“Princess, please,” I say, shaking her a little. “I know everything is crazy right now, but I need you to snap out of this, J. I try to warm some sense into her, begging her now to return to herself, to hurry back to her mind, to the present moment. It took a minute to coax her back out again. She looked like she’d disappeared into herself somewhere-like she’d found a small room in her brain and had locked herself inside. She was so terrified-so surprised-by what she’d done that she could hardly speak. When I reach her I pull her into my arms, and her cold, unresponsive body reminds me of the time I found her standing over Anderson, a gun aimed at his chest. I hear Winston’s soft, insistent whimpers and Brendan’s steady, reassuring response that the wound isn’t as bad as it looks, that he’s going to be okay, that he’s been through worse than this and survived it-Īnd I know my priority right now needs to be Juliette. I shove my way through the quiet, stunned, still-breathing bodies of my friends. Juliette just murdered six hundred people at once. But when I see the blood, thick and heavy, seeping through clothes and upholstery, dripping down frozen hands, I know we’ll never recover from this.
It seems staged-like a bad joke, like a bad theater production. It seems fake, for a second, all the limp bodies in seats with their chests butterflied open. I don’t actually believe it until I see the blood. The shudders ripple with renewed fervor across the floorboards, ripping through walls and seats and people. She already put the energy into the world and now. I look at Juliette and see her staring, slack-jawed, frozen at the sight of the devastation, and I realize she must’ve stopped screaming a minute ago. The room loses half its light, bathing the cavernous space in a freakish glow, and it’s suddenly hard to see what’s happening. And then, with one last vibration, three of the massive chandeliers rip free from the ceiling and shatter as they hit the floor.Ĭrystal flies everywhere.
The chandeliers swing too fast and the lights flicker ominously. People are frozen in place even as they shake, the room vibrating around them.
Seismic currents are thundering up the walls, across the floors, chattering my teeth. I mean, I knew Juliette was strong-and I knew we hadn’t discovered the depth of her powers-but I never imagined she’d be capable of this. But she’s screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, with an agony that seems almost an exaggeration, and it’s causing devastation I never knew possible.
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