Defy Me

by Tahereh Mafi

  But when I walk inside I’m stunned to discover a blinding, gleaming interior. I look around, taking in the marble floors, the rich carpets and furnishings. The ceilings are high, the architecture modern but elegant. It’s all glass and marble and stainless steel.

  I’ve never been anywhere so beautiful.

  And I haven’t even had a moment to take it all in before I’m greeted by a thin, older man with even thinner brown hair.

  The soldiers flanking me step back as he steps forward.

  “Ms. Ferrars?” he says.

  “Yes?”

  “You are to come with me.”

  I hesitate. “Who are you?”

  He studies me a moment and then seems to make a decision. “You may call me Delalieu.”

  “Okay,” I say, the word disappearing into a whisper.

  I follow Delalieu into a glass elevator and watch him use a key card to authorize the lift. Once we’re in motion, I find the courage to speak.

  “Where am I?” I ask. “What’s happening?”

  His answer comes automatically. “You are in Sector 45 headquarters. You’re here to have a meeting with the chief commander and regent of Sector 45.” He doesn’t look at me when he speaks, but there’s nothing in his tone that feels threatening. So I ask another question.

  “Why?”

  The elevator doors ping as they open. Delalieu finally turns to look at me. “You’ll find out in just a moment.”

  I follow Delalieu down a hall and wait, quietly, outside a door while he knocks. He peeks his head inside when the door opens, announces his presence, and then motions for me to follow him in.

  When I do, I’m surprised.

  There’s a beautiful man in military uniform—I’m assuming he’s the commander—standing in front of a large, wooden desk, his arms crossed against his chest. He’s staring me straight in the eye, and I’m suddenly so overwhelmed I feel myself blush.

  I’ve never seen anyone so handsome before.

  I look down, embarrassed, and study the laces of my tennis shoes. I’m grateful for my long hair. It serves as a dark, heavy curtain, shielding my face from view.

  “Look at me.”

  The command is sharp and clear. I look up, nervously, to meet his eyes. He has thick, dark brown hair. Eyes like a storm. He looks at me for so long I feel goose bumps rise along my skin. He won’t look away, and I feel more terrified by the moment. This man’s eyes are full of anger. Darkness. There’s something genuinely frightening about him, and my heart begins to hammer.

  “You’re growing up quickly,” he says.

  I stare at him, confused, but he’s still studying my face.

  “Fourteen years old,” he says quietly. “Such a complicated age for a young girl.” Finally, he sighs. Looks away. “It always breaks my heart to break beautiful things.”

  “I don’t— I don’t understand,” I say, feeling suddenly ill.

  He looks up again. “You’re aware of what you did today?”

  I freeze. Words pile up in my throat, die in my mouth.

  “Yes or no?” he demands.

  “Y-yes,” I say quickly. “Yes.”

  “And do you know why you did it? Do you know how you did it?”

  I shake my head, my eyes filling fast with tears. “It was an accident,” I whisper. “I didn’t know— I didn’t know that this—”

  “Does anyone else know about your sickness?”

  “No.” I stare at him, my eyes wide even as tears blur my vision. “I mean, n-not, not really—just my parents—but no one really understands what’s wrong with me. I don’t even understand—”

  “You mean you didn’t plan this? It wasn’t your intention to murder the little boy?”

  “No!” I cry out, and then clap both hands over my mouth. “No,” I say, quietly now. “I was trying to help him. He’d fallen to the floor and I— I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”

  “Liar.”

  I’m still shaking my head, wiping away tears with shaking hands. “It was an accident. I swear, I didn’t mean to—I d-didn’t—”

  “Sir.” It’s Delalieu. His voice.

  I didn’t realize he was still in the room.

  I sniff, hard, wiping quickly at my face, but my hands are still shaking. I try, again, to swallow back the tears. To pull myself together.

  “Sir,” Delalieu says more firmly, “perhaps we should conduct this interview elsewhere.”

  “I don’t see why that’s necessary.”

