Defy Me

by Tahereh Mafi

  The feeling is explosive.

  It takes root inside of me. Hope catches fire in my blood, a feeling more powerful than these drugs, more powerful than myself. I cling to it with my whole heart, and, suddenly, I’m able to feel my hands. I don’t know why or how but I feel a quiet strength surge up my spine.

  Evie doesn’t notice.

  “I regret our mistakes,” she’s saying. “I regret the oversights that seem so obvious now. We couldn’t have known so many years ago that things would turn out like this. We didn’t expect to be blindsided by something so flimsy as your emotions. We couldn’t have known, at the onset, that things would escalate in this way.

  “Paris,” she says, “had convinced everyone that bringing you on base in Sector 45 would be beneficial to us all, that he’d be able to monitor you in a new environment rife with experiences that would motivate your powers to evolve. Your father and I thought it was a stupid plan, stupider still for placing you under the direct supervision of a nineteen-year-old boy with whom your history was . . . complicated.” She looks away. Shakes her head. “But Anderson delivered results. With Aaron you made progress at a rate we’d only dreamed of, and we were forced to let it be. Still,” she says. “It backfired.”

  Her eyes linger, for a moment, on my shaved head.

  “There are few people, even in our inner circle, who really understand what we’re doing here. Your father understands. Ibrahim understands. But Paris, for security reasons, was never told everything about you. He wasn’t yet a supreme commander when we gave him the job, and we decided to keep him informed on a need-to-know basis. Another mistake,” Evie says, her voice both sad and terrifying.

  She presses the back of her hand to her forehead.

  “Six months and everything falls apart. You run away. You join some ridiculous gang. You drag Aaron into all of this and Paris, the oblivious fool, tries to kill you. Twice. I nearly slit his throat for his idiocy, but my mercy may as well have been for nothing, what with your attempt to murder him. Oh, Ella,” she says, and sighs. “You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble this year. The paperwork alone.” She closes her eyes. “I’ve had the same splitting headache for six months.”

  She opens her eyes. Looks at me for a long time.

  “And now,” she says, gesturing at me with the tablet in her hand, “there’s this. Emmaline needs to be replaced, and we’re not even sure you’re a suitable substitute. Your body is operating at maybe sixty-five percent efficiency, and your mind is a complete disaster.” She stops. A vein jumps in her forehead. “Perhaps it’s impossible for you to understand how I’m feeling right now. Perhaps you don’t care to know the depth of my disappointments. But you and Emmaline are my life’s work. I was the one who found a way to isolate the gene that was causing widespread transformations in the population. I was the one who managed to re-create the transformation. I was the one who rewrote your genetic code.” She frowns at me, looking, for the first time, like a real person. Her voice softens. “I remade you, Ella. You and your sister were the greatest accomplishments of my career. Your failures,” she whispers, touching the tips of her fingers to my face, “are my failures.”

  I make a harsh, involuntary sound.

  She stands up. “This is going to be uncomfortable for you. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I’m afraid we have no choice. If this is going to work, I’ll need you to have a healthy, unpolluted headspace. We have to start fresh. When we’re done, you won’t remember anything but what I tell you to remember. Do you understand?”

  My heart picks up and I hear its wild, erratic beats amplified on a nearby monitor. The sounds echo around the room like a siren.

  “Your temperature is spiking,” Evie says sharply. “There’s no need to panic. This is the merciful option. Paris is still clamoring to have you killed, after all. But Paris”—she hesitates—“Paris can be melodramatic. We’ve all known how much he’s hated you for your effect on Aaron. He blames you, you know.” Evie tilts her head at me. “He thinks you’re part of the reason Aaron is so weak. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if he’s right.”

  My heart is beating too fast now. My lungs feel fit to burst. The bright lights above my head bleed into my eyes, into my brain—

  “Now. I’m going to download this information”—I hear her tap the silver box—“directly into your mind. It’s a lot of data to process, and your body will need some time to accept it all.” A long pause. “Your mind might try to reject this, but it’s up to you to let things take their course, do you understand? We don’t want to risk splicing the past and present. It’s only painful in the first few hours, but if you can survive those first hours, your pain receptors will begin to fail, and the rest of the data should upload without incident.”

  I want to scream.

  Instead, I make a weak, choking sound. Tears spill fast down my cheeks and my mother stands there, her fingers small and foreign on my face, and I see, but cannot feel, the enormous needle going into the soft flesh at my temple. She empties and refills the syringe what feels like a thousand times, and each time it’s like being submerged underwater, like I’m slowly drowning, suffocating over and over again and never allowed to die. I lie there, helpless and mute, caught in an agony so excruciating I no longer breathe, but rasp, as she leans over me to watch.

  “You’re right,” she says softly. “Maybe this is cruel. Maybe it would’ve been kinder to simply let you die. But this isn’t about you, Ella. This is about me. And right now,” she says, stroking my hair, “this is what I need.”

  Kenji

  The whole thing happens so quickly it takes me a second to register exactly what went down.

  Delalieu is dead.

  Delalieu is dead and Anderson is alive.

  Anderson is back from the dead.

