First published in USA 2019 by HarperCollins Children’s Books
First published in Great Britain 2019
by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited
The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, USA
Text copyright © 2019 Tahereh Mafi
First e-book edition 2019
ISBN 978 1 4052 9179 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1854 7
www.egmont.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
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CONTENTS
Cover
Copyright page
Title page
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE
KENJI
WARNER
KENJI
JULIETTE ELLA
KENJI
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
WARNER
JULIETTE ELLA
She’s screaming.
She’s just screaming words, I think. They’re just words. But she’s screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, with an agony that seems almost an exaggeration, and it’s causing devastation I never knew possible. It’s like she just—imploded.
It doesn’t seem real.
I mean, I knew Juliette was strong—and I knew we hadn’t discovered the depth of her powers—but I never imagined she’d be capable of this.
Of this:
The ceiling is splitting open. Seismic currents are thundering up the walls, across the floors, chattering my teeth. The ground is rumbling under my feet. People are frozen in place even as they shake, the room vibrating around them. The chandeliers swing too fast and the lights flicker ominously. And then, with one last vibration, three of the massive chandeliers rip free from the ceiling and shatter as they hit the floor.
Crystal flies everywhere. The room loses half its light, bathing the cavernous space in a freakish glow, and it’s suddenly hard to see what’s happening. I look at Juliette and see her staring, slack-jawed, frozen at the sight of the devastation, and I realize she must’ve stopped screaming a minute ago. She can’t stop this. She already put the energy into the world and now—
It has to go somewhere.
The shudders ripple with renewed fervor across the floorboards, ripping through walls and seats and people.
I don’t actually believe it until I see the blood. It seems fake, for a second, all the limp bodies in seats with their chests butterflied open. It seems staged—like a bad joke, like a bad theater production. But when I see the blood, thick and heavy, seeping through clothes and upholstery, dripping down frozen hands, I know we’ll never recover from this.
Juliette just murdered six hundred people at once.
There’s no recovering from this.
I shove my way through the quiet, stunned, still-breathing bodies of my friends. I hear Winston’s soft, insistent whimpers and Brendan’s steady, reassuring response that the wound isn’t as bad as it looks, that he’s going to be okay, that he’s been through worse than this and survived it—
And I know my priority right now needs to be Juliette.
When I reach her I pull her into my arms, and her cold, unresponsive body reminds me of the time I found her standing over Anderson, a gun aimed at his chest. She was so terrified—so surprised—by what she’d done that she could hardly speak. She looked like she’d disappeared into herself somewhere—like she’d found a small room in her brain and had locked herself inside. It took a minute to coax her back out again.
She hadn’t even killed anyone that time.
I try to warm some sense into her, begging her now to return to herself, to hurry back to her mind, to the present moment.
“I know everything is crazy right now, but I need you to snap out of this, J. Wake up. Get out of your head. We have to get out of here.”
She doesn’t blink.
“Princess, please,” I say, shaking her a little. “We have to go—now—”
And when she still doesn’t move, I figure I have no choice but to move her myself. I start hauling her backward. Her limp body is heavier than I expect, and she makes a small, wheezing sound that’s almost like a sob. Fear sparks in my nerves. I nod at Castle and the others to go, to move on without me, but when I glance around, looking for Warner, I realize I can’t find him anywhere.
What happens next knocks the wind from my lungs.
The room tilts. My vision blackens, clears, and then darkens only at the edges in a dizzying moment that lasts hardly a second. I feel off-center. I stumble.
And then, all at once—
Juliette is gone.
Not figuratively. She’s literally gone. Disappeared. One second she’s in my arms, and the next, I’m grasping at air. I blink and spin around, convinced I’m losing my mind, but when I scan the room I see the audience members begin to stir. Their shirts are torn and their faces are scratched, but no one appears to be dead. Instead, they begin to stand, confused, and as soon as they start shuffling around, someone shoves me, hard. I look up to see Ian swearing at me, telling me to get moving while we still have a chance, and I try to push back, try to tell him that we lost Juliette—that I haven’t seen Warner—and he doesn’t hear me, he just forces me forward, offstage, and when the murmur of the crowd grows into a roar, I know I have no choice.
I have to go.
“I’m going to kill him,” she says, her small hands forming fists. “I’m going to kill him—”
“Ella, don’t be silly,” I say, and walk away.
