Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  “Essy,” she said. Esther coughed into Sloane’s shoulder, clutched at her shirt. “Where’s Matt?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know,” Esther said.

  Over Esther’s shoulder, Sloane saw Ziva dragging something out of the river. Water poured out of the hole in her jaw as she heaved Matt onto the shore. He coughed and rolled onto his side.

  Esther said weakly, “The Dark One, is he . . .”

  “Dead?” Sloane said. There were spots of his blood on her sleeve. “Yeah. He’s dead.”

  They walked across the bridge in a pack. Sloane led the way, and Ziva and Mox loped behind. Matt was leaning on Esther for support, the pain from his crushed hand having finally hit him.

  They passed people huddled next to the railing, looking confused. One of them was a teenager wearing ripped jeans and Converse sneakers; no siphon. Up ahead, Sloane spotted the Seventeenth Church of Christ, Scientist, a squat stone pod of a building that stood where Wacker split in two. The building that Sloane vaguely remembered being behind it, though, was gone, replaced by an Unrealist structure that peeled apart like a banana at the top, sending offices in all different directions, arching over the street.

  They turned right on Wacker, ignoring the screams that were now coming from everywhere and the alarms that drowned them out.

  “We have to find Ines,” Esther said from behind her. “And my mom.”

  “The phones,” Sloane said. “They probably won’t work.”

  There were power lines in the street. Wires severed by buildings, by gas-burning streetlights.

  “Then I’ll drive to California,” Esther said.

  “First, find Ines,” Sloane said. “You two can go together.” She didn’t add if she’s alive because she refused to acknowledge the possibility that she wasn’t. “Go to Mexico on the way back, if you can, maybe. And I’ll . . .” She trailed off before she could say that she would look for her mother, because she suddenly felt sure there was no way her mother was still alive. Though why she was so convinced, she couldn’t have said.

  When she saw the Camel—not the Thompson Center—ahead of them, she almost fell to her knees with relief. They would need the collective magical knowledge the Camel offered if they were going to survive whatever was happening.

  Her ears were ringing as they passed through the front doors of the Cordus Center and wove through the lobby, which was full of confused Genetrixae people yelling at one another over the din. A security alarm was going off, and it was hard to think of anything beyond the blaring. Soldiers from the Army of Flickering were here and there, shouting for everyone to calm down.

  Esther and Sloane both watched, quiet. Sloane swallowed her rising hysteria. “What happened?” she said, her voice breaking. “Is this Earth or Genetrix?”

  Esther looked around at the chaos in the Camel lobby. “A little of both, I think.”

  The first sign that Ines might be alive was that her apartment building was still standing.

  It hadn’t been a given. Esther, Matt, and Sloane had walked along the lakefront path to get here, leaving Mox and Ziva to locate the rest of the Resurrectionist’s army, and they had turned on Wilson Avenue to walk through Uptown, where the peace of the waterfront had given way to madness. Some buildings were split down the middle, with half a living room exposed to the street or a bathroom sink hanging over the edge of a divided floor, about to tumble to the ground. They passed a kitchen floor that sagged over an alley, dropping tiles when the wind blew. A ladder was braced against the side of the three-flat, and a man was climbing into one of the windows of his second-floor apartment while his small daughter stood on the ground and shouted instructions. “The bear with the missing ear!” she cried out. Her eyes were full of tears. “Do you see him?”

  Farther down the street, Sloane saw another one of those broken buildings, but with an arm and a leg hanging from one of the split floorboards of a third-story apartment. She tried not to look at it.

  Across the street from Ines and Albie’s building, where there had once been a dark pub, was a Genetrix park with a colorful statue standing in the middle of a small pond. Magical lights danced just under the surface of the water, unaffected by the collision of worlds.

  “What is it?” Esther said. Sloane had been staring at the park for a long time.

  “That shitty pub that gave Ines food poisoning is gone,” Sloane said.

  “You hated that place,” Matt said, and not quite like he was reminding her; more like it was a revelation.

