“What is it?” I say.
“We need to talk.” She looks at Castle. “Your name is Castle, right?”
He nods.
“Yeah, I know you’re wise to this business, Castle, so I’m going to need you to get in on this, too.” Nazeera whips her finger through the air to draw a circle around the four of us. “We all need to talk. Now.”
Juliette
It’s a strange thing, to never know peace. To know that no matter where you go, there is no sanctuary. That the threat of pain is always a whisper away. I’m not safe locked into these 4 walls, I was never safe leaving my house, and I couldn’t even feel safe in the 14 years I lived at home. The asylum kills people every day, the world has already been taught to fear me, and my home is the same place where my father locked me in my room every night and my mother screamed at me for being the abomination she was forced to raise.
She always said it was my face.
There was something about my face, she said, that she couldn’t stand. Something about my eyes, the way I looked at her, the fact that I even existed. She’d always tell me to stop looking at her. She’d always scream it. Like I might attack her. Stop looking at me, she’d scream. You just stop looking at me, she’d scream.
She put my hand in the fire once.
Just to see if it would burn, she said. Just to check if it was a regular hand, she said.
I was 6 years old then.
I remember because it was my birthday.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
“Never mind,” is all I say when Kenji shows up at my door.
“Never mind, what?” Kenji sticks his foot out to catch the closing door. Now he’s squeezing his way in. “What’s going on?”
“Never mind, I don’t want to talk to any of you. Please go away. Or maybe you can all go to hell. I don’t actually care.”
Kenji looks stunned, like I just slapped him in the face. “Are you—wait, are you serious right now?”
“Nazeera and I are leaving for the symposium in an hour. I have to get ready.”
“What? What’s happening, J? What’s wrong with you?”
Now, I turn to face him. “What’s wrong with me? Oh, like you don’t know?”
Kenji runs a hand through his hair. “I mean, I heard about what happened with Warner, yeah, but I’m pretty sure I just saw you guys making out in the hallway so I’m, uh, really confused—”
“He lied to me, Kenji. He lied to me this whole time. About so many things. And so did Castle. So did you—”
“Wait, what?” He grabs my arm as I turn away. “Wait—I didn’t lie to you about shit. Don’t mix me up in this mess. I had nothing to do with any of it. Hell, I still haven’t figured out what to say to Castle. I can’t believe he kept all of this from me.”
I go suddenly still, my fists closing as my anger builds and breaks, holding fast to a sudden hope. “You weren’t in on all of this?” I say. “With Castle?”
“Uh-uh. No way. I had no clue about any of this insanity until Warner told me about it yesterday.”
I hesitate.
Kenji rolls his eyes.
“Well, how am I supposed to trust you?” I say, my voice rising in pitch like a child. “Everyone’s been lying to me—”
“J,” he says, shaking his head. “C’mon. You know me. You know I don’t bullshit. That’s not my style.”
I swallow, hard, feeling suddenly small. Feeling suddenly broken inside. My eyes sting and I fight back the impulse to cry. “You promise?”
“Hey,” he says softly. “Come here, kid.”
I take a tentative step forward and he wraps me up in his arms, warm and strong and safe and I’ve never been so grateful for his friendship, for his steady existence in my life.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers. “I swear.”
“Liar,” I sniff.
“Well, there’s a fifty percent chance I’m right.”
“Kenji?”
“Mm?”
“If I find out you’re lying to me about any of this I swear to God I will break all the bones in your body.”
A short laugh. “Yeah, okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Uh-huh.” He pats my head.
“I will.”
“I know, princess. I know.”
Several more seconds of silence.
And then
“Kenji,” I say quietly.
“Mm?”
“They’re going to destroy Sector 45.”
“Who is?”
“Everyone.”
Kenji leans back. Raises an eyebrow. “Everyone who?”
“All the other supreme commanders,” I say. “Nazeera told me everything.”
Unexpectedly, Kenji’s face breaks into a tremendous smile. “Oh, so Nazeera is one of the good guys, huh? She’s on our team? Trying to help you out?”
“Oh my God, Kenji, please focus—”
“I’m just saying,” he says, holding up his hands. “The girl is fine as hell is all I’m saying.”
I roll my eyes. Try not to laugh as I wipe away errant tears.
“So.” He nods his head at me. “What’s the deal? The details? Who’s coming? When? How? Et cetera?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Nazeera is still trying to figure it out. She thinks maybe in the next week or so? The kids are here to monitor me and send back information, but they’re coming to the symposium, specifically, because apparently the commanders want to know how the other sector leaders will react to seeing me. Nazeera says she thinks the information will help inform their next moves. I’m guessing we have maybe a matter of days.”
Kenji’s eyes go wide, panicked. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, but when they decide to obliterate Sector 45 their plan is to also take me prisoner. The Reestablishment wants to bring me back in, apparently. Whatever that means.”