“One day,” she says, chasing after me, her eyes bright with tears. “If he doesn’t stop hurting you, I swear I’ll do it. You’ll see.”
I laugh.
“It’s not funny!” she cries.
I turn to face her. “No one can kill my dad. He’s unkillable.”
“No one is unkillable,” she says.
I ignore her.
“Why doesn’t your mum do anything?” she says, and she grabs my arm.
When I meet her eyes she looks different. Scared.
“Why doesn’t anyone stop him?”
The wounds on my back are no longer fresh, but, somehow, they still hurt. Ella is the only person who knows about these scars, knows what my dad started doing to me on my birthday two years ago. Last year, when all the families came to visit us in California, Ella had barged into my room, wanting to know where Emmaline and Nazeera had gone off to, and she’d caught me staring at my back in the mirror.
I begged her not to say anything, not to tell anyone what she saw, and she started crying and said that we had to tell someone, that she was going to tell her mom and I said, “If you tell your mom I’ll only get into more trouble. Please don’t say anything, okay? He won’t do it again.”
But he did do it again.
And this time he was angrier. He told me I was seven years old now, and that I was too old to cry.
“We have to do something,” she says, and her voice shakes a little. Another tear steals down the side of her face and, quickly, she wipes it away. “We have to tell someone.”
“Stop,” I say. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“But—”
“Ella. Please.”
“No, we have t—”
“Ella,” I say, cutting her off. “I think there’s something wrong with my mom.”
Her face falls. Her anger fades. “What?”
I’d been terrified, for weeks, to say the words out loud, to make my fears real. Even now, I feel my heart pick up.
“What do you mean?” she says. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s . . . sick.”
Ella blinks at me. Confused. “If she’s sick we can fix her. My mum and dad can fix her. They’re so smart; they can fix anything. I’m sure they can fix your mum, too.”
I’m shaking my head, my heart racing now, pounding in my ears. “No, Ella, you don’t understand—I think—”
“What?” She takes my hand. Squeezes. “What is it?”
“I think my dad is killing her.”
We’re all running.
Base isn’t far from here, and our best option is to go on foot. But the minute we hit the open air, the group of us—myself, Castle, Winston, injured Brendan, Ian, and Alia—go invisible. Someone shouts a breathless thanks in my direction, but I’m not the one doing this.
My fists clench.
Nazeera.
These last couple of days with her have been making my head spin. I never should’ve trusted her. First she hates me, then she hates me even more, and then, suddenly, she decides I’m not an asshole and wants to be my friend? I can’t believe I fell for it. I can’t believe I’m such an idiot. She’s been playing me this whole time. This girl just shows up out of nowhere, magically mimics my exact supernatural ability, and then—right when she pretends to be best friends with Juliette—we’re ambushed at the symposium and Juliette sort of murders six hundred people?
No way. I call bullshit.
No way this was all some big coincidence.
Juliette attended that symposium because Nazeera encouraged her to go. Nazeera convinced Juliette it was the right thing to do. And then five seconds before Brendan gets shot, Nazeera tells me to run? Tells me we have the same powers?
Bullshit.
I can’t believe I let myself be distracted by a pretty face. I should’ve trusted Warner when he told me she was hiding something.
Warner.
God. I don’t even know what happened to him.
The minute we get back to base our invisibility is lifted. I can’t know for sure if that means Nazeera went her own way, but we can’t slow down long enough to find out. Quickly, I project a new layer of invisibility over our team; I’ll have to keep it up just long enough to get us all to a safe space, and just being back on base isn’t assurance enough. The soldiers are going to ask questions, and right now I don’t have the answers they need.
They’re going to be pissed.
We make our way, as a group, to the fifteenth floor, to our home on base in Sector 45. Warner only just finished having this thing built for us. He cleared out the entire top floor for our new headquarters—we’d hardly even settled in—and things have already gone to shit. I can’t even allow myself to think about it now, not yet.
It makes me feel sick to my stomach.
Once we’re gathered in our largest common room, I do a head count. All original, remaining Omega Point members are present. Adam and James show up to find out what happened, and Sonya and Sara stick around just long enough to gather intel before carting Brendan over to the medical wing. Winston disappears down the hall behind them.