  “Yeah.” Sloane frowned.

  “Ines,” Esther said. “Remember?” She tugged Sloane by the elbow. “Come on, guys.”

  The buzzer was broken, so Sloane forced her way through the front door—the lock had never been entirely secure—and climbed the stairs to Ines and Albie’s apartment. Now that they were here, she couldn’t bear the thought that Ines wasn’t in the apartment. Esther had to drag her up the last few steps. She pounded on the apartment door. “Ines! Ines, it’s Essy, open up!”

  Sloane braced herself for silence. But she heard footsteps right away, and Ines’s low voice as she fumbled with the locks. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she was saying over and over again, wiggling the door back and forth in its frame. The door opened, and Ines was standing in front of them in her bare feet and a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms, her eyes red and her hair tangled. She smelled like weed and sweat and coffee.

  “Where the fuck have you guys been?” Ines demanded.

  They all fell together like a house of cards, just barely holding each other upright.

  45

  THAT NIGHT, Sloane woke to a nightmare in which Albie’s corpse climbed out of the river and shambled toward her. He croaked his condemnation for what she had done, for killing Nero, for destroying the better part of two worlds.

  She woke breathless and shaking. A candle flickered in the center of the kitchen table. Esther sat with a bottle of water on one of the stools, staring into the flame.

  “Esther,” Sloane said, clutching a pillow to her chest. “I think . . . I think I figured something out.”

  Esther rested her cheek on top of the water bottle and looked at Sloane. Her eyes were soft with grief and tight with worry.

  “Your mom’s alive,” Sloane said. She clutched the pillow harder, her heart pounding. “She must be, because I love her, and all the things that survived the collision, they’re all the things I loved in both worlds.” She choked. “My magic turned Nero’s death into whatever this is, this fucking Frankenstein’s monster world, so it’s made up of all the things I wanted, and—”

  Esther got up and walked over to the couch. She sat next to Sloane so their shoulders were touching.

  “Some of the things I want,” Sloane whispered. “Are . . . not good. No one should get to make their own world—”

  “I know, Slo.”

  Sloane shoved her face into the pillow she held and tried not to scream.

  Matt stepped out of Albie’s room, where he had evidently been standing, hidden by shadow. He rustled in the kitchen cabinets for a few minutes while Sloane tried to get her grip on the pillow to loosen, then walked over to them, holding out a little yellow pill.

  Sloane swallowed it.

  The safe house was quiet. Someone had torn down most of the boards covering the windows, so sunlight filtered in through a layer of dust. Sloane passed the blankets wadded up by the door—her old bed—and the roomful of soldiers, sitting together on the floor, playing cards, repairing siphons, and, in the case of one group, drumming on old pots with their bony fingertips.

  She went to the storeroom to look for Mox and found him sitting at the little table across from Ziva. Their hands were clasped, his big, warm palm all but encompassing her wasted knuckles.

  “Sloane!” Mox said, and they jerked away from each other like they had been caught doing something embarrassing.

  “Sorry, I can come back,” Sloane said. She felt like she had interrupted something.

 
“No, stay,” Ziva said. “I was just telling him about a conversation you and I had.”

  Over time, Sloane was sure, she would be able to tease out each thread of the knot of the past few days, but it was too soon for that. After taking the benzo, she had fallen into a heavy sleep on Ines’s couch, then woken up, borrowed clean clothes, and, with Ines’s help, hot-wired a car to drive across the city, but that was all she had managed so far.

  What she had gathered, however, from conversations in front of the bodega down the street from Ines’s place, was that no one had internet, cell service, or electricity. People in the Earth sections of the city had begun to poke their heads into the Genetrix parts out of curiosity and desperation, since the Genetrixae people had fared better in the wake of the disaster because their siphons were still functioning. But then the shopkeeper started ranting about sorcery, so that was the most she had learned about the state of the world around her.

  “A conversation we had,” Sloane repeated.