  “I don’t mean to seem impertinent, sir, but I really feel that you might be better served conducting this interview privately.”

  I dare to turn, to look up at him. And that’s when I notice the third person in the room.

  A boy.

  My breath catches in my throat with an almost audible gasp. A single tear escapes down my cheek and I brush it away, even as I stare at him. I can’t help it—I can’t look away. He has the kind of face I’ve never seen in real life. He’s more handsome than the commander. More beautiful. Still, there’s something unnerving about him, something cold and alien about his face that makes him difficult to look at. He’s almost too perfect. He has a sharp jawline and sharp cheekbones and a sharp, straight nose. Everything about him reminds me of a blade. His face is pale. His eyes are a stunning, clear green, and he has rich, golden hair. And he’s staring at me, his eyes wide with an emotion I can’t decipher.

  A throat clears.

  The spell is broken.

  Heat floods my face and I avert my eyes, mortified I didn’t look away sooner.

  I hear the commander mutter angrily under his breath. “Unbelievable,” he says. “Always the same.”

  I look up.

  “Aaron,” he says sharply. “Get out.”

  The boy—his name must be Aaron—startles. He stares at the commander for a second, and then glances at the door. But he doesn’t move.

  “Delalieu, please escort my son from the room, as he seems presently unable to remember how to move his legs.”

  His son.

  Wow. That explains the face.

  “Yes, sir, of course, sir.”

  Aaron’s expression is impossible to read. I catch him looking at me, just once more, and when he finds me staring, he frowns. It’s not an unkind look.

  Still, I turn away.

  He and Delalieu move past me as they exit, and I pretend not to notice when I hear him whisper—

  “Who is she?”

  —as they walk away.

  “Ella? Are you all right?”

  I blink, slowly clearing the webbing of blackness obscuring my vision. Stars explode and fade behind my eyes and I try to stand, the carpet pressing popcorn impressions into my palms, metal digging into my flesh. I’m wearing manacles, glowing cuffs that emit a soft, blue light that leaches the life from my skin, makes my own hands seem sinister.

  The woman at my door is staring at me. She smiles.

  “Your father and I thought you might be hungry,” she says. “We made you dinner.”

  I can’t move. My feet seem bolted in place, the pinks and purples of the walls and floors assaulting me from every corner. I’m standing in the middle of the bizarre museum of what was likely my childhood bedroom—staring at what might be my biological mother—and I feel like I might throw up. The lights are suddenly too bright, the voices too loud. Someone walks toward me and the movement feels exaggerated, the footsteps thudding hard and fast in my ears. My vision goes in and out and the walls seem to shake. The floor shifts, tilts backward.

  I fall, hard, onto the floor.

  For a minute, I hear nothing but my heartbeat. Loud, so loud, pressing in on me, assaulting me with a cacophony of sound so disturbing I double over, press my face into the carpet and scream.

  I’m hysterical, my bones shaking in my skin, and the woman picks me up, reels me in, and I tear away, still screaming—

  “Where is everyone?” I scream. “What’s happening to me?” I scream. “Where am I? Wher
e’s Warner and Kenji and oh my God—oh my God—all those people—all those people I k-killed—”

  Vomit inches up my throat, choking me, and I try and fail to suppress the images, the horrible, terrifying images of bodies cleaved open, blood snaking down ridges of poorly torn flesh and something pierces my mind, something sharp and blinding and suddenly I’m on my knees, heaving the meager contents of my stomach into a pink basket.

  I can hardly breathe.

  My lungs are overworked, my stomach still threatening to betray me, and I’m gasping, my hands shaking hard as I try to stand. I spin around, the room moving more quickly than I do, and I see only flashes of pink, flashes of purple.

  I sway.

  Someone catches me again, this time new arms, and the man who calls me his daughter holds me like I’m his child and he says, “Honey, you don’t have to think about them anymore. You’re safe now.”

  “Safe?” I rear back, eyes wild. “Who are you—?”

