Juliette slides down a rope out her window (literally slides, why are these kids so stupid?) and then thinks that escaping was too easy.

It makes me think we did something wrong.

No shit, you failed to shoot Warner even after he point-blank told you all the reasons you should. 

A few soldiers pop their heads out of the shattered window and I’m frantic to shimmy down the rope but they’re already moving to unlatch the anchor.

Why is no one trying to follow her?  Or get on walky-talkies and send someone around to intercept?

Why didn’t Warner try to follow?

They run into a civilian housing area, where sirens have gone off telling everyone to go inside and hide from the ‘rebels,’ which seems…both good and bad.  At least we don’t have to worry about collateral damage, but it seems quite lazy to just give them a conveniently empty video game level to run through and hide in.  The fact that there’s no one outside of a handful of main characters and some mook soldiers makes this world seem very unfinished.  We don’t know anything about where Warner, Juliette, or this ‘sector’ fit into the larger world, and now we don’t know what the civilians are doing or what their lives are like or anything except that the sorta kinda exist and have shitty houses here.  There’s simply no sense of a larger world, just the isolated experiences of a few people who are unconnected to anything but each other.

They run around while being shot at until Juliette gets too tired to carry on so Adam has to carry her.

Fucking really?  She can crash through concrete walls, but we’re still going to go for the old damsel in distress routine?

Juliette doesn’t even feel like a person anymore.  She’s more like a really fancy gun that Adam and Warner are fighting over.  She can’t move on her own, she can’t decide to do things on her own, she can’t and/or refuses to use her powers on her own.  She’s deadly, but so is any good handgun, and handguns also can’t fire themselves off or run away.

I wonder what I must look like, tattered and wild in this shredded dress. The slit Warner created now stops at my hip bone. I must look like a crazed animal.

Gasp!  Her clothing is ripped!  She’s showing her hips!  How wild and savage!

I hate you, book.

They hop a fence and Adam explains that all soldiers have a biochemical tracking serum in them, which of course can’t be removed because it’s part of their blood or some shit, but it’s okay because this spot they’re in now is the remains of an old nuclear power plant.

Which is…right next to a civilian housing development?

Why?

You’ve got all those abandoned old houses that we drove through at the start of the book, but you’ve decided to build right next to the radioactive ruins of a power plant?

Also, if there’s a limited number of places where your tracking won’t work, then they’ll know to go search those area once you go ‘offline’, so not actually a plus.

Also, also

One day the whole thing exploded.

No. 

Adam says there’s enough radiation around to kill people but it’s never bothered him.  Maybe because cancer takes a while to set in, you fucking moron.

Adam then goes on to say that the whole “tracking device went caput” thing happened before, specifically mentions that Warner was aware of it, and then goes on to say that they’ll probably just think he’s dead.  The fuck is wrong with you, book?  How did you put those two thoughts so close together and not realize how stupid it sounds?

Oh, and also Juliette is immune to the radiation, too, which Adam knows because it was in her medical files for some godforsaken reason.

YOU HAVE A GIRL WHO IS IMMUNE TO RADIATION EFFECTS AND YOU TRIED TO CURE HER OF THAT?  HOW MANY DIFFERENT WAYS CAN YOU FUCK UP YOUR OWN PREMISE, BOOK?

They sit around and snuggle for a while, then Adam takes her to a place where he’s hidden a tank for them to use.

A tank.

Seriously.

He says he reported it broken and it just got left in place, abandoned, because Warner didn’t want to admit he’d broken a “500-thousand-dollar” tank.  First, that’s kind of cheap for a tank.  Second, if they’re really worried about cost, they should want to come in and salvage it for parts so they don’t have to spend all that money one a new tank.

Third, money is only an issue if you’ve got a normal working economy.  A totalitarian government can just point at a factory and say “make tanks now.”  I really want to know why they’re still working on a basically capitalist system when they’re both near-post-apocalypse and evil dictatorship.  Why is money even still a thing?  The cost should be measured in labor and materials, not money, since money sinks far down on the list of concerns once you’re talking about not having enough food to go around.

Fourth, tanks break.  It’s what they do.  Why would you feel the need to hide that?

“I had a feeling it would come in handy one day. It’s always good to be prepared.”

Prepared. He was always prepared. To run. To escape.

I wonder why.

Juliette will fail to ask this question out loud, because she gets snuggles instead, and snuggles are apparently more important.  Oh, sorry, first aid, not snuggles.  But the narration reads like snuggles, what with how twitterpated Juliette acts.

They get going and Adam says they’re heading to his house.  I guess concerns about that whole tracking thing are…forgotten?

As they drive along, Juliette has plenty of time to sit quietly and monologue at us.  The action, as illogical as it was, did at least force her to give us some semi-straight narration to explain the events to us.  I miss that.  Now she’s just angsting about Warner touching her and wondering if Adam’s ability to do the same is only temporary.

She starts angsting out loud about how Adam is doing all this stuff for her and she doesn’t know why, and he stops driving long enough to remind her that it’s not because he has any moral compass or convictions or ideals.  Nope, it’s all because he loves her, and he loves her because she’s “good.”

 “How can you be sure?”

His lips are so close to mine. “Because you still give a damn about the world.”

Um, are you sure?  She hasn’t done anything except be mildly concerned about the cost of one building, and even that only lasted a couple of chapters.  She sure as shit didn’t care about the civilians in that compound they were running through, or show any curiosity about what the soldiers were up to, who they were getting ready to attack, if they were volunteers or draftees…really, she hasn’t concerned herself with the world AT ALL in this book.  She doesn’t wonder about it or have any moral opinions about it and lord knows she’s not tried to DO anything about it.

But enough of that, it’s teenaged kissy times again!

They get to where they’re going and someone comes out of the house to excitedly greet Adam and give hugs and squeal in glee that he’s home “for good.”

Uh…tracking device?  Remember that thing?  You’re not in the radiation field anymore, and we already know that you come back “online” after you leave it, so…??????

This new person is a kid, and he’s Adam’s brother.  His name is James.

James is a handful of inches short of my height, but it’s obvious in his face that he’s young, unblemished, untouched by most of the world’s harsh realities.

…in a world where people routinely starve to death because there’s not enough food, that’s quite an important description.  You can’t just toss that out there as shorthand for saying that he’s innocent.  What you’re really saying is “he’s had enough food to grow up healthy, and either he’s been sheltered enough not to realize what the means or he’s a tiny sociopath.”

I think I’m going to hate James.  Either the kid himself or what he does to the book.  Either way, this introduction does not bode well.