  “About whether I was glad to be alive again,” Ziva said. She worked her jaw up and down for a few seconds until it clicked. Sloane watched her tongue move behind her exposed teeth and wondered how, in just a few days, her disgust for Ziva’s rotting body had all but disappeared.

  “Ah,” Sloane said.

  “Z and I decided it’s time for her to go,” Mox said. He was staring at the table.

  “Oh?” Sloane said. She didn’t seem to be capable of speaking more than one syllable at a time.

  Ziva nodded. “Nero is dead, which means the consul is out of danger and no longer needs us. I’ve spoken to the others, and they agree.”

  “I’ll always need you,” Mox said fiercely. “All of you.”

  “Mox,” Ziva said, with as much gentleness as Sloane had ever heard in her rough, dry voice. She had also never heard Ziva use Mox’s name. He was always “Consul” or “Sir.”

  Mox looked up at Ziva. She covered his hand with hers again. “You’ll miss us,” Ziva said. “Want us. But that’s something else entirely.”

  Mox didn’t respond, which was as good as agreement.

  “Let’s do this now, while Sloane is here,” Ziva said, getting to her feet. “That way, I won’t worry about you as much.”

  “Now?” Mox choked a little on the word.

  “There is never a good time,” Ziva said. “To let go, or to rest.”

  Ziva gave Sloane a crooked smile. Sloane returned it.

  Together, they went to the main room where the rest of the army waited. When Mox entered, they all started clambering to their feet, some with more ease than others. The ones that were able-bodied helped the others up or held detached limbs the way a husband might hold his wife’s purse.

  Sloane would have had a hard time imagining Mox making a speech, and he didn’t surprise her. He wandered through the ranks of the soldiers, greeting them by name, speaking quietly into their ears, putting his arms around them. As he made his way through the crowd, Sloane wondered if he would be able to do it, if the depth of his desire for friends would guide his magic away from it.

  Sloane sat against the door frame and watched. The soldiers who had already said goodbye to Mox began saying goodbye to each other. Two of the women closest to Sloane laughed about an old joke, raspy, choking laughs that sounded like dying. One of the men sat down with his back against the wall and his severed foot in his lap, his hand tenderly wrapped around the ankle.

  At last, Mox came to Ziva, who stood with her head high so her braid brushed the middle of her hunched spine. The sun was pale against her face, and bright, so it temporarily bleached away the green tint to her skin. Sloane tried to imagine what Ziva had looked like when she was alive, her cheeks full and pink, her shoulders broad, her eyes gleaming.

  Mox held Ziva tightly, almost lifting her off the ground. Ziva’s skeletal hand cradled the back of Mox’s head as he spoke softly to her, too quietly for Sloane to hear, not that she was trying. All around them, the soldiers had gone quiet, sitting on the floor again in their small groups, around their decks of cards and makeshift drums and piles of colorful glass, the treasures of their wagers.

  Finally, Mox pulled away enough to touch his forehead to Ziva’s.

  When she collapsed, he was ready to catch her. A tension Sloane had not truly felt went out of the room all at once, like a change in air pressure. The bodies of all the soldiers went brittle and dry, unmoving. Mox lowered Ziva to the floor, his hair hanging in his face.

  Sloane stood and made her way to his side. For a while, she stayed silent, watching his shoulders shudder. But when he went still at last, she offered him her hand and led the way out of the safe house.

  And when the building went up in flames, she stood by the river and watched it burn with him.

  Ines sat in the driver’s seat of an old Jeep Wrangler, swearing at the steering column. Mox sat beside her in the passenger seat, a toolbox on his lap, offering suggestions that only seemed to make Ines swear more. Sloane observed it all from the curb, where she was keeping watch—there was a lot of looting going on as well as a fair amount of violence, and she had a pipe wrench in hand, ready to defend her distracted friends if necessary.

  The Jeep was parked on the street just outside Ines’s apartment, which meant they were lucky to have gotten to it first. Most of the good cars had already been stolen, leaving only rust-buckets and mopeds behind.

