’d offer to scratch it with my teeth, but—”

“Nice try, Ibarra. I don’t need footage to be skeptical of you.” He smiles and flicks his head up to swipe the bangs from his face.

I learn his name from the documentary. Tanner—tried as an adult for pushing a boy off a riverside cliff.

The footage spans everyone. Erity, the girl with almond-shaped eyes and black, pin-straight hair, convicted of “sacrificing” four girls in the name of witchcraft. Stella, the girl with the golden curls, burned her ex-boyfriend’s house to the ground with his whole family inside. Blaise, a lanky boy on the other end of my row, shot two guys at a college party when he was drunk. Salem, the boy who frighteningly looks like he could be my brother, raped several women. And finally, Jacinda, who killed a family during a car-crash-suicide attempt.

Of course, they saved the best for last. The date of the graphic flashing across the screen is today. This clip played this morning.

“Evalyn Ibarra, the most infamous of the younger candidates, has been at the center of practically every national news discussion for the past few months,” says a platinum blonde at a morning news round table. A graphic materializes on the screen behind her. “Our polls show that eighteen percent of Americans think that the Compass Room will find Ibarra innocent, sixty-five percent think that the Compass Room will find her guilty, and seventeen percent are unsure. How about those statistics, Gary?”

The camera pans out.

“Well,” Gary says, “I’m going to have to agree with national opinion on this one, Katherine. The case is no stranger to anyone who turns on the television for more than five minutes. And you know how I think the jury would have leaned if the trial had continued and Ibarra hadn’t chosen the CR option.”

“That Ibarra would have been found guilty.”

“Exactly.”

“How long do you think she’ll last in the Compass Room?”

“If we study those who’ve committed crimes of her magnitude and have also been sentenced to CRs, and take what we know of their experience, I’d give her two days.”

“Two days? You’re only giving her two days?”

“Look at Anton Freesan and Janice Grey. Neither of them lasted longer than forty-eight hours, which we found out in the minimal documentation released after their CR was finished. Their crimes were very similar to Ibarra’s.”

“But Ibarra is young. Don’t you think the CR has been engineered to take that into consideration?”

“CRs are designed to terminate the morally corrupt. Think of them as the ultimate lie-detector test. The moral nature of a human doesn’t truly change with age, which was discovered a few years ago by a team of psychoanalysts in Philadelphia, if you remember.”

“I do.”

“Ibarra has the same moral arrow as she will when she’s thirty, and if she’s evil, the CR will recognize that.”

Feeling the eyes of every candidate on me, I glance down. Most are scornful—hate-filled. Even though they committed crimes, I am the queen of darkness.

They have nothing to worry about. If I’m really evil, the CR will make sure that by day two, my heart isn’t beating.

The footage of my crime rolls. Crying families outside Roosevelt College. Students and professors wailing, screaming. FBI, police, bomb squad.

All storming the school to catch one of the shooters who initiated fifty-six deaths.

All storming the school to catch me.

More footage rolls from a prime-time documentary of my crime. I was one of eight who shot up a faculty banquet at the college, the only one who didn’t kill myself—psychologists figure because I chickened out at the last minute.

They also mention Nick, another shooter, and the fact that we met through Meghan. I was her best friend, he her boyfriend. When we decided to take our lives, we made sure she came with us.

I hold my breath and wait, wait for the footage to end, wait for everyone in the cabin to tear themselves from me.

One boy refuses.

You’re dead, Casey mouths.

A little door slides open right behind his head, a robotic syringe jutting forward.

The needle stabs Casey in the neck. He jerks. “The hell?”

His eyes roll to the back of his head.

My neck stings, my jaw goes numb, and the inside of the train blurs to nothing.

March 2, Last Year

Riverview Apartments

At eight thirty in the morning, the sun filtered into my room, leaves creating geometrical shapes across the sheets and Liam’s bare chest. I rolled to my stomach and brushed the hair from his closed eyes. His chest rose and fell as he slept.

Waking up to Liam in the morning was a reawakening to my good luck. I always knew that high school sweethearts were a thing of fantasy. Somehow, I had managed to keep mine. Our five-year anniversary was only a few months away.

I crawled over him. The feeling of my bare skin gliding over his somehow never got old. It didn’t for him either; his skin erupted in goose bumps. He blinked a few times, focusing on me.

“There is something so sexy about watching you wake up,” I told him. “I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of it.”

He rolled me over and slid on top of me, his lips finding the stretch of sensitive skin above my collarbone. It was the place he kissed and touched when he was trying to be romantic, because he knew too well that I’d melt beneath him. My hands explored his waist to bring him closer.

He kissed my jaw and said, “Even when I snore all night?”

I grinned. “I’m getting used to it.”

A crash sounded from the kitchen, followed by the ting of a metal bowl rolling across the linoleum.

“Okay, since you now know that I’m awake, you should come out. If you aren’t screwing, that is,” Meghan hollered. “I made you two breakfast.”

“Thought I smelled bacon.” Liam rolled off of me, sitting up.

“Why is she cooking breakfast? She never cooks me breakfast.” I’d given her the keys to my car last night. Liam and I ended up drinking too much and had to take a cab home. She probably crashed into something and was now trying to make up for it, I thought.

I was the crazy junior who had not only clung to my high school boyfriend, but my childhood best friend as well. So many students I met since I started college thought I was insane. College was a time to break free from childhood—a time for students to experiment and sleep with people they didn’t even like and join sororities where the members, for a few fleeting years, would be as close to them as sisters until they graduated and never saw them again.

The three of us could have gone somewhere other than Phoenix for school. But Phoenix was only an hour away from home, and in Phoenix, we’d have each other.

And had them I did. I’d been living with Meghan for three years. Liam had his own apartment with a roommate, but he was practically living with us as well. Our third wheel, Meghan liked to call him.

Liam leaned over me and kissed my neck, his languid tongue rolling over my collarbone. I gasped as his fingers traced the inside of my thigh. “I love you,” he whispered. “Meghan’s probably just excited. She knows what’s waiting for you.”

“A quickie before class?”

“Funny.” His voice rumbled in my ear. “I meant out on the patio.”

He had piqued my curiosity. But his eyes that were lighter than the sun-washed sky outside weren’t giving me a clue as to what he was getting at.

“That was your cue to get your ass out of bed.”

“Thanks for that.” I smacked him playfully and sat, locating my pajamas scattered across the floor. I dressed and tied my hair up. As I walked out to the living room, I hoped Meghan had made an excessive amount of bacon.

I looked toward the sliding glass door. On the balcony sat a full-sized wooden easel. I squealed and ran outside. Liam followed.

“Why?” I asked.

“What do you mean, why?”

I spun to him. “What’s the occasion?”

“I’m tired of seeing you ‘working’ with colored pencils and printer paper.”

I didn’t have any decent art supplies. It wasn’t like I’d been an artist all my life. I never took any art classes prior to college, but I knew I could draw. I knew I could conceptualize images and create them.

Then one day, during my freshman year, I decided to change my major to art. Because being a business major was unfulfilling.

Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter what you get your degree in. People just want to think it does.

I didn’t tell Mom until the summer before my sophomore year. Safe to say she was still bitter.

“You didn’t have to,” I said, even though I was so ecstatic that I couldn’t stop shaking.

Meghan sauntered outside. She wore an apron from the coffee shop she used to work at. “You know what this means?” She waved a dirty spatula in the air.

“We can get our blog up and running.” I bounced on my toes.

“We can get our effing blog up and running.”

Meghan and I liked the concept of teamwork, and an organic fan base. We had this brilliant idea not long before. Meghan was a photography major and damn good photographer. We’d been best friends ever since high school, and even then, she was obsessed with her work. We wanted to play around with perception—how a photograph could transform into a painting. It could be the same image and yet entirely different.

But this was only theory.

“Art-supply shop this afternoon?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Damn, eggs are burning.” Meghan ran inside.

Liam pushed his sandy hair back. “I gotta take a shower and get to the library. Even on Saturdays I can’t relax. College blows.”

“I love you.”

He shot me that perfect, lopsided grin of his. “Because I buy you easels?”

“Because you know me. You know that a wooden easel means more than the world to me.”

He took my hand and dragged me to him, planting a kiss on my forehead. “I love you too. More than you know.”