Allegiant

by Veronica Roth

  The thread tugs harder, and I stoke the flame with names. Tobias. Caleb. Christina. Matthew. Cara. Zeke. Uriah.

  But I can’t bear up under the serum’s weight. My body falls to the side, and my wounded arm presses to the cold ground. I am drifting. . . .

  It would be nice to float away, a voice in my head says. To see where I will go . . .

  But the fire, the fire.

  The desire to live.

  I am not done yet, I am not.

  I feel like I am digging through my own mind. It is difficult to remember why I came here and why I care about unburdening myself from this beautiful weight. But then my scratching hands find it, the memory of my mother’s face, and the strange angles of her limbs on the pavement, and the blood seeping from my father’s body.

  But they are dead, the voice says. You could join them.

  They died for me, I answer. And now I have something to do, in return. I have to stop other people from losing everything. I have to save the city and the people my mother and father loved.

  If I go to join my parents, I want to carry with me a good reason, not this—this senseless collapsing at the threshold.

  The fire, the fire. It rages within, a campfire and then an inferno, and my body is its fuel. I feel it racing through me, eating away at the weight. There is nothing that can kill me now; I am powerful and invincible and eternal.

  I feel the serum clinging to my skin like oil, but the darkness recedes. I slap a heavy hand over the floor and push myself up.

  Bent at the waist, I shove my shoulder into the double doors, and they squeak across the floor as their seal breaks. I breathe clean air and stand up straighter. I am there, I am there.

  But I am not alone.

  “Don’t move,” David says, raising his gun. “Hello, Tris.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY

  TRIS

  “HOW DID YOU inoculate yourself against the death serum?” he asks me. He’s still sitting in his wheelchair, but you don’t need to be able to walk to fire a gun.

  I blink at him, still dazed.

  “I didn’t,” I say.

  “Don’t be stupid,” David says. “You can’t survive the death serum without an inoculation, and I’m the only person in the compound who possesses that substance.”

  I just stare at him, not sure what to say. I didn’t inoculate myself. The fact that I’m still standing upright is impossible. There’s nothing more to add.

  “I suppose it no longer matters,” he says. “We’re here now.”

  “What are you doing here?” I mumble. My lips feel awkwardly large, hard to talk around. I still feel that oily heaviness on my skin, like death is clinging to me even though I have defeated it.

  I am dimly aware that I left my own gun in the hallway behind me, sure I wouldn’t need it if I made it this far.

  “I knew something was going on,” David says. “You’ve been running around with genetically damaged people all week, Tris, did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He shakes his head. “And then your friend Cara was caught trying to manipulate the lights, but she very wisely knocked herself out before she could tell us anything. So I came here, just in case. I’m sad to say I’m not surprised to see you.”

  “You came here alone?” I say. “Not very smart, are you?”

  His bright eyes squint a little. “Well, you see, I have death serum resistance and a weapon, and you have no way to fight me. There’s no way you can steal four virus devices while I have you at gunpoint. I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for no reason, and it will be at the expense of your life. The death serum may not have killed you, but I am going to. I’m sure you understand—officially we don’t allow capital punishment, but I can’t have you surviving this.”

  He thinks I’m here to steal the weapons that will reset the experiments, not deploy one of them. Of course he does.

  I try to guard my expression, though I’m sure it’s still slack. I sweep my eyes across the room, searching for the device that will release the memory serum virus. I was there when Matthew described it to Caleb in painstaking detail earlier: a black box with a silver keypad, marked with a strip of blue tape with a model number written on it. It is one of the only items on the counter along the left wall, just a few feet away from me. But I can’t move, or else he’ll kill me.

  I’ll have to wait for the right moment, and do it fast.

  “I know what you did,” I say. I start to back up, hoping that the accusation will distract him. “I know you designed the attack simulation. I know you’re responsible for my parents’ deaths—for my mother’s death. I know.”

  “I am not responsible for her death!” David says, the words bursting from him, too loud and too sudden. “I told her what was coming just before the attack began, so she had enough time to escort her loved ones to a safe house. If she had stayed put, she would have lived. But she was a foolish woman who didn’t understand making sacrifices for the greater good, and it killed her!”

  I frown at him. There’s something about his reaction—about the glassiness of his eyes—something that he mumbled when Nita shot him with the fear serum—something about her.

  “Did you love her?” I say. “All those years she was sending you correspondence . . . the reason you never wanted her to stay there . . . the reason you told her you couldn’t read her updates anymore, after she married my father . . .”

  David sits still, like a statue, like a man of stone.

  “I did,” he says. “But that time is past.”

  That must be why he welcomed me into his circle of trust, why he gave me so many opportunities. Because I am a piece of her, wearing her hair and speaking with her voice. Because he has spent his life grasping at her and coming up with nothing.

  I hear footsteps in the hallway outside. The soldiers are coming. Good—I need them to. I need them to be exposed to the airborne serum, to pass it on to the rest of the compound. I hope they wait until the air is clear of death serum.

  “My mother wasn’t a fool,” I say. “She just understood something you didn’t. That it’s not sacrifice if it’s someone else’s life you’re giving away, it’s just evil.”

  I back up another step and say, “She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplaced disgust for another person’s genetics. That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don’t have enough of their own. That’s why I need to stop you from ‘sacrificing’ all those people and their memories. Why I need to rid the world of you once and for all.”

  I shake my head.

  “I didn’t come here to steal anything, David.”

  I twist and lunge toward the device. The gun goes off and pain races through my body. I don’t even know where the bullet hit me.

  I can still hear Caleb repeating the code for Matthew. With a quaking hand I type in the numbers on the keypad.

  The gun goes off again.

  More pain, and black edges on my vision, but I hear Caleb’s voice speaking again. The green button.

  So much pain.

  But how, when my body feels so numb?

  I start to fall, and slam my hand into the keypad on my way down. A light turns on behind the green button.

  I hear a beep, and a churning sound.

  I slide to the floor. I feel something warm on my neck, and under my cheek. Red. Blood is a strange color. Dark.

  From the corner of my eye, I see David slumped over in his chair.

  And my mother walking out from behind him.

  She is dressed in the same clothes she wore the last time I saw her, Abnegation gray, stained with her blood, with bare arms to show her tattoo. There are still bullet holes in her shirt; through them I can see her wounded skin, red but no longer bleeding, like she’s frozen in time. Her dull blond hair is tied back in a knot, but a few loose strands frame her face in gold.

  I know she can�
�t be alive, but I don’t know if I’m seeing her now because I’m delirious from the blood loss or if the death serum has addled my thoughts or if she is here in some other way.

  She kneels next to me and touches a cool hand to my cheek.

  “Hello, Beatrice,” she says, and she smiles.

  “Am I done yet?” I say, and I’m not sure if I actually say it or if I just think it and she hears it.

  “Yes,” she says, her eyes bright with tears. “My dear child, you’ve done so well.”

  “What about the others?” I choke on a sob as the image of Tobias comes into my mind, of how dark and how still his eyes were, how strong and warm his hand was, when we first stood face-to-face. “Tobias, Caleb, my friends?”

  “They’ll care for each other,” she says. “That’s what people do.”

  I smile and close my eyes.

  I feel a thread tugging me again, but this time I know that it isn’t some sinister force dragging me toward death.

  This time I know it’s my mother’s hand, drawing me into her arms.

  And I go gladly into her embrace.

  Can I be forgiven for all I’ve done to get here?

  I want to be.

  I can.

  I believe it.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-ONE

  TOBIAS

  EVELYN BRUSHES THE tears from her eyes with her thumb. We stand by the windows, shoulder to shoulder, watching the snow swirl past. Some of the flakes gather on the windowsill outside, piling at the corners.

  The feeling has returned to my hands. As I stare out at the world, dusted in white, I feel like everything has begun again, and it will be better this time.

  “I think I can get in touch with Marcus over the radio to negotiate a peace agreement,” Evelyn says. “He’ll be listening in; he’d be stupid not to.”

  “Before you do that, I made a promise I have to keep,” I say. I touch Evelyn’s shoulder. I expected to see strain at the edges of her smile, but I don’t.

  I feel a twinge of guilt. I didn’t come here to ask her to lay down arms for me, to trade in everything she’s worked for just to get me back. But then again, I didn’t come here to give her any choice at all. I guess Tris was right—when you have to choose between two bad options, you pick the one that saves the people you love. I wouldn’t have been saving Evelyn by giving her that serum. I would have been destroying her.

  Peter sits with his back to the wall in the hallway. He looks up at me when I lean over him, his dark hair stuck to his forehead from the melted snow.

  “Did you reset her?” he says.

  “No,” I say.

  “Didn’t think you would have the nerve.”

  “It’s not about nerve. You know what? Whatever.” I shake my head and hold up the vial of memory serum. “Are you still set on this?”

  He nods.

  “You could just do the work, you know,” I say. “You could make better decisions, make a better life.”

  “Yeah, I could,” he says. “But I won’t. We both know that.”

  I do know that. I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten. He is afraid that he will not be able to put in that work, that he will squander those days, and that they will leave him worse off than he is now. And I understand that feeling—I understand being afraid of yourself.

  So I have him sit on one of the couches, and I ask him what he wants me to tell him about himself, after his memories disappear like smoke. He just shakes his head. Nothing. He wants to retain nothing.

  Peter takes the vial with a shaking hand and twists off the cap. The liquid trembles inside it, almost spilling over the lip. He holds it under his nose to smell it.

  “How much should I drink?” he says, and I think I hear his teeth chattering.

  “I don’t think it makes a difference,” I say.

  “Okay. Well . . . here goes.” He lifts the vial up to the light like he is toasting me.

  When he touches it to his mouth, I say, “Be brave.”

  Then he swallows.

  And I watch Peter disappear.

  The air outside tastes like ice.

  “Hey! Peter!” I shout, my breaths turning to vapor.