Juliette and Warner never show.
Quickly, we share our own versions of what we saw. It doesn’t take long to confirm we all witnessed basically the same thing: blood, mayhem, murdered bodies, and then—a slightly less-bloody version of the same thing. No one seems as surprised by the twisted turn of events as I was, because, according to Ian, “Weird supernatural shit happens around here all the time, it’s not that weird,” but, more important:
No one saw what happened to Warner and Juliette.
No one but me.
For a few seconds, we all stare at each other. My heart pounds hard and heavy in my chest. I feel like I might be on fire, burning with indignation.
Denial.
Alia is the first to speak. “You don’t think they’re dead, do you?”
Ian says, “Probably.”
And I jump to my feet. “STOP. They’re not dead.”
“How can you be sure?” Adam says.
“I would know if they were dead.”
“What? How w—”
“I would just know, okay?” I cut him off. “I would know. And they’re not dead.” I take a deep, steadying breath. “We’re not going to freak out,” I say as calmly as possible. “There has to be a logical explanation. People don’t just disappear, right?”
Everyone stares at me.
“You know what I mean,” I snap, irritated. “We all know that Juliette and Warner wouldn’t, like, run away together. They weren’t even on speaking terms before the symposium. So it makes the most sense that they would be kidnapped.” I pause. Look around again. “Right?”
“Or dead,” Ian says.
“If you keep talking like that, Sanchez, I can guarantee that at least one person will be dead tonight.”
Ian sighs, hard. “Listen, I’m not trying to be an asshole. I know you were close with them. But let’s be real: they weren’t close with the rest of us. And maybe that makes me less invested in all this, but it also makes me more level-headed.”
He waits, gives me a chance to respond.
I don’t.
Ian sighs again. “I’m just saying that maybe you’re letting emotion cloud your better judgment right now. I know you don’t want them to be dead, but the possibility that they are dead is, like, really high. Warner was a traitor to The Reestablishment. I’m surprised they didn’t try to kill him sooner. And Juliette—I mean, that’s obvious, right? She murdered Anderson and declared herself ruler of North America.” He raises his eyebrows in a knowing gesture. “Those two have had targets on their backs for months.”
My jaw clenches. Unclenches. Clenches again.
“So,” Ian says quietly. “We have to be smart about this. If they’re dead, we need to be thinking about our next moves. Where do we go?”
“Wait—what do you mean?” Adam says, sitting forward. “What next moves? You think we have to leave?”
“Without Warner and Juliette, I don’t think we’re safe here.” Lily takes Ian’s hand in a show of emotional support that makes me feel violent. “The soldiers paid their allegiance to the two of them—to Juliette in particular. Without her, I’m not sure they’d follow the rest of us anywhere.”
“And if The Reestablishment had Juliette murdered,” Ian adds, “they’re obviously just getting started. They’ll be coming to reclaim Sector 45 any second now. Our best chance of survival is to first consider what’s best for our team. Since we’re the obvious next targets, I think we should bail. Soon.” A pause. “Maybe even tonight.”
“Bro, are you insane?” I drop down into my chair too hard, feeling like I might scream. “We can’t just bail. We need to look for them. We need to be planning a rescue mission right now!”
Everyone just stares at me. Like I’m the one who’s lost his mind.
“Castle, sir?” I say, trying and failing to keep the sharp edge out of my voice. “Do you want to chime in here?”
But Castle has sunk down in his chair. He’s staring up, at the ceiling, at nothing. He looks dazed.
I don’t have the chance to dwell on it.
“Kenji,” Alia says quietly. “I’m sorry, but Ian’s right. I don’t think we’re safe here anymore.”
“We’re not leaving,” Adam and I say at exactly the same time.
I spin around, surprised. Hope shoots through me fast and strong. Maybe Adam feels more for Juliette than he lets on. Maybe Adam will surprise us all. Maybe he’ll finally stop hiding, stop cowering in the background. Maybe, I think, Adam is back.
“Thank you,” I say, and point at him in a gesture that says to everyone:
See? This is loyalty.
“James and I aren’t running anymore,” Adam says, his eyes going cold as he speaks. “I understand if the rest of you have to leave, but James and I will stay here. I was a Sector 45 soldier. I lived on this base. Maybe they’ll give me immunity.”
