“I don’t know,” I tell him. I sniff away the last of my tears. Try to wipe my nose. “Castle kept telling me to ‘focus’ and ‘harness my Energy.’” I use air quotes to illustrate my point. “But all I know about myself is that I can break things—I don’t know why it happens. So I don’t know how he expects me to replicate what I’ve already done. I had no idea what I was doing then, and I don’t know what I’m doing now, either. Nothing’s changed.”
“Hold up,” Kenji says, dropping the brick back onto the stack before falling on the mats across from me. He splays out on the ground, body stretched out, arms folded behind his head as he stares up at the ceiling. “What are we talking about again? What events are you supposed to be replicating?”
I lie back against the mats, too; mimic Kenji’s position. Our heads are only a few inches apart. “Remember? The concrete I broke back in Warner’s psycho room. The metal door I attacked when I was looking for A-Adam.” My voice catches and I have to squeeze my eyes shut to quell the pain.
I can’t even say his name right now.
Kenji grunts. I feel him nodding his head on the mats. “All right. Well, what Castle told me is that he thinks there’s more to you than just the touching thing. That maybe you also have this weird superhuman strength or something.” A pause. “That sound about right to you?”
“I guess.”
“So what happened?” he asks, tilting his head back to get a good look at me. “When you went all psycho-monster on everything? Do you remember if there was a trigger?”
I shake my head. “I don’t really know. When it happens, it’s like—it’s like I really am completely out of my mind,” I tell him. “Something changes in my head and it makes me … it makes me crazy. Like, really, legitimately insane.” I glance over at him but his face betrays no emotion. He just blinks, waiting for me to finish. So I take a deep breath and continue. “It’s like I can’t think straight. I’m just so paralyzed by the adrenaline and I can’t stop it; I can’t control it. Once that crazy feeling takes over, it needs an outlet. I have to touch something. I have to release it.”
Kenji props himself up on one elbow. Looks at me. “So what gets you all crazy, though?” he asks. “What were you feeling? Does it only happen when you’re really pissed off?”
I take a second to think about it before I say, “No. Not always.” I hesitate. “The first time,” I tell him, my voice a little unsteady, “I wanted to kill Warner because of what he made me do to that little kid. I was so devastated. I was angry—I was really angry—but I was also … so sad.” I trail off. “And then when I was looking for Adam?” Deep breaths. “I was desperate. Really desperate. I had to save him.”
“And what about when you went all Superman on me? Slamming me into the wall like that?”
“I was scared.”
“And then? In the research labs?”
“Angry,” I whisper, my eyes unfocused as I stare up at the ceiling, remembering the rage of that day. “I was angrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I never even knew I could feel that way. To be so mad. And I felt guilty,” I add, so quietly. “Guilty for being the reason why Adam was in there at all.”
Kenji takes a deep, long breath. Pulls himself up into a sitting position and leans against the wall. He says nothing.
“What are you thinking …?” I ask, shifting to sit up and join him.
“I don’t know,” Kenji finally says. “But it’s obvious that all of these incidents were the result of really intense emotions. Makes me think the whole system must be pretty straightforward.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like there has to be some kind of trigger involved,” he says. “Like, when you lose control, your body goes into automatic self-protect mode, you know?”
“No?”
Kenji turns so he’s facing me. Crosses his legs underneath him. Leans back on his hands. “Like, listen. When I first found out I could do this invisible thing? I mean, it was an accident. I was nine years old. Scared out of my mind. Fast-forward through all the shitty details and my point is this: I needed a place to hide and couldn’t find one. But I was so freaked out that my body, like, automatically did it for me. I just disappeared into the wall. Blended or whatever.” He laughs. “Tripped me the hell out, because I didn’t realize what’d happened for a good ten minutes. And then I didn’t know how to turn myself back to normal. It was crazy. I actually thought I was dead for a couple of days.”
“No way,” I gasp.
“Yup.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s what I said.”
“So … so, what? You think my body taps into its defense mode when I freak out?”
“Pretty much.”
“Okay.” I think. “Well, how am I supposed to tap into my defense mode? How did you figure yours out?”
He shrugs. “Once I realized I wasn’t some kind of ghost and I wasn’t hallucinating, it actually became kind of cool. I was a kid, you know? I was excited, like I could tie on a cape and kill bad guys or something. I liked it. And it became this part of me that I could access whenever I wanted. But,” he adds, “it wasn’t until I really started training that I learned how to control and maintain it for long periods of time. That took a lot of work. A lot of focus.”
“A lot of work.”
“Yeah—I mean, all of this takes a lot of work to figure out. But once I accepted it as a part of me, it became easier to manage.”
“Well,” I say, leaning back again, blowing out an exasperated breath, “I’ve already accepted it. But it definitely hasn’t made things easier.”
Kenji laughs out loud. “My ass you’ve accepted it. You haven’t accepted anything.”
“I’ve been like this my entire life, Kenji—I’m pretty sure I’ve accepted it—”
“No.” He cuts me off. “Hell no. You hate being in your own skin. You can’t stand it. That’s not called acceptance. That’s called—I don’t know—the opposite of acceptance. You,” he says, pointing a finger at me, “you are the opposite of acceptance.”