“Bring you back in?” Kenji frowns. “For what? More testing? Torture? What do they want to do with you?”
I shake my head. “I have no idea. I have no clue who these people are. My sister,” I say, the words feeling strange as I say them, “is apparently still being tested and tortured somewhere. So I’m pretty sure they’re not bringing me back for a big family reunion, you know?”
“Wow.” Kenji rubs his forehead. “That is some next-level drama.”
“Yeah.”
“So—what are we going to do?”
I hesitate. “I don’t know, Kenji. They’re coming to kill everyone in Sector 45. I don’t think I have a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
I look up. “I mean I’m pretty sure I’ll have to kill them first.”
Warner
My heart is pounding frantically in my chest. My hands are clammy, unsteady. But I cannot make time to deal with my mind. Nazeera’s confessions might cost me my sanity. I can only pray she is mistaken. I can only hope that she will be proven desperately and woefully wrong and there’s no time, no time at all to deal with any of this. I can no longer make room in my day for these flimsy, unreliable human emotions.
I must live here now.
In my own solitude.
Today I will be a soldier only, a perfect robot if need be, and stand tall, eyes betraying no emotion as our supreme commander Juliette Ferrars takes the stage.
We’re all here today, a small battalion posted up behind her like her own personal guard—myself, Delalieu, Castle, Kenji, Ian, Alia, Lily, Brendan, and Winston—even Nazeera and Haider, Lena, Stephan, Valentina, and Nicolás stand beside us, pretending to be supportive as she begins her speech. The only ones missing are Sonya, Sara, Kent, and James, who stayed behind on base. Kent cares little about anything these days but keeping James out of danger, and I can’t say I blame him. Sometimes I wish I could opt out of this life, too.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Steady myself.
I just want this to be over.
The location of the biannual symposium is fairly fl
uid, and generally rotational. But in recognition of our new supreme commander, the event was relocated to Sector 45, an effort made possible entirely by Delalieu.
I can feel our collective group pulse with different kinds and levels of energy, but it’s all so meshed together I can’t tell fear and apathy apart. I’m focused instead on the audience and our leader, as their reactions are the most important. And of all the many events and symposiums I’ve attended over the years, I’ve never felt such an electric charge in the crowd as I do now.
554 of my fellow chief commanders and regents are in the audience, but so are their spouses, and even several members of their closest staff. It’s unprecedented: every invitation was accepted. No one wanted to miss the opportunity to meet the new seventeen-year-old leader of North America, no. They’re fascinated. They’re hungry. Wolves sitting in human skin, eager to tear into the flesh of the young girl they’ve already underestimated.
If Juliette’s powers didn’t offer her body a level of functional invincibility I’d be deeply concerned about her standing alone and unguarded in front of all her enemies. The civilians of this sector may be rooting for her, but the rest of the continent has no interest in the disruption she’s brought to the land—or to the threat she poses to their ranks in The Reestablishment. These men and women standing before her today are paid to be loyal to another party. They have no sympathy for her cause, for her fight for the common people.
I have no idea how long they’ll let her speak before they rip into her.
But I don’t have to wait long.
Juliette has only just started speaking—she’s only just begun talking about the many failures of The Reestablishment and the need for a new beginning when the crowd becomes suddenly restless. They stand up, raise their fists and my mind disconnects as they shout at her, the events unfolding before my eyes as if in slow motion. She doesn’t react.
One, two, sixteen people are on their feet now, and she keeps talking.
Half the room roars upward, angry words hurled in her direction and now I can feel her growing angrier, her frustration peaking, but somehow, she holds her ground. The more they protest, the more she projects her voice; she’s speaking so loudly now she’s practically shouting. I look quickly between her and the crowd, my mind working desperately to decide what to do. Kenji catches my eye and the two of us understand each other without speaking.
We have to intervene.
Juliette is now denouncing The Reestablishment’s plans to obliterate languages and literature; she’s outlining her hopes to transition the civilians out of the compounds; and she’s just begun addressing our issues with the climate when a shot is fired into the room.
There’s a moment of perfect silence, and then—
Juliette peels the dented bullet off her forehead. Tosses it to the ground. The gentle, tinkling sound of metal on marble reverberates around the room.
Mass chaos.
Hundreds and hundreds of people are suddenly on their feet, all of them shouting at her, threatening her, pointing guns at her, and I can feel it, I can feel it spiraling out of control.
More shots ring out, and in the seconds it takes us to form a plan, we’re already too late. Brendan falls to the ground with a sudden, horrifying gasp. Winston screams; catches his body.
And that’s it.
Juliette goes suddenly still, and my mind slows down.
