Imagine Me (Shatter Me, #6)

by Tahereh Mafi

now I feel like I’m clinging to the blurring edges of sanity, that elusive, fair-weather friend always breaking my heart.

Nazeera and I had been out of bed for a while, racing through the dark in an attempt at murdering one another.

She’s clearly doing something to J right now, ravaging her mind while lashing out at the world around us, because the acid trip I’m staring at is only getting worse.

Warner looks even worse than l expected. Raw, clenched, a vein straining at his temple. He’s on his knees holding on to J like he’s trying to hold back a riot, and I didn’t realize until just this second that he might be here for more than just emotional support.

I was digging my own grave. Slithering, terrifying horror moves through my body as I understand: Emmaline was in my head. She wanted to see if she could get me to kill myself.

Once I’m finally close enough, Warner looks up. He seems stunned. It occurs to me then that he’s only just seeing me—after all this—he’s only just realizing I’m here. A flicker of relief flashes through his eyes, too quickly replaced by pain. And then he calls out two words—two words I never thought I’d inspire him to say: “Help me.”

He spent nearly two hours physically fighting to keep Juliette from harm, protecting her with his own body as he was lashed by fallen trees, flying rocks, errant debris, and violent winds. The girls said they could tell just by looking at him that he had at least two broken ribs. A fracture in his right arm. A dislocated shoulder. Probably internal bleeding.

For a couple of months we forgot that Warner was scary. He smiled like four and a half times and we decided to forget that he was basically a psychopath with a long history of ruthless murder.

“J said that Evie did a bunch of work on her muscles and bones and stuff while she was in Oceania—priming her for Operation Synthesis—to basically become Emmaline’s new body. So I think, ultimately, J playing host to Emmaline is what Evie had planned all along.”

“What happened to you, man?” I whisper. “Where’d you go?” “Hell,” he says. “I’ve finally found hell.”

It is only in the desperate seconds before death that we realize the windows against which we broke our bodies were only mirrors, all along.

Come back to life, love I’ll be here when you wake up My eyes fly open. The heat is merciless. Confusing. Consuming. It calms me, settles my raging heart. His hands move along my body, light touches along my arms, the sides of my torso. I claw my way back to him by memory, my shaking hands tracing the familiar shape of his back, my cheek still pressed against the familiar beat of his heart. The scent of him, so familiar, so familiar, and then I look up— His eyes, something about his eyes Please, he says, please don’t shoot me for this

“Oh, okay, so we’re all just saying really obvious things out loud? Is that what we’re doing?” Kenji.

Anderson presses the gun to James’s throat, and my knees nearly give out.

Nazeera. She materializes in front of him just in time to jump up, into the sky. The supreme soldiers start shooting upward, releasing round after round with impunity, and though I’m terrified for Nazeera, I realize she took that risk for me. For James. We’ll do our best, she’d said. I didn’t realize her best included risking her life for that kid. For me. God, I fucking love her.

“Where’s Adam?” I shake my head. Shrug. “Do you think we’ll find him?” she asks, her voice practically a whisper. I look up. There’s a yearning there—something more than general concern in her tone. I turn fully to meet her eyes, but she won’t look at me.

This is the come-to-Jesus moment. This is the moment where Warner and James finally come face-to-face not as strangers, but as brothers. Surreal.

“Kent tracked down Anderson on his own,” Warner says, his gaze shifting to James. “He offered his allegiance in exchange for protection.”

“Every single time you claim to understand even a fraction of what I’m feeling, I want to disembowel you. I want to sever your carotid artery. I want to rip out your vertebrae, one by one. You have no idea what it is to love her,” he says angrily. “You couldn’t even begin to imagine. So stop trying to understand.”

Eight glass cylinders, each as tall as the room and as wide as a desk, are arranged in a perfect line, straight across the laboratory. Five of them contain human figures. Three on the end remain empty.

Warner’s eyes flash. “I want to hurt people all the time,” he says. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night because I’m thinking about all the people I’d like to murder.”

“Besides, we don’t love him for his jokes, do we, Nazeera?” The two of them lock eyes for a moment. “We love him for his heart.”

Nouria smiles at me then, but it’s a strange smile, a searching smile. “Don’t you understand?” she says. “This is it. This is the end. This is the defining moment we’ve all been fighting for. The end of an era. The end of a revolution. We currently—finally—have every advantage. We have people on the inside. If we do this right, we could collapse The Reestablishment in a matter of days.”

“Operation Synthesis will remove every trace of your old friend. She will be unrecognizable. A super soldier in every sense of the word. Beyond salvation.”

“Because we realized, months ago, that Ella was the only one strong enough to kill her own sister.

I imagine love, I imagine wind, I imagine gold hair and green eyes and whispers, laughter I imagine Me extraordinary, unbroken the girl who shocked herself by surviving, the girl who loved herself through learning, the girl who respected her skin, understood her worth, found her strength s t r o n g s t r o n g e r strongest Imagine me master of my own universe I am everything I ever dreamed of

In fact, in the last couple of months I’d forgotten what he was like without her around. But this reminder has been more than enough. Too much, in fact. I don’t want any more reminders. I can guarantee that I will never again forget that Warner is not a fun guy to spend time with.

“Hey,” Nazeera says, her voice suddenly close. “I have a feeling I’m about four months away from falling madly in love with you, so please don’t get yourself killed, okay?”

Friends? I have friends? “Hey, princess,” someone whispers in my ear.

The scene is surreal. Anderson is guarding Juliette. The same Anderson who’s spent so much of his energy trying to murder her—is now standing in front of her with his arms out, guarding her with his life.

No one thought it would happen like this. No one thought the supreme commanders would destroy themselves. No one thought we’d see Anderson felled by one his own, no one thought he’d clutch his bleeding chest and use his last gasp of breath to say: “Run, Juliette. Run—”

“She’s really going to kill you.” “Then I will die.” That’s it. Warner’s last words before he leaves. He meets J in the middle of the room and she doesn’t hesitate before taking a violent swing at his face. He blocks. She swings again. He blocks. She kicks. He ducks. He’s not fighting her. He only matches her, move for move, meeting her blows, anticipating her mind.

“Come back to me, love. Come back.” I’m still struggling to breathe, desperately searching his eyes for answers. Explanations. “Where?” “Here,” he whispers, pressing my hands to his heart. “Home.”

“You know my name,” he says softly. “You’ve always known me, love. I’ve always known you. And I’m so—I’m so desperately in love with you—”

And this time, when I look up, I see his face. “Aaron,” I gasp. He drops to his knees. He pulls my bleeding body into his arms and I break, I break apart, sobs cracking open my chest.

I watch the capital of Oceania—all 120 acres of it—go up in flames. And Warner and Juliette go with it.

And then we carry my sister home.

“That’s a strange justification for spending the hours before your wedding digging feces out of a toilet.” Kent saunters up to us. He’s laughing. My brother. So strange. He’s a happier, healthier version of himself than I’ve ever seen before. He took a week to recover after we got him back here, but when he regained consciousness and we told him what happened—and assured him that James was safe—he fainted. And didn’t wake up for another two days.

She realized she didn’t want to forget her years as Juliette—or to diminish the young woman she was, fighting against all odds to survive. Juliette Ferrars is who she was when she was made known to the world, and she wants it to remain that way. I’m the only one allowed to call her Ella now.

Juliette Ferrars, one of the most feared, most lauded heroes of our known world, is crying over a dog. Perhaps no one else would understand, but I know that this is the first time she’s ever held one. Without hesitation, without fear, without danger of causing an innocent creature any harm. For her, this is true joy. To the world, she is formidable. To me? She is the world.