A Vault of Sins Read Online Free PDF Page B

last so long?
    TimtheTheorist: What do you mean?
    Nine Lives: Why wasn’t EI dead yet?
    TimtheTheorist: Did you not READ through the trial transcript? Here, [LINK] for your future reference. Gemma Branam explained it all in her testimony.
    Nine Lives: But that doesn’t make any sense in comparison to other psychopaths who’ve committed similar crimes and died in the CR. All of them were killed within 48 hours of the CR beginning. Why not EI? If she’s really a psychopath and the CR wasn’t malfunctioning, shouldn’t she have been executed in the first few days? I mean, she’s a terrorist.
    No one has responded to Nine Lives yet. I don’t know who the member is, but I like him or her. At least someone is suspicious of the so-called truth that everyone else believes so easily.
    ***
    In my dream, I’m alone.
    The forest swells up all around me, warm and dark and moist. It’s a cocoon of comfort, if I didn’t know better. This is always the worst part of the dream—the feeling of entrapment, of loneliness. I’m lying on the ground, the underbrush of the woods spidering over my body, and I smell the Compass Room again. The wood fire, the soil, the sweat—and the blood, permeating above all the other odors.
    It’s always night in the dream-Compass Room. Fog rolls through the air, thick enough to taste.
    I hear the other candidates. Tanner and Jace scream the loudest. Shrieks of anguish, like their flesh is slowly being ripped from their bones. I shut my eyes to wait it out because I know that I can’t save them.
    But then I hear Casey.
    The underbrush ropes me to the ground, growing tighter as I twist and writhe, trying to free myself to get to him. His voice rips the night in half, and I scream to match his, back arching off the earth, the entire forest shattering into a thousand sharp pieces.
    I jerk awake, lying on my back with my hand pressed to my chest, waiting for my heart to stop pounding. I inhale the cold air of my living room and hold it in my lungs as the terror dissipates. It’s like waiting for a brain freeze to end. I get up, flipping on all the light switches in the silent house, checking the shadowy corners for dream monsters.
    Not dream monsters. Illusions. Nick or Meghan, a Compass Room test crawling from the darkness. There’s nothing in the house, but of course there wouldn’t be.
    I peel back the curtain in the living room. Fingers of the dark trees sway back and forth with the wind and I want to throw up my heart. I let the curtain fall back into place, rush to the kitchen, and take a long pull from the tequila bottle. The
good
tequila bottle.
    Returning to the living room, I flop back onto the bed.
    The woods in my dreams are thick, always lurking with Compass Room devils. The woods around my home are nothing more than a scattering of sad little trees, but my mind doesn’t care.
    Gemma and the division thought they erased Compass Room C from existence, but they can’t. It’s everywhere.

Posted by Figar077: Let me set things straight.
    I am not some crazy conspiracy theorist in every aspect of my life, nor am I a huge EI fan in particular. But looking at the bare bones of this case, someone is lying, and I don’t think that it’s EI and her criminal posse.
    Gemma Branam is the CR creator and leading witness for the defense in the Malfunction Trial, so her word would generally be taken as fact. But she has to be covering up something.
    The only thing that we do know from previous Compass Rooms is the order in which the criminals die, and that never varies.
    The most evil die in the first handful of days. Terrorists, serial killers, serial rapists. Then, over the course of the rest of the month, the moral arrow of the remaining candidates take a little longer to determine.
    This was the case for every CR up until EI’s room—Room C. So tell me, if Branam claims the room worked just like the others, why was both Gordon Ostheim, a torturer, and Ibarra, a terrorist, alive in week