by Tahereh Mafi
“Yes.”
“Throw me a freaking bone here.”
“We broke up,” I say, pulling a pillow over my eyes, “because of information I shared with her that is, as I said, classified.”
“What? Why? That doesn’t make any sense.” A pause. “Unless—”
“Oh good, I can practically hear the tiny gears in your tiny brain turning.”
“You lied to her about something?” he says. “Something you should’ve told her? Something classified—about her?”
I wave a hand at nothing in particular. “The man’s a genius.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yes,” I say. “Very much shit.”
He exhales a long, hard breath. “That sounds pretty serious.”
“I am an idiot.”
He clears his throat. “So, uh, you really screwed up this time, huh?”
“Quite thoroughly, I’m afraid.”
Silence.
“Wait—tell me again why all these sheets are on the floor?”
At that, I pull the pillow away from my face. “Why do you think they’re on the floor?”
A second’s hesitation and then,
“Oh, what—c’mon, man, what the hell.” Kenji jumps off the bed looking disgusted. “Why would you let me sit here?” He stalks off to the other side of the room. “You guys are just—Jesus—that is just not okay—”
“Grow up.”
“I am grown.” He scowls at me. “But Juliette’s like my sister, man, I don’t want to think about that shit—”
“Well, don’t worry,” I say to him, “I’m sure it’ll never happen again.”
“All right, all right, drama queen, calm down. And tell me about this classified business.”
JULIETTE
Run, I said to myself.
Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you’re a blur that blends into the background.
Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and run.
Run run run until you can’t hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.
Run until you drop dead.
Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.
Run, I said.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
My feet pound against the hard, packed earth, each steady footfall sending shocks of electric pain up my legs. My lungs burn, my breaths coming in fast and sharp, but I push through the exhaustion, my muscles working harder than they have in a long time, and keep moving. I never used to be any good at this. I’ve always had trouble breathing. But I’ve been doing a lot of cardio and weight training since moving on base, and I’ve gotten much stronger.
Today, that training is paying off.
I’ve covered at least a couple of miles already, panic and rage propelling me most of the way through, but now I have to break through my own resistance in order to maintain momentum. I cannot stop. I will not stop.
I’m not ready to start thinking yet.
It’s a disturbingly beautiful day today; the sun is shining high and bright, impossible birds chirping merrily in half-blooming trees and flapping their wings in vast, blue skies. I’m wearing a thin cotton shirt. Dark blue jeans. Another pair of tennis shoes. My hair, loose and long, waves behind me, locked in a battle with the wind. I can feel the sun warm my face; I feel beads of sweat roll down my back.
Could this possibly be real? I wonder.
Did someone shoot me with those poison bullets on purpose? To try and tell me something?
Or are my hallucinations an altogether different issue?
I close my eyes and push my legs harder, will myself to move faster. I don’t want to think yet. I don’t want to stop moving.
If I stop moving, my mind might kill me.
A sudden gust of wind hits me in the face. I open my eyes again, remember to breathe. I’m back in unregulated territory now, my powers turned fully on, the energy humming through me even now, in perpetual motion. The streets of the old world are paved, but pockmarked by potholes and puddles. The buildings are abandoned, tall and cold, electric lines strapped across the skyline like the staffs of unfinished songs, swaying gently in the afternoon light. I run under a crumbling overpass and down several cascading, concrete stairs manned on either side by unkempt palm trees and burned-out lampposts, their wrought-iron handrails rough and peeling paint. I turn up and down a few side streets and then I’m surrounded, on all sides, by the skeleton of an old freeway, twelve lanes wide, an enormous metal structure half collapsed in the middle of the road. I squint more closely and count three equally massive green signs, only two of which are still standing. I read the words—
405 SOUTH LONG BEACH
—and I stop.
I fall forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped behind my head, and fight the urge to tumble to the ground.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Over and over and over
I look up, look around.
An old bus sits not far from me, its many wheels mired in a pool of still water, rotting, half rusted, like an abandoned child steeping in its own filth. Freeway signs, shattered glass, shredded rubber, and forgotten bumpers litter what’s left of the broken pavement.
The sun finds me and shines in my direction, a spotlight for the fraying girl stopped in the middle of nowhere and I’m caught in its focused rays of heat, melting slowly from within, quietly collapsing as my mind catches up to my body like an asteroid barreling to earth.
And then it hits me—
The reminders like reverberations
The memories like hands around my throat
There it is
There she is
shattered again.
I’m curled into myself against the back of the filthy bus and I’ve got a hand clamped over my mouth to try and trap the screams but their desperate attempts to escape my lips are fighting a tide of unshed tears I cannot allow and—
breathe
My body shakes with unspent emotion.
Vomit inches up my oesophagus.
