Juliette wakes up and finds out that, while she was asleep, someone stripped her naked and washed her cleaned her hair.

I’ve never felt so pristine.

I’m too tired to be bothered by it.

Her only reaction is that it’s mildly weird to be clean.

She’s NAKED and someone had hands on her body, which by the way has terrified her until this point because she’s afraid of accidently hurting someone, but this doesn’t even cross her mind now.  Why did anyone even bother with this?  Were they afraid she was going to bring in germs and so she got decontaminated?  Because, really, a quarantine would be more effective; she can bring in nasties that aren’t on her skin.  It’s just so completely bizarre and random and wasteful.  Do they have personnel to be spared giving sponge baths to newbies?  There is no reason for this other than to make Juliette pretty when she wakes up, and all of the creepy implications of it get ignored.

A doctor comes in and asks her how she’s feeling, and she responds with questions of her own.  Instead of answering her and assuring her, he just keeps asking her inane questions, because this doctor is an idiot.  He doesn’t even repeat the questions he fails to get answered, he just moves on to new questions.

“Can I at least make sure you’re doing all right? Then I’ll answer your questions. I promise. Just let me get through the basic protocol here.”

Actually, since a lot of mental state and disorder is based on not knowing what the fuck is going on, explaining the basics to her would calm her down and let her give you a better sense of her baseline health.  Idiot.

“Are you a psychologist?”

“Sort of.” He brushes the hair away from his forehead.

“Sort of?”

He laughs. Pauses. Rolls the pen between his fingers. “Yes. For all intents and purposes, I am a psychologist. Sometimes.”

“What is that supposed to mean … ?”

He parts his lips. Presses them shut.

What’s with the cagey answers?  Either you’ve been trained in the profession or you haven’t.  Say no but you act as one, or yes.  Not that hard.

She’s finally told that Adam is okay, then Kenji comes in and she apologizes for accidently touching him last chapter.  He’s fine, though, fine enough to make awkward come-ons again.

Kenji is there to take her to some dude named Castle.

http://media.tumblr.com/5bbd93d7537b8a8e8218f879b9237020/tumblr_inline_mh3tcgikgW1qmw06n.gif

Sorry, not that Castle.  He’s far too awesome for this story.

The doctor, Winston, says they have a ‘special suit’ for her but doesn’t explain what that is and sends Kenji out to get something else for her because apparently the suit isn’t ready yet.  Then they chat for just long enough for Juliette to act morally superior to Winston.

That whole previous paragraph?  One chapter.

Kenji says they had to destroy the clothes in my duffel bag, too, so I have no idea whose outfit is currently hanging on my frame.

Well that’s suspicious, since the reason they destroyed her other clothes is that they were dirty and bloody.  (Anyone ever heard of washing?  Or saving cloth for rags/patches?  They’re in post-apocalypse land and also living underground, are they just farting out all their new clothes?)

“But what about Adam? Where is James—”

“Wow.” Winston runs a hand through his floppy hair. “You’re just not going to give it up, huh?”

Considering it’s been about ten minutes and also no one will tell her where James is or how Adam is doing besides alive…yeah.

We’re walking through an entire city underground, hallways and passageways, smooth stone floors, rough walls left untouched.

How?  How did they make all of this?  Do you not realize how incredibly energy-intensive it is to build underground?

And they’re having to do this on the sly in a resource-pocalypse.

“How do you find the electricity necessary to run this place?” I look more closely at the unidentifiable machines, the flickering screens, the unmistakable humming of hundreds of computers built into the framework of this underground world.

Kenji tugs on a stray strand of my hair. I spin around. “We steal it.”

THAT IS NOT AN ADEQUATE EXPLAINTION, ESPECIALLY IF THERE’S AN “ENTIRE CITY” HERE, THAT WOULD TAKE INCREDIBLE AMOUNTS OF ENERGY AND STEALING IT WOULD BE VERY, VERY NOTICABLE.  Forget about the machines that she’s looking at, what about light, air, and water?  They’d have to keep the lights on all day, pump water in and out, and have some sort of ventilation system to keep everyone from suffocating.  And do this for a whole city. 

Adam drops the bomb that this Castle dude wanted her and Kenji’s involvement in the army and Adam’s life was all intentional to get to her.

Damn, everyone is sniffing after this chick, aren’t they?  Which just makes it all the stranger that she was locked up in a torture prison for so long.  Why did she get put there in the first place if she’s in such high demand?

It’s an empty space, impressive in its sparseness. The floors and ceilings are built by bricks carefully pieced together. Everything feels old and ancient, but somehow modern technology is keeping this place alive. Artificial lighting illuminates the cavernous dimensions,

First these idiots waste energy by building and maintaining large open spaces that aren’t needed, then they compound the problem by keeping every bit of it illuminated.

On stolen energy.

While supposedly hiding.

Castle arrives, and he wants the same thing everyone else does: her superpowers.  Juliette says she won’t cooperate until they show her Jamie so she can be sure he’s alive.  He agrees and takes her on a tour of the place.  The group here is called Omega Point.

“We’ve been planning, organizing, mapping out our strategy for many years now. The collapse of our human society should not come as a surprise. We brought it upon ourselves.

“The question wasn’t whether things would fall apart,” he continues. “Only when.

[…]

“I mean things are not nearly as bad as The Reestablishment wants us to think they are.”

“But there’s no food—”

“That they give you access to.”

So, he starts off by saying that the apocalypse was inevitable, then follows it up by saying there was no apocalypse and the Reestablishment faked all of that.

Why would they do that?  Actually, we know so very little of the world that I can’t even decide how to react to this.  The only bit we know, the lack of resources and failing environment, is so spotty and glanced over that I can’t tell what this revelation even means.  I don’t know what’s going on outside of this little five-feet-around-Juliette bubble, so how do I know if this Satan evil or just megalomania evil?

“There is still a chance to change things. We can provide fresh drinking water to all people. We can make sure crops are not regulated for profit; we can ensure that they are not genetically altered to benefit manufacturers. Our people are dying because we are feeding them poison. Animals are dying because we are forcing them to eat waste, forcing them to live in their own filth, caging them together and abusing them. Plants are withering away because we are dumping chemicals into the earth that make them hazardous to our health. But these are things we can fix.

Hey, author.  Your soapbox is showing.

These are valid issues to bring up, even though they’re very simplified here, but you’d expect them to come up in a modern discourse, not a future environment apocalypse story.  Without more details, it really feels like exactly what we’ve got now, except for some reason everyone’s dead and there’s no birds anymore.  (Which, now that I think about it, would seriously fuck over everyone.  Not only do they play a big part in pest control, they’re crucial to how several species of plants disperse their seeds and reproduce.)

When Juliette asks for proof, he points out that their compound survives because they’ve found the Reestablishment’s “secret” farms and warehouses full of food and they steal from it.  Still begging the question of how they haven’t been caught.  There’s hundreds of people here, all surviving off of thievery.  That’s really noticeable.

Also, no, when you fuck up the environment bad enough that farms fail, you can’t keep back a few working farms for funsies.  The environment is fucked.  We’re interdependent; you can’t keep things going piecemeal like that.

Still no word on why they’ve done this.  Presumably to make the rest of humanity easier to control, but when all of humanity is a shivering, huddled sob fest, why would you even want to rule over that?

They finally get to where Adam is, and he’s sleeping peacefully and looks fine.  Then Castle drops the news that there are other “gifted” people like her around here, with the implication that Adam is being healed by their magic, I guess.