Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  Sloane squeezed Esther’s hand hard and hoped the pressure would steady her. She wasn’t good at consoling people; that had been Albie’s job. “Your mom knows everything she needs to know,” she said. “That her daughter saved the world. And loves her.”

  Esther’s head bobbed. “Okay.” She swallowed. “Yeah.”

  A taxi pulled up to the curb. They all piled in, quieting down on the drive back to the Camel. Sloane looked out the window, but she didn’t see anything they passed. All she could think about was how everything that happened now—including getting pulled into a parallel dimension—would be After Albie. Like a new era. Sloane AA.

  Some things split your life in half.

  TOP SECRET

  MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

  TO: Director, Project Delphi

  FROM: Captain Kyros Stasiak, Cordus Protective Forces

  SUBJECT: Elsberry, MO

  Dear Director,

  I understand your point of view regarding the destructive incident in Elsberry, MO—I initially shared it myself. However, after interviewing dozens of people and observing the aftermath myself, I want to assure you that the reports were neither imagined nor exaggerated. Witnesses did indeed observe a figure fitting the description of the man Merlin saw at the site of the massacre of the first Army of Flickering; he was followed by a troop of what appeared to be reanimated corpses. Whether there was actually anything supernatural about the supposed corpses remains to be seen, but the descriptions are consistent, specific, and reliable.

  We are working to repair the town hall, which was obliterated, and we have offered modest reparations to the families of the dead to cover funeral costs. But what we would rather give them is an explanation of how their loved ones died and who killed them. They have begun calling him “the Resurrectionist.” Let us hope he can be apprehended before the nickname catches on.

  Sincerely,

  Captain Kyros Stasiak

  Cordus Protective Forces

  TOP SECRET

  TOP SECRET

  MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

  TO: Director, Project Delphi

  FROM: Captain Kyros Stasiak, Cordus Protective Forces

  SUBJECT: RE: Elsberry, MO

  Dear Director,

  Two days ago, we received a report that there had been a disturbance at Roe’s Hill Cemetery on the North Side of Chicago. The reports said that huge amounts of earth had been displaced in an apparently magical fashion, exposing countless graves to the elements. The case had been tied up in local (nonmagical) law enforcement for a few months before they realized magic had been involved and referred it to us. We sent an officer to investigate the incident. What we discovered is that dozens of graves had been dug up, their coffins opened, and the bodies therein stolen. Upon further investigation, it seems that all of the aforementioned bodies belonged to soldiers of the first Army of Flickering.

  I cannot help but make a connection between the Resurrectionist’s last attack in Peoria, Illinois—where he was again seen with a small army of what was described as reanimated corpses (to be specific: skin rotted, bones exposed, fingernails clawlike, some holding their own severed limbs)—and this incident. The coffins were unearthed at approximately the same time as the Resurrectionist’s first attack. I submit that perhaps the Resurrectionist has enacted some sick magical working that we do not presently comprehend—he has successfully raised an army from the dead.

  I trust you will find this as disturbing as I do. Pardon my language, but what kind of twisted son of a bitch massacres an army and then raises them from the dead to take down their former leader?

  I wish I had better news.

  Sincerely,

  Captain Kyros Stasiak

  Cordus Protective Forces

  TOP SECRET

  24

  THE FIRST TIME she had ever seen Matt was at the Farmhouse, which is what they called the building where they had trained to defeat the Dark One. He had been holding on to the chain of the porch swing, gangly, his hair in short dreadlocks. He had told her she had a weird name and asked her how she got it. When she told him she and her brother were named after characters in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, he had laughed, and his smile had been so wide that she liked him right away.

  There was something about Matt standing in the hallway holding the door frame that reminded her of the teenager she had known. But he had stopped smiling that way a long time ago. Long before they started dating.

  He certainly wasn’t smiling now.

  “Nice note,” he said, holding up the piece of paper Sloane had slipped under his door before they left.

  Matt—

  We’re going to meet Alternate Bert. Just have to know. Taking chaperones, so don’t worry.

  —Slo and Essy

  He crumpled it up and threw it at her feet. It bounced up against her shins and settled near the wall.

  “Well, I actually told you where I was going this time,” Sloane said coolly.

  “That isn’t the issue,” Matt said. “We’re supposed to be a team, Sloane.”

  “You don’t want a team,” Sloane said. “You want obedience.”

  Matt flinched like she had hit him and stepped back. She felt a twinge of regret. But she was tired of bracing herself every time she wanted to do something, say something, go somewhere. And not just here in Genetrix, but anywhere. He was a kind man, but his disapproval was paternalistic, at best, and, at worst, oppressive.

  “Wow, hey, none of this,” Esther said before Matt could respond. She put herself between them, holding one hand out to Sloane and the other out to Matt. “It’s not like Sloane dragged me along, Matt. I agreed with her that it would be helpful, and I knew you wouldn’t want to come, so—”

  “No, you knew that if you told me about it before you left, I would argue with you,” Matt said, scowling. “You don’t just get to go behind my back because you know I disagree with you! Have I ever done that to either of you?”

