Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  If she survived that long.

  She was still wearing her boots. That was something, an anchor to keep her here instead of in her memories. She had worn flippers in the Dive. The Dark One had taken her shoes. But here, she had her boots.

  “She’s awake,” someone—or something—said. The voice came from her right.

  “Good,” her captor grunted. “I’m tired.”

  He released her legs, and she crashed to the floor, her body battered by the tiles. She was in a long hall flanked by wide pillars and tiled with white marble. Geometric fixtures of blue glass hung in a line down the center of the hall. The tall windows on one side of the room were boarded up with plywood except for the top row of glass. Across from them, on the other wall, a line of morning sunlight glinted on tiny golden tiles.

  Her elbows ached from hitting the ground so hard. She rolled over so she was on hands and knees and breathed through her nose as the pain subsided. She had been right about the Resurrectionist’s army surrounding her. They were in every direction, standing in clusters or sitting with their backs against the wall, talking. They were dressed in uniforms, rich navy slacks and shirts with high collars, capes pinned at the shoulder by gilded buttons. If not for the unnatural greenish tint of their skin and the patches of rot on their faces and hands and throats, she might have thought they were just soldiers.

  Sloane stood. The man—if he could be called that—who had been carrying her was tall and broad with milky blue eyes and only one ear. The woman with the bone-bare jaw who had knocked her unconscious was standing behind him, her dark, fraying hair worn in a braid over one shoulder. Sloane tasted bile.

  “Move,” the man said.

  She wanted to do as she was told. She really did. But her legs were shaking, so she just stood there staring at them both.

  The woman rolled her eyes, grabbed Sloane’s elbow, and dragged her forward. Sloane’s shoes squeaked as she walked down a hallway of broken tiles and peeling paint and up a metal staircase. The higher and deeper she went into the building, the less likely it was that she could escape. She tried to make a map in her mind—West, you’re walking west—but it was all she could do to focus on her boots.

  Boots meant now. Bare feet meant the past.

  The woman stopped in front of a door and unlocked it with a key from the ring on her belt. Inside was a disintegrating laboratory. All the walls were painted azure, as was the front of each drawer and cabinet door, all of them dangling precariously from the lab table in the center of the room. The floor—wood under linoleum—was buckling in places and covered with bits of plaster and flakes of blue paint.

  It wasn’t a cell, not really. That was good. That meant it wasn’t supposed to keep her in. That meant there was a way out.

  The woman shoved her into the laboratory and shut the door behind her. Sloane listened as she turned the lock, then walked the perimeter of the room, getting a sense of its size. It was empty except for the lab table in the middle and a faucet on the back wall. She went to it. There was a pipe beneath it that must have gone to some kind of sink drain, but the sink was gone.

  She turned on the water. It hissed for a moment before spraying a few orange drops in every direction, then spewing yellowish water that likely wasn’t safe to drink. But she was covered in dirt and dust from the Drain and desperate to smell less like death. She stripped off her coat and turned it inside out so she could tear off one of the pockets with her teeth. It would make a good washcloth.

  She scrubbed at the backs of her hands with the balled-up cloth until they were almost the right color, then rinsed out the pocket and used it on her face. She scrubbed until her cheeks tingled, then moved on to her throat and neck. Last was her hair, which made the water run black.

  She turned off the faucet and wrung out her hair, then tied it in a knot at the back of her head so it wouldn’t get in her way. She wrapped herself in the coat, rubbing her arms to generate some warmth. The water had chilled her, or maybe she was just afraid.

  She crouched with her back against the lab table, facing the door, and took the deepest breaths she could manage.

  It had gone this way before. Waking in a strange place and having to wait there until her captor, the Dark One, decided to do something. Falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion. She didn’t know what had happened to her before she was taken to the room, while she was unconscious, and she wasn’t sure how long he had stood at her bedside watching her before touching her face to wake her. The lost time had plagued her more than she would have expected it to—the idea that her body had no memory of its own, that she could not interrogate it for the answer.

  She stayed crouched there, counting each breath so she could be sure that time was passing, until her feet went numb. She was just standing up to get her blood moving again when a key turned in the lock. Sloane backed up fast, moving until she hit the boards that covered the window frame. Her chest ached. She couldn’t hear anything but the whisper of the Dark One saying her name.

  The Resurrectionist stood in the doorway, the living dead woman visible just past his bulky shoulder. Nero had said that the Resurrectionist wore five siphons. He had miscounted. There was one over each of the man’s eyes, one over his nose and mouth, one on his throat; a siphon for each hand; one over an ear. Each one was plain, made of dark metal that looked like pewter.

  He had a loping gait, not quite a limp, unstable and predatory. He made a flicking gesture paired with a sharp whistle, and the door slammed behind him.

  They were alone.

  Her vision was going dark at the edges. She felt a tingling in her chest, in her hands, the same sensation she’d had when she encountered the Needle in the sunken Sakhalin and the magical weapon in the Dome. Whoever and whatever the Resurrectionist was, he was suffused with magic.

