Sarah Harian - The Wicked We Have Done

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.