I hesitate, my hand on the vial in my pocket. I look at her, and I can see the way time has worn through her like an old piece of cloth, the fibers exposed and fraying. And I can see the woman I knew as a child, too, the mouth that stretched into a smile, the eyes that sparkled with joy. But the longer I look at her, the more convinced I am that that happy woman never existed. That woman is just a pale version of my real mother, viewed through the self-centered eyes of a child.
I sit down across from her at the table and put the vial of memory serum between us.
“I came to make you drink this,” I say.
She looks at the vial, and I think I see tears in her eyes, but it could just be the light.
“I thought it was the only way to prevent total destruction,” I say. “I know that Marcus and Johanna and their people are going to attack, and I know that you will do whatever it takes to stop them, including using that death serum you possess to its best advantage.” I tilt my head. “Am I wrong?”
“No,” she says. “The factions are evil. They cannot be restored. I would sooner see us all destroyed.”
Her hand squeezes the edge of the table, the knuckles pale.
“The reason the factions were evil is because there was no way out of them,” I say. “They gave us the illusion of choice without actually giving us a choice. That’s the same thing you’re doing here, by abolishing them. You’re saying, go make choices. But make sure they aren’t factions or I’ll grind you to bits!”
“If you thought that, why didn’t you tell me?” she says, her voice louder and her eyes avoiding mine, avoiding me. “Tell me, instead of betraying me?”
“Because I’m afraid of you!” The words burst out, and I regret them but I’m also glad they’re there, glad that before I ask her to give up her identity, I can at least be honest with her. “You . . . you remind me of him!”
“Don’t you dare.” She clenches her hands into fists and almost spits at me, “Don’t you dare.”
“I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it,” I say, coming to my feet. “He was a tyrant in our house and now you’re a tyrant in this city, and you can’t even see that it’s the same!”
“So that’s why you brought this,” she says, and she wraps her hand around the vial, holding it up to look at it. “Because you think this is the only way to mend things.”
“I . . .” I am about to say that it’s the easiest way, the best way, maybe the only way that I can trust her.
If I erase her memories, I can create for myself a new mother, but.
But she is more than my mother. She is a person in her own right, and she does not belong to me.
I do not get to choose what she becomes just because I can’t deal with who she is.
“No,” I say. “No, I came to give you a choice.”
I feel suddenly terrified, my hands numb, my heart beating fast—
“I thought about going to see Marcus tonight, but I didn’t.” I swallow hard. “I came to see you instead because . . . because I think there’s a hope of reconciliation between us. Not now, not soon, but someday. And with him there’s no hope, there’s no reconciliation possible.”
She stares at me, her eyes fierce but welling up with tears.
“It’s not fair for me to give you this choice,” I say. “But I have to. You can lead the factionless, you can fight the Allegiant, but you’ll have to do it without me, forever. Or you can let this crusade go, and . . . and you’ll have your son back.”
It’s a feeble offer and I know it, which is why I’m afraid—afraid that she will refuse to choose, that she will choose power over me, that she will call me a ridiculous child, which is what I am. I am a child. I am two feet tall and asking her how much she loves me.
Evelyn’s eyes, dark as wet earth, search mine for a long time.
Then she reaches across the table and pulls me fiercely into her arms, which form a wire cage around me, surprisingly strong.
“Let them have the city and everything in it,” she says into my hair.
I can’t move, can’t speak. She chose me. She chose me.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
TRIS
THE DEATH SERUM smells like smoke and spice, and my lungs reject it with the first breath I take. I cough and splutter, and I am swallowed by darkness.
I crumple to my knees. My body feels like someone has replaced my blood with molasses, and my bones with lead. An invisible thread tugs me toward sleep, but I want to be awake. It is important that I want to be awake. I imagine that wanting, that desire, burning in my chest like a flame.
The thread tugs harder, and I stoke the flame with names. Tobias. Caleb. Christina. Matthew. Cara. Zeke. Uriah.
But I can’t bear up under the serum’s weight. My body falls to the side, and my wounded arm presses to the cold ground. I am drifting. . . .
It would be nice to float away, a voice in my head says. To see where I will go . . .
But the fire, the fire.
The desire to live.
I am not done yet, I am not.
I feel like I am digging through my own mind. It is difficult to remember why I came here and why I care about unburdening myself from this beautiful weight. But then my scratching hands find it, the memory of my mother’s face, and the strange angles of her limbs on the pavement, and the blood seeping from my father’s body.
But they are dead, the voice says. You could join them.
They died for me, I answer. And now I have something to do, in return. I have to stop other people from losing everything. I have to save the city and the people my mother and father loved.
If I go to join my parents, I want to carry with me a good reason, not this—this senseless collapsing at the threshold.
The fire, the fire. It rages within, a campfire and then an inferno, and my body is its fuel. I feel it racing through me, eating away at the weight. There is nothing that can kill me now; I am powerful and invincible and eternal.
I feel the serum clinging to my skin like oil, but the darkness recedes. I slap a heavy hand over the floor and push myself up.
Bent at the waist, I shove my shoulder into the double doors, and they squeak across the floor as their seal breaks. I breathe clean air and stand up straighter. I am there, I am there.
But I am not alone.
“Don’t move,” David says, raising his gun. “Hello, Tris.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
TRIS
“HOW DID YOU inoculate yourself against the death serum?” he asks me. He’s still sitting in his wheelchair, but you don’t need to be able to walk to fire a gun.
I blink at him, still dazed.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“Don’t be stupid,” David says. “You can’t survive the death serum without an inoculation, and I’m the only person in the compound who possesses that substance.”
