Allegiant

He winks at me, and I feel the muscles around my eye contracting as he does, though I didn’t tell them to. Without warning, his—my—our arms jerk toward the glass and reach into it, closing around the neck of my reflection. But then the mirror disappears, and my—his—our hands are around our own throat, dark patches creeping into the edge of our vision. We sink to the ground, and the grip is as tight as iron.

I can’t think. I can’t think of a way out of this one.

By instinct, I scream. The sound vibrates against my hands. I picture those hands as mine really are, large with slender fingers and calloused knuckles from hours at the punching bag. I imagine my reflection as water running over Marcus’s skin, replacing every piece of him with a piece of me. I remake myself in my own image.

I am kneeling on the concrete, gasping for air.

My hands tremble, and I run my fingers over my neck, my shoulders, my arms. Just to make sure.

I told Tris, on the train to meet Evelyn a few weeks ago, that Marcus was still in my fear landscape, but that he had changed. I spent a long time thinking about it; it crowded my thoughts every night before I slept and clamored for attention every time I woke. I was still afraid of him, I knew, but in a different way—I was no longer a child, afraid of the threat my terrifying father posed to my safety. I was a man, afraid of the threat he posed to my character, to my future, to my identity.

But even that fear, I know, does not compare to the one that comes next. Even though I know it’s coming, I want to open a vein and drain the serum from my body rather than see it again.

A pool of light appears on the concrete in front of me. A hand, the fingers bent into a claw, reaches into the light, followed by another hand, and then a head, with stringy blond hair. The woman coughs and drags herself into the circle of light, inch by inch. I try to move toward her, to help her, but I am frozen.

The woman turns her face toward the light, and I see that she is Tris. Blood spills over her lips and curls around her chin. Her bloodshot eyes find mine, and she wheezes, “Help.”

She coughs red onto the floor, and I throw myself toward her, somehow knowing that if I don’t get to her soon, the light will leave her eyes. Hands wrap around my arms and shoulders and chest, forming a cage of flesh and bone, but I keep straining toward her. I claw at the hands holding me, but I only end up scratching myself.

I shout her name, and she coughs again, this time more blood. She screams for help, and I scream for her, and I don’t hear anything, I don’t feel anything, but my heartbeat, but my own terror.

She drops to the ground, tensionless, and her eyes roll back into her head. It’s too late.

The darkness lifts. The lights return. Graffiti covers the walls of the fear landscape room, and across from me are the mirror-windows to the observation room, and in the corners are the cameras that record each session, all where they’re supposed to be. My neck and back are covered in sweat. I wipe my face with the hem of my shirt and walk to the opposite door, leaving my black box with its syringe and needle behind.

I don’t need to relive my fears anymore. All I need to do now is try to overcome them.

I know from experience that confidence alone can get a person into a forbidden place. Like the cells on the third floor of Erudite headquarters.

Not here, though, apparently. A factionless man stops me with the end of his gun before I reach the door, and I am nervous, choking.

“Where you going?”

I put my hand on his gun and push it away from my arm. “Don’t point that thing at me. I’m here on Evelyn’s orders. I’m going to see a prisoner.”

“I didn’t hear about any after-hours visits today.”

I drop my voice low, so he feels like he’s hearing a secret. “That’s because she didn’t want it on the record.”

“Chuck!” someone calls out from the stairs above us. It’s Therese. She makes a waving motion as she walks down. “Let him through. He’s fine.”

I nod to Therese and keep moving. The debris in the hallway has been swept clean, but the broken lightbulbs haven’t been replaced, so I walk through stretches of darkness, like patches of bruises, on my way to the right cell.

When I reach the north corridor, I don’t go straight to the cell, but rather to the woman who stands at the end. She is middle-aged, with eyes that droop at the edges and a mouth held in a pucker. She looks like everything exhausts her, including me.

“Hi,” I say. “My name is Tobias Eaton. I’m here to collect a prisoner, on orders from Evelyn Johnson.”

Her expression doesn’t change when she hears my name, so for a few seconds I’m sure I’ll have to knock her unconscious to get what I want. She takes a piece of crumpled paper from her pocket and flattens it against her left palm. On it is a list of prisoners’ names and their corresponding room numbers.

“Name?” she says.

“Caleb Prior. 308A.”

“You’re Evelyn’s son, right?”

“Yeah. I mean . . . yes.” She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who likes the word “yeah.”

She leads me to a blank metal door with 308A on it—I wonder what it was used for when our city didn’t require so many cells. She types in the code, and the door springs open.

“I guess I’m supposed to pretend I don’t see what you’re about to do?” she says.

She must think I’m here to kill him. I decide to let her.

“Yes,” I say.

“Do me a favor and put in a good word for me with Evelyn. I don’t want so many night shifts. The name’s Drea.”

“You got it.”

She gathers the paper into her fist and shoves it back into her pocket as she walks away. I keep my hand on the door handle until she reaches her post again and turns to the side so she isn’t facing me. It seems like she’s done this a few times before. I wonder how many people have disappeared from these cells at Evelyn’s command.

I walk in. Caleb Prior sits at a metal desk, bent over a book, his hair piled on one side of his head.

“What do you want?” he says.

“I hate to break this to you—” I pause. I decided a few hours ago how I wanted to handle this—I want to teach Caleb a lesson. And it will involve a few lies. “You know, actually, I kind of don’t hate it. Your execution’s been moved up a few weeks. To tonight.”

That gets his attention. He twists in his chair and stares at me, his eyes wild and wide, like prey faced with a predator.

“Is that a joke?”

“I’m really bad at telling jokes.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “No, I have a few weeks, it’s not tonight, no—”

“If you shut up, I’ll give you an hour to adjust to this new information. If you don’t shut up, I’ll knock you out and shoot you in the alley outside before you wake up. Make your choice now.”

Seeing an Erudite process something is like watching the inside of a watch, the gears all turning, shifting, adjusting, working together to form a particular function, which in this case is to make sense of his imminent demise.

Caleb’s eyes shift to the open door behind me, and he seizes the chair, turning and swinging it into my body. The legs hit me, hard, which slows me down just enough to let him slip by.

I follow him into the hallway, my arms burning from where the chair hit me. I am faster than he is—I slam into his back and he hits the floor face-first, without bracing himself. With my knee against his back, I pull his wrists together and squeeze them into a plastic loop. He groans, and when I pull him to his feet, his nose is bright with blood.

Drea’s eyes touch mine for just a moment, then move away.

I drag him down the hallway, not the way I came, but another way, toward an emergency exit. We walk down a flight of narrow stairs where the echo of our footsteps layers over itself, dissonant and hollow. Once I’m at the bottom, I knock on the exit door.

Zeke opens it, a stupid grin on his face.