  I mean, right now he’s flat on the ground, buried under the weight of every single piece of furniture in this room. Castle stares, intently, from across the space, and when I hear Anderson wheezing, I realize Castle isn’t trying to kill him; he’s only using the furniture to contain him.

  I inch closer to the crowd forming around Anderson’s gasping figure. And then I notice, with a start, that Adam is pressed up against the wall like a statue, his face frozen in horror.

  My heart breaks for him.

  I’m so glad Adam dragged James off to bed hours ago. So glad that kid doesn’t have to see any of this right now.

  Castle finally makes his way across the room. He’s standing a few feet away from Anderson’s prone figure when he asks the question we’re all thinking:

  “How are you still alive?”

  Anderson attempts a smile. It comes out crooked. Crazy. “You know what’s always been so great about you, Castle?” He says Castle’s name like it’s funny, like he’s saying it out loud for the first time. He takes a tight, uneven breath. “You’re so predictable. You like to collect strays. You love a good sob story.”

  Anderson cries out with a sudden, rough exhalation, and I realize Castle probably turned up the pressure. When Anderson catches his breath, he says, “You’re an idiot. You’re an idiot for trusting so easily.”

  Another harsh, painful gasp.

  “Who do you think called me here?” he says, struggling to speak now. “Who do you think has been keeping me apprised”—another strained breath—“of every single thing you’ve been discussing?”

  I freeze.

  A horrible, sick feeling gathers in my chest.

  We all turn, as a group, to face Nazeera. She’s standing apart from everyone else, the personification of calm, collected intensity. She has no expression on her face. She looks at me like I might be a wall.

  For a split second I feel so dizzy I think I might actually pass out.

  Wishful thinking.

  That’s it—that’s the thing that does it. A room full of extremely powerful people and yet, it’s this moment, this brief, barely there moment of shock that ruins us all. I feel the needle in my neck before I even register what
’s happening, and I have only a few seconds to scan the room—glimpsing the horror on my friends’ faces—before I fall.

  Warner

  I’m sitting in my office listening to an old record when I get the call. I worry, at first, that it might be Lena, begging me to come back to her, but my feeling of revulsion quickly transforms to hate when I hear the voice on the line. My father. He wants me downstairs.

  The mere sound of his voice fills me with a feeling so violent it takes me a minute to control myself.

  Two years away.

  Two years becoming the monster my father always wanted me to be. I glance in the mirror, loathing myself with a new, profound intensity I’d never before experienced. Every morning I wake up hoping only to die. To be done with this life, with these days.

  He knew, when he made that deal, what he was asking me to do. I didn’t. I was sixteen, still young enough to believe in hope, and he took advantage of my naiveté. He knew what it would do to me. He knew it would break me. And it was all he’d ever wanted.

  My soul.

  I sold my soul for a few years with my mother, and now, after everything, I don’t even know if it’ll be worth it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to save her. I’ve been away too long. I’ve missed too much. My mother is doing so much worse now, and no doctor has been able to help her. Nothing has helped. My efforts have been worse than futile.

  I gave up everything—for nothing.

  I wish I’d known how those two years would change me. I wish I’d known how hard it would be to live with myself, to look in the mirror. No one warned me about the nightmares, the panic attacks, or the dark, destructive thoughts that would follow. No one explained to me how darkness works, how it feasts on itself or how it festers. I hardly recognize myself these days. Becoming an instrument of torture destroyed what was left of my mind.

  And now, this: I feel empty, all the time. Hollowed out.

  Beyond redemption.

  I didn’t want to come back here. I wanted to walk directly into the ocean. I wanted to fade into the horizon. I wanted to disappear.

  Of course, he’d never let that happen.

  He dragged me back here and gave me a title. I was rewarded for being an animal. Celebrated for my efforts as a monster. Never mind the fact that I wake up in the middle of every night strangled by irrational fears and a sudden, violent urge to upend the contents of my stomach.

  Never mind that I can’t get these images out of my head.

  I glance at the expensive bottle of bourbon my father left for me in my room and feel suddenly disgusted. I don’t want to be like him. I don’t want his opiate, his preferred form of oblivion.

  At least, soon, my father will be gone. Any day now, he’ll be gone, and this sector will become my domain. I’ll finally be on my own.

  Or something close to it.

  Reluctantly, I pull on my blazer and take the elevator down.

  When I finally arrive in his quarters as he requested, he spares me only the briefest look.

  “Good,” he says. “You’ve come.”

  I say nothing.

  He smiles. “Where are your manners? You’re not going to greet our guest?”

  Confused, I follow his line of sight. There’s a young woman sitting on a chair in the far corner of the room, and, at first, I don’t recognize her.

  When I do, the blood drains from my face.

  My father laughs. “You kids remember each other, right?”

  She was sitting so quietly, so still and small that I almost hadn’t noticed her at all. My dead heart jumps at the sight of her slight frame, a spark of life trying, desperately, to ignite.

  “Juliette,” I whisper.

  My last memory of her was from two years ago, just before I left home for my father’s sick, sadistic assignment. He ripped her away from me. Literally ripped her out of my arms. I’d never seen that kind of rage in his eyes, not like that, not over something so innocent.

