Chapter 24 James
James
Chapter 24
“I’m fine,” says Juliette, breathing out. Her eyes close as the pain recedes and she waves Warner down, still grimacing. “It’s fine. Really. I swear.”
There’s a collective tension in the room as we all watch her and wait. I study my older brother, the severe lines of his face. He’s been terrified for months.
Juliette, like me and Warner, was born into the arms of The Reestablishment; I didn’t know who my father was for a long time—Warner and I have different moms—but we’re all children of supreme commanders. The major difference was that Juliette’s parents were scientists, whereas my dad was strictly military. Juliette’s mom was the one who launched the experiment responsible for rewriting human DNA, generating preternatural powers for use as weapons by the regime. My dad was a unique monster, but Juliette’s parents were sadistic on a whole different level. They had kids for the sole purpose of experimentation, using their offspring as guinea pigs, building and breaking them down over and over in increasingly inhumane ways. The consequences eventually killed Juliette’s sister.
Juliette herself was never meant to bear children.
I fall back into my chair with a sigh. I look up at Warner, who’s standing, unmoving, by the matching chair beside me. “Are you sure you’re okay, love?” he says to his wife, thawing as he approaches her. He sits on the side of the bed, takes her hands. He presses his forehead to her temple, then whispers something in her ear.
Quietly, I hear her say, “The bleeding stopped a few hours ago,” and I turn away, not wanting to eavesdrop.
They weren’t expecting to get pregnant.
After ten years of marriage and endless tests, they’d accepted that it was practically impossible to reverse the near-sterilization her parents forced on her. The baby was an enormous shock. The entire pregnancy has been fraught. She nearly miscarried three times. At one point we couldn’t hear the heartbeat. There’ve been a lot of dark days.
Juliette calls the whole thing a miracle.
Warner calls it a “fucking nightmare,” and he never uses explicit language. Once, when we thought she’d lost the baby, I heard him having a panic attack in the bathroom. Kenji had been with him then, calming him down.
The memory strikes me in the chest.
We like to give each other shit around here, but at the end of the day we’d all die for each other, no questions asked.
“Really, I’m fine,” I hear Juliette say, and I glance up to catch her forcing a smile, her hand still caught under her belly. “I just hate that I can’t get out of bed.”
“Just a few more weeks,” Kenji says, his own eyes sobered. “You got this, J.”
“We can have as many meetings in here as you like,” I add a little eagerly. “And I’ll make sure to come by more often.”
“Really?” Her eyes brighten. “I’d like to hear all the Rosabelle stories—”
“No,” Warner says sharply. “Nothing upsetting.”
She only looks at him, her smile blossoming into something so openly adoring I have to look away. “I’ll be all right,” she says softly. “You don’t have to worry so much.”
“That’s like telling water not to be wet,” Kenji mutters, crunching popcorn again. “This man lives to worry about you. It’s his favorite thing to do. Between worrying about you and talking about you and frolicking through fields aggressively shouting your name at wildlife, I’m surprised the man has any time left to fuck with the world.”
“Hey, don’t make fun of my husband,” Juliette says playfully, and pinches him. “He works hard.”
Kenji yelps. Popcorn forgotten, he turns to look at her with wide eyes. “Did you just, like, zap me with your killing power?”
She laughs. “Only a little bit.”
“Only a little bit?” His eyes go wider. “J, you can literally murder people with only a little bit —”
“She can murder whoever she wants,” Warner says flatly. “Don’t stifle her.”
Kenji’s jaw drops open. “You two are disgusting. This whole situation is disgusting. I hate everyone in this room.”
“Except for me,” I point out.
“Except for you,” he says, nodding. He hesitates, then frowns. “Wait, no, I’m still mad at you.”
“I thought we forgave him,” says Juliette.
“No, we haven’t,” says Warner, crossing his arms. He turns fully to face me. “And we’re not done with this discussion.”
I sigh, slumping deeper into my chair.
“At first I thought cutting you off from the girl was the right course of action,” says Warner, “but it’s clear to me now that you need to finish what you started. She’s exhibited enough vulnerability—enough instability—in her interactions with you to prove she’s human, and that makes her weak.”
“Write that down,” Kenji says. “Remember this moment. Hell, make it the title of your memoir: Being Human Makes You Weak , by Aaron Warner Anderson.”
Juliette fights a smile, but Warner ignores this. He’s still looking at me when he says, “If the girl has one weakness, she has others. It’s your job to find them.”
“She’s not going to do it!” I shout, throwing up my hands. “Rosabelle the serial killer is not going to participate in a therapy program. Can you imagine her opening up? Talking about how The Reestablishment hurt her feelings? The steps she’s taking to be a more mindful individual?”
Warner’s mouth is a grim line. “No one is expecting her to actually participate. This is nothing more than an opportunity for you to have regular access to her in a controlled environment. If we want her to believe that we’ve accepted her bid for asylum, we need to establish an equally believable transition into our world. It’s what we do with all theoretically reformed members of The Reestablishment. By the end of the program, we’ve compiled a thorough dossier on each member, all of which informs next steps.”
“How long?” I ask. “How long would I have to do this?”
“The rehabilitation program takes about eight weeks altogether. As her sponsor, you would spend most days with her, and you would oversee all her progress, convening with her doctors and so on. You’ll report everything, of course, directly to me.”
“It might be useless,” I say. “We might not get anything out of her.”
“It’s a risk,” Warner acknowledges. “Regardless, it’s a psychological move to buy us time. We want to wear her down. Give her the illusion of freedom. Allow The Reestablishment to believe we’re stupid enough to have taken the bait, and that she’s still on course to complete the mission she’s been assigned. While you’re with her, you’ll have the opportunity to coax information out of her with plausible deniability; she’ll find herself forced to play along in order to placate you, which means she’ll have to give up some truths in order to survive. Glean what you can about who she is. Right now, you don’t even know her last name.”
