It’s 8:00 in the morning and I’m wearing a dress the color of dead forests and old tin cans.

I have no idea what color that’s supposed to mean.  Maybe Juliette is progressing to psychedelic hallucinations now.

I stare at my legs and wonder that I own a pair.

Wow.  What a great protagonist we have here.

For 17 years I’ve trained myself to cover every inch of exposed skin and Warner is forcing me to peel the layers away. I can only assume he’s doing it on purpose. My body is a carnivorous flower, a poisonous houseplant, a loaded gun with a million triggers and he’s more than ready to fire.

…well this took a left turn into creepy.

Before now, I was equating Juliette’s power with her touching people, aka an action.  But no, it’s a passive thing outside her control, to the point where her very body presents a danger to others, and in response she’s covered it up.

Hm, what does this remind me of…

Oh yeah, how about every instance of men insisting that women cover themselves because they claim a woman’s body is so dangerous and would tempt them into lust, which is of course the woman’s fault and responsibility.  It’s right there in the slang: sexy women are called “bombshells” or “knockouts.”  Female bodies are very often viewed in confrontational terms, as something that women uses as a weapon, something that must be conquered, something that is dangerous and has to be covered least the wily female use it against the rational male.

That would have been a stretch before, when the focus was on her touching people, but this paragraph equates the very sight of her skin with deadly force.

There’s not much to say about that yet, besides that…well, that paragraph exists, but I’ll be keeping it mind as we read forward.  The book drew that line.  There’s no going back.

I am sitting all alone in a velvet chair in a blue room wearing a dress made of olives.

Are you just fucking with us for shits and giggles now?

Warner comes in and it turns out her dress is green.  Thank you, Warner.  Juliette probably would have claimed it was made out of kitten tongues and Godzilla sperm next.  Nothing’s beyond the reach of her ‘gift’ for metaphors.

Juliette once again states that she hates him because he wants her to torture people, then asks why she’s there.  You just stated your assumption of why you’re there!  Why bother asking?

Warner wants to have breakfast before he explains, because we’ve delayed for 20 fucking chapters now, what’s a little bit more?

Warner goes on a little shpeel about how the world’s been so mean to her, even taunts her about her parents giving her up, then basically says that he’ll let her get revenge on the world and she’d probably like that.

Also, he’s 19, if anyone cares.

Then the next chapter opens with a time-skip to a week later, as Juliette bemoans the fact that Warner won’t let her speak to Adam.

Um…WHAT HAPPENED AFTER BREAKFAST?  DID HE EXPLAIN ANYTHING?  She starts off by saying that  in the week that passed, all she’s done is “murder” time.  (Haha, because killing time, get it, fuck you book.)

My schedule consists of meetings with Warner and eating with Warner and listening to Warner.

And all Warner does is talk about the moronic government and all the stuff it’s destroyed, if Juliette’s summarizing is to be believed.  Apparently he’s trying to convince her to join him, but it seems that would be better served if he would just tell her what he has planned.  All she’s been resistant about is the idea of torture, and he’s denied that he wants that, but he won’t replace it with anything.  Is he lying when he denies?

And if he does want her to torture or kill people, why isn’t he being more convincing, telling her that the people he wants dead are bad people who are hurting the world an yada yada yada?

The way he’s going about this seems designed to waste time, not actually convince her.

Apparently that’s all the author cares about.

She tells Warner she wants the cameras gone, and he says no because she’s unstable.  This makes her flashback to when she was 14 and in a grocery store watching a kid throw a temper tantrum.  Apparently she killed this kid by accident, but we don’t get the full flashback so we don’t actually know what she did, just that she thought she was helping.

She once again says she wants the cameras gone and threatens to basically commit suicide if he doesn’t.  And this makes him…happy?  Because she’s showing some ‘signs of life’?  She’s been spitting angry lines at him, including ‘I’ll fight you’ lines, since she arrived, so how is this different?

“I know everything about you, love.” He grins. “I’ve wanted you for a very long time. I’ve waited forever for you to be ready. I’m not going to let you go so easily.”

“I don’t want to be a monster,” I say, perhaps more for my sake than his.

“Don’t fight what you’re born to be.”

So, yeah, this guy’s an idiot.  He wants her to use her power on people, but all he’s doing towards that end is trying to convince her that monstering will be cool, not that what she’d do isn’t monstrous.

“Either you get rid of the cameras or I will find and break every single one of them.”

Well at least that’s better than threatening self harm some more.

He goes on about how she could have so much power if only she’d use it! and in general saying exactly the wrong things, which indicates that he knows so, so very little about dealing with people.  How did he get to be in charge of anything with skills like this?

“Inflicting pain, you see, is an incredibly efficient method of getting information out of anyone. And with you?”

I think the word you’re looking for is “effective.”  Torture is actually terrible inefficient.  See, people under torture will say anything to make it stop.  Anything.  True, untrue, doesn’t matter.  Ever heard of the witch trials?  Ever wonder how they got people to confess to have devil orgies and naming other people as co-conspirators?  It’s not because those things happened, but because the victims were saying whatever they thought their torturers wanted just to make the pain stop.

Torture will get you so many falls positives and useless information that you’ll have no way of knowing what’s true and what’s just people saying what you want to hear.  Yeah, you can get people to talk, but you can’t trust what they say.  You’ll spend more resources trying to verify what you find out than you would have if you’d just pursued intelligence in other ways.  That’s the exact opposite of what efficient means.

He continues to taunt her by saying that she’s been a monster all along and she should just embrace it instead of repress it.

“It’s time you stopped pretending,” he says, so softly. “Juliette—” He takes my face in his gloved hands, so unexpectedly gentle. “You don’t have to be nice anymore. You can destroy all of them. You can take them down and own this whole world and—”

Are we sure he actually cares about using her torture abilities?  Because he’s acting more like he just wants to be right, instead of wanting to use her.  If using her were all he cared about, he’d try a different tactic.

She denies it all, and he brushes it off as just stubbornness.  She brings up the camera issue, saying that with Adam in her room he doesn’t need the cameras.

So then they talk about Adam.  Warner taunts her with the fact that Adam volunteered, because he remembered her from when they went to school together.  He said he wanted to see what the big deal was, because they’d been warned away from her as kids but never told why.

Juliette gets unreasonably angry about this, and I have no idea why.  Okay, so he said some mean things before properly meeting you, so?  She never stops to consider that 1) this was several weeks ago and doesn’t reflect his current feelings and 2) could very well have been just something he said as an excuse to get picked.

Then she asks Warner to take off his shirt, which he does.

There’s a lot of random stripping in this book.

His eyes as hard and beautiful as frozen gemstones.

Are frozen gemstones very different from unfrozen stones?

Ah, he took his shirt off because he promised to get rid of the cameras if she promised to touch him. But when she reminds him of that promise, he says that his word isn’t very binding after all, so she backs out of the deal.

Adam shows up and Warner tells him to take Juliette to her room.