Allegiant (25 page)

He pants, and his eyes aren’t focused on her, but rather on something over her shoulder. “Don’t do it!” he shouts, and he lunges forward, toward whatever phantom the serum is showing him. Nita puts an arm across his chest to keep him steady, and he screams, “Don’t—!”

Nita shakes him. “I’ll stop them from doing it if you tell me how to get in!”

“Her!” David says, and tears gleam in his eyes. “The—the name—”

“Whose name?”

“We’re running out of time!” the man with the gun trained on David says. “Either we get the serum or we kill him—”

“
Her,
” David says, pointing at the space in front of him.

Pointing at me.

I stretch my arms around the corner of the wall and fire twice. The first bullet hits the wall. The second hits the man in the arm, so the huge weapon topples to the floor. The red-haired woman points her weapon at me—or the part of me that she can see, half hidden by the wall—and Nita screams, “Hold your fire!”

“Tris,” Nita says, “you don’t know what you’re doing—”

“You’re probably right,” I say, and I fire again. This time my hand is steadier, my aim is better; I hit Nita’s side, right above her hip. She screams into her mask and clutches the hole in her skin, sinking to her knees, her hands covered in blood.

David surges toward me with a grimace of pain as he puts weight on his injured leg. I wrap my arm around his waist and swing his body around so he’s between me and the remaining soldiers. Then I press one of my guns to the back of his head.

They all freeze. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, in my hands, behind my eyes.

“Fire, and I’ll shoot him in the head,” I say.

“You wouldn’t kill your own leader,” the red-haired woman says.

“He’s not my leader. I don’t care if he lives or dies,” I say. “But if you think I’m going to let you gain control of that death serum, you’re insane.”

I start to shuffle backward, with David whimpering in front of me, still under the influence of the serum cocktail. I duck my head and turn my body sideways so it’s safely behind his. I keep one of the guns against his head.

We reach the end of the hallway, and the woman calls my bluff. She fires, and hits David just above the knee, in his other leg. He collapses with a scream, and I am exposed. I dive to the ground, slamming my elbows into the floor, as a bullet goes past me, the sound vibrating inside my head.

Then I feel something hot spreading through my left arm, and I see blood and my feet scramble on the floor, searching for traction. I find it and fire blindly down the hallway. I grab David by the collar and drag him around the corner, pain searing through my left arm.

I hear running footsteps and groan. But they aren’t coming from behind me; they’re coming from in front. People surround me, Matthew among them, and some of them pick David up and run with him down the hallway. Matthew offers me his hand.

My ears are ringing. I can’t believe I did it.

T
RIS

T
HE HOSPITAL IS
packed with people, all of them yelling or racing back and forth or yanking curtains shut. Before I sat down I checked all the beds for Tobias. He wasn’t in any of them. I am still shaking with relief.

Uriah is not here either. He is in one of the other rooms, and the door is closed—not a good sign.

The nurse who dabs my arm with antiseptic is breathless and looks around at all the activity instead of at my wound. I’m told it’s a minor graze, nothing to worry about.

“I can wait, if you need to do something else,” I say. “I have to find someone anyway.”

She purses her lips, then says, “You need stitches.”

“It’s just a graze!”

“Not your arm, your head,” she says, pointing to a spot above my eye. I had almost forgotten about the cut in all the chaos, but it still hasn’t stopped bleeding.

“Fine.”

“I’m going to have to give you a shot of this numbing agent,” she says, holding up a syringe.

I am so used to needles that I don’t even react. She dabs my forehead with antiseptic—they are so careful about germs here—and I feel the sting and prickle of the needle, diminishing by the second as the numbing agent does its work.

I watch the people rush past as she stitches my skin—a doctor pulls off a pair of bloodstained rubber gloves; a nurse carries a tray of gauze, his shoes nearly slipping on the tile; a family member of someone injured wrings her hands. The air smells like chemicals and old paper and warm bodies.

“Any updates on David?” I say.

“He’ll live, but it will take him a long time to walk again,” she says. Her lips stop puckering, just for a few seconds. “Could have been a lot worse, if you hadn’t been there. You’re all set.”