  “Ziva was the one who noticed.” His voice was distorted by the siphon and had that tinny quality she had noticed on the street when he’d whistled. He spoke as if they had been in the middle of a conversation. “All those sorcerers in their fine clothing scurrying about like rats. Something going on, clearly.” He cocked his head. “I have eyes wherever I need them. And the things the eyes said about you. No siphon. Always in the company of that hulking soldier—”

  “The one you killed, you mean?” The question came out hot and fierce. She drew a harsh breath.

  “No apparent knowledge of our world.” He continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Are you hyperventilating?”

  “Fuck you,” Sloane said, her fingers curling into the paint and plaster.

  “No magic, not even when you had no other choice,” he said. “Does that mean you can’t use it? I wonder.” He tilted his head to the other side. “But why would they summon a soldier from another dimension to kill me if she couldn’t use magic?”

  The plaster bit into the skin under her fingernails. He knew. He knew where she was from, what she was meant to do—

  But how?

  She remembered the look in Mox’s eyes at the bar, how he had been waiting for something she hadn’t given him. I have eyes wherever I need them. Mox had been the Resurrectionist’s eyes, rescuing her from the snare, luring her to the Tankard, then asking enough questions to figure out she was in the wrong world.

  Sloane cursed herself. She had been so stupid. Aelia and Nero wanted her to stay inside, stay safe, but she had been confident, cocky, a child playing at heroics. And now she would die for it.

  “It would have been simple to end it, but then—the others,” the Resurrectionist said. “How many are there?”

  “If you touch them,” Sloane said, launching herself off the wall, “I’ll—”

  “Hit me with a pipe that turns to dust?” he said, voice turning unctuous. “You aren’t being fair. You and your friends come to kill me and I’m not allowed to fight back?”

  “You’re destroying this world,” she said. “And my world. What’s fair about that?”

  “Destroying the world? Me?” He laughed darkly
. “I should be flattered, I suppose, that you think I can control that level of destruction while having a street fight.”

  Sloane thought of his dark silhouette against the turbulent blur of the Drain. It had not ceased even for a moment as he took Kyros down and chased her.

  “This world, your world, they destroy themselves. All worlds do.” He was shifty, restless, even, with the weight of siphons anchoring him. “They don’t need me.”

  “Is that how you justify it?”

  “How are you being compensated?” he said. “Pennies, nickels, and dimes? Power to take back with you? What?”

  “Compensated?”

  “Ah, you’re a true hero, then.” He sounded almost amused. “Scandalized by the mere mention of an exchange—”

  “I didn’t choose to come here!” she said. “And if I could get myself home, I would be gone already.”

  But it didn’t seem like he heard her. He jerked his head to the side, like he was listening to something in the distance. Then he wheeled around and stormed out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him.

  Sloane was still for a while after he left. Her fear had settled to a low flame. She knew the Dark One. She knew the gritty feeling of being near him, the twist of her gut when his focus found her. Didn’t she?

  Enough, she thought, and she turned to the boarded window behind her. It was her best chance at escape. Wood broke. Boards burned. Windows opened up to ledges and streets and the cold night air.

  She started pulling out drawers and opening cabinets. They were made of flimsy plywood, and time had made them brittle. Good kindling, maybe, but that didn’t help her unless she wanted to burn the room down around her. Still, she pulled the drawers free of their tracks and stacked them on top of the table. They were assets.

  Blunt force was the first thing to try. She picked up one of the larger drawers and swung it hard at the window boards.

  The drawer shattered, leaving Sloane holding only the drawer pull and half the front panel. She tossed it aside.

  There were gaps between the boards in the window that were wide enough for her fingers. She grabbed one of the boards and put her feet up on the wall to give herself leverage. Sloane pushed with her feet as she pulled with both hands at the wood, straining with all her strength to break it, or even loosen it. But . . . nothing. Her hands ached, and she swallowed a frustrated scream.

  She was not going to die here. Not in a rotten room in a parallel dimension.

  What she needed, she thought, was more pressure than her body could apply. Which she could accomplish with either more force—something she couldn’t get her hands on right now—or a smaller surface area.

  Sloane stared at the boards for a few seconds, praising whatever had set the laws of the universe and also empowered her to remember them. Then she stood next to the drainpipe sticking out of the wall. The slip nut that held the drain extension to the U-shaped trap was old, simple to loosen with her hand. She held on to the drain flange and pulled hard. The piece—inlet, flange, and trap—separated from the extension and the escutcheon plate against the wall. The pipe was solid, heavy. She put it on the table.

  She wriggled out of her coat and unbuttoned her shirt, ignoring the sudden chill. Once the shirt was off, she put the coat back on and buttoned it up to her throat. She twisted the shirt into a rope and shoved the tail of it through the gap between the boards.

  It was annoying work, like threading a needle when you couldn’t keep your hands steady. Even with her fingers stuck through the gap on either side of the board, she couldn’t maneuver the makeshift rope to pull it through the other gap. She tried again and again, missing the fabric each time. Sweat was starting to bead on the back of her neck. The longer she spent doing this, she thought, the more likely it was that someone was going to interrupt her.

