Shadow Me (Shatter Me, #4.5)

by Tahereh Mafi

feeling suddenly restless, as the crowd goes still. It’s a sea of military faces, the iconic red/green/blue stripes of The Reestablishment emblazoned on every uniform.

It’s creepy as hell.

I freeze in place. I can feel the warmth of her body edging up against mine.

I don’t actually believe it until I see the blood. It seems fake, for a second, all the limp bodies in seats with their chests butterflied open. It seems staged—like a bad joke, like a bad theater production. But when the blood arrives, heavy and viscous, seeping through clothes and upholstery, dripping down frozen hands, I know we’ll never recover from this. Juliette just murdered six hundred people at once. There’s no recovering from this.

She was so terrified—so surprised—by what she’d done that she could hardly speak. She looked like she’d disappeared into herself somewhere—like she’d found a small room in her brain and had locked herself inside. It took a minute to coax her back out again.