“What are you trying to say?” I shoot back. “That I have to like being this way?” I don’t give him a chance to respond before I say, “You have no idea what it’s like to be stuck in my skin—to be trapped in my body, afraid to breathe too close to anything with a beating heart. If you did, you’d never ask me to be happy to live like this.”
“Come on, Juliette—I’m just saying—”
“No. Let me make this clear for you, Kenji. I kill people. I kill them. That’s what my ‘special’ power is. I don’t blend into backgrounds or move things with my mind or have really stretchy arms. You touch me for too long and you die. Try living like that for seventeen years and then tell me how easy it is to accept myself.”
I taste too much bitterness on my tongue.
It’s new for me.
“Listen,” he says, his voice noticeably softer. “I’m not trying to judge, okay? I’m just trying to point out that because you don’t want it, you might subconsciously be sabotaging your efforts to figure it out.” He puts his hands up in mock defeat. “Just my two cents. I mean, obviously you’ve got some crazy powers going on. You touch people and bam, done. But then you can crush through walls and shit, too? I mean, hell, I’d want to learn how to do that, are you kidding me? That would be insane.”
“Yeah,” I say, slumping against the wall. “I guess that part wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Right?” Kenji perks up. “That would be awesome. And then—you know, if you leave your gloves on—you could just crush random stuff without actually killing anyone. Then you wouldn’t feel so bad, right?”
“I guess not.”
“So. Great. You just need to relax.” He gets to his feet. Grabs the brick he was toying with earlier. “Come on,” he says. “Get up. Come over here.”
I walk over to his side of the room and stare at the brick he’s holding. He gives it to me like he’s handing over some kind of family heirloom. “Now,” he
says. “You have to let yourself get comfortable, okay? Allow your body to touch base with its core. Stop blocking your own Energy. You’ve probably got a million mental blocks in your head. You can’t hold back anymore.”
“I don’t have mental blocks—”
“Yeah you do.” He snorts. “You definitely do. You have severe mental constipation.”
“Mental what—”
“Focus your anger on the brick. On the brick,” he says to me. “Remember. Open mind. You want to crush the brick. Remind yourself that this is what you want. It’s your choice. You’re not doing this for Castle, you’re not doing it for me, you’re not doing it to fight anyone. This is just something you feel like doing. For fun. Because you feel like it. Let your mind and body take over. Okay?”
I take a deep breath. Nod a few times. “Okay. I think I’m—”
“Holy shit.” He lets out a low whistle.
“What?” I spin around. “What happened—”
“How did you not just feel that?”
“Feel what—”
“Look in your hand!”
I gasp. Stumble backward. My hand is full of what looks like red sand and brown clay pulverized into tiny particles. The bigger chunks of brick crumble to the floor and I let the debris slip through the cracks between my fingers only to lift the guilty hand to my face.
I look up.
Kenji is shaking his head, shaking with laughter. “I am so jealous right now you have no idea.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know. I KNOW. So badass. Now think about it: if you can do that to a brick, imagine what you could do to the human body—”
That wasn’t the right thing to say.
Not now. Not after Adam. Not after trying to pick up the pieces of my hopes and dreams and fumbling to glue them back together. Because now there’s nothing left. Because now I realize that somewhere, deep down, I was harboring a small hope that Adam and I would find a way to work things out.
Somewhere, deep down, I was still clinging to possibility.
And now that’s gone.
Because now it’s not just my skin Adam has to be afraid of. It’s not just my touch but my grip, my hugs, my hands, a kiss—anything I do could injure him. I’d have to be careful just holding his hand. And this new knowledge, this new information about just exactly how deadly I am—
It leaves me with no alternative.
I will forever and ever and ever be alone because no one is safe from me.
I fall to the floor, my mind whirring, my own brain no longer a safe space to inhabit because I can’t stop thinking, I can’t stop wondering, I can’t stop anything and it’s like I’m caught in what could be a head-on collision and I’m not the innocent bystander.
I’m the train.
I’m the one careening out of control.
Because sometimes you see yourself—you see yourself the way you could be—the way you might be if things were different. And if you look too closely, what you see will scare you, it’ll make you wonder what you might do if given the opportunity. You know there’s a different side of yourself you don’t want to recognize, a side you don’t want to see in the daylight. You spend your whole life doing everything to push it down and away, out of sight, out of mind. You pretend that a piece of yourself doesn’t exist.
You live like that for a long time.
For a long time, you’re safe.
And then you’re not.
TWENTY-FIVE
Another morning.
Another meal.
I’m headed to breakfast to meet Kenji before our next training session.
He came to a conclusion about my abilities yesterday: he thinks that the inhuman power in my touch is just an evolved form of my Energy. That skin-to-skin contact is simply the rawest form of my ability—that my true gift is actually a kind of all-consuming strength that manifests itself in every part of my body.
My bones, my blood, my skin.
I told him it was an interesting theory. I told him I’d always seen myself as some sick version of a Venus flytrap and he said, “OH MY GOD. Yes. YES. You are exactly like that. Holy shit, yes.”
Beautiful enough to lure in your prey, he said.
Strong enough to clamp down and destroy, he said.
Poisonous enough to digest your victims when the flesh makes contact.
“You digest your prey,” he said to me, laughing as though it was amusing, as though it was funny, as if it was perfectly acceptable to compare a girl to a carnivorous plant. Flattering, even. “Right? You said that when you touch people, it’s, like, you’re taking their energy, right? It makes you feel stronger?”
I didn’t respond.
“So you’re exactly like a Venus flytrap. You reel ’em in. Clamp ’em down. Eat ’em up.”
I didn’t respond.
“Mmmmmmm,” he said. “You’re like a sexy, super-scary plant.”
I closed my eyes. Covered my mouth in horror.
“Why is that so wrong?” he said. Bent down to meet my gaze. Tugged on a lock of my hair to get me to look up. “Why does this have to be so horrible? Why can’t you see how awesome this is?” He shook his head at me. “You are seriously missing out, you know that? This could be so cool if you would just own it.”
Own it.
Yes.
How easy it would be to just clamp down on the world around me. Suck up its life force and leave it dead in the street just because someone tells me I should. Because someone points a finger and says “Those are the bad guys. Those men over there.” Kill, they say. Kill because you trust us. Kill because you’re fighting for the right team. Kill because they’re bad, and we’re good. Kill because we tell you to. Because some people are so stupid that they actually think there are thick neon lines separating good and evil. That it’s easy to make that kind of distinction and go to sleep at night with a clear conscience. Because it’s okay.
It’s okay to kill a man if someone else deems him unfit to live.
What I really want to say is who the hell are you and who are you to decide who gets to die. Who are you to decide who should be killed. Who are you to tell me which father I should destroy and which child I should orphan and which mother should be left without her son, which brother should be left without a sister, which grandmother should spend the rest of her life crying in the early hours of the morning because the body of her grandchild was buried in the ground before her own.
What I really want to say is who the hell do you think you are to tell me that it’s awesome to be able to kill a living thing, that it’s interesting to be able to ensnare another soul, that it’s fair to choose a victim simply because I’m capable of killing without a gun. I want to say mean things and angry things and hurtful things and I want to throw expletives in the air and run far, far away; I want to disappear into the horizon and I want to dump myself on the side of the road if only it will bring me toward some semblance of freedom but I don’t know where to go. I have nowhere else to go.
And I feel responsible.
Because there are times when the anger bleeds away until it’s nothing but a raw ache in the pit of my stomach and I see the world and wonder about its people and what it’s become and I think about hope and maybe and possibly and possibility and potential. I think about glasses half full and glasses to see the world clearly. I think about sacrifice. And compromise. I think about what will happen if no one fights back. I think about a world where no one stands up to injustice.
And I wonder if maybe everyone here is right.
If maybe it’s time to fight.
I wonder if it’s ever actually possible to justify killing as a means to an end and then I think of Kenji. I think of what he said. And I wonder if he would still call it awesome if I decided to make him my prey.
I’m guessing not.
TWENTY-SIX
Kenji is already waiting for me.
He and Winston and Brendan are sitting at the same table again, and I slide into my sea
t with a distracted nod and eyes that refuse to focus in front of me.
“He’s not here,” Kenji says, shoving a spoonful of breakfast into his mouth.
“What?” Oh how fascinating look at this fork and this spoon and this table. “What do y—”
“Not here,” he says, his mouth still half full of food.
Winston clears his throat, scratches the back of his head. Brendan shifts in his seat beside me.
“Oh. I—I, um—” Heat flushes up my neck as I look around at the 3 guys sitting at this table. I want to ask Kenji where Adam is, why he isn’t here, how he’s doing, if he’s okay, if he’s been eating regularly. I want to ask a million questions I shouldn’t be asking but it’s blatantly clear that none of them want to talk about the awkward details of my personal life. And I don’t want to be that sad, pathetic girl. I don’t want pity. I don’t want to see the uncomfortable sympathy in their eyes.
So I sit up. Clear my throat.
“What’s going on with the patrols?” I ask Winston. “Is it getting any worse?”
Winston looks up midchew, surprised. He swallows down the food too quickly and coughs once, twice. Takes a sip of his coffee—tar black—and leans forward, looking eager. “It’s getting weirder,” he says.
“Really?”
“Yeah, so, remember how I told you guys that Warner was showing up every night?”
Warner. I can’t get the image of his smiling, laughing face out of my head.
We nod.
“Well.” He leans back in his chair. Holds up his hands. “Last night? Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Brendan’s eyebrows are high on his forehead. “What do you mean, nothing?”
“I mean no one was there.” He shrugs. Picks up his fork. Stabs at a piece of food. “Not Warner, not a single soldier. Night before last?” He looks around at us. “Fifty, maybe seventy-five soldiers. Last night, zero.”
“Did you tell Castle about this?” Kenji isn’t eating anymore. He’s staring at Winston with a focused, too-serious look on his face. It’s worrying me.
“Yeah.” Winston nods as he takes another sip of his coffee. “I turned in my report about an hour ago.”
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