Read Online A Vault of Sins by Sarah Harian - Free Book Online Page A

the division can convince the public that this all happened in our heads.”
    “Meta-sex is still sex, Evalyn.”
    I pour myself a rum and coke. “Except we didn’t have meta-sex. We had real sex.”
    “Tell that to the press.” Valerie sits on the couch with her phone and begins to watch the CR feeds for herself. It might be below freezing today, but I can’t stay inside.
    Outside, I sit on the porch steps. This will probably be the only time I’ll have to look through these feeds before the government finds a way to take them down. It isn’t hard to find the Reprise site—it must be receiving a ridiculous amount of traffic right now. The main page hosts what the breaking story called the “highlights.”
    The highlights are all of the monumental moments. Not just the deaths, but also our moments of vulnerability—when we were terrified, when we were hungry, when we were being seduced. They’re separated by individual, so some feeds are repeated twice. Many under mine and Casey’s names, for example. Many under Valerie’s and Jace’s.
    I don’t know what compels me to be brave in this moment, but I click on a clip that overlaps me and Stella. Then I sit, drink my rum, and watch her die all over again.
    Her death is more dramatic than I remember. She burns alive, and I scream so loudly in the recording that my speakers crackle. When she’s dead, Casey walks into the picture. He kneels behind me and wraps his arms around me. This is when I lose it, when all of the walls I built up around myself since Meghan’s death come crashing down. I shriek into Casey’s chest, sobbing until I’ve completely worn myself out, until I can hardly talk.
    The video is a close-up bird’s-eye view of the death. I start the clip over and watch again, noticing something—someone—that I didn’t see when Stella had died in my arms in the Compass Room. The illusion of the house was blocking him.
    Gordon.
    He stands against a tree in a near meadow, arms crossed as he watches us, like he’s looking right through the illusion of the house. When Stella finally dies, he slinks into the darkness of the forest, going completely unnoticed by both me and Casey.
    What a creep.
    I move onto the next clip, watching video after video, instances I didn’t know about, like Valerie’s and Jace’s first kiss. Jace wakes up screaming, and Valerie—maybe in attempt to calm her—silences Jace’s mouth with her own. Jace releases a moan of relief, and I don’t think that it’s because she realizes she was only dreaming. It’s a relief of connection, a kiss after two weeks of fear, and two weeks of wanting her.
    I back out of the clip, unable to watch another second. When I realize how ragged my breathing is, I try to control it, shutting my eyes.
    But I keep seeing Jace’s face.
    The sharp emotion of sheer anguish rips through me. She should be here right now. She should be alive and with Valerie.
    I down the rest of my rum and begin opening the clips overlapping me and Tanner. First, the one where he finds our camp and tells the rest of us that Gordon was chasing him. Then, the one of me removing the splinter from his finger. The one of him stabbing Gordon to save me and Casey.
    And finally the one where he dies and I kill Gordon.
    I wonder what the world thinks of the way I brutally murdered him. Even if everyone believes it’s only a simulation, this clip proves that even after being sentenced to the CR, I was willing to kill again. And now I’m back in the real world instead of rotting in jail.
    Tapping on the clip of Casey and me in the cabin, I watch myself run inside after our makeshift bath, dripping wet and very, very naked.
    I try to study my own face as Casey and I have sex, and the hesitance that consumes my features. I’d be lying if I said that it was the best sex I’d ever had. It wasn’t even close. But the fact that we got that far without showering for two weeks in hell said something, right?
    Or maybe we were just