Go away, I whisper, but only in my head
go away, I say
Please die
I’d chained the terrified little girl of my past in some unknowable dungeon inside of me where she and her fears had been carefully stored, sealed away.
Her memories, suffocated.
Her anger, ignored.
I do not speak to her. I don’t dare look in her direction. I hate her.
But right now I can hear her crying.
Right now I can see her, this other version of myself, I can see her dragging her dirty fingernails against the chambers of my heart, drawing blood. And if I could reach inside myself and rip her out of me with my own two hands, I would.
I would snap her little body in half.
I would toss her mangled limbs out to sea.
I would be rid of her then, fully and truly, bleached forevermore of her stains on my soul. But she refuses to die. She remains within me, an echo. She haunts the halls of my heart and mind and though I’d gladly murder her for a chance at freedom, I cannot. It’s like trying to choke a ghost.
So I close my eyes and beg myself to be brave. I take deep breaths. I cannot let the broken girl inside of me inhale all that I’ve become. I cannot revert back to another version of myself. I will not shatter, not again, in the wake of an emotional earthquake.
But where do I even begin?
How do I deal with any of this? These past weeks had already been too much for me; too much to handle; too much to juggle. It’s been hard to admit that I’m unqualified, that I’m in way over my head, but I got there. I was wi
lling to recognize that all this—this new life, this new world—would take time and experience. I was willing to put in the hours, to trust my team, to try to be diplomatic. But now, in light of everything—
My entire life has been an experiment.
I have a sibling. A sister. And an altogether different set of parents, biological parents, who treated me no differently than my adoptive ones did, donating my body to research as if I were nothing more than a science experiment.
Anderson and the other supreme commanders have always known me. Castle has always known the truth about me. Warner knew I’d been adopted.
And now, to know that those I’ve trusted most have been lying to me—manipulating me—
Everyone has been using me—
It rips itself from my lungs, the sudden scream. It wrenches free from my chest without warning, without permission, and it’s a scream so loud, so harsh and violent it brings me to my knees. My hands are pressed against the pavement, my head half bent between my legs. The sound of my agony is lost in the wind, carried off by the clouds.
But here, between my feet, the ground has fissured open.
I jump up, surprised, and look down, spin around. I suddenly can’t remember if that crack was there before.
The force of my frustration and confusion sends me back to the bus, where I exhale and lean against the back doors, hoping for a place to rest my head—except that my hands and head rip through the exterior wall as though it were made of tissue, and I fall hard on the filthy floor, my hands and knees going straight through the metal underfoot.
Somehow this only makes me angrier.
My power is out of control, stoked by my reckless mind, my wild thoughts. I can’t focus my energy the way Kenji taught me to, and it’s everywhere, all around me, within and without me and the problem is, I don’t care anymore.
I don’t care, not right now.
I reach without thinking and rip one of the bus seats from its bolts, and throw it, hard, through the windshield. Glass splinters everywhere; a large shard hits me in the eye and several more fly into my open, angry mouth; I lift a hand to find slivers stuck in my sleeve, glittering like miniature icicles. I spit the spare bits from my mouth. Remove the glass shards from my shirt. And then I pull an inch-long piece of glass out of the inside of my eyelid and toss it, with a small clatter, to the ground.
My chest is heaving.
What, I think, as I rip another seat from its bolts, do I do now? I throw this seat straight through a window, shattering more glass and ripping open more metal innards. Instinct alone moves my arm up to protect my face from the flying debris, but I don’t flinch. I’m too angry to care. I’m too powerful at the moment to feel pain. Glass ricochets off my body. Razor-thin ribbons of steel bounce off my skin. I almost wish I felt something. Anything.
What do I do?
I punch the wall and there’s no relief in it; my hand goes straight through. I kick a chair and there’s no comfort in it; my foot rips through the cheap upholstery. I scream again, half outrage, half heartbreak, and watch this time as a long, dangerous crack forms along the ceiling.
That’s new.
And I’ve hardly had time to think the thought when the bus gives a sudden, lurching heave, yawns itself into a deep shudder, and splits clean in half.
The two halves collapse on either side of me, tripping me backward. I fall into a pile of shredded metal and wet, dirty glass and, stunned, I stumble up to my feet.
I don’t know what just happened.
I knew I was able to project my abilities—my strength, for certain—but I didn’t know that there was any projectional power in my voice. Old impulses make me wish I had someone to discuss this with. But I have no one to talk to anymore.
Warner is out of the question.
Castle is complicit.
And Kenji—what about Kenji? Did he know about my parents—my sister—too? Surely, Castle would’ve told him?
The problem is, I can’t be sure of anything anymore.
There’s no one left to trust.
