Adam looks at me, surprised by my reaction.
“It’s not like I want this,” he says. “But I can’t see how we could possibly fight back without getting ourselves killed. I’m trying to be practical.” He runs an agitated hand through his hair. “I took a chance,” he says, lowering his voice. “I tried to fight back, and it got us all massacred. I shouldn’t even be alive right now. But for some crazy reason, I am, and so is James, and God, Juliette, so are you.
“And I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head, looking away. “I feel like I’ve been given a chance to live my life. I’ll need to think of new ways to find food and put a roof over my head. I have no money coming in, I’ll never be able to enlist in this sector again, and I’m not a registered citizen, so I’ll never be able to work. Right now all I’m focused on is how I’ll be able to feed my family and my friends in a few weeks.” His jaw tenses. “Maybe one day another group will be smarter—stronger—but I don’t think that’s us anymore. I don’t think we stand a chance.”
I’m blinking at him, stunned. “I can’t believe this.”
“You can’t believe what?”
“You’re giving up.” I hear the accusation in my voice and I do nothing to hide it. “You’re just giving up.”
“What choice do I have?” he asks, his eyes hurt, angry. “I’m not trying to be a martyr,” he says. “We gave it a shot. We tried to fight back, and it came to shit. Everyone we know is dead, and that battered group of people you saw out there is all that’s left of our resistance. How are the nine of us supposed to fight the world?” he demands. “It’s not a fair fight, Juliette.”
I’m nodding. Staring into my hands. Trying and failing to hide my shock.
“I’m not a coward,” he says to me, struggling to moderate his voice. “I just want to protect my family. I don’t want James to have to worry that I’m going to show up dead every day. He needs me to be rational.”
“But living like this,” I say to him. “As fugitives? Stealing to survive and hiding from the world? How is that any better? You’ll be worried every single day, constantly looking over your shoulder, terrified of ever leaving James alone. You’ll be miserable.”
“But I’ll be alive.”
“That’s not being alive,” I say to him. “That’s not living—”
“How would you know?” he snaps. His mood shifts so suddenly I’m stunned into silence. “What do you know about being alive?” he demands. “You wouldn’t say a word when I first found you. You were afraid of your own shadow. You were so consumed by grief and guilt that you’d gone almost completely insane—living so far inside your own head that you had no idea what happened to the world while you were gone.”
I flinch, stung by the venom in his voice. I’ve never seen Adam so bitter or cruel. This isn’t the Adam I know. I want him to stop. Rewind. Apologize. Erase the things he’s just said.
But he doesn’t.
“You think you’ve had it hard,” he’s saying to me. “Living in psych wards and being thrown in jail—you think that was difficult. But what you don’t realize is that you’ve always had a roof over your head, and food delivered to you on a regular basis.” His hands are clenching, unclenching. “And that’s more than most people will ever have. You have no idea what it’s really like to live out here—no idea what it’s like to starve and watch your family die in front of you. You have no idea,” he says to me, “what it means to truly suffer. Sometimes I think you live in some fantasy land where everyone survives on optimism—but it doesn’t work that way out here. In this world you’re either alive, about to die, or dead. There’s no romance in it. No illusion. So don’t try to pretend you have any idea what it means to be alive today. Right now. Because you don’t.”
Words, I think, are such unpredictable creatures.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.
I swallow, hard
one
two
three
and steady myself to respond quietly. Carefully.
He’s just upset, I’m telling myself. He’s just scared and worried and stressed out and he doesn’t mean any of it, not really, I keep telling myself.
He’s just upset.
He doesn’t mean it.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I don’t know what it’s like to live. Maybe I’m still not human enough to know more than what’s right in front of me.” I stare straight into his eyes. “But I do know what it’s like to hide from the world. I know what it’s like to live as though I don’t exist, caged away and isolated from society. And I won’t do it again,” I say. “I can’t. I’ve finally gotten to a point in my life where I’m not afraid to speak. Where my shadow no longer haunts me. And I don’t want to lose that freedom—not again. I can’t go backward. I’d rather be shot dead screaming for justice than die alone in a prison of my own making.”
Adam looks toward the wall, laughs, looks back at me.
“Are you even hearing yourself right now?” he asks. “You’re telling me you want to jump in front of a bunch of soldiers and tell them how much you hate The Reestablishment, just to prove a point? Just so they can kill you before your eighteenth birthday? That doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “It doesn’t serve anything. And this doesn’t sound like you,” he says, shaking his head. “I thought you wanted to live on your own. You never wanted to be caught up in war—you just wanted to be free of Warner and the asylum and your crazy parents. I thought you’d be happy to be done with all the fighting.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “I’ve always said I wanted to fight back. I’ve said it from the beginning—from the moment I told you I wanted to escape when we were on base. This is me,” I insist. “This is how I feel. It’s the same way I’ve always felt.”
“No,” he says. “No, we didn’t leave base to start a war. We left to get the hell away from The Reestablishment, to resist in our own way, but most of all to find a life together. But then Kenji showed up and took us to Omega Point and everything changed, and we decided to fight back. Because it seemed like it might actually work—because it seemed like we might actually have a chance. But now”—he looks around the room, at the closed door—“what do we have left? We’re all half dead,” he says. “We are eight poorly armed men and women and one ten-year-old boy trying to fight entire armies. It’s just not feasible,” he says. “And if I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be for a stupid reason. If I go to war—if I risk my life—it’s going to be because the odds are in my favor. Not otherwise.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid to fight for humanity—”
“You have no idea what you’re saying,” he snaps, his jaw tensing. “There’s nothing we can do now.”
“There’s always something, Adam. There has to be. Because I won’t live like this anymore. Not ever again.”
“Juliette, please,” he says, his words desperate all of a sudden, anguished. “I don’t want you to get killed—I don’t want to lose you again—”
“This isn’t about you, Adam.” I feel terrible saying it, but he has to understand. “You’re so important to me. You’ve loved me and you were there for me when no one else was. I never want you to think I don’t care about you, because I do,” I tell him. “But this decision has nothing to do with you. It’s about me,” I tell him. “And this life”—I point to the door—“the life on the other side of that wall? That’s not what I want.”
My words only seem to upset him more.
“Then you’d rather be dead?” he asks, angry again. “Is that what you’re saying? You’d rather be dead than try to build a life with me here?”
“I would rather be dead,” I say to him, inching away from his outstretched hand, “than go back to being silent and suffocated.”
And Adam is just about to respond—he’s parting his lips to speak—when the sounds of chaos reach us from the other side of the wall. We share one panicked look before yanking the bedroom door open and rushing into the living room.
My heart stops. Starts. Stops again.
Warner is here.