Allegiant (Divergent #3)(87)
Author: Veronica Roth

“No, you are not,” Johanna says calmly. “I am the leader of the Allegiant. And you are going to agree to this treaty, or I am going to tell them that you had a chance to end this conflict without bloodshed if you sacrificed your pride, and you said no.”

Marcus’s passive mask is gone, revealing the malicious face beneath it. But even he can’t argue with Johanna, whose perfect calm and perfect threat have mastered him. He shakes his head but doesn’t argue again.

“I agree to your terms,” Johanna says, and she holds out her hand, her footsteps squeaking in the snow.

Evelyn removes her glove fingertip by fingertip, reaches across the gap, and shakes.

“In the morning we should gather everyone together and tell them the new plan,” Johanna says. “Can you guarantee a safe gathering?”

“I’ll do my best,” Evelyn says.

I check my watch. An hour has passed since Amar and Christina separated from us near the Hancock building, which means he probably knows that the serum virus didn’t work. Or maybe he doesn’t. Either way, I have to do what I came here to do—I have to find Zeke and his mother and tell them what happened to Uriah.

“I should go,” I say to Evelyn. “I have something else to take care of. But I’ll pick you up from the city limits tomorrow afternoon?”

“That sounds good,” Evelyn says, and she rubs my arm briskly with a gloved hand, like she used to when I came in from the cold as a child.

“You won’t be back, I assume?” Johanna says to me. “You’ve found a life for yourself on the outside?”

“I have,” I say. “Good luck in here. The people outside—they’re going to try to shut the city down. You should be ready for them.”

Johanna smiles. “I’m sure we can negotiate with them.”

She offers me her hand, and I shake it. I feel Marcus’s eyes on me like an oppressive weight threatening to crush me. I force myself to look at him.

“Good-bye,” I say to him, and I mean it.

Hana, Zeke’s mother, has small feet that don’t touch the ground when she sits in the easy chair in their living room. She is wearing a ragged black bathrobe and slippers, but the air she has, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyebrows raised, is so dignified that I feel like I am standing in front of a world leader. I glance at Zeke, who is rubbing his face with his fists to wake up.

Amar and Christina found them, not among the other revolutionaries near the Hancock building, but in their family apartment in the Pire, above Dauntless headquarters. I only found them because Christina thought to leave Peter and me a note with their location on the useless truck. Peter is waiting in the new van Evelyn found for us to drive to the Bureau.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know where to start.”

“You might begin with the worst,” Hana says. “Like what exactly happened to my son.”

“He was seriously injured during an attack,” I say. “There was an explosion, and he was very close to it.”

“Oh God,” Zeke says, and he rocks back and forth like his body wants to be a child again, soothed by motion as a child is.

But Hana just bends her head, hiding her face from me.

Their living room smells like garlic and onion, maybe remnants from that night’s dinner. I lean my shoulder into the white wall by the doorway. Hanging crookedly next to me is a picture of the family—Zeke as a toddler, Uriah as a baby, balancing on his mother’s lap. Their father’s face is pierced in several places, nose and ear and lip, but his wide, bright smile and dark complexion are more familiar to me, because he passed them both to his sons.

“He has been in a coma since then,” I say. “And . . .”

“And he isn’t going to wake up,” Hana says, her voice strained. “That is what you came to tell us, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I came to collect you so that you can make a decision on his behalf.”

“A decision?” Zeke says. “You mean, to unplug him or not?”

“Zeke,” Hana says, and she shakes her head. He sinks back into the couch. The cushions seem to wrap around him.

“Of course we don’t want to keep him alive that way,” Hana says. “He would want to move on. But we would like to go see him.”

I nod. “Of course. But there’s something else I should say. The attack . . . it was a kind of uprising that involved some of the people from the place where we were staying. And I participated in it.”

I stare at the crack in the floorboards right in front of me, at the dust that has gathered there over time, and wait for a reaction, any reaction. What greets me is only silence.

“I didn’t do what you asked me,” I say to Zeke. “I didn’t watch out for him the way I should have. And I’m sorry.”

I chance a look at him, and he is just sitting still, staring at the empty vase on the coffee table. It is painted with faded pink roses.

“I think we need some time with this,” Hana says. She clears her throat, but it doesn’t help her tremulous voice.

“I wish I could give it to you,” I say. “But we’re going back to the compound very soon, and you have to come with us.”

“All right,” Hana says. “If you can wait outside, we will be there in five minutes.”

The ride back to the compound is slow and dark. I watch the moon disappear and reappear behind the clouds as we bump over the ground. When we reach the outer limits of the city, it begins to snow again, large, light flakes that swirl in front of the headlights. I wonder if Tris is watching it sweep across the pavement and gather in piles by the airplanes. I wonder if she is living in a better world than the one I left, among people who no longer remember what it is to have pure genes.

Christina leans forward to whisper into my ear. “So you did it? It worked?”

I nod. In the rearview mirror I see her touch her face with both hands, grinning into her palms. I know how she feels: safe. We are all safe.

“Did you inoculate your family?” I say.

“Yep. We found them with the Allegiant, in the Hancock building,” she says. “But the time for the reset has passed—it looks like Tris and Caleb stopped it.”

Hana and Zeke murmur to each other on the way, marveling at the strange, dark world we move through. Amar gives the basic explanation as we go, looking back at them instead of the road far too often for my comfort. I try to ignore my surges of panic as he almost veers into streetlights or road barriers, and focus instead on the snow.