  “Well, maybe if you ever wanted to do anything—”

  “Sloane, shut up!” Esther snapped. “Stop being such a fucking child.”

  Heat rushed into Sloane’s face. Esther pinched her nose as if forcing tension away. Sloane kept forgetting how tired Esther had looked when she dragged herself out of the river. Nothing was waiting for Sloane back on Earth except familiarity and an apartment she needed to move out of. But waiting for Esther was a dying parent. Every moment they spent here was, for her, a moment too long.

  “You make a fair point,” Esther said to Matt. “Right, Sloane?”

  “You don’t have to pressure her into agreeing with you,” Matt said.

  “She’s not,” Sloane forced herself to say. “It is a fair point. Sorry.”

  Esther sighed with obvious relief and kicked off one of her shoes so it landed somewhere in the bedroom she had claimed. The other one soon joined it, and she stood in flat feet, her pink lipstick faded everywhere but the outline of her mouth, her eye makeup smeared under her lower lashes. The Essy of Insta! fame was gone.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “Well, how was he?”

  “A dick,” Sloane said.

  “He was not a dick,” Esther said. “He was a mailman with a dead wife. No interest in government work or magic.”

  “So he wasn’t like Bert.” Matt looked triumphant. “I told Esther earlier, just because someone’s got the same genes as their parallel counterpart—”

  “He was a lot like Bert, actually.” Sloane crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “He was listening to Neil Young. He had all these books on magical objects of legend. He talked like Bert, teared up like Bert; he had fucking gnomes in his front yard. He was Bert, but the spread of magic derailed him.”

  “How could the spread of magic derail him? Bert was fascinated by magic,” Matt said. “He would have loved for it to become widespread.”

  “No, Bert was fascinated by mystery,” Sloane said. “He liked knowing things that no one else knew and finding out that m
yths were real, so once magic became this known quantity that you could control with tech and frequencies, he lost interest.” She stared at her shoes, covered in dust and dirt and puddle water. “He was similar enough that I lost it a little,” she said. “He was similar enough that I think it’s possible—maybe even likely—that the Resurrectionist could be the alternate version of the Dark One.”

  “Our Dark One was just making use of magic that most of Earth didn’t believe existed,” Matt said. “I guess it makes sense that in a world where magic is widely known to exist, he would delve deeper into what was possible—like bring an army back from the dead.”

  Sloane nodded.

  “I mean, if a normal person knew how to bring someone back from death, they wouldn’t build a freaking army. They would bring back loved ones, family, friends,” Esther said.

  Sloane thought of Cameron at the community swimming pool, teaching her how to backflip into the water. There were so many things she hadn’t said to him. Things she could say if she figured out how to raise the dead.

  Esther’s voice sounded strained as she continued, as if she was thinking of her own father, lost to the Dark One, and her mother, who wouldn’t be around much longer: “But the Dark One wasn’t—isn’t normal.”

  “The good news—well, the slightly better than horrible news,” Sloane said, “is that we do know the Dark One a little. So we’re not facing a completely unknown enemy here. Like you said the other day, Matt—we’ve done this before.”

  It was a better apology than the earlier one, in a way; it acknowledged that he had been right to find hope in the idea that they had experienced this already. She was remembering, only it didn’t feel like memory, not really. It felt like becoming something she had already been. A pared-down Sloane, whittled to her essential elements. A clenched jaw and a clear head and a single purpose: the end of the Dark One.

  “I know you hate the siphons, Slo, but you have to keep working on it,” Matt said. “We all do. That’s the next step for us here—learn how to use magic, because it’s the best weapon we have.”

  “Never thought I’d wish I still had the Needle stuck in my hand,” Sloane said. “But I’m starting to.”

  Over the next week, Sloane grew to despise the siphon. She hated its weight, its coldness, the feeling of the strings that pulled it tight to her knuckles. It was useless and inert on her hand no matter which working she tried. Cyrielle had given up on the magical breath and had attempted to teach her half a dozen small workings, each of which had the same result: nothing. The Resurrectionist was just a specter, a legend, but the siphon was an enemy she could see and touch.

  The others were mastering theirs without much difficulty. Matt had a knack for moving objects without touching them. Esther had been clumsy with all wrist-siphon workings, but Cyrielle, in a stroke of genius, had gotten a throat siphon for her, and now Esther could mimic anyone’s voice at will.

  Every morning, Sloane considered smashing the siphon with one of the books at her bedside. The only thing that stopped her was fear of the Resurrectionist and the thought of the Drain.

  Sloane considered going back to the Tankard to see Mox again but decided against it. Instead she found other ways to occupy herself. She took Kyros running along the lakefront despite the frosty air. She read the stack of books she had found in her room. She even managed to drag Esther to the Art Institute, where there was now an entire wing dedicated to Art Workings. She had wandered for hours through an exhibit of photographs that turned into three-­dimensional scenes when you drew close, to make you feel like you were walking around inside them. She was beginning to understand the Unrealists—how could you trust reality when reality was so easily manipulated?

  The only upside to the constant siphon frustration was how tiring it was. The heavy sleep kept her clear of the worst of her nightmares, though nothing could entirely protect her from them. More often than not, she dreamed about Albie, about chasing him through empty streets or up and down staircases. In one vivid dream, he ran out into traffic on the interstate and got crushed between two semis heading straight toward each other. The whole scene had erupted into flames.

  When Sloane woke up from those dreams, she gave up on going back to sleep and tried to soothe herself by reading. The three of them had gathered all the books left in their rooms and piled them in the hallway, making a little library. Sloane kept The Manifestation of Impossible Wants: A New Theory of Magic for herself, but she also picked up a collection of poetry from Matt’s room and a history text from Esther’s.

  The history book covered the period after the end of World War II, the establishment of the Iron Curtain and a Cold War Sloane both did and didn’t recognize. She waited for the development of satellite technology, the Space Race, but it didn’t come; in its place, there was technology to plunge deeper underwater, to hear farther across the SOFAR channel—the level of the ocean at which sound traveled fastest—to place hydrophones deeper in the ocean without losing their efficacy. And all this resulted, of course, in the Tenebris Incident, an accident of underwater-missile testing that had spread magic throughout the world.

  Sloane was sitting in the hallway one morning, the book in her lap and a half-empty cup of coffee next to her, when she heard a soft ding—the sound of the elevator arriving. Nero exited, his hands in his pocket, one thumb covered in the chrome of his siphon. His hair was combed back from his forehead, revealing lines she hadn’t noticed before. She wondered, for the first time, how old he was.

  “Yes?” she said to him as he came closer.

  “I have been alerted of your wandering the halls every single night this week,” Nero said to her. “I finally came to find out if you were sleepwalking.”

  “So whatever magical alarm you’ve rigged, it’s on my room,” Sloane said. “Are you watching me sleep, Creepmaster 2000?”

  “Creep—what?” Nero crouched next to her, his elbows on his knees. “No, I am not watching you sleep. I am simply made aware that someone has exited their living space.”

  “I have insomnia,” Sloane said.

  “Always?”

  “Since my brother was murdered by a world-destroying lord of evil,” Sloane said. “I usually take medication for it, but I left it at home.”

  Nero tilted his head as he looked at her. “Did it not occur to you that we also make medicine on Genetrix?”

  Sloane laughed a little. “I guess it hadn’t. Do you guys have benzodiazepines?”

  “Like Valium?” Nero said.

  “I guess that would work,” she said.

  “I will request some for you,” Nero said. “I know how frustrating it is to not get enough sleep on a regular basis.”

  Sloane hadn’t realized it would be that simple. “Well . . . thanks.”

  “Of course.” Nero nudged her book so he could see what was on the cover. It was a sketch of the baleen whale Kyros had mentioned, adrift in the clouds above Challenger Deep.

  “History,” Nero said. “I suppose that makes it easier to sleep.”

  “You don’t like history?”

  “Not particularly, no.” Nero shrugged. “On a grand scale, perhaps—the birth of the world, the first living organisms, the beginning of humanity. But the details of squabbling between nations—That’s my land; No, it’s mine; Let’s kill each other over it—no. That does not interest me.”

  “Without those little squabbles, you wouldn’t have magic,” Sloane said. “There wouldn’t have been a ballistic missile to accidentally fire into the Mariana Trench.”

  “And magic for magic’s sake, that’s such a good thing?”

  “No,” Sloane said. “But—don’t you like magic? You work here, after all.”

  “Sometimes I like it,” he said. “It’s given me knowledge of the universe beyond anything my ancestors would have dreamed. But that knowledge is never enough to prevent catastrophe, it seems.”

  “It’s not your responsibility to stop all bad things from happening.”

&nbs
p; “Only some things. I know.” He smiled a little. “But I bear the weight of them.”

  She wondered if he was thinking of his sister, lured into the Resurrectionist’s clutches. The horror of her death, her body suspended above the Camel, stiff and cold. Sometimes Sloane thought of Cameron that way too, lying dead in his casket, dusted with powder from the mortician that made him look plastic, like a doll. She had been young when he joined the fight against the Dark One. Too young to stop him, probably, but she hadn’t even tried.

  “I understand that, I think,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading with my moroseness,” Nero said. “I hear that your siphon efforts have been considerable.”

  “But fruitless.”

  Nero acknowledged that with a nod. “There’s a book that may help you to understand more about magical theory. It’s called The Manifestation of Impossible—”

  “—​Wants. Yeah, I read that one,” she said. Maybe she was flattering herself, but she thought he looked a little impressed. “Magic is all about desire, not just intent, blah-blah. Didn’t do me much good—you can’t make yourself want something.”

  Nero cocked his head to the side again. “Can’t you?”

  She had never considered that before. She had lived half her life wanting only one thing—to save the world—and the other half wanting to be left alone, which was almost the same thing as wanting nothing at all. She didn’t know what it was like to desire something between those two extremes. She wasn’t sure she was even capable of it.