Chapter 1 Warner
Warner
“Well?” I pivot slowly to face him, leaning one shoulder against a cold concrete wall. “Can you sense anything?”
Adam takes a tight breath.
“I don’t know, man,” he says. He shoves his hands in his pockets and shakes his head, exhaling. “I might need another minute.
Something feels off.”
I watch him shift his weight as his eyes track the vast window, assessing the stark scene beyond: Rosabelle Wolff is seated
at a metal chair, unmoving, stiff as a stake in the ground as her estranged father, Hugo, attempts another ill-fated interrogation.
“Rosa,” Hugo says desperately, his voice pitching higher. “Please—why won’t you speak to me—?”
Every day has been a failure.
Every day Hugo’s panic rises as the hours progress, his emotional instability spiking to near hysteria as Rosabelle grows only more remote.
I’ve encouraged him several times to abandon the assignment, but now that he’s seen her again after so many years apart, he’s lost all objectivity.
He’s frantic for a spark of recognition—a moment of redemption—and he won’t relent.
I’d hoped his determination to connect with his daughter would give us a much-needed psychological advantage, but the unfortunate truth is that Hugo has become a liability.
Worse, he’s costing us time. Most days these sessions end in tears.
His, not hers.
I do my best, every day, to dissociate from his pain.
More concerning is that I haven’t been able to get a read on Rosabelle in over a week. Her eyes are vacant, her energy cold.
I’ve grown so accustomed to being flattened by the psychic torrent of other people that it’s nearly disorienting to be confronted
by her style of silence.
Rosabelle’s emotional response is nonexistent.
In my life I’ve encountered one other person whose emotional state I couldn’t fathom—and he’s standing right next to me. My
half brother Adam Kent Anderson. Only a year apart, we’d grown up never knowing the truth about each other or our family.
For so long Adam and I had jettisoned our father’s name from our lives; Anderson had once torn us apart. Our father had intentionally pit us against each other; in fact, we once sought to kill each other.
But over the past decade we’ve learned to reclaim our shared name, slowly suturing ourselves back together. Me and my brothers,
finally united under the same banner.
It was Ella who inspired this. Ella, who refused to be broken or branded by the story once written for her. It’s what she
taught me was possible when she took back the name Juliette.
She’s known to the world as Juliette Ferrars.
She’ll always be Ella to me.
I experience a stab of pain at the thought of her, tensing even as I try to ignore the blade of fear that’s lately lodged itself between my lungs.
A quickening in my blood chases every unguarded beat of my heart these days; my own feelings are so unstable I can’t allow myself to experience them in full.
The thought of losing her—or our unborn child—is more than my paper soul can survive.
Even now I feel an encroaching tremor animate my body and I clench my fists in concert with my jaw, compartmentalizing my life the way I always do.
The way I have to.
“Hey,” says Adam suddenly.
I realize only then, meeting his eyes, that he’s been watching me.
“You okay?”
The lie comes out fast. “Yes.”
“You sure?”
Adam’s concern continues to surprise and disarm me, despite its consistency.
“I’m sure,” I say, turning away, struggling to rebuild the walls in my mind.
“Hey,” he says again. “Look at me for a second.”
When I look up I feel the spike in his sympathy. More than that, I see it in the way he studies my face, then scans the rest
of me, as if searching for open wounds.
“You want me to ask Alia to check on her?”
These words deliver me a disorienting injury.
I had no idea I was so obvious; I have no desire to be pitied.
Still, my heart begins to pound, my fears threatening to bleed beyond their enclosure even as gratitude expands in me like static, bristling under my skin.
That familiar blade pierces me again and I can’t compartmentalize quickly enough; instead I retreat so far inside my mind I feel physically distant when I say, tonelessly, “Nazeera is with her now. But thank you.”
Adam holds my gaze a beat longer; finally, he nods.
I once thought he was a brainless soldier.
I’d read him wrong, all those years ago. In fact, I couldn’t read him at all. His interior quiet was never as complete nor
as deafening as Rosabelle’s; instead, his emotional cues came across as both vague and wooden, and I thought I had the latitude,
as a result, to make the tragic assumption he was a garden-variety idiot. As it turns out, Adam has the uncommon ability to
neutralize the preternatural powers of others—and he’d been unconsciously exercising a skill to shut me out. There was a time
when he didn’t even know how to unlatch this armor; now he rarely bothers to hide his emotions from me. He calls it growth.
