Seventeen-year-old Juliette has a lethal touch: skin-to-skin contact with another person causes them agonizing pain, and she has not touched anyone in 264 days. Branded a freak and consumed by guilt over an accident that killed a child, she has been locked away in an isolation cell of an asylum, recording her fractured thoughts in a journal. The world outside has collapsed under the rule of the Reestablishment, a regime promising order in a dying society while crushing freedom. Juliette's solitude breaks when a new cellmate arrives, Adam, a boy she recognizes from childhood. When soldiers come for her, she is delivered to Warner, a young, magnetic, and ruthless military commander who wants to weaponize her deadly ability for the regime. Forced to choose between becoming a tool of oppression and risking everything to escape, Juliette begins to discover she may not be as powerless or as alone as she believed. Told in an intensely interior, lyrical voice that uses crossed-out lines and repetition to render the narrator's unstable mind, the novel opens a dystopian saga about power, control, and self-worth. As alliances form and Juliette's understanding of her gift shifts, she edges toward the possibility that what she has feared as a curse might instead be a source of strength.