2 weeks pass.

2 weeks of dresses and showers and food I want to throw across the room. 2 weeks of Warner smiling and touching my waist, laughing and guiding the small of my back, making sure I look my best as I walk beside him. He thinks I’m his trophy. His secret weapon.

I have to stifle the urge to crack his knuckles into concrete.

But I offer him 2 weeks of cooperation because in 1 week we’ll be gone.

Another way to write that: “2 weeks in which I do jack diddly squat and apparently make no plans or efforts to prepare for my escape, because obviously Adam will take care of all that.”

Oh, scratch that, she does do something in that two weeks.  She starts to feel sorry for Warner, because he had a crappy childhood.  What a crock of shit excuse.

The worst part of that is that it’s just so lazy.  Warner is underdeveloped and flat.  His only defining point is his willingness to take a “break a few eggs for an omelet” approach, and that’s being swept aside with the excuse of bad parenting.  We’ve seen that a million times, and we’ve seen that better a million times.  As an excuse, it really only works when it’s matched with better characterization and more information.  It can be part of what formed him, it can be worked into the overall tapestry of his character, but it shouldn’t be this paint-by-numbers. 

Of course, it would help if he didn’t have a paint-by-numbers personality, as well.  We don’t even know what it is he wants to do with all this power he’s so eager to have.

I still don’t even know what place he has in the overall social structure of this world.  So he’s in charge of a sector.  So what?  Are we talking analogous to a baron or a duke here?  Is he a platoon leader or a battalion commander?  Is he good at this power-gathering, is he the product of nepotism, is he at the bottom of the rung with great ambitions?  WHO KNOWS!

Juliette and Adam talk about how Warner is off-balance and obsessed with her and just really wants her to admit being as cruel as he is, and to do it voluntarily. 

So, yeah, we’ve pretty much abandoned the idea that he wants her for any sort of concrete reason anymore.  Now she’s just here to be a shiny bauble that Warner uses to justify his own twisted self-worth issues.

Breakfast in the blue room has become routine. I eat and don’t ask where the food comes from, whether or not the workers are being paid for what they do, how this building manages to sustain so many lives, pump so much water, or use so much electricity. I bide my time now. I cooperate.

Juliette no longer cares about these issues that caused her such great disgust before, because she’s about to leave and apparently this place can go on being wasteful with her blessing as long as she’s not in it.

One day Warner makes her put on a skimpy outfit, and we get yet another bit of “my body is so dangerous that it feels utterly wrong to expose it to the world.”

That whole thing is still weird to me, and I don’t know what to do with it.  On the one hand, it’s justified by her condition.  On the other hand, if you justify something like that, it just means you put work into writing a story where women have to cover up their bodies to avoid hurting people.

Warner takes her to a dungeon where he’s got a bonafide Bond-villain-level trap laid out for her.  He puts her in a room where spikes come out of the floor and ceiling at random intervals and then retract again, then jump out again.

Why would anyone build this?  You’re in a world of limited resources, why waste it on this?  It’s completely pointless to put this much effort and time and material into something that can be accomplished just as well with a baseball bat to the kneecaps.

He locks her in there with a naked toddler, and of course the point is to make her touch the child to save him from the spikes to see what happens when she does so.  Since she’s in a skimpy outfit, she can’t use her own clothes to do this, except YES SHE CAN SHE CAN TAKE HER TANKTOP OFF AND WRAP UP THE KID IN IT.

LOOK, I KNOW YOU PROBABLY WANT TO KEEP YOUR BOOBIES COVERED FOR WHATEVER REASON, BUT WE’RE TALKING THE LIFE OF A CHILD HERE, YOU CAN SACRIFICE YOUR MODESTY IF YOU HAVE TO, THEY’RE JUST BOOBIES.

But Juliette cares not.  She’s so invested in keeping her torso hidden from male eyes that she decides to pick up the kid bare-handed, even though it makes him scream in pain.

She doesn’t even think about the fact that she is, indeed, still wearing clothing.  It doesn’t enter her mind.  That tanktop is staying on because we must default to modesty, no questions asked, and doing otherwise isn’t even an option.

Kind of sick when that’s more important than the life of a little kid.

I mean, my god, THEY’RE JUST BOOBIES, DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BOYS SEE YOUR BOOBIES?

NOTHING!

NOTHING HAPPENS!

NOT A GOD DAMN THING!

Keeping them covered is fine; I’m not saying that you’re ridiculous for walking down the street with a full-coverage shirt on.  I’ve even been known to complain about the lack of modest necklines in women’s fashion.  But this is a matter of priorities, and a torture chamber is not exactly an everyday, normal-priorities-having occurrence.

Well, after the kid cries from being touched enough, they finally retract the spikes, and then Juliette

CRASHES THROUGH A CONCRETE WALL WITH HER BARE HANDS.

I’m not misreading a bad metaphor.  She really does that.  Warner even points out that she did that, just in case we thought it was metaphorical.  She did it to get at Warner and threaten him with death if he ever made her do that again.

Uh, sweetie, his whole point in this book is to make you do stuff like that and he’s shown no signs of wanting to do anything else.  Why not kill him? 

All the soldiers point guns at her all of a sudden and Warner says he’ll kill anyone that hurts her, but fuck, maybe bullets would just bounce off her for all we know.

Juliette doesn’t even seem surprised that she did it.  She’s all like “yeah, through the wall, so what?  I keel you!”

Sweetie, babe, Juliette, honey…  WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR ADAM TO BREAK YOU OUT OF THAT PLACE IF YOU CAN TEAR THROUGH CONCRETE WALLS WITH YOUR BARE HANDS?

THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING SITTING AROUND PASSIVELY WAITING FOR MEN TO SAVE YOU WHEN YOU’RE THE FUCKING HULK AND ROUGUE ALL WRAPPED UP IN ONE?