FORTY

After shooting Warner, Juliette runs with Warner’s gun and focuses on a sequence of urgent goals: find Adam, steal a car, recover James and Kenji, learn to drive, and get everyone to safety. Juliette refuses to believe Adam is dead, but the empty streets, fading light, and unknown positions of Warner’s soldiers make the search dangerous.

Juliette hides from a passing soldier and eventually finds Adam’s blood on the pavement. Juliette follows the trail through dim side streets until it disappears near an old steel building. When Juliette cannot open the locked door quietly, panic and desperation overwhelm her, and Juliette punches through the steel. Juliette realizes that the same strange strength that helped her break concrete in Warner’s torture chamber is still part of her, though she does not understand it.

Inside the abandoned factory, Juliette searches in darkness and hears labored breathing. Juliette finds Adam shirtless, badly beaten, wounded in the leg, and hanging by bound wrists from a conveyor system in what was once a slaughterhouse. Adam tells Juliette where to find a hidden knife in his pants, and Juliette uses it to cut him down. Adam is in severe pain, but Adam is alive, and Juliette reassures him that he will not die.

As Juliette helps Adam out, Adam explains that Warner shot him only to disable him, then ordered soldiers to bind him there so Warner could return later and torture him to death. The captors believed no one could break into the reinforced building. Adam sees the mangled steel door and learns that Juliette punched and kicked her way inside, revealing her new physical power to him.

Juliette leaves Adam hidden while she searches for transportation. Juliette finds an abandoned unlocked car with keys still inside and groceries in the backseat, likely left by someone fleeing the alarm and curfew. Juliette helps Adam into the passenger seat, gives him a banana, and tells Adam she shot Warner, though Juliette does not know if Warner is dead. The chapter ends with Juliette revealing the next obstacle: she does not know how to drive.