  Finally she caught the rope on the other side of the board. Then she had to do it again. She needed to use two boards against each other, like the bars of an old-fashioned prison cell. It was easier the second time to maneuver the rope; she brought the end out on the other side of the second board and tied the two shirt ends together in a tight knot. She then grabbed the pipe, worked it through the center of the knot, and started turning it.

  At first, she didn’t notice a change. But the more she turned the pipe, the tighter the shirt fabric became around the boards, and soon it was difficult to turn the pipe at all. Sloane had to climb up, bracing herself on the window ledge, and force the pipe down as hard as she could. Her hand throbbed. But the boards were starting to creak.

  Another turn, and the skin of her palms was starting to peel. The boards groaned.

  Another turn, and they cracked.

  Laughing, Sloane worked at the shirt knot to free the pipe, then used it to press into the weak spot in the boards, which were easier to bend now that she had made them give. Soon she had made a gap in the boards big enough for her body to fit through—but only just. She would have to crawl out.

  Getting her head through was simple enough, though the broken wood scraped her scalp. It was still day, but the sun was getting low. The building had tiers, like a wedding cake, so she was above a lower level, the top covered in gravel. She wasn’t sure how she would get down from that roof, but at least she could drop to the gravel without cracking her skull.

  She forced her way through the boards, biting her lip to keep from screaming when the wood dug into her shoulders on either side. She sucked in her stomach hard, wriggled the rest of the way through, then toppled to the gravel roof, aching.

  She knew better than to celebrate. She stood, brushed gravel off her clothes, and limped along the edge of the roof as she looked for a fire escape. Freedom was so close—just seven stories down—but out of reach unless she wanted to break her back. The Sears Tower was in full view, a dark giant against the clouds, and the Warner Tower wasn’t far from it, the ripples of its western side reflecting gray back at her. She was facing the lake, and the building she was in sat on top of what would be Congress Parkway back home. She had driven beneath this building but didn’t know what it was called.

  Sloane walked the perimeter of the lower roof, but there was no ladder to be found. If she was going to escape, she would need to go back through the building.

  At the other end of the roof was what she assumed was a stairway bulkhead with a door. It would likely lead to a stairwell not dissimilar from the one she had discovered in the Camel. If she was lucky, she would be able to get all the way to the first floor of this building, and then she could make a desperate run for it.

  Sloane forced the door open—either it had been left unlocked or the lock had broken—and stepped into a dark stairwell that smelled like rot. She felt her way to a railing and held it tightly as she descended. It had been a long time since she’d had food or water. Her mouth was so dry it was starting to feel fuzzy. But she kept going, holding the thought of a glass of water in front of her like a carrot on a string.

  She had made it past five landings when a light came on. Sloane jumped back against the wall, letting her eyes adjust. She heard footsteps. People talking. Close, and getting closer, as whoever they were climbed up the stairs. She went carefully down the last few steps to the door and tried to tug it open without making too much noise, but it was too heavy for that; she would need to pull harder.

  Sloane counted down in her head, then yanked the door open. The hinges screeched, and she sprinted into the hallway beyond, where the linoleum was buckling just as it had been in the laboratory that had served as her cell.

  Huge chunks of plaster were pulling away from the walls and in broken bits on the floor, and half the ceiling tiles were missing or dangling precariously overhead. She passed doors that opened to old offices with maroon carpeting and fluorescent lights. Charts still hung on one office’s wall, tracking sick-leave trends in blue marker.

  She looked out one of the few remaining windows to figure out which direction she was going. She spotted the Sears Tower, nearer no
w than it had been when she was on the roof, which meant she was moving north—closer to where she had first come in. Closer to the Resurrectionist’s army.

  She heard something behind her and ducked into one of the offices to hide. Except it wasn’t quite an office—not anymore, at least. The walls that outlined cubicles and nooks were still there, but the debris had been cleared from the floor. In one corner was a mattress with a sheet patterned with faded flowers and a matching pillowcase. Stacked next to the pillow were a few books, only one of which she recognized: The Manifestation of Impossible Wants.

  On one of the built-in desks near the front were neat piles of screws, wires, metal plates. In a box under the desk were old siphons in various stages of disrepair—one missing all the plates that would cover the palm, another missing all the fingers. A variety of screwdrivers were in a jar nearby, handles up, waiting to be used.

  This was where someone lived.

  She didn’t know much about zombies—or whatever the proper term for the Resurrectionist’s soldiers was, since they seemed too intelligent to be actual zombies—but she doubted they needed to sleep. So if this was anyone’s bedroom, it was the Resurrectionist’s. Which meant she couldn’t have chosen a worse hiding place.

  She heard voices again. Sloane slipped into another room that had clearly been a meeting space, judging by the long rickety table and the abundance of windows. These weren’t boarded completely, giving her light to see by. In fact—

  She was fairly sure she could open one.

  Sloane wiggled the window by its handle, testing how loose it was in its frame. It shifted back and forth. She looked over her shoulder and paused to listen to the voices. They had gotten louder. She made out a few words: