Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  SENATOR GOO: Pardon me for interrupting. We very much appreciate your testimony on this matter. But before you proceed, I’d like to ask Ms. Andrews a question.

  MATTHEW WEEKES: Um. I don’t think—

  SLOANE ANDREWS: Go for it, Senator.

  SENATOR GOO: Thank you, Ms. Andrews. I was wondering—I’ve always wondered—how did you know that the Dark One would fall for such a trap?

  SLOANE ANDREWS: Well, for one thing, I figured if he saw one of the people fated to destroy him—or whatever the prophecy says—making an open challenge, he wouldn’t be able to resist going out to kill them.

  SENATOR GOO: Yes, I’ve heard you give that reasoning in several interviews since the Dark One’s defeat. But I can’t help but think that it was just as likely he would know you were setting a trap.

  [silence]

  SENATOR GOO: Ms. Andrews?

  SLOANE ANDREWS: Sorry, I—it’s hard to explain. I had had—I guess I’d had a very specific experience of the Dark One, a unique experience, when I was in captivity. It was only twenty-four hours, but . . . it was the closest anyone had ever been to him without dying or being in his thrall. Even his followers, the ones we’d gotten to question, didn’t seem to know much about him.

  SENATOR GOO: I understand this is hard for you to talk about, Ms. Andrews. I was hoping that you might try so that the official record can reflect reality as accurately as possible.

  SLOANE ANDREWS: Yeah. Well—the real explanation is a little more complicated than the one I’ve given before.

  SENATOR GOO: I think everyone here understands that you have shared what you were able to thus far, Ms. Andrews.

  SLOANE ANDREWS: I guess so. Well—it wasn’t so much that I thought just any of us down on that bridge would be able to lure him there. And that’s what it was—luring. Figuring out what bait he wouldn’t be able to resist. Which, uh . . . was me. I was the bait.

  SENATOR GOO: Because . . .

  ESTHER PARK: Because he was kind of obsessed with her, okay?

  SLOANE ANDREWS: I think he—he said we were similar. Can we move on? I don’t get it either, I promise. The guy was—

  ESTHER PARK: A couple bananas short of a bunch.

  INES MEJIA: Or a couple bananas in excess of a bunch.

  SLOANE ANDREWS: It doesn’t really matter why it worked, anyway; we just knew it would. So we all suited up—

  MATTHEW WEEKES: Which is to say, we got our artifacts, which we had all acquired as part of our previous work with ARIS—

  SENATOR GOO: And these artifacts were intended for what purpose?

  MATTHEW WEEKES: Weapons. Magical weapons, to be exact. ARIS had outfitted us with objects of legend, most of which had been generously provided by other governments around the world. The Golden Bough and the Ring of Gyges were on loan from Greece; the Gjallarhorn came in from Sweden; the Freikugeln—magic bullets—had been taken from Germany during World War II by [redacted], so they were easy enough—

  ESTHER PARK: [redacted] prefers if you say “allegedly.”

  MATTHEW WEEKES: Allegedly taken, sure. And Sloane had Koschei’s Needle. It turned out that the Ring of Gyges was useless to us, but the other items channeled magic somewhat reliably, so we figured if we used them all at once, we’d have a higher likelihood of actually doing something. We’d gotten better at consistency, but it doesn’t hurt to have a contingency plan—

  INES MEJIA: I stayed where I was, to make sure nobody left the condo. I must have cleaned that window twenty times, almost ran out of Windex—

  ESTHER PARK: Matt and I took hiding spots at either end of the bridge. I was in the tower north of the river, and Matt was south of it, on the river walk. Albie wanted to come, but since he was still pretty beat up, we left him behind. Tried to, anyway.

  SENATOR GOO: And where is Mr. Summers today?

  MATTHEW WEEKES: He’s—he wasn’t feeling well. He was really sorry to miss this, but he cleared me to tell his part of things. Anyway, Esther and I had taken up our positions, and Sloane—

  SLOANE ANDREWS: I set out alone, on foot. I stopped in the middle of the bridge. With the Needle. I wanted—my intention was to do something that was hard to ignore in order to lure him out. I wasn’t sure what it would be, but magic sometimes takes a shape of its own, as if it doesn’t matter what we want from it. A bright light came out of the Needle, kind of like—a thread, I guess. Golden. Up to the sky. There’s footage of it in the official record—

  SENATOR GOO: Several bystanders submitted footage of this incident in advance of this hearing, and they are labeled Exhibit 23, A through E.

  SLOANE ANDREWS: Anyway, it worked. He came down. He wasn’t subtle about it either. Blew open the side of Trump Tower and floated down like he was wire-flying in a stage play or whatever. Landed right in front of me. He spoke to me. I don’t—I’m not sure what he said. Something about me summoning him, about how he knew it was a trap but he needed something from me. But I never found out what that was because—

  ESTHER PARK: We weren’t going to give him time to do anything to her; we acted right away. I had the Horn, and Matt had the Bough, and Ines was—

  INES MEJIA: Running as fast as fucking possible down five million flights of stairs, because the goddamn elevator stopped working the second he blew out the windows—

  MATTHEW WEEKES: The Horn was letting out this frequency, too low for us to hear but vibrating in the street—it drove a massive crack through the pavement right under Sloane and the Dark One, and I was adding to it with the Bough, but we could both tell it wasn’t going to be enough. The Dark One had set up some kind of protective barrier around him and Sloane, and she was screaming—

  SLOANE ANDREWS: I’m not sure what he was doing to me. It felt like he was trying to rip me apart. It was all I could do just to hold on to the Needle. No chance of me actually thinking straight long enough to use it.

  MATTHEW WEEKES: But then—from the bridge just west of the one we were on, the one that State Street runs across—

  SLOANE ANDREWS: The Bataan-Corregidor Memorial Bridge.

  MATTHEW WEEKES: Yeah, that one. Anyway, it was Albie. He had the Freikugeln in his fist and he was aiming them out the open window of a taxi. I think you guys gave the taxi driver the Medal of Honor. One of a handful of private citizens to get it. Anyway, then everything just . . . broke.

  SENATOR GOO: I will refer everyone to Exhibit 24, A through R, for footage of this event from a . . . wide variety of angles, submitted by civilian bystanders in advance of this hearing. Essentially, the entirety of Trump Tower pulled free of its moorings, taking along with it the Wabash Avenue Bridge with the Dark One and Miss Andrews on top of it. For approximately 1.23 seconds, everything remained suspended in midair and then radiated outward from a central point inside the . . . floating building. The steel and glass projectiles caused forty-five casualties and upward of two hundred injuries as well as a significant amount of property damage.

  ESTHER PARK: We’re . . . sorry?

  SENATOR GOO: We’ll be expecting your reparation money any day now, Ms. Park.

  [silence]

  SENATOR GOO: That was a joke.

  MATTHEW WEEKES: We all got knocked out at that point, so none of us remember—

  SLOANE ANDREWS: I remember something. I remember—falling. Into water. The river. I sank all the way to the bottom with the concrete from the bridge. That was when I blacked out. I woke up on the lake shore. Still not sure how I got there, why I didn’t just drown. And the Dark One, he was . . . gone.

  14

  SLOANE WALKED a winding path through the tents that surrounded the Drain site. It had rained earlier, so the ground was soft beneath her boots. There were fewer people milling around than when she had come during the day, and those who were still out were gathered around portable grills and small fires with lanterns hanging above their heads or floodlights attached to the front of their tents. She heard a few bars of “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” coming from one of the sites, and the
words chased her, as if carried on the cold wind, all the way to the Dome.

  Sloane stopped at the security barrier that separated the crowd of seekers—no matter what they were here for, they were all looking for something—from the Drain site. She was not far now from the cluster of tents she had stomped over to a few days ago to punch that guy in the face.

  But it felt like a dream to her now. Albie was gone, which meant it didn’t matter what some Dark One acolyte called her or what he wanted. Albie was gone, and now there was only what needed to be done and the one willing to do it.

  No one had recognized her, nor would anyone. She had changed into new clothes in the car. They were shapeless and black, disguising anything feminine about her figure. She was tall enough to be mistaken for a man. A hood was secured over her hair, and over her nose and mouth, she had on a neoprene mask she wore when running in the dead of winter. She was glad she hadn’t put on makeup that day—nothing to wipe off. ARIS would suspect her, she was sure, as soon as they realized what she had done. But the disguise would buy her some time.

  Sloane took the broken pieces of Koschei’s Needle from the container in her back pocket. She had broken it herself. After Bert came after her and Albie, unnecessarily, and died because of it, and after being a captive of the Dark One, she was repulsed by the Needle in her flesh. She had argued with the people at ARIS when they refused to remove it; they’d said there was no way to know how it would behave if they disturbed it. So one night, with one foot in a nightmare and one foot in reality, Sloane had gnawed the Needle out of her own hand and ripped it loose with her teeth. Then, with the taste of coppery blood in her mouth, she had snapped the artifact in half—but it hadn’t been as easy as a needle snapping in a sewing machine because you hadn’t threaded it properly. It had taken every ounce of her strength, every ounce of the Needle’s own magic. She had collapsed afterward, all her energy exhausted, and woken up in a hospital, her hand bandaged, a week later.

  She hadn’t touched the Needle bare-handed since then, afraid it would somehow leap back under her skin. But it seemed that, broken, it didn’t have the same power it had possessed when she had found it at the bottom of the ocean. She felt its magic like the simmer of water about to boil. It tingled and burned inside her, but the pull of it wasn’t irresistible.

  Magic was not a weapon or even an amoral source of energy—it was an infection. Wherever it was, people died, places turned rotten, and the order of things was disrupted, sometimes irreparably. But there was no other weapon against the magic ARIS had developed than magic itself.

  Sloane held the two pieces of the Needle up to the light from the security station. Two pinpricks of white glinted on its surface. It was like two magnets with opposite polarity—she could feel the bond that formed between the two ends and the irrepressible need to join. But she wouldn’t let them. Then what felt like fire raced down her fingers and the back of her right hand, her arm, her shoulder; it boiled in her blood and singed her spine, and she felt the tug of the Needle, knew it wanted to join with her, too, just as it wanted to mend itself.

  She gritted her teeth and pushed back. The pieces of the Needle resisted, struggling toward her, and she turned them, held them like knives in the center of her fist.

  Her palm felt like she had poured acid over it, but she held tight to the Needle fragments and walked toward the security station. The guard—not the same one who had been there the last time she visited but wearing the same bland uniform—called out for her to stop. She walked straight toward the gate.

  What came next felt like a reflex, the same achy tickling that followed a doctor’s mallet striking the knee. She jerked the two halves of the Needle up, and the gate lifted—frame and all—high above her head. It stayed there, unwavering, as she and the guard both looked up at it. The wind shivered through the chain links, but otherwise everything was silent.

  Sloane raised an eyebrow at the guard. He didn’t tell her to stop again.

  The gate remained suspended even after she passed under it. When she looked over her shoulder, it was still there, hanging fifty feet above her head as if strung from the clouds.

  The front entrance of the Dome met the same fate. The doors pulled effortlessly from their hinges and burst through the roof. The hole they left behind was slim and rectangular, like the cut of a knife.

  The Dome ceiling was dark now, but emergency lights glowed here and there, showing the spokes of the Dome’s bicycle-wheel interior, paths to the emergency exits. A guard with a Taser stood in Sloane’s path.

  “Sir, put your . . . weapon . . . down,” he said.