I just stare at him, not sure what to say. I didn’t inoculate myself. The fact that I’m still standing upright is impossible. There’s nothing more to add.
“I suppose it no longer matters,” he says. “We’re here now.”
“What are you doing here?” I mumble. My lips feel awkwardly large, hard to talk around. I still feel that oily heaviness on my skin, like death is clinging to me even though I have defeated it.
I am dimly aware that I left my own gun in the hallway behind me, sure I wouldn’t need it if I made it this far.
“I knew something was going on,” David says. “You’ve been running around with genetically damaged people all week, Tris, did you think I wouldn’t notice?” He shakes his head. “And then your friend Cara was caught trying to manipulate the lights, but she very wisely knocked herself out before she could tell us anything. So I came here, just in case. I’m sad to say I’m not surprised to see you.”
“You came here alone?” I say. “Not very smart, are you?”
His bright eyes squint a little. “Well, you see, I have death serum resistance and a weapon, and you have no way to fight me. There’s no way you can steal four virus devices while I have you at gunpoint. I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for no reason, and it will be at the expense of your life. The death serum may not have killed you, but I am going to. I’m sure you understand—officially we don’t allow capital punishment, but I can’t have you surviving this.”
He thinks I’m here to steal the weapons that will reset the experiments, not deploy one of them. Of course he does.
I try to guard my expression, though I’m sure it’s still slack. I sweep my eyes across the room, searching for the device that will release the memory serum virus. I was there when Matthew described it to Caleb in painstaking detail earlier: a black box with a silver keypad, marked with a strip of blue tape with a model number written on it. It is one of the only items on the counter along the left wall, just a few feet away from me. But I can’t move, or else he’ll kill me.
I’ll have to wait for the right moment, and do it fast.
“I know what you did,” I say. I start to back up, hoping that the accusation will distract him. “I know you designed the attack simulation. I know you’re responsible for my parents’ deaths—for my mother’s death. I know.”
“I am not responsible for her death!” David says, the words bursting from him, too loud and too sudden. “I told her what was coming just before the attack began, so she had enough time to escort her loved ones to a safe house. If she had stayed put, she would have lived. But she was a foolish woman who didn’t understand making sacrifices for the greater good, and it killed her!”
I frown at him. There’s something about his reaction—about the glassiness of his eyes—something that he mumbled when Nita shot him with the fear serum—something about her.
“Did you love her?” I say. “All those years she was sending you correspondence . . . the reason you never wanted her to stay there . . . the reason you told her you couldn’t read her updates anymore, after she married my father . . .”
David sits still, like a statue, like a man of stone.
“I did,” he says. “But that time is past.”
That must be why he welcomed me into his circle of trust, why he gave me so many opportunities. Because I am a piece of her, wearing her hair and speaking with her voice. Because he has spent his life grasping at her and coming up with nothing.
I hear footsteps in the hallway outside. The soldiers are coming. Good—I need them to. I need them to be exposed to the airborne serum, to pass it on to the rest of the compound. I hope they wait until the air is clear of death serum.
“My mother wasn’t a fool,” I say. “She just understood something you didn’t. That it’s not sacrifice if it’s someone else’s life you’re giving away, it’s just evil.”
I back up another step and say, “She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplaced disgust for another person’s genetics. That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don’t have enough of their own. That’s why I need to stop you from ‘sacrificing’ all those people and their memories. Why I need to rid the world of you once and for all.”
I shake my head.
“I didn’t come here to steal anything, David.”
I twist and lunge toward the device. The gun goes off and pain races through my body. I don’t even know where the bullet hit me.
I can still hear Caleb repeating the code for Matthew. With a quaking hand I type in the numbers on the keypad.
The gun goes off again.
More pain, and black edges on my vision, but I hear Caleb’s voice speaking again. The green button.
So much pain.
But how, when my body feels so numb?
I start to fall, and slam my hand into the keypad on my way down. A light turns on behind the green button.
I hear a beep, and a churning sound.
I slide to the floor. I feel something warm on my neck, and under my cheek. Red. Blood is a strange color. Dark.
From the corner of my eye, I see David slumped over in his chair.
And my mother walking out from behind him.
She is dressed in the same clothes she wore the last time I saw her, Abnegation gray, stained with her blood, with bare arms to show her tattoo. There are still bullet holes in her shirt; through them I can see her wounded skin, red but no longer bleeding, like she’s frozen in time. Her dull blond hair is tied back in a knot, but a few loose strands frame her face in gold.
I know she can’t be alive, but I don’t know if I’m seeing her now because I’m delirious from the blood loss or if the death serum has addled my thoughts or if she is here in some other way.
She kneels next to me and touches a cool hand to my cheek.
“Hello, Beatrice,” she says, and she smiles.
“Am I done yet?” I say, and I’m not sure if I actually say it or if I just think it and she hears it.
“Yes,” she says, her eyes bright with tears. “My dear child, you’ve done so well.”
“What about the others?” I choke on a sob as the image of Tobias comes into my mind, of how dark and how still his eyes were, how strong and warm his hand was, when we first stood face-to-face. “Tobias, Caleb, my friends?”
“They’ll care for each other,” she says. “That’s what people do.”
I smile and close my eyes.
I feel a thread tugging me again, but this time I know that it isn’t some sinister force dragging me toward death.
This time I know it’s my mother’s hand, drawing me into her arms.
And I go gladly into her embrace.
Can I be forgiven for all I’ve done to get here?
I want to be.
I can.
I believe it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE