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 willing 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—