  The woman takes my hand. Squeezes my fingers even as I wrench free from her grip. “I’m your mother,” she says. “And I’ve decided it’s time for you to come home.”

  “What”—I grab two fistfuls of her shirt—“have you done with my friends?” I scream. And then I shake her, shake her so hard she actually looks scared for a second, and then I try to pick her up and throw her into the wall but remember, with a start, that my powers have been cut off, that I have to rely on mere anger and adrenaline and I turn around, suddenly furious, feeling more certain by the second that I’ve begun to hallucinate, hallucinate, when

  unexpectedly

  she slaps me in the face.

  Hard.

  I blink, stunned, but manage to stay upright.

  “Ella Sommers,” she says sharply, “you will pull yourself together.” Her eyes flash as she appraises me. “What is this ridiculous, dramatic behavior? Worried about your friends? Those people are not your friends.”

  My cheek burns and half my mouth feels numb but I say, “Yes, yes they’re my fr—”

  She slaps me again.

  My eyes close. Reopen. I feel suddenly dizzy.

  “We are your parents,” she says in a harsh whisper. “Your father and I have brought you home. You should be grateful.”

  I taste blood. I reach up, touch my lip. My fingers come away red. “Where’s Emmaline?” Blood is pooling in my mouth and I spit it out, onto the floor. “Have you kidnapped her, too? Does she know what you’ve done? That you donated us to The Reestablishment? Sold our bodies to the world?”

  A third, swift slap.

  I feel it ring in my skull.

  “How dare you.” My mother’s face flushes crimson. “How dare you— You have no idea what we’ve built, all these years— The sacrifices we made for our future—”

  “Now, Evie,” my dad says, and places a calming hand on her shoulder. “Everything is going to be okay. Ella just needs a little time to settle in, that’s all.” He glances at me. “Isn’t that right, Ella?”

  It hits me then, in that moment. Everything. It hits me, all at once, with a frightening, destabilizing force—

  I’ve been kidnapped by a pair of crazy people and I might never see my friends again. In fact, my friends might be dead. My parents might’ve killed them. All of them.

  The realization is like suffocation.

  Tears fill my throat, my mouth, my eyes—

  “Where,” I say, my chest heaving, “is Warner? What did you do to him?”

  Evie’s expression goes suddenly murderous. “You and that damn boy. If I have to hear his name one more time—”

  “Where’s Warner?” I’m screaming again. “Where is he? Where’s Kenji? What did you do with them?”

  Evie looks suddenly exhausted. She pinches the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger.

  “Darling,” she says, but she isn’t looking at me, she’s looking at my father. “Will you handle this, please? I have a terrible headache and several urgent phone calls to return.”

  “Of course, my love.” And he pulls a syringe from his pocket and stabs it, swiftly, into my neck.

  Kenji

  The common room is really growing on me.

  I used to walk by, all the time, and wonder why Warner ever thought we’d need a common room this big. There’s tons of seating and a lot of room to spread out, but I always thought it was a waste of space. I secretly wished Warner had used the square footage for our bedrooms.

  Now I get it.

  When Nazeera and I walk in, ten minutes late to the impromptu pizza party, everyone is here. Brendan is here. He’s sitting in a corner being fussed over by Castle and Alia, and I nearly tackle him. I don’t, of course, because it’s obvious he’s still in recovery, but I’m relieved to find that he looks okay. Mostly he looks wrung-out, but he’s not wearing a sling or anything, so I’m guessing the girls didn’t run into any problems when they were patching him up. That’s a great sign.

  I spot Winston walking across the room and I catch up to him, clap him on the back. “Hey,” I say, when he turns around. “You okay?”

  He’s balancing a couple of paper plates, both of which are already sagging under the weight of too much pizza, and he smiles with his whole face when he says, “I hate today. Today is a garbage fire. I hate everything about today except for the fact that Brendan is okay and we have pizza. Other than that, today can go straight to hell.”

  “Yeah. I feel that so much.” And then, after a pause, I say quietly: “So I’m guessing you never had that conversation with Brendan, huh?”

