by Tahereh Mafi
“What do you mean?”
“Simply that you must not live in denial. Juliette Ferrars is not who you think she is, and she is not to be trifled with. She seems, at times, entirely defenseless. Naive. Even innocent. But you cannot allow yourself to forget the fist of anger that still lives in her heart.”
My lips part, surprised.
“You’ve read about it, haven’t you? In her journal,” he says. “You’ve read where her mind has gone—how dark it’s been—”
“How did you—”
“And I,” he says, “I have seen it. I’ve seen her lose control of that quietly contained rage with my own eyes. She nearly destroyed all of us at Omega Point long before your father did. She broke the ground in a fit of madness inspired by a simple misunderstanding,” he says. “Because she was upset about the tests we were running on Mr. Kent. Because she was confused and a little scared. She wouldn’t listen to reason—and she nearly killed us all.”
“That was different,” I say, shaking my head. “That was a long time ago. She’s different now.” I look away, failing to control my frustration at his thinly veiled accusations. “She’s happy—”
“How can she be truly happy when she’s never dealt with her past? She’s never addressed it—merely set it aside. She’s never had the time, or the tools, to examine it. And that anger—that kind of rage,” Castle says, shaking his head, “does not simply disappear. She is volatile and unpredictable. And heed my words, son: Her anger will make an appearance again.”
“No.”
He looks at me. Picks me apart with his eyes. “You don’t really believe that.”
I do not respond.
“Mr. Warner—”
“Not like that,” I say. “If it comes back, it won’t be like that. Anger, maybe—yes—but not rage. Not uncontrolled, uninhibited rage—”
Castle smiles. It’s so sudden, so unexpected, I stop midsentence.
“Mr. Warner,” he says. “What do you think is going to happen when the truth of her past is finally revealed to her? Do you think she will accept it quietly? Calmly? If my sources are correct—and they usually are—the whispers underground affirm that her time here is up. The experiment has come to an end. Juliette murdered a supreme commander. The system won’t let her go on like this, her powers unleashed, unchecked. And I have heard that the plan is to obliterate Sector 45.” He hesitates. “As for Juliette herself,” he says, “it is likely they will either kill her, or place her in another facility.”
My mind spins, explodes. “How do you know this?”
Castle laughs briefly. “You can’t possibly believe that Omega Point was the only resistance group in North America, Mr. Warner. I’m very well connected underground. And my point still stands.” A pause. “Juliette will soon have access to the information necessary to piece together her past. And she will find out, one way or another, your part in all of it.”
I look away and back again, eyes wide, my voice fraying. “You don’t understand,” I whisper. “She would never forgive me.”
Castle shakes his head. “If she learns from someone else that you’ve always known she was adopted? If she hears from someone else that you tortured her sister?” He nods. “Yes, it’s true, she will likely never forgive you.”
For a sudden, terrible moment, I lose feeling in my knees. I’m forced to sit down, my bones shaking inside me.
“But I didn’t know,” I say, hating how it sounds, hating that I feel like a child. “I didn’t know who that girl was, I didn’t know Juliette had a sister— I didn’t know—”
“It doesn’t matter. Without you, without context, without an explanation or an apology, all of this will be much harder to forgive. But if you tell her yourself and tell her now? Your relationship might still stand a chance.” He shakes his head. “Either way, you must tell her, Mr. Warner. Because we have to warn her. She needs to know what’s coming, and we have to start planning. Your silence on the subject will end only in devastation.”
Juliette
I am a thief.
I stole this notebook and this pen from one of the doctors, from one of his lab coats when he wasn’t looking, and I shoved them both down my pants. This was just before he ordered those men to come and get me. The ones in the strange suits with the thick gloves and the gas masks with the foggy plastic windows hiding their eyes. They were aliens, I remember thinking. I remember thinking they must’ve been aliens because they couldn’t have been human, the ones who handcuffed my hands behind my back, the ones who strapped me to my seat. They stuck Tasers to my skin over and over for no reason other than to hear me scream but I wouldn’t. I whimpered but I never said a word. I felt the tears streak down my cheeks but I wasn’t crying.
I think it made them angry.
They slapped me awake even though my eyes were open when we arrived. Someone unstrapped me without removing my handcuffs and kicked me in both kneecaps before ordering me to rise. And I tried. I tried but I couldn’t and finally six hands shoved me out the door and my face was bleeding on the concrete for a while. I can’t really remember the part where they dragged me inside.
I feel cold all the time.
I feel empty, like there is nothing inside of me but this broken heart, the only organ left in this shell. I feel the bleats echo within me, I feel the thumping reverberate around my skeleton. I have a heart, says science, but I am a monster, says society. And I know it, of course I know it. I know what I’ve done. I’m not asking for sympathy. But sometimes I think—sometimes I wonder—if I were a monster—surely, I would feel it by now?
I would feel angry and vicious and vengeful. I’d know blind rage and bloodlust and a need for vindication.
Instead, I feel an abyss within me that’s so deep, so dark I can’t see within it; I can’t see what it holds. I do not know what I am or what might happen to me.
I do not know what I might do again.
—AN EXCERPT FROM JULIETTE’S JOURNALS IN THE ASYLUM
I’m dreaming about birds again.
I wish they would go away already. I’m tired of thinking about them, hoping for them. Birds, birds, birds—why won’t they go away? I shake my head as if to clear it, but feel my mistake at once. My mind is still dense and foggy, swimming in confusion. I blink open my eyes slowly, tentatively, but no matter how far I force them open, I can’t seem to take in any light. It takes me too long to understand that I’ve awoken in the middle of the night.
A sharp gasp.
That’s me, my voice, my breath, my quickly beating heart. Where is my head? Why is it so heavy? My eyes close fast, sand stuck in the lashes, sticking them together. I try to clear the haze—try to remember—but parts of me still feel numb, like my teeth and toes and the spaces between my ribs and I laugh, suddenly, and I don’t know why—
I was shot.
My eyes fly open, my skin breaking into a sudden, cold sweat.
Oh my God I was shot, I was shot I was shot
I try to sit up and can’t. I feel so heavy, so heavy with blood and bone and suddenly I’m freezing, my skin is cold rubber and clammy against the metal table I’m sticking to and all at once
I want to cry
all at once I’m back in the asylum, the cold and the metal and the pain and the delirium all confusing me and then I’m weeping, silently, hot tears warming my cheeks and I can’t speak but I’m scared and I hear them, I hear them
the others
screaming
Flesh and bone breaking in the night, hushed, muffled voices—suppressed shouts—cellmates I’d never see—
Who were they? I wonder.
I haven’t thought about them in so long. What happened to them. Where they came from. Who did I leave behind?
My eyes are sealed shut, my lips parted in quiet terror. I haven’t been haunted like this in so long so long so long
It’s the drugs, I think. There was poison in those bullets.
Is that why I can see the birds?
I smile.
Giggle. Count them. Not just the white ones, white with streaks of gold like crowns atop their heads, but blue ones and black ones and yellow birds, too. I see them when I close my eyes but I saw them today, too, on the beach and they looked so real, so real
Why?
Why would someone try to kill me?
Another sudden jolt to my senses and I’m more alert, more myself, panic clearing the poison for a single moment of clarity and I’m able to push myself up, onto my elbows, head spinning, eyes wild as they scan the darkness and I’m just about to lie back down, exhausted, when I see something—
“Are you awake?”
I inhale sharply, confused, trying to make sense of the sounds. The words are warped like I’m hearing them underwater and I swim toward them, trying, trying, my chin falling against my chest as I lose the battle.
“Did you see anything today?” the voice says to me. “Anything . . . strange?”
“Who—where, where are you—” I say, reaching blindly into the dark, eyes only half open now. I feel resistance and wrap my fingers around it. A hand? A strange hand. It’s a mix of metal and flesh, a fist with a sharp edge of steel.
I don’t like it.
I let go.
“Did you see anything today?” it says again.
I mumble.
“What did you see?” it says.
And I laugh, remembering. I could hear them—hear their caw caws as they flew far above the water, could hear their little feet walking along the sand. There were so many of them. Wings and feathers, sharp beaks and talons.
So much motion.
“What did you see—?” the voice demands again, and it makes me feel strange.
“I’m cold,” I say, and lie down again. “Why is it so cold?”
A brief silence. A rustle of movement. I feel a heavy blanket drape over the simple sheet already covering my body.
“You should know,” the voice says to me, “that I’m not here to hurt you.”
“I know,” I say, though I don’t understand why I’ve said it.
“But the people you trust are lying to you,” the voice is saying. “And the other supreme commanders only want to kill you.”
I smile wide, remembering the birds. “Hello,” I say.
Someone sighs.
“I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll talk another time,” the voice says. “When you’re feeling better.”
I’m so warm now, warm and tired and drowning again in strange dreams and distorted memories. I feel like I’m swimming in quicksand and the harder I pull away, the more quickly I am devoured and all I can think is
here
in the dark, dusty corners of my mind
I feel a strange relief.
I am always welcome here
in my loneliness, in my sadness
in this abyss, there is a rhythm I remember. The steady drop of tears, the temptation to retreat, the shadow of my past
the life I choose to forget has not
will never
ever
forget me
Warner
I’ve been awake all night.
Infinite boxes lie open before me, their innards splayed across the room. Papers are stacked on desks and tables, spread open on my floor. I’m surrounded by files. Many thousands of pages of paperwork. My father’s old reports, his work, the documents that ruled his life—
I have read them all.
Obsessively. Desperately.
And what I’ve found within these pages does nothing to soothe me, no—
I am distraught.
I sit here, cross-legged on the floor of my office, suffocated on all sides by the sight of a familiar typeset and my father’s too-legible scrawl. My right hand is caught behind my head, desperate for a length of hair to yank out of my skull and finding none. This is so much worse than I had feared, and I don’t know why I’m so surprised.
This is not the first time my father has kept secrets from me.
It was after Juliette escaped Sector 45, after she ran away with Kent and Kishimoto and my father came here to clean up the mess—that was when I learned, for the first time, that my father had knowledge of their world. Of others with abilities.
He’d kept it from me for so long.
I’d heard rumors, of course—from the soldiers, from the civilians—of various unusual sightings and stories, but I brushed them off as nonsense. A human need to find a magical portal to escape our pain.
But there it was—all true.
After my father’s revelation, my thirst for information became suddenly insatiable. I needed to know more—who these people were, where they’d come from, how much we’d known—
And I unearthed truths I wish every day I could unlearn.
There are asylums, just like Juliette’s, all over the world. Unnaturals, as The Reestablishment calls them, were rounded up in the name of science and discovery. But now, finally, I’m understanding how it all began. Here, in these stacks of papers, are all the horrible answers I sought.
Juliette and her sister were the very first Unnatural finds of The Reestablishment. The discovery of these girls’ unusual abilities led to the discoveries of other people like them, all over the world. The Reestablishment went on to collect as many Unnaturals as they could find; they told the civilians they were cleansing them of their old and their ill and imprisoning them in camps for closer medical examination.
But the truth was rather more complicated.
The Reestablishment quickly weeded out the useful Unnaturals from the nonuseful for their own benefit. The ones with the best abilities were absorbed by the system—divvied up around the world by the supreme commanders for their personal use in perpetuating the wrath of The Reestablishment—and the others were disposed of. This led to the eventual rise of The Reestablishment, and, with it, the many asylums that would house the other Unnaturals around the globe. For further studies, they’d said. For testing.
Juliette had not yet manifested abilities when she was donated to The Reestablishment by her parents. No. It was her sister who started it all.
Emmaline.
It was Emmaline whose preternatural gifts startled everyone around them; the sister, Emmaline, was the one who unwittingly drew attention to herself and her family. The unnamed parents were frightened by their daughter’s frequent and incredible displays of psychokinesis.
They were also fanatics.
There’s limited information in my father’s files about the mother and father who willingly gave up their children for experimentation. I’ve scoured every document and was able to glean only a little about their motives, ultimately piecing together from various notes and extraneous details a startling depiction of these characters. It seems these people had an unhealthy obsession with The Reestablishment. Juliette’s biological parents were devoted to the cause long before it had even gained momentum as an international movement, and they thought that studying their daughter might help shed light on the current world and its many ailments. If this was happening to Emmaline, they theorized, maybe it was happening to others—and maybe, somehow, this was information that could be used to help better the world. In no time at all The Reestablishment had Emmaline in custody.
Juliette was taken as a precaution.
If the older sibling had proven herself capable of incredible feats, The Reestablishment thought the younger sister might, too. Juliette was only five years old, and she was held under close surveillance.
After a month in a facility, Juliette showed no signs of a special ability. So she was injected with a drug that would destroy critical parts of her memory, and sent to live in Sector 45, under my father’s supervision. Emmaline had kept her real name, but the younger sister, unleashed into the real world, would need an alias. They renamed her Juliette, planted false memories in her head, and assigned her adoptive parents who, only too happy to bring home a child into their childless family, followed instructions to never tell the child that she’d been adopted. They
also had no idea that they were being watched. All other useless Unnaturals were, generally, killed off, but The Reestablishment chose to monitor Juliette in a more neutral setting. They hoped a home life would inspire a latent ability within her. She was too valuable as a blood relation to the very talented Emmaline to be so quickly disposed of.
It is the next part of Juliette’s life that I was most familiar with.
I knew of Juliette’s troubles at home, her many moves. I knew of her family’s visits to the hospital. Their calls to the police. Her stays in juvenile detention centers. She lived in the general area that used to be Southern California before she settled in a city that became firmly a part of what is now Sector 45, always within my father’s reach. Her upbringing among the ordinary people of the world was heavily documented by police reports, teachers’ complaints, and medical files attempting to understand what she was becoming. Eventually, upon finally discovering the extremes of Juliette’s lethal touch, the vile people chosen to be her adoptive parents would go on to abuse her—for the rest of her adolescent life with them—and, ultimately, return her to The Reestablishment, which was only too happy to receive her.
It was The Reestablishment—my own father—who put Juliette back in isolation. For more tests. More surveillance.
And this was when our worlds collided.
Tonight, in these files, I was finally able to make sense of something both terrible and alarming:
The supreme commanders of the world have always known Juliette Ferrars.
They’ve been watching her grow up. She and her sister were handed over by their psychotic parents, whose allegiance to The Reestablishment overruled all else. Exploiting these girls—understanding their powers—was what helped The Reestablishment dominate the world. It was through the exploitation of other innocent Unnaturals that The Reestablishment was able to conquer and manipulate people and places so quickly.