  The Needle seemed to know that he was talking about it—Sloane winced as the burning in her palm intensified. Her voice would give her away, so she didn’t speak, just shook her head.

  He held out the Taser.

  She held out the broken Needle.

  The Taser exploded into fine particles of black dust. A thread of light wrapped around the security guard’s hand, making him scream.

  Sloane gave him a wide berth. There was no time for sympathy or wonder. She ran toward the room where she had felt the prototype. She felt it again now, pulsing, like the heart beneath the floorboards in that Edgar Allan Poe story. It called to something inside her and something inside the Needle. Magic beckoned to magic, as it always did.

  As the Dark One had once beckoned to her.

  Hello, Sloane. Did you get some sleep?

  I hope so, because you have a big decision to make today.

  She pushed the Dark One’s words out of her mind and chased the feeling down, only then allowing herself to articulate what she had always known: That the feeling of magic speaking to her was the feeling of something coming back to life. A new pulse, new circulation in an unused limb.

  It made her into something new.

  The doors to the laboratory where the prototype was held shot up and stayed, stable, just beneath the curve of the Dome. Sloane walked through the door frame, more cautious now than she had been before. The laboratory was white: white walls, white floors, white tables. There was a row of microscopes on one table, slim computer monitors on another. An eyewash station, an emergency shower. Sturdy ducts twisted together in the ceiling—which was also painted white—terminating in massive vents.

  Sloane took all this in, but her focus went right to the prototype, which sat on its own lab table on a metal platform. Someone had put red tape around it. It was, as Ines had predicted, a box. Narrow enough to fit in a palm, but about a foot long, made of matte metal. Her body trembled as she approached it, the broken Needle held out.

  And then: A feeling as familiar to her as air in her lungs. She had felt it only once before, that hunger, that emptiness that demanded filling—just before the Needle killed everyone on the Dive with her. Then, it had been shapeless, just a want so potent she’d been forced to give in to it.

  And now she wanted only one thing: to destroy this piece of shit before it could hurt anything—or anyone—else.

  Her want caught on the Needle like thread going through the eye of it, and then—

  Light—

  She smelled like dust and smoke.

  When she came to, after, it was still dark. In a perfect circle around her body, the laboratory floor was intact and just as clean as when she had first walked in. But beyond that was rubble. The Dome was still mostly whole, but there was a huge dent in the side, like a bite taken out of an apple. The laboratory—and the prototype with it—was now just gravel and metal fragments that were too small to piece back together.

  For a long time, she sat on the circle of clean floor and shook. But the sun was rising. So she forced herself to stand up, then stumbled out of the wreckage. On her way out, she saw a security guard lying on the ground near an exterior door. She was lucky she had woken up first.

  Assuming he was unconscious, not dead.

  She didn’t see any others. Maybe they had fled at the first sight of magic. She didn’t blame them—after all, the
Dark One was the only magic-user most people had ever heard of, so the Drains had taught people that if they saw any evidence of magic, it was best to run.

  The light and the sound had woken the seekers in their tents, and now they were standing as close to the security barrier as they could get. Sloane walked past a séance and a group of men talking excitedly about “his return.” No one paid any attention to her.

  She got into her car and drove to a nearby forest preserve. It was still hours until the funeral. She walked deep into the woods to set a fire, gathering kindling as she went. She stacked it in one of the metal trashcans that were staggered along the paths, lit it with a match, waited for the flames to build and catch the thicker logs she added, and then stripped to her underwear.

  She burned the clothes she had worn to the Drain site and changed into yesterday’s outfit. As the fabric burned down to cinders, she walked out of the woods, branches scratching her neck and ears and shoulders, underbrush grazing her ankles. She shook the dust from her hair, then braided it tightly. When she looked at her reflection in the dark screen of her phone—turned off since the night before—she couldn’t help but feel like all her efforts to look normal had been wasted. She looked crazed, her eyes too wide, her jaw bulging with tension. Matt would know something had happened. It didn’t matter.