  Peter stands by the doorway to Erudite headquarters, looking clueless. At the sound of his name—which I have told him at least ten times since he drank the serum—he raises his eyebrows, pointing to his chest. Matthew told us people would be disoriented for a while after drinking the memory serum, but I didn’t think “disoriented” meant “stupid” until now.

  I sigh. “Yes, that’s you! For the eleventh time! Come on, let’s go.”

  I thought that when I looked at him after he drank the serum, I would still see the initiate who shoved a butter knife into Edward’s eye, and the boy who tried to kill my girlfriend, and all the other things he has done, stretching backward for as long as I’ve known him. But it’s easier than I thought to see that he has no idea who he is anymore. His eyes still have that wide, innocent look, but this time, I believe it.

  Evelyn and I walk side by side, with Peter trotting behind us. The snow has stopped falling now, but enough has collected on the ground that it squeaks under my shoes.

  We walk to Millennium Park, where the mammoth bean sculpture reflects the moonlight, and then down a set of stairs. As we descend, Evelyn wraps her hand around my elbow to keep her balance, and we exchange a look. I wonder if she is as nervous as I am to face my father again. I wonder if she is nervous every time.

  At the bottom of the steps is a pavilion with two glass blocks, each one at least three times as tall as I am, at either end. This is where we told Marcus and Johanna we would meet them—both parties armed, to be realistic but even.

  They are already there. Johanna isn’t holding a gun, but Marcus is, and he has it trained on Evelyn. I point the gun Evelyn gave me at him, just to be safe. I notice the planes of his skull, showing through his shaved hair, and the jagged path his crooked nose carves down his face.

  “Tobias!” Johanna says. She wears a coat in Amity red, dusted with snowflakes. “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to keep you all from killing each other,” I say. “I’m surprised you’re carrying a gun.”

  I nod to the bulge in her coat pocket, the unmistakable contours of a weapon.

  “Sometimes you have to take difficult measures to ensure peace,” Johanna says. “I believe you agree with that, as a principle.”

  “We’re not here to chat,” Marcus says, looking at Evelyn. “You said you wanted to talk about a treaty.”

  The past few weeks have taken something from him. I can see it in the turned-down corners of his mouth, in the purple skin under his eyes. I see my own eyes set into his skull, and I think of my reflection in the fear landscape, how terrified I was, watching his skin spread over mine like a rash. I am still nervous that I will become him, even now, standing at odds with him with my mother at my side, like I always dreamed I would when I was a child.

  But I don’t think that I’m still afraid.

  “Yes,” Evelyn says. “I have some terms for us both to agree to. I think you will find them fair. If you agree to them, I will step down and surrender whatever weapons I have that my people are not using for personal protection. I will leave the city and not return.”

  Marcus laughs. I’m not sure if it’s a mocking laugh or a disbelieving one. He’s equally capable of either sentiment, an arrogant and deeply suspicious man.

  “Let her finish,” Johanna says quietly, tucking her hands into her sleeves.

  “In return,” Evelyn says, “you will not attack or try to seize control of the city. You will allow those people who wish to leave and seek a new life elsewhere to do so. You will allow those who choose to stay to vote on new leaders and a new social system. And most importantly, you, Marcus, will not be eligible to lead them.”

  It is the only purely selfish term of
the peace agreement. She told me she couldn’t stand the thought of Marcus duping more people into following him, and I didn’t argue with her.

  Johanna raises her eyebrows. I notice that she has pulled her hair back on both sides, to reveal the scar in its entirety. She looks better that way—stronger, when she is not hiding behind a curtain of hair, hiding who she is.

  “No deal,” Marcus says. “I am the leader of these people.”

  “Marcus,” Johanna says.

  He ignores her. “You don’t get to decide whether I lead them or not because you have a grudge against me, Evelyn!”

  “Excuse me,” Johanna says loudly. “Marcus, what she is offering is too good to be true—we get everything we want without all the violence! How can you possibly say no?”

  “Because I am the rightful leader of these people!” Marcus says. “I am the leader of the Allegiant! I—”

  “No, you are not,” Johanna says calmly. “I am the leader of the Allegiant. And you are going to agree to this treaty, or I am going to tell them that you had a chance to end this conflict without bloodshed if you sacrificed your pride, and you said no.”

  Marcus’s passive mask is gone, revealing the malicious face beneath it. But even he can’t argue with Johanna, whose perfect calm and perfect threat have mastered him. He shakes his head but doesn’t argue again.

  “I agree to your terms,” Johanna says, and she holds out her hand, her footsteps squeaking in the snow.

  Evelyn removes her glove fingertip by fingertip, reaches across the gap, and shakes.

  “In the morning we should gather everyone together and tell them the new plan,” Johanna says. “Can you guarantee a safe gathering?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Evelyn says.

  I check my watch. An hour has passed since Amar and Christina separated from us near the Hancock building, which means he probably knows that the serum virus didn’t work. Or maybe he doesn’t. Either way, I have to do what I came here to do—I have to find Zeke and his mother and tell them what happened to Uriah.

  “I should go,” I say to Evelyn. “I have something else to take care of. But I’ll pick you up from the city limits tomorrow afternoon?”