I make a sound of disbelief. “How am I supposed to know her last name?”
“You claim to have possessed her alleged wedding invitation—”
“Oh.”
“—and instead of keeping it as evidence, or, at minimum, memorizing its details, you decided to toss it into a fire.”
“Okay, wait a second, that’s not fair—”
Kenji lets out a low whistle, shaking his head at me in something like amazement. “You’re really lowering the bar for the rest of us, man. I appreciate it.” He glances surreptitiously at Warner. “Now maybe someone will finally cut me some slack for failing to file a report on time.”
“You filed the report incorrectly ,” Warner says, turning sharply to Kenji. “And the oversight cost us three months of chaos—”
“Come on,” Kenji groans. “You’ve got to let this go. That was two years ago—”
“Look,” I say desperately. “I didn’t think Rosabelle would end up being so important. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and at the time I was a little distracted by what I thought were much bigger issues—”
“I don’t care.” Warner returns his eyes to me. “You’re going to make up for it. I want to know her family history. I want to know what she’s capable of. I want to know about those bruises on her body and the scar inside her wrist. I want to know more about her sister. And obviously I want to know what she’s really doing here. We’re trying to slow down their plans, James. What we need is time. Time, and enough information to prepare a counterattack.”
“Fine,” I sigh, crossing my arms. “I hate it, but fine. When do I have to start?”
“Tomorrow,” Kenji says, throwing a piece of popcorn at my head. “Obviously.”
Warner nods. “Ten a.m.”
“Fine,” I say again.
“One last thing, James.”
I glare at the ceiling. “What?”
“You are not to put a hand on her unless it’s to kill her. Do you understand?”
My head snaps forward. “Excuse me?”
“You heard what I said. Don’t touch her. Ever. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
Juliette and Kenji are looking at me with renewed interest, exchanging glances.
“Oh shit, twist ,” Kenji whispers loudly.
He rips open a familiar bag of jelly beans, offers the bag to Juliette, and then dumps a fistful of beans into his own mouth. Chewing, he says, “This might be better than movie night.”
My jaw clenches. “What makes you think I’m going to touch her?”
“I don’t think you have plans to,” Warner says. “I’m only advising you not to do it when, inevitably, you want to.”
“I just gasped,” says Kenji, not gasping.
“Me too,” says Juliette, also not gasping.
“This is genuinely insulting,” I say to Warner. “You think I don’t know how to handle myself? I’m twenty-one years old. You were two years younger than me when you led a fucking revolution—”
“Language!” Kenji says gleefully, grinning as he rips open a bag of potato chips.
“—and everyone around here still treats me like I’m a child. I’m not a child. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I grew up a long time ago. Maybe it’s time you stopped treating me like I don’t know how to wipe my own ass—”
“You didn’t grow up the way we did,” Warner says, deathly calm. “Your generation has been coddled. Untested. You didn’t have to grow up as fast as we did—”
“Shouldn’t have said that,” Kenji says under his breath.
“Are you joking?” I’m on my feet now. Livid. “I was six years old when I watched my friends get dragged into back alleys to have their organs ripped out. You know what’ll fuck you up? Watching adults terrorize children over and over again. You think I didn’t grow up as fast as you did? Who do you think buried the bodies? You think anyone cared to organize funerals for street kids? I was seven the first time I fired a gun. Seven the first time I killed someone. You have no idea what kind of shit I’ve seen—”
“Aaaand he shouldn’t have said that,” Kenji mutters.
“Would you like an award for your troubles?” Warner says, rounding on me. “You think you’re the only one who had to watch people die? You think you’re the only one tainted by misery? What you’ve suffered is tragic, but it doesn’t come close to the levels of darkness we’ve had to endure—”
“Sweetheart,” Juliette says softly, and Warner immediately stills, his body tensing. “This isn’t the kind of competition any of us wants to win.”
Warner lowers his head, steadies his breath. “You’re going to be on your own,” he says, turning to face the wall. “You’ll be alone with her for long stretches of time. Only occasional surveillance, as promised. I need to be able to trust you.”
“Of course you can trust me,” I say angrily. “What kind of a bullshit thing is that to say?”
“James,” he says, a warning in his voice. “Don’t insult my intelligence.”
“She’s, like, really , really beautiful,” Kenji explains to Juliette in an undertone. He shoves some chips into his mouth. “James is very into her”—he crunches—“even though she killed him, and later threw up on him.”
Now Juliette does gasp. “Do I get to meet her?”
“ No ,” everyone shouts at the same time.
Juliette shrinks back, surprised.
“I’m sorry,” Warner says instantly. He blanches. “Forgive me, love. I didn’t mean to shout at you.”
She softens, beaming at him like he’s some kind of baby animal. Sometimes I think she sees Warner in a way literally no one else does. She seems to think he has no thorns at all.
“Okay, for real, though.” Kenji turns to look at her. “Why would we introduce you to the mercenary who definitely wants to kill you? None of us are going to meet her. She gets no access to any of us. That’s part of the reason why we decided Genius over here”—he nods at me—“needs to be the one to handle this mess.”
I exhale angrily. “Can we wrap this up, please? And for clarity, I am not into her, and I am fully capable of doing my job. Just because I think she might be a complex human being doesn’t mean I’m into her.”
Warner shoots me a look.
“What?” I say. “I’m not.”
“Good,” he says darkly. “Then this won’t be a problem for you at all.”