Sarah Harian - The Wicked We Have Done

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.