  But he was wild.

  Out of his mind.

  She and I hadn’t done anything more than talk to each other. I’d started stealing down to her room whenever I could get away, and I’d trick the cameras’ feeds to give us privacy. We’d talk, sometimes for hours. She’d become my friend.

  I never touched her.

  She said that after what happened with the little boy, she was afraid to touch anyone. She said she didn’t understand what was happening to her and didn’t trust herself anymore. I asked her if she wanted to touch me, to test it out and see if anything would happen, and she looked scared and I told her not to worry. I promised it’d be okay. And when I took her hand, tentatively, waiting for disaster—

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing happened except that she burst into tears. She threw herself into my arms and wept and told me she’d been terrified that there was something wrong with her, that she’d turned into a monster—

  We only had a month, altogether.

  But there was something about her that felt right to me, from the very beginning. I trusted her. She felt familiar, like I’d always known her. But I also knew it seemed a dramatic sort of thought, so I kept it to myself.

  She told me about her life. Her horrible parents. She’d shared her fears with me, so I shared mine. I told her about my mom, how I didn’t know what was happening to her, how worried I was that she was going to die.

  Juliette cared about me. Listened to me the way no one else did.

  It was the most innocent relationship I’d ever had, but it meant more to me than anything. For the first time in years, I felt less alone.

  The day I found out she was finally being transferred, I pulled her close. I pressed my face into her hair and breathed her in and she cried. She told me she was scared and I promised I’d try to do something—I promised to talk to my dad even though I knew he wouldn’t care—

  And then, suddenly, he was there.

  He ripped her out of my arms, and I noticed then that he was wearing gloves. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried. “Have you lost your mind? Have you lost yourself entirely?”

  “Dad,” I said, panicking. “Nothing happened. I was just saying good-bye to her.”

  His eyes widened, round with shock. And when he spoke, his words were whispers. “You were just— You were saying good-bye to her?”

  “She’s leaving,” I said stupidly.

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  I swallowed, hard.

  “Jesus,” he said, running a hand across his mouth. “How long have you been doing this? How long have you been coming down here?”

  My heart was racing. Fear pulsed through me. I was shaking my head, unable to speak.

  “What did you do?” my dad demanded, his eyes flashing. “Did you touch her?”

  “No.” Anger surged through me, giving me back my voice even as my face flushed with embarrassment. “No, of course not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dad, why are you”—I shook my head, confused—“I don’t understand why you’re so upset. You’ve been pushing me and Lena together for months, even though I’ve told you a hundred times that I don’t like her, but now, when I actually—” I hesitated, looking at Juliette, her face half hidden behind my dad. “I was just getting to know her. That’s all.”

  “You were just getting to know her?” He stared at me, disgusted. “Of all the girls in the world, you fall for this one? The child-murderer bound for prison? The likely insane test tube experiment? What is wrong with you?”

  “Dad, please— Nothing happened. We’re just friends. We just talk sometimes.”

  “Just friends,” he said, and laughed. The sound was demented. “You know what? I’ll let you take this with you. I’ll let you keep this one while you’re gone. Let it sit with you. Let it teach you a lesson.”

  “What? Take what with me?”

  “A warning.” He leveled me with a lethal look. “Try something like this again,” he said, “and I’ll kill her. And I’
ll make sure you get to watch.”

  I stared at him, my heart beating out of my chest. This was insane. We hadn’t even done anything. I’d known that my dad would probably be angry, but I never thought he’d threaten to kill her. If I’d known, I never would’ve risked it. And now—

  My head was spinning. I didn’t understand. He was dragging her down the hall and I didn’t understand.

  Suddenly, she screamed.

  She screamed and I stood there, helpless as he dragged her away. She called my name—cried out for me—and he shook her, told her to shut up, and I felt something inside of me die. I felt it as it happened. Felt something break apart inside of me as I watched her go.

  I’d never hated myself so much. I’d never been more of a coward.

  And now, here we are.

  That day feels like a lifetime ago. I never thought I’d see her again.

  Juliette looks up at me now, and she looks different. Her eyes are glassy with tears. Her skin has lost its pallor; her hair has lost its sheen. She looks thinner. She reminds me of myself.

  Hollow.

  “Hi,” I whisper.

  Tears spill, silently, down her cheeks.

  I have to force myself to remain calm. I have to force myself not to lose my head. My mother warned me, years ago, to hide my heart from my father, and every time I slipped—every time I let myself hope he might not be a monster—he punished me, mercilessly.

  I wasn’t going to let him do that to me again. I didn’t want him to know how much it hurt to see her like this. How painful it was to sit beside her and say nothing. Do nothing.

  “What is she doing here?” I ask, hardly recognizing my own voice.

  “She’s here,” he says, “because I had her collected for us.”

  “Collected for what? You said—”

  “I know what I said.” He shrugs. “But I wanted to see this moment. Your reunion. I’m always interested in your reunions. I find the dynamics of your relationship fascinating.”

  I look at him, feel my chest explode with rage and somehow, fight it back. “You brought her back here just to torture me?”