I frown. “But—”
“James and I aren’t leaving,” Adam says. Loudly. Definitively. “You can make your plans without us. We have to take off for the night, anyway.” Adam stands, turns to his brother. “It’s time to get ready for bed.”
James stares at the floor.
“James,” Adam says, a gentle warning in his voice.
“I want to stay and listen,” James says, crossing his arms. “You can go to bed without me.”
“James—”
“But I have a theory,” the ten-year-old says. He says the word theory like it’s brand-new to him, like it’s an interesting sound in his mouth. “And I want to share it with Kenji.”
Adam looks so tense that the strain in his shoulders is stressing me out. I think I haven’t been paying close enough attention to him, because I didn’t realize until right now that Adam looks worse than tired. He looks ragged. Like he could collapse, crack in half, at any moment.
James catches my eye from across the room, his own eyes round and eager.
I sigh.
“What’s your theory, little man?”
James’s face lights up. “I was just thinking: maybe all the fake-killing thing was, like, a distraction.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Like, if someone wanted to kidnap Warner and Juliette,” James says. “You know? Like you said earlier. Causing a scene like that would be the perfect distraction, right?”
“Well. Yeah,” I say, and frown. “I guess. But why would The Reestablishment need a distraction? When have they ever been secretive about what they want? If a supreme commander wanted to take Juliette or Warner, for example, wouldn’t they just show up with a shit ton of soldiers and take what they wanted?”
“Language,” Adam says, outraged.
“My bad. Strike the word shit from the record.”
Adam shakes his head. He looks like he might throttle me. But James is smiling, which is really all that matters.
“No. I don’t think they’d rush in like that, not with so many soldiers,” James says, his blue eyes bright. “Not if they had something to hide.”
“You think they’d have something to hide?” Lily pipes up. “From us?”
“I don’t know,” James says. “Sometimes people hide things.” He steals a split-second glance at Adam as he says it, a glance that sets my pulse racing with fear, and I’m about to respond when Lily beats me to it.
“I mean, it’s possible,” she says. “But The Reestablishment doesn’t have a long history of caring about pretenses. They stopped pretending to care about the opinion of the public a long time ago. They mow people down in the street just because they feel like it. I don’t think they’re worried about hiding things from us.”
Castle laughs, out loud, and we all spin around to stare at him. I’m relieved to finally see him react, but he still seems lost in his head somewhere. He looks angry. I’ve never really seen Castle get angry.
“They hide a great deal from us,” he says sharply. “And from each other.” After a long, deep breath, he finally gets to his feet. Smiles, warily, at the ten-year-old in the room. “James, you are wise indeed.”
“Thank you,” James says, blinking up at him.
“Castle, sir?” I say, my voice coming out harder than I’d intended. “Will you please tell us what the hell is going on? Do you know something?”
Castle sighs. Rubs the stubble on his chin with the flat of his palm. “All right, Nazeera,” he says, turning toward nothing, like he’s speaking to a ghost. “Go ahead.”
When Nazeera appears, as if out of thin air, I’m not the only one who’s pissed. Okay, maybe I’m the only one who’s pissed.
But everyone else looks surprised, at least.
They’re staring at her, at each other, and then all of them—all of them—turn to look at me.
“Bro, did you know about this?” Ian asks.
I scowl.
Invisibility is my thing. My thing, goddammit.
No one ever said I had to share that with anyone. Especially not with someone like Nazeera, a lying, manipulative—
Gorgeous. Gorgeous human being.
Shit.
I turn, stare at the wall. I can’t be distracted by her anymore. She knows I’m into her—my infatuation is apparently obvious to everyone within a ten-mile radius, according to Castle—and she’s clearly been using my idiocy to her best advantage.
Smart. I respect the tactic.
But that also means I have to keep my guard up when she’s around. No more staring. No more daydreaming about her. No more thinking about how she looked at me when she smiled. Or the way she laughed, like she meant it, the same night she yelled at me for asking reasonable questions. Which, by the way—
I don’t think I was crazy for wondering out loud how the daughter of a supreme commander could get away with wearing an illegal headscarf. She told me later that she wears the scarf symbolically, every once in a while, that she can’t get away with wearing it all the time because it’s illegal. But when I pointed this out to her, she gave me hell. And then she gave me shit for being confused.
