in the dark. He was tender and kind and gentle and he saved me, saved my life. Probably carried me into bed. Tucked me in beside him. It must’ve been him.
But when I glance down at my body I realize I’m wearing clean clothes, no blood or holes or anything anywhere and I wonder who washed me, wonder who changed me, and worry that might’ve been Warner, too.
“Did you . . .” I hesitate, touching the hem of the shirt I’m wearing. “Did—I mean—my clothes—”
He smiles. He stares until I’m blushing and I decide I hate him a little and then he shakes his head. Looks into his palms. “No,” he says. “The girls took care of that. I just carried you to bed.”
“The girls,” I whisper, dazed.
The girls.
Sonya and Sara. They were there too, the healer twins, they helped Warner. They helped him save me because he’s the only one who can touch me now, the only person in the world who’d have been able to transfer their healing power safely into my body.
My thoughts are on fire.
Where are the girls what happened to the girls and where is Anderson and the war and oh God what’s happened to Adam and Kenji and Castle and I have to get up I have to get up I have to get up and get out of bed and get going
but
I try to move and Warner catches me. I’m off-balance, unsteady; I still feel as though my legs are anchored to this bed and I’m suddenly unable to breathe, seeing spots and feeling faint. Need up. Need out.
Can’t.
“Warner.” My eyes are frantic on his face. “What happened? What’s happening with the battle—?”
“Please,” he says, gripping my shoulders. “You need to start slowly; you should eat something—”
“Tell me—”
“Don’t you want to eat first? Or shower?”
“No,” I hear myself say. “I have to know now.”
One moment. Two and three.
Warner takes a deep breath. A million more. Right hand over left, spinning the jade ring on his pinkie finger over and over and over and over “It’s over,” he says.
“What?”
I say the word but my lips make no sound. I’m numb, somehow. Blinking and seeing nothing.
“It’s over,” he says again.
“No.”
I exhale the word, exhale the impossibility.
He nods. He’s disagreeing with me.
“No.”
“Juliette.”
“No,” I say. “No. No. Don’t be stupid,” I say to him. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say to him. “Don’t lie to me goddamn you,” but now my voice is high and broken and shaking and “No,” I gasp, “no, no, no—”
I actually stand up this time. My eyes are filling fast with tears and I blink and blink but the world is a mess and I want to laugh because all I can think is how horrible and beautiful it is, that our eyes blur the truth when we can’t bear to see it.
The ground is hard.
I know this to be an actual fact because it’s suddenly pressed against my face and Warner is trying to touch me but I think I scream and slap his hands away because I already know the answer. I must already know the answer because I can feel the revulsion bubbling up and unsettling my insides but I ask anyway. I’m horizontal and somehow still tipping over and the holes in my head are tearing open and I’m staring at a spot on the carpet not ten feet away and I’m not sure I’m even alive but I have to hear him say it.
“Why?” I ask.
It’s just a word, stupid and simple.
“Why is the battle over?” I ask. I’m not breathing anymore, not really speaking at all; just expelling letters through my lips.
Warner is not looking at me.
He’s looking at the wall and at the floor and at the bedsheets and at the way his knuckles look when he clenches his fists but no not at me he won’t look at me and his next words are so, so soft.
“Because they’re dead, love. They’re all dead.”
My body locks.
My bones, my blood, my brain freeze in place, seizing in some kind of sudden, uncontrollable paralysis that spreads through me so quickly I can’t seem to breathe. I’m wheezing in deep, strained inhalations, and the walls won’t stop swaying in front of me.
Warner pulls me into his arms.
“Let go of me,” I scream, but, oh, only in my imagination because my lips are finished working and my heart has just expired and my mind has gone to hell for the day and my eyes my eyes I think they’re bleeding. Warner is whispering words of comfort I can’t hear and his arms are wrapped entirely around me, trying to keep me together through sheer physical force but it’s no use.
I feel nothing.
Warner is shushing me, rocking me back and forth, and it’s only then that I realize I’m making the most excruciating, earsplitting sound, agony ripping through me. I want to speak, to protest, to accuse Warner, to blame him, to call him a liar, but I can say nothing, can form nothing but sounds so pitiful I’m almost ashamed of myself. I break free of his arms, gasping and doubling over, clutching my stomach.
“Adam.” I choke on his name.
“Juliette, please—”
“Kenji.” I’m hyperventilating into the carpet now.
“Please, love, let me help you—”
“What about James?” I hear myself say. “He was left at Omega Point—he wasn’t a-allowed to c-come—”
“It’s all been destroyed,” Warner says slowly, quietly. “Everything. They tortured some of your members into giving away the exact location of Omega Point. Then they bombed the entire thing.”
“Oh, God.” I cover my mouth with one hand and stare, unblinking, at the ceiling.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
“Liar,” I whisper, venom in my voice. I’m angry and mean and I can’t be bothered to care. “You’re not sorry at all.”
I glance at Warner just long enough to see the hurt flash in and out of his eyes. He clears his throat.
“I