  Winston goes suddenly pink. “I said I was waiting for the right time. Does this seem like the right time to you?”

  “Good point.” I sigh. “I guess I was just hoping you had some good news. We could all use some good news right now.”

  Winston shoots me a sympathetic look. “No word on Juliette?”

  I shake my head. Feel suddenly sick. “Has anyone told you her real name is Ella?”

  “I heard,” Winston says, raising his eyebrows. “That whole story is batshit.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Today is the worst.”

  “Fuck today,” Winston says.

  “Don’t forget about tomorrow,” I say. “Tomorrow’s going to suck, too.”

  “What? Why?” The paper plates in Winston’s hands are going translucent from pizza grease. “What’s happening tomorrow?”

  “Last I heard we were jumping ship,” I say. “Running for our lives. I’m assuming it’s going to suck.”

  “Shit.” Winston nearly drops his plates. “Seriously? Brendan needs more time to rest.” Then, after a beat: “Where are we going to go?”

  “The other side of the continent, apparently,” Ian says as he walks over.

  He hands me a plate of pizza. I murmur a quick thanks and stare at the pizza, wondering whether I’d be able to shove the whole thing in my mouth at once. Probably not.

  “Do you know something we don’t?” Winston says to Ian, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. Winston tries, unsuccessfully, to shove them back up with his forearm, and Ian steps up to do it for him.

  “I know a lot of things you don’t know,” Ian says. “The first of which is that Kenji was definitely hooking up with Nazeera, like, five seconds ago.”

  My mouth nearly falls open before I remember there’s food in it. I swallow, too quickly, and choke. I’m still coughing as I look around, panicking that Nazeera might be within earshot. Only when I spot her across the room speaking with Sonya and Sara do I finally relax.

  I glare at Ian. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Winston, at least, has the decency to whisper-yell when he says, “You were hooking up with Nazeera? We were only gone a few hours!”

  “I did not hook up with Nazeera,” I lie.

  Ian takes a bite of pizza. “Whatever, bro. No judgment. The world’s on fire. Have some fun.”

  “We didn’t”—I sigh, look away—“it wasn’t like that. It’s not
even anything. We were just, like—” I make some random gesture with my hand that means exactly nothing.

  Ian raises his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” Winston says, shooting me a look. “We’ll talk about the Nazeera thing later.” He turns to Ian. “What’s happening tomorrow?”

  “We bail,” Ian says. “Be ready to go at dawn.”

  “Right, I heard that part,” Winston says, “but where are we going?”

  Ian shrugs. “Castle has the news,” he says. “That’s all I heard. He was waiting for Kenji and Nazeera to put their clothes back on before he told everyone the details.”

  I tilt my head at Ian, threatening him with a single look. “Nothing is going on with me and Nazeera,” I say. “Drop it.”

  “All right,” he says, picking at his pizza. “Makes sense. I mean she’s not even that pretty.”

  My plate falls out of my hand. Pizza hits the floor. I feel a sudden, unwelcome need to punch Ian in the face. “Are you— Are you out of your mind? Not even— She’s, like, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life, and you’re out here saying she’s not even that pretty? Have y—”

  “See what I’m saying?” Ian cuts me off. He’s looking at Winston.

  “Wow,” Winston says, staring solemnly at the pizza on the ground. “Yeah, Kenji is definitely full of shit.”

  I drag a hand across my face. “I hate you guys.”

  “Anyway,” Ian says, “I heard Castle’s news has something to do with Nouria.”

  My head snaps back up.

  Nouria.

  I nearly forgot. This morning, just before the symposium, the twins told me they’d uncovered something—something to do with the poison in the bullets Juliette had been shot with—that led them back to Nouria.

  But so much happened today that I never had the chance to follow up. Find out what happened.

  “Did you hear about that?” Ian asks me, raising an eyebrow. “She sent a message, apparently. That’s what the girls are saying.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and frown. “I heard.”

  I honestly have no idea how this might shake out.