I nod. I wish I could tell her that I’m not a hero, that I was using him as a shield, like a wall of meat. I wish I could confess to being a person full of hate for the Bureau and for David, a person who would let someone else get riddled with bullets to save herself. My parents would be ashamed.

She places a bandage over the stitches to protect the wound, and gathers all the wrappers and soaked cotton balls into her fists to throw them away.

Before I can thank her, she is gone, off to the next bed, the next patient, the next injury.

Injured people line the hallway outside the emergency ward. I have gathered from the evidence that there was another explosion set off at the same time as the one near the entrance. Both were diversions. Our attackers got in through the underground tunnel, as Nita said they would. She never mentioned blowing holes in walls.

The doors at the end of the hallway open, and a few people rush in, carrying a young woman—Nita—between them. They put her on a cot near one of the walls. She groans, clutching at a roll of gauze that is pressed to the wound in her side. I feel strangely separate from her pain. I shot her. I had to. That’s the end of it.

As I walk down the aisle between the wounded, I notice the uniforms. Everyone sitting here wears green. With few exceptions, they are all support staff. They are clutching bleeding arms or legs or heads, their injuries no better than my own, some much worse.

I catch my reflection in the windows just beyond the main corridor—my hair is stringy and limp, and the bandage dominates my forehead. David’s blood and my blood smear my clothes in places. I need to shower and change, but first I have to find Tobias and Christina. I haven’t seen either of them since before the invasion.

It doesn’t take me long to find Christina—she is sitting in the waiting room when I walk out of the emergency ward, her knee jiggling so much that the person next to her is giving her dirty looks. She lifts a hand to greet me, but her eyes shift away from mine and toward the doors right afterward.

“You all right?” she asks me.

“Yeah,” I say. “There’s still no update on Uriah. I couldn’t get into the room.”

“These people make me crazy, you know that?” she says. “They won’t tell anyone anything. They won’t let us see him. It’s like they think they own him and everything that happens to him!”

“They work differently here. I’m sure they’ll tell you when they know something concrete.”

“Well, they would tell
you
,” she says, scowling. “But I’m not convinced they would give
me
a second look.”

A few days ago I might have disagreed with her, unsure how influential their belief in genetic damage was on their behavior. I’m not sure what to do—not sure how to talk to her now that I have these advantages and she does not and there’s nothing either of us can do about it. All I can think to do is be near her.

“I have to find Tobias, but I’ll come back after I do and sit with you, okay?”

She finally looks at me, and her knee goes still. “They didn’t tell you?”

My stomach clenches with fear. “Tell me what.”

“Tobias was arrested,” she says quietly. “I saw him sitting with the invaders right before I came in here. Some people saw him at the control room before the attack—they say he was disabling the alarm system.”

There is a sad look in her eyes, like she pities me. But I already knew what Tobias did.

“Where are they?” I say.

I need to talk to him. And I know what I need to say.

T
OBIAS

M
Y WRISTS STING
from the plastic tie the guard squeezed around them. I probe my jaw with just my fingertips, testing the skin for blood.

“All right?” Reggie says.

I nod. I have dealt with worse injuries than this—I have been hit harder than I was by the soldier who slammed the butt of his gun into my jaw while he was arresting me. His eyes were wild with anger when he did it.

Mary and Rafi sit a few feet away, Rafi clutching a handful of gauze to his bleeding arm. A guard stands between us and them, keeping us separate. As I look at them, Rafi meets my eyes and nods. As if to say,
Well done.

If I did well, why do I feel sick to my stomach?

“Listen,” Reggie says, shifting so he’s closer to me. “Nita and the fringe people are taking the fall. It’ll be all right.”

I nod again, without conviction. We had a backup plan for our probable arrest, and I’m not worried about its success. What I am worried about is how long it’s taking them to deal with us, and how casual it has been—we have been sitting against a wall in an empty corridor since they caught the invaders more than an hour ago, and no one has come to tell us what will happen to us, or to ask us any questions. I haven’t even seen Nita yet.

It puts a sour taste in my mouth. Whatever we did, it seems to have shaken them up, and I know of nothing that shakes people up as much as lost lives.

How many of those am I responsible for, because I participated in this?

“Nita told me they were going to steal memory serum,” I say to Reggie, and I’m afraid to look at him. “Was that true?”

Reggie eyes the guard who stands a few feet away. We have already been yelled at once for talking.

But I know the answer.

“It wasn’t, was it,” I say. Tris was right. Nita was lying.

“Hey!” The guard marches toward us and sticks the barrel of her gun between us. “Move aside. No conversation allowed.”

Reggie shifts to the right, and I make eye contact with the guard.

“What’s going on?” I say. “What happened?”

“Oh, like you don’t know,” she answers. “Now keep your mouth shut.”

I watch her walk away, and then I see a small blond girl appear at the end of the hallway. Tris. A bandage stretches across her forehead, and blood smears her clothes in the shape of fingers. She clutches a piece of paper in her fist.

“Hey!” the guard says. “What are you doing here?”

“Shelly,” the other guard says, jogging over. “Calm down. That’s the girl who saved David.”

The girl who saved David—from what, exactly?

“Oh.” Shelly puts her gun down. “Well, it’s still a valid question.”

“They asked me to bring you guys an update,” Tris says, and she offers Shelly the piece of paper. “David is in recovery. He’ll live, but they’re not sure when he’ll walk again. Most of the other injured have been cared for.”

The sour taste in my mouth grows stronger. David can’t walk. And what they’ve been doing all this time is caring for the injured. All this destruction, and for what? I don’t even know. I don’t know the truth.

What did I do?

“Do they have a casualty count?” Shelly asks.

“Not yet,” Tris replies.

“Thanks for letting us know.”

“Listen.” She shifts her weight to one foot. “I need to talk to him.”

She jerks her head toward me.

“We can’t really—” Shelly starts.

“Just for a second, I promise,” Tris says. “Please.”

“Let her,” the other guard says. “What could it hurt?”

“Fine,” Shelly says. “I’ll give you two minutes.”

She nods to me, and I use the wall to push myself to my feet, my hands still bound in front of me. Tris comes closer, but not that close—the space, and her folded arms, form a barrier between us that may as well be a wall. She looks somewhere south of my eyes.

“Tris, I—”

“Want to know what your friends did?” she says. Her voice shakes, and I do not make the mistake of thinking it’s from tears. It’s from anger. “They weren’t after the memory serum. They were after poison—death serum. So that they could kill a bunch of important government people and start a war.”

I look down, at my hands, at the tile, at the toes of her shoes. A war. “I didn’t know—”

“I was right. I was right, and you didn’t listen. Again,” she says, quiet. Her eyes lock on mine, and I find that I do not want the eye contact I craved, because it takes me apart, piece by piece. “Uriah was standing right in front of one of the explosives they set off as diversions. He’s unconscious and they’re not sure he’ll wake up.”

It’s strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

“What?”

All I can see is Uriah’s face when he hit the net after the Choosing Ceremony, the giddy smile he wore as Zeke and I pulled him onto the platform next to the net. Or him sitting in the tattoo parlor, his ear taped forward so it wouldn’t get in Tori’s way as she drew a snake on his skin. Uriah might not wake up? Uriah, gone forever?

And I promised. I promised Zeke I would look after him, I
promised
. . .

“He’s one of the last friends I have,” she says, her voice breaking. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you the same way again.”

She walks away. I hear Shelly’s muffled voice telling me to sit down, and I sink to my knees, letting my wrists rest on my legs. I struggle to find a way to escape this, the horror of what I’ve done, but there is no sophisticated logic that can liberate me; there is no way out.

I put my face in my hands and try not to think, try not to imagine anything at all.

The overhead light in the interrogation room reflects a muddled circle in the center of the table. That is where I keep my eyes as I recite the story Nita gave me, the one that is so close to true I have no trouble telling it. When I’m finished, the man recording it taps out my last sentences on his screen, the glass lighting up with letters where his fingers touch it. Then the woman acting as David’s proxy—Angela—says, “So you didn’t know the reason Juanita asked you to disable the security system?”