  “Hey.” Matt stepped out of the apartment building carrying a few bottles of water in one hand. His other hand, the one that had been crushed by the siphon, was wrapped in a thick bandage. Cyrielle had found a Genetrix doctor for him that morning.

  He offered the water bottles to Sloane, and she took one. “Thanks.”

  “Just got back from our place,” he said. “Or, rather, the public Genetrixae park that is now in place of our place.”

  There was a hint of accusation in Matt’s voice. Sloane stayed quiet. He looked exhausted, his eyes puffy and his shoulders slumped.

  “If your whole theory is true,” Matt said quietly, “then our apartment is gone because you wanted it to be gone.”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “That’s—a place I was dreading going back to. Because I knew it would be hard. That’s all.”

  Matt nodded, but his jaw still looked tight.

  “You can have this one if you’re eager to leave,” Sloane said, pointing to the Jeep. They were all setting off on their own road trips: Ines and Esther were driving to California to check on Esther’s mother and then to Mexico to see Ines’s family; Matt was going to New York to find his parents; and Mox and Sloane were heading to central Illinois to find out if Sloane’s mom was still there or if her entire hometown had blinked out of existence. Sloane was terrified to find out, even though, deep down, she already knew it was gone.

  The worlds had combined according to her every whim, every preference, and every petty fear. She felt naked in a way she had not known was possible. But she was almost feverishly grateful that Matt was still here, that even though her desires were revealing themselves to be murkier and smaller than she had expected, she still wanted him to be in her world.

  “No, I’d rather find something that’s not a gas-guzzler,” Matt said. “It’s a long drive to New York.”

  “You sure you want to go alone?”

  Matt nodded. “I think I could use the thinking time, actually.”

  Their breakup felt real now that they were back on Earth—more or less—and Matt had met Mox and they were quite literally going in different directions. But it was worse now than it had been before. Whatever misconceptions Matt had had about Sloane’s mushy insides were gone now. All he had to do was look around at all the things she had destroyed to see the truth.

  A victory shout came from inside the Jeep Wrangler as the engine roared to life. Ines stuck her head out the window. “And a full tank of gas too!”

  “Okay,” Sloane said. “I guess I’ll see you in a month.” They had all agreed to meet at
Ines’s place then to take stock of things.

  She wanted to tell Matt so much. That she was sorry she hadn’t saved their apartment. That she hadn’t moved on from him as easily as it seemed. That she wished she were better. But their intimate drama seemed insignificant compared to the chaos around them, the uncertain fates of their families. So she stayed quiet. She handed a bottle of water to Ines and hugged her goodbye while Mox piled their bags in the trunk.

  Then she stood in front of Matt, unsure how to let him go.

  He leaned in first, wrapping an arm around her and squeezing her tight. She had only just begun to return the gesture when he released her.

  “Stay safe,” he said.

  “You too.”

  “You’re going to have to learn how to drive,” Sloane said as Mox folded himself into the passenger seat. She had tried to find a car big enough to accommodate him, but that had proved to be impossible. At least the Jeep could handle the unstable roads on the drive south.

  Mox had found his wrist siphon in Nero’s intact workshop in the Camel, and it was now on his hand. He had offered to find one for her, but Sloane knew she didn’t need one. She had the Needle.

  In the back seat were two bags, one packed with clothes, the other packed with food and other necessities. Sloane didn’t generally approve of looting, but there was nothing left of her earthly possessions, and she couldn’t access any of her money—not that money was terribly useful right now anyway, with two standard U.S. currencies floating around. Money was just a bunch of green paper if you didn’t have a government or a sense of order.

  Sloane started down Lake Shore Drive, which was mostly intact, having been similar in both universes. There were ridges and cracks where the different pavements had come together, but she had heard people talking about the road being drivable.

  Sloane hadn’t wanted to make this trip, but as Mox had said the night before: Maybe you just have to know. Someday, he might find that he had to know, too, about his own family.