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.
This, I now realize, is why they’ve been so patient with a seventeen-year-old who’s declared herself ruler of an entire continent. This is why they’ve so quietly abided the truth of her having slaughtered one of their fellow commanders.
And Juliette has no idea.
She has no idea she’s being played and preyed upon. She has no idea that she has no real power here. No chance at change. No opportunity to make a difference in the world. She was, and will forever be nothing more than a toy to them—a science experiment to watch carefully, to make certain the concoction doesn’t boil over too soon.
But it did.
Juliette failed their tests over a month ago, and my father tried to kill her for it. He tried to kill her because he’d decided that she’d become a distraction. Gone was the opportunity for this Unnatural to grow into an adversary.
The monster we’ve bred has tried to kill my own son. She’s since attacked me like a feral animal, shooting me in both my legs. I’ve never seen such wildness—such blind, inhuman rage. Her mind shifts without warning. She showed no signs of psychosis upon first arrival in the house, but appeared to dissociate from any structure of rational thought while attacking me. Having seen her instability with my own eyes makes me only more certain of what needs to be done. I write this now as a decree from my hospital bed, and as a precaution to my fellow commanders. In the case that I don’t recover from these wounds and am unable to follow through with what needs to be done: You, who are reading this now, you must react. Finish what I could not do. The younger sister is a failed experiment. She is, as we feared, disconnected from humanity. Worse, she’s become a distraction for Aaron. He’s become—in a toxic turn of events—impossibly drawn to her, with no apparent regard for his own safety. I have no idea what she’s done to his mind. I only know now that I should never have entertained my own curiosity by allowing him to bring her on base. It’s a shame, really, that she is nothing like her elder sister. Instead, Juliette Ferrars has become an incurable cancer we must cut out of our lives for good.
—AN EXCERPT FROM ANDERSON’S DAILY LOG
Juliette threatened the balance of The Reestablishment.
She was an experiment gone wrong. And she’d become a liability. She needed to be expunged from the earth.
My father tried so hard to destroy her.
And I see now that his failure has been of great interest to the other commanders. My father’s daily logs were shared; all the supreme commanders shared their logs with one another. It was the only way for the six of them to remain apprised, at all times, of each other’s daily goings-on.
So. They knew his story. They’ve known about my feelings for her.
And they have their orders to kill Juliette.
But they’re waiting. And I have to assume there’s something more—some other explanation for their hesitation. Maybe they think they can rehabilitate her. Maybe they’re wondering whether Juliette cannot still be of service to them and to their cause, much like her sister has been.