I’m still confused.
She’s not covering her hair now, either, but no one else seems to have registered this fact. Maybe they’d already seen her like this. Maybe everyone but me already had that conversation with her, already heard her story about wearing it symbolically, occasionally.
Illegally, when her dad wasn’t watching.
“Kenji,” she says, and her voice is so sharp I look up, stare at her despite my own very explicit orders to keep my eyes on the wall. All it takes is two seconds of eye contact and my heart hits itself.
That mouth. Those eyes.
“Yeah?” I cross my arms.
She looks surprised, like she wasn’t expecting me to be upset, and I don’t care. She should know that I’m pissed. I want her to know that invisibility is my thing. That I know I’m petty and I don’t care. Plus, I don’t trust her. Also, what is up with these kids of the supreme commanders all being super-good-looking? It’s almost like they did it on purpose, like they made these kids in test tubes or some shit.
I shake my head to clear it.
Carefully, Nazeera says, “I really think you should sit down for this.”
“I’m good.”
She frowns. For a second she looks almost hurt, but before I have a chance to feel bad about it, she shrugs. Turns away.
And what she says next nearly splits me in half.
I’m sitting on an orange chair in the hallway of a dimly lit building. The chair is made of cheap plastic, its edges coarse and unfinished. The floor is a shiny linoleum that occasionally sticks to the soles of my shoes. I know I’ve been breathing too loudly but I can’t help it. I sit on my hands and swing my legs under my seat.
Just then, a boy comes into view. His movements are so quiet I only notice him when he stops directly in front of me. He leans against the wall opposite me, his eyes focused on a point in the distance.
I study him for a moment.
He seems about my age, but he’s wearing a suit. There’s something strange about him; he’s so pale and stiff he seems close to dead.
“Hi,” I say, and try to smile. “Do you want to sit down?”
He doesn’t return my smile. He won’t even look at me. “I’d prefer to stand,” he says quietly.
“Okay.”
We’re both silent awhile.
Finally, he says, “You’re nervous.”
I nod. My eyes must be a little red from crying, but I’d been hoping no one would notice. “Are you here to get a new family, too?”
“No.”
“Oh.” I look away. Stop swinging my feet. I feel my bottom lip tremble and I bite it, hard. “Then why are you here?”
He shrugs. I see him glance, briefly, at the three empty chairs next to me, but he makes no effort to sit down. “My father made me come.”
“He made you come here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He stares at his shoes and frowns. “I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you be in school?”
And then, instead of answering me, he says, “Where are you from?”
“What do you mean?”
He looks up then, meets my eyes for the first time. He has such unusual eyes. They’re a light, clear green.
“You have an accent,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah.” I look at the floor. “I was born in New Zealand. That’s where I lived until my mum and dad died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
I nod. Swing my legs again. I’m about to ask him another question when the door down the hall finally opens. A tall man in a navy suit walks out. He’s carrying a briefcase.
It’s Mr. Anderson, my social worker.
He beams at me. “You’re all set. Your new family is dying to meet you. We have a couple more things to do before you can go, but it won’t take too lon—”
I can’t hold it in anymore.
I start sobbing right there, all over the new dress he bought me. Sobs rack my body, tears hitting the orange chair, the sticky floor.
Mr. Anderson sets down his briefcase and laughs. “Sweetheart, there’s nothing to cry about. This is a great day! You should be happy!”
But I can’t speak.
I feel stuck, stuck to the seat. Like my lungs have been stuck together. I manage to calm the sobs but I’m suddenly hiccuping, tears spilling quietly down my cheeks. “I want—I want to go h-home—”
“You are going home,” he says, still smiling. “That’s the whole point.”
And then—
“Dad.”
I look up at the sound of his voice. So quiet and serious. It’s the boy with the green eyes. Mr. Anderson, I realize, is his father.
“She’s scared,” the boy says. And even though he’s talking to his dad, he’s looking at me. “She’s really scared.”
“Scared?” Mr. Anderson looks from me to his son, then back again. “What’s there to be scared of ?”
I scrub at my face. Try and fail to stop the tears.
“What’s her name?” the boy asks. He’s still staring at me, and this time, I stare back. There’s something in his eyes, something that makes me feel safe.
“This is Juliette,” Mr. Anderson says, and looks me over. “Tragic”—he sighs—“just like her namesake.”
Nazeera was right. I should’ve sat down.
I’m looking at my hands, watching a tremor work its way across my fingers. I nearly lose my grip on the stack of photos I’m clutching. The photos. The photos Nazeera passed around after telling us that Juliette is not who we think she is.
I can’t stop staring at the pictures.
A little brown girl and a little white girl running in a field, both of them smiling tiny-toothed smiles, long hair flying in the wind, small baskets full of strawberries swinging from their elbows.
Nazeera and Emmaline at the strawberry patch, it read on the back.
Little Nazeera being hugged, on either side, by two little white girls, all three of them laughing so hard they look like they’re about to fall over.
Ella and Emmaline and Nazeera, it read.
A close-up of a little girl smiling right into the camera, her eyes huge and blue-green, lengths of soft brown hair framing her face.
Ella on Christmas morning, it read.
“Ella Sommers,” Nazeera says.
She says her real name is Ella Sommers, sister to Emmaline Sommers, daughter of Maximillian and Evie Sommers.
“Something is wrong,” Nazeera says.
“Something is happening,” she says. She says she woke up six weeks ago remembering Juliette—sorry, Ella—
“Remembering her. I was remembering her, which means I’d forgotten her. And when I remembered Ella,” she says, “I remembered Emmaline, too. I remembered how we’d all grown up together, how our parents used to be friends. I remembered but I didn’t understand, not right away. I thought maybe I was confusing dreams with memory. Actually, the memories came back to me so slowly I thought, for a while, that I might’ve been hallucinating.”
She says the hallucinations, as she called them, were impossible to shake, so she started digging, started looking for information.
“I learned the same thing you did. That two girls named Ella and Emmaline were donated to The Reestablishment, and that only Ella was taken out of their custody, so Ella was given an alias. Relocated. Adopted. But what you didn’t know was that the parents who gave up their daughters were also members of The Reestablishment. They were doctors and scientists. You didn’t know that Ella—the girl you know to be Juliette—is the daughter of Evie Sommers, the current supreme commander of Oceania. She and I grew up together. She, like the rest of us kids, was built to serve The Reestablishment.”
Ian swears, loudly, and Adam is so stunned he doesn’t complain.
“That can’t be possible,” Adam says. “Juliette—The girl I went to school with? She was”—he shakes his head—“I knew Juliette for years. She wasn’t made like you or Warner. She was this quiet, timid, sweet girl. She was always so nice. She never wanted to hurt anyone. All she ever wanted was to, like, connect with people. She was trying to help that little boy in the grocery store. But then it just—everything ended so badly and she got sucked into this whole mess and I tried,” he says, looking suddenly distraught, “I tried to help her, I tried to keep her safe. I wanted to protect her from this. I wanted t—”
He cuts himself off. Pulls himself together.
“She wasn’t like this,” he says, and he’s staring at the ground now. “Not until she started spending all that time with Warner. After she met him she just—I don’t know what happened. She lost herself, little by little. Eventually she became someone else.” He looks up. “But she wasn’t made to be this way, not like you. Not like Warner. There’s no way she’s the daughter of a supreme commander—she’s not a born murderer. Besides,” he says, taking a sharp breath, “if she were from Oceania she would have an accent.”
Nazeera tilts her head at Adam.
“The girl you knew had undergone severe physical and emotional trauma,” she says. “She’d had her native memories forcibly removed. She was shipped across the globe as a specimen and convinced to live with abusive adoptive parents who beat the life out of her.” Nazeera shakes her head slowly. “The Reestablishment—and Anderson, in particular—made sure that Ella could never remember why she was suffering, but just because she couldn’t remember what happened to her didn’t change the fact that it happened. Her body was repeatedly used and abused by a rotating cast of monsters. And that shit leaves its mark.”
Nazeera looks Adam straight in the eye.
“Maybe you don’t understand,” she says. “I read all the reports. I hacked into all my father’s files. I found everything. What they did to Ella over the course of twelve years is unspeakable. So yes, I’m sure you remember a very different person. But I don’t think she became someone she wasn’t. My guess is she finally gathered the strength to remember who she’d always been. And if you don’t get that, I’m glad things didn’t work out between the two of you.”
In an instant, the tension in the room is nearly suffocating.
Adam looks like he might be on fire. Like fire might literally come out of his eyeballs. Like it might be his new superpower.
I clear my throat. I force myself to say something—anything—to break the silence. “So you guys, uh, you all knew about Adam and Juliette, too, huh? I didn’t realize you knew about that. Huh. Interesting.”
Nazeera takes her time turning in her seat to look me in the eye. “Are you kidding?” she says, staring at me like I’m worse than an idiot.
I figure it’s best not to press the issue.
“Where did you get these photos?” Alia asks, changing the subject more deftly than I did. “How can we trust that they’re real?”
At first, Nazeera only looks at her. And she seems resigned when she says, “I don’t know how to convince you that the photos are real. I can only tell you that they are.”
The room goes silent.
“Why do you even care?” Lily says. “Why are we supposed to believe you care about this? About Juliette—about Ella? What do you have to gain from helping us? Why would you betray your parents?”
Nazeera sits back in her seat. “I know you all think the children of the supreme commanders are a bunch of carefree, amoral psychopaths, happy to be the military robots our parents wanted us to be, but nothing is ever that straightforward. Our parents are homicidal maniacs intent on ruling the world; that part is true. But the thing no one seems to understand is that our parents chose to be homicidal maniacs. We, on the other hand, were forced to be. And just because we’ve been trained to be mercenaries doesn’t mean we like it. None of us got to choose this life. None of us enjoyed being taught to torture before we could even drive. And it’s not insane to imagine that sometimes even horrible people are searching for a way out of their own darkness.”
Nazeera’s eyes flash with feeling as she speaks, and her words puncture the life vest around my heart. Emotion drowns me again.
Shit.
“Is it really so crazy to think I might care about the girls I once loved as my own sisters?” she’s saying. “Or about the lies my parents forced me to swallow, or the innocent people I watched them murder? Or maybe even something simpler than that—that I might’ve opened my eyes one day and realized that I was part and parcel of a system that was not only ravaging the world but also slaughtering everyone in it?”
Shit.
I can feel it, can feel my heart filling out, filling up. My chest feels tight, like it’s swollen, like my lungs don’t fit anymore. I don’t want to care about Nazeera. Don’t want to feel her pain or feel connected to her or feel anything. I just want to keep a level head. Be cool.
I force myself to think about a joke James told me the other day, a stupid pun—something to do with muffins—a joke that was so lame I nearly cried. I focus on the memory, the way James laughed at his own lameness, snorting so hard a little food fell out of his mouth. I smile and glance at James, who looks like he might be falling asleep in his seat.
Soon, the tightness in my chest begins to abate.
Now I’m really smiling, wondering if it’s weird that I love bad jokes even more than good ones, when I hear Ian say—
“It’s not that you seem heartless. It’s just that these photos seem so convenient. You had them ready to share.” He stares down at the single photo he’s holding. “These kids could be anyone.”
“Look closely,” Nazeera says, standing up to get a better look at the picture in his hands. “Who do you think that is?”
I lean over—Ian isn’t far from me—and peer over his shoulder. There’s really no point denying it anymore; the resemblance is insane.
Juliette. Ella.
She’s just a kid, maybe four or five years old, standing in front of the camera, smiling. She’s holding a bouquet of dandelions up to the cameraman, as if to offer him one. And then, just off to the side, there’s another figure. A little blond boy. So blond his hair is white. He’s staring, intensely, at a single dandelion in his hands.
I nearly fall out of my chair. Juliette is one thing, but this—
“Is that Warner?” I say.
Adam looks up sharply. He glances from me to Nazeera, then stalks over to look at the photo. His eyebrows fly up his head.
“No way,” he says.
Nazeera shrugs.
“No way,” Adam says again. “No way. That’s impossible. There’s no way they knew each other this long. Warner had no idea who Juliette was before she came here.” When Nazeera seems unmoved, Adam says, “I’m serious. I know you think I’m full of shit, but I’m not wrong about this. I was there. Warner literally interviewed me for the job of being her cellmate in the asylum. He didn’t know who she was. He’d never met her. Never seen her face, not up close, anyway. Half the reason he chose me to be her roommate was because she and I had history, because he found that useful. He’d grill me for hours about her.”
Nazeera sighs slowly, like she’s surrounded by idiots.