I call it loud.
“So,” Adam says, building toward a segue. He takes a breath as he returns his eyes to the interrogation. “You really think
this girl is activating some kind of a shield?”
I step closer to the window, pulling up beside my brother. As my heart rate steadies, I feel the pager vibrate in my pocket,
each buzz like a shot to the head. I glance at the notifications, scanning for emergencies and finding none for the moment.
In my head I build the scaffolding for the work to come: I silently add things to my to-do list; draft responses to questions;
sketch out solutions to problems; delegate responsibilities; attempt to anticipate the next pitfall. All this I’ll set aside
to manage later.
Right now I give Adam a cursory glance.
I thought I was dressed casually today, forgoing my standard uniform for a leather field jacket, slacks, and boots; but Adam redefines the word casual. He’s wearing a lightweight puffer jacket over an old hoodie and a pair of faded jeans, at least a day’s stubble shadowing
his jaw. He could use a haircut. His sneakers are scuffed and worn, and he’s pulled his shoelaces so tightly the tongue and
toe box are pinched, the sight of which so aggressively repulses me I have to force myself to look away. I spin my wedding
ring around my finger. It costs me something to say nothing about his shoes.
Still, despite our outward differences, we share an uncanny moment of alignment: exhaling at the same time.
“I don’t know if it’s a shield,” I admit, returning my eyes to Rosabelle.
There’s a dim clang of metal as she sits up in her seat, her manacles knocking together, and Hugo, who’s sunk to the ground
in defeat, looks up at the sound.
“Rosa,” says Hugo, his voice fraying as he repeats the same lines over and over. “Please. You have to believe me—I never would’ve
left you. They forced me to leave you. Please, say something—”
I look at Adam, anchoring myself in the room.
“As you already know,” I say to him, “we discovered last week that the mercenary has the unprecedented ability to die at will.
It’s possible she’s able to shut off her mind by extension. But logic would insist that were she capable of such a thing,
she might’ve activated this power earlier.”
“And you don’t think she has?”
“I don’t know,” I say again, more quietly this time. “I’ve never had an issue sensing her emotions, which leads me to assume for the moment that this is some new kind of power—something we haven’t seen from her before.”
Adam nods, even as he frowns. “And you think I might be able to disarm her. You think it’s something she turns on and off.”
“I don’t know,” I say for the third time. “I’m not ready to commit to absolutes yet. If you find that you’re able to shut
off her power, I might be able to understand its origins. I’m trying to determine whether this—whatever this is—is an internal
power, activated from within, or an external power, generated remotely.”
“Remotely?” Adam raises his eyebrows. “Like, you think The Reestablishment might’ve turned off the chip in her brain?”
“The problem is, there is no chip in her brain,” I say, my mood darkening as I meet his eyes. “If there were, she’d be a lot
easier to understand. All I know is that this”—I nod at the window—“is not her natural state. I know her to be capable of heightened emotion and brain activity, but her
mind has been impenetrable since the moment of her incarceration. It’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered.”
“Really?” asks Adam, his surprise peaking. “Not even with me?”
I feel him throw up a shield between us to illustrate his point, and his shock quiets to a note of flat, anemic interest.
“No,” I say, returning my eyes to the inmate. “Not even with you.”
Rosabelle’s silence is so complete she might as well be dead.
She wears no expression despite having been recently united with her father after more than ten years of separation.
Occasionally she shifts in her seat, her shackled hands clasped behind her, and the sounds of metal ring softly through the room.
Each time this happens Hugo seizes with a visibly painful hope, practically holding his breath at the thought that she might finally speak, but in eight days, she hasn’t said a word.
If it weren’t for the human blink of her eyes, the rise and fall of her chest, the occasional rearrangement of herself in her chair—she might be mistaken for a machine.
Or a ghost.
There’s something spectral about her. She’s surprisingly slight, lacking in substance and color. She’s almost porcelain white;
her skin and hair leached of pigment. Even her eyes are desaturated—some kind of gray. Still, the pallor of her skin is secondary
to the real issue, which is perceptible only in her presence: Rosabelle doesn’t seem to belong here. She emanates an otherworldly
resonance, as if she might’ve died in birth but was sentenced to life.
Looking at her for too long makes me uncomfortable.