I can feel it before it happens: I can feel the change, the static in the air. Heat ripples around her, tongues of power unfurling from her body like lightning preparing for a strike and there’s no time to do anything but hold my breath when, suddenly—
She screams.
Long. Loud. Violent.
The world seems to blur for just a second—for just a moment everything seizes, freezes in place: contorted bodies; angry, distorted faces; all frozen in time—
Floorboards peel upward and fissure apart. Cracks like thunderclaps as they shatter up the walls. Light fixtures swing precariously before smashing to the floor.
And then, everyone.
Every single person in her line of sight. 554 people and all their guests. Their faces, their bodies, the seats they sit in: sliced open like fresh fish. Their flesh feathers outward, swelling slowly as a steady gush of blood gathers in pools around their feet.
They all drop dead.
Juliette
I started screaming today.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
Were you happy
Were you sad
Were you scared
Were you mad
the first time you screamed?
Were you fighting for your life your decency your dignity your humanity
When someone touches you now, do you scream?
When someone smiles at you now, do you smile back?
Did he tell you not to scream did he hit you when you cried?
Did he have one nose two eyes two lips two cheeks two ears two eyebrows.
Was he one human who looked just like you.
Color your personality.
Shapes and sizes are variety.
Your heart is an anomaly.
Your actions
are
the
only
traces
you leave
behind.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
Sometimes I think the shadows are moving.
Sometimes I think someone might be watching.
Sometimes this idea scares me and sometimes the idea makes me so absurdly happy I can’t stop crying. And then sometimes I think I have no idea when I started losing my mind in here. Nothing seems real anymore and I can’t tell if I’m screaming out loud or only in my head.
There’s no one here to hear me.
To tell me I’m not dead.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
I don’t know when it started.
I don’t know why it started.
I don’t know anything about anything except for the screaming.
My mother screaming when she realized she could no longer touch me. My father screaming when he realized what I’d done to my mother. My parents screaming when they’d lock me in my room and tell me I should be grateful. For their food. For their humane treatment of this thing that could not possibly be their child. For the yardstick they used to measure the distance I needed to keep away.
I ruined their lives, is what they said to me.
I stole their happiness. Destroyed my mother’s hope for ever having children again.
Couldn’t I see what I’d done? is what they’d ask me. Couldn’t I see that I’d ruined everything?
I tried so hard to fix what I’d ruined. I tried every single day to be what they wanted. I tried all the time to be better but I never really knew how.
I only know now that the scientists are wrong.
The world is flat.
I know because I was tossed right off the edge and I’ve been trying to hold on for seventeen years. I’ve been trying to climb back up for seventeen years but it’s nearly impossible to beat gravity when no one is willing to give you a hand.
When no one wants to risk touching you.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
Am I insane yet?
Has it happened yet?
How will I ever know?
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
There’s a moment of pure, perfect silence before everything, everything explodes. At first, I don’t even realize what I’ve done. I don’t understand what just happened. I didn’t mean to kill these people—
And then, suddenly
It hits me
The crushing realization that I’ve just slaughtered a room of six hundred people.
It seems impossible. It seems fake. There were no bullets. No excess force, no violence. Just one, long, angry cry.
“Stop it,”
I screamed. I squeezed my eyes shut and screamed it, anger and heartbreak and exhaustion and crushing devastation filling my lungs. It was the weight of recent weeks, the pain of all these years, the embarrassment of false hopes manufactured in my heart, the betrayal, the loss—
Adam. Warner. Castle.
My parents, real and imagined.
A sister I might never know.
The lies that make up my life. The threats against the innocent people of Sector 45. The certain death that awaits me. The frustration of having so much power, so much power and feeling so utterly, completely powerless
“Please,” I screamed. “Please stop—”
And now—
Now this.
My limbs have gone numb from disbelief. My ears feel full of wind, my mind disconnected from my body. I couldn’t have killed this many people, I think, I couldn’t have just killed all these people that isn’t possible, I think, it’s not possible not possible that I opened my mouth and then this
Kenji is trying to say something to me, something that sounds like we have to get out of here, hurry, we have to go now—
But I’m numb, I’m dim, I’m unable to move one foot in front of the other and someone is dragging me, forcing me to move and I hear explosions
And suddenly my mind sharpens.
I gasp and spin around, searching for Kenji but he’s gone. His shirt is soaked in blood and he’s being dragged off in the distance, his eyes half closed and
Warner is on his knees, his hands cuffed behind his back
Castle is unconscious on the floor, blood running freely from his chest
Winston is still screaming, even as someone drags him away
Brendan is dead
Lily, Ian, Alia, dead
And I’m trying to reconnect my mind, trying to work my way through the shock seizing my body and my head is spinning, spinning, and I see Nazeera out of the corner of my eye with her head in her hands and someone touches me and I jump
I jerk back