But those words—that simple thought—suddenly inspires in me a memory. It’s something hazy I have to reach for. I wrap my hands around it and pull. A voice? A female voice, I remember now. Telling me—
I gasp.
It was Nazeera. Last night. In the medical wing. It was her. I remember her voice now—I remember reaching out and touching her hand, I remember the feel of the metal knuckles she’s always wearing and she said—
“. . . the people you trust are lying to you—and the other supreme commanders only want to kill you . . .”
I spin around too fast, searching for something I cannot name.
Nazeera was trying to warn me. Last night—she’s barely known me and she was trying to tell me the truth long before any of the others ever did—
But why?
Just then, something hard and loud lands heavily on the half-bent steel structure blocking the road. The old freeway signs shudder and sway.
I’m looking straight at it as it happens. I’m watching this in real time, frame by frame, and yet, I’m still so shocked by what I see that I forget to speak.
It’s Nazeera, fifty feet in the air, sitting calmly atop a sign that says—
10 EAST LOS ANGELES
—and she’s waving at me. She’s wearing a loose, brown leather hood attached to a holster that fits snugly around her shoulders. The leather hood covers her hair and shades her eyes so that only the bottom half of her face is visible from where I stand. The diamond piercing under her bottom lip catches fire in the sunlight.
She looks like a vision from an unknowable time.
I still have no idea what to say.
Naturally, she does not share my problem.
“You ready to talk yet?” she says to me.
“How—how did you—”
“Yeah?”
“How did you get here?” I spin around, scanning the distance. How did she know I was here? Was I being followed?
“I flew.”
I turn back to face her. “Where’s your plane?”
She laughs and jumps off the freeway sign. It’s a long, hard fall that would’ve injured any normal person. “I really hope you’re joking,” she says to me, and then grabs me around the waist and leaps up, into the sky.
WARNER
I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my life, but I never thought I’d have the pleasure of seeing Kishimoto shut his mouth for longer than five minutes. And yet, here we are. In any other situation, I might be relishing this moment. Sadly, I’m unable to enjoy even this small pleasure.
His silence is unnerving.
It’s been fifteen minutes since I finished sharing with him the same details I shared with Juliette earlier today, and he hasn’t said a word. He’s sitting quietly in the corner, his head pressed against the wall, face in a frown, and he will not speak. He only stares, his eyes narrowed at some invisible point across the room.
Occasionally he sighs.
We’ve been here for almost two hours, just he and I. Talking. And of all the things I thought would happen today, I certainly did not think it would involve Juliette running away from me, and my befriending this idiot.
Oh, the best-laid plans.
Finally, after what feels like a tremendous amount of time, he speaks.
“I can’t believe Castle didn’t tell me,” is the first thing he says.
“We all have our secrets.”
He looks up, looks me in the eye. It’s not pleasant. “You have any more secrets I should know about?”
“None you should know about, no.”
He laughs, but it sounds sad. “You don’t even realize what you’re doing, do you?”
“Realize what?”
“You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of pain, bro. You can’t keep living like this. This,” he says, pointing at my face, “this old you? This messed-up dude who never talks and never smiles and never says anything nice and never allows
anyone to really know him—you can’t be this guy if you want to be in any kind of relationship.”
I raise an eyebrow.
He shakes his head. “You just can’t, man. You can’t be with someone and keep that many secrets from them.”
“It’s never stopped me before.”
Here, Kenji hesitates. His eyes widen, just a little. “What do you mean, before?”
“Before,” I say. “In other relationships.”
“So, uh, you’ve been in other relationships? Before Juliette?”
I tilt my head at him. “You find that hard to believe.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that you have feelings, so yeah, I find that hard to believe.”
I clear my throat very quietly. Look away.
“So—umm—you, uh”—he laughs, nervously—“I’m sorry but, like, does Juliette know you’ve been in other relationships? Because she’s never mentioned anything about that, and I think that would’ve been, like, I don’t know? Relevant?”
I turn to face him. “No.”
“No, what?”
“No, she doesn’t know.”
“Why not?”
“She’s never asked.”
Kenji gapes at me. “I’m sorry—but are you—I mean, are you actually as stupid as you sound? Or are you just messing with me right now?”
“I’m nearly twenty years old,” I say to him, irritated. “Do you really think it so strange that I’ve been with other women?”
“No,” he says, “I, personally, don’t give a shit how many women you’ve been with. What I think is strange is that you never told your girlfriend that you’ve been with other women. And to be perfectly honest it’s making me wonder whether your relationship wasn’t already headed to hell.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” My eyes flash. “I love her. I never would’ve done anything to hurt her.”
“They why would you lie to her?”
“Why do you keep pressing this? Who cares if I’ve been with other women? They meant nothing to me—”
“You’re messed up in the head, man.”