A/N: Five years after Allegiant, the city faces a new threat.
Takes place in the book-verse and contains spoilers for the entire book series. Originally conceived as a fix-fic/spite-fic to address issues raised in a sporking community, so if you view Four as a romantic hero, this may not be the story for you. The premise and the familiar characters are the property of Veronica Roth, while the remainder of the world-building is original. Trigger warning: Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them.
"Deanna Schneider is an agent of Marcus Eaton," I conclude. "I'm sorry."
Evelyn Johnson, the head of Chicago's Office of Immigration, folds her hands on her desk and shakes her head. Behind her, outside the window, construction rigs are repairing the train tracks damaged by the Diligent movement.
"Another small, feisty blonde," she says with a sigh. "Can you head off Tobias from announcing his engagement with her, Paloma? I'd like to at least spare him that humiliation."
"I'm not sure he's going to listen to me, after what happened last time."
"I wish he'd just kept dating you. I know where you stand."
"Right behind you, as always." Because it's safe there. And because if I have my eyes on your food and your drink, on your city water supply and on your ventilation systems, on your immigrants and what they do, I can assure that nobody, ever, will make you forget me. "What are we going to do with her?"
"Could you take her out for drinks and see that she forgets everything?"
"I don't think she deserves to lose her whole personality."
"Did she replace a real Deanna Schneider, or is her whole family fake?"
"She is the real one. Her history is seamless."
"Then she's a traitor."
"There are still people who'll care if she forgets them." I looked at the monitors for the Saint Paul experiment once, years after I'd been taken to the Bureau of Genetic Welfare and adopted. My parents were married to other people. The way they'd forgotten me, that day when I was ten, hadn't changed at all.
The one thing you can't do, my scientist foster-mother explained, was get the old personality back. Once erased, it was gone. I asked how that fit with genes controlling us, and she said something about hormones and behavioral predilections and "blood will tell."
"It's the humane thing to do," Evelyn says. Her eyes look weary, though it's only mid-morning. "Abnegation promised that the self was an illusion. In the old days, they would have said what I'm asking you to do was nothing more than helping a snake shed its skin."
xoxoxoxox
Experientia docet. It's the Diligent motto, scrawled in red paint across boards covering where windows were blown out by a Diligent bomb last week.
Scaffolding runs up the gray-brown stone face of the building, swarming with workers in overalls. Now and then, a person eddies loose from the foot traffic along Chicago Avenue, pausing to sound out the words or, more often, to wave and yell to one of the workers.
It means experience teaches: that the old ways, the familiar ones, the factions, were the right way to live. The Diligent believe our system, without walls or factions, will ultimately destroy the city.
As I weave between trees, pedestrians, and pedal-carts, following glimmers of sunshine through the ravine between tall buildings, it occurs to me that I don't know which of the old factions would have been responsible for repairing a damaged building.
xoxoxoxox
"That still makes my gut turn inside out," I say to Deanna Schneider as she executes a neat landing on the terrazzo floor of Water Tower Place, to the applause of shoppers.
"You've got to try it some time." She's almost laughing, tucking a strand of pale hair back into her bun as she unlocks the flying harness with a practiced one-handed move. A controlled fall of eight floors turns her cheeks pink and makes her eyes sparkle.
"We've got these ten percent off for the rest of the afternoon, folks," she says to the crowd. "You'll have to take the elevator up, but it'll be a lot more fun coming down!"
"How often do people buy?" I ask.
"Between you and me, almost never on the actual flying harness. But they scoop up Dauntless memorabilia, which does very nice things for the police budget. Everybody secretly wants to be a little bit Dauntless."
"Let me buy you a drink, if you're ready for a break."
She accepts almost before I finish the sentence. "The Julius stand got a shipment of hothouse grapefruit. They say it makes the kale smoothies totally radical."
We sit at a wrought iron table in a court surrounded by food stands. It's not that unlike one of the Fringe bazaars, except that after five years here, I'm not sure what to make of an entire stand devoted to oatmeal and another to food so spicy that it stings going down. If I want to eat nettles, I can go wander the wilderness like the bandits.
"I got a new health supplement," I say.
"Is it bootleg or official?"
"Bootleg." It's not, but that's the right answer to make Deanna hold out her cup. Serious, responsible Paloma Markham must be trying to fit in with the crowd that takes risks. Therefore, because I'm trying to be dangerous, whatever I give her must be safe.
I pour a vial of green serum into both of our drinks, telling myself that it's the right thing, the kind thing. "I was trying to think of a good engagement present for you and Tobias. I looked at the Erudite shop."
"Boring. Nothing but dull old books. I told them they should do science experiments, like with making things turn color and blow up, and they just blinked at me like owls." Deanna sips, then takes a gulp. "That is yum."
"I'll see if my supplier has more, if you like."
"I'd love that. Don't tell, but I think Tobias and I are going to elope. My grandmother's gone kind of nuts with wanting me married in black-and-white, and how it's not a real marriage if we don't go under the truth serum together, and I just. . . it seems so Candor, you know? I want to stand on top of the Hancock Tower and make promises with Tobias and then swoop down onto the city together."
My eyes sting, which I'm going to blame on the grapefruit juice. "Traditions die if we don't remember them."
"But it's not my tradition. I wouldn't have chosen Candor. Faction before blood, right?"
"I wouldn't know. Experientia docet?"
When Deanna lifts her cup to toast the Diligent slogan, I can convince myself that she deserves what's about to happen: not because she's a bad person, even though she's a part of bad things, but because she's sloppy. I wouldn't have fallen for that trick.
Deanna takes another gulp, swallows. Her blue eyes widen, then go blank.
"You can't take everything at face value if you're going to survive," I say, hoping she's already past losing herself. If it's the last thing she hears, it's a taunt. I want it to be advice for starting over.
She finishes the drink, slowly, so I finish mine, all the way to the pool of unmixed grapefruit juice at the bottom.
"This is really stupid," she says, "but I can't remember your name."
xoxoxoxox
"Tobias Johnson," he repeats for the third time.
Deanna shakes her head, smiling. "Have we met before?"
I shouldn't have brought Tobias here, to Deanna's family home in the old Candor district, but he got all misty in those dark blue eyes and set his jaw just so, looking mysterious and determined, the way he must have done in the old Dauntless days.
"It's like someone gave her the memory serum," Tobias says. He's a smear of darkness against the merciless white of the sitting room's upholstery. "You're sure you two were drinking the exact same thing?"
"Positive. Maybe she's allergic to something in a Julius."
His shoulders slump. "She'd probably be immune to the serum anyway. Like Tris."
I don't have to look across the room at the mirror, reflecting pale, golden Deanna as she clasps my brown hand, to hear Tobias' unspoken and you'd be the one who doesn't remember even your own name. Because she looks like Tris, who was genetically perfect, and I look like Nita, who wasn't.
xoxoxoxox
"I'm going to ask Johanna about testing people for serum immunity," Evelyn says when I tell her about Tobias' reaction. Behind her, the trains are running smoothly again.
"There's no need," I say soothingly. "Not that many people are immune to even one serum. Being lucid with the choosing serum and the fear serum. . . that was the genetic marker. Anything else is a fluke."
"It's a fluke that affects our security." She rubs her knuckles together. "I don't want to go back to the old days of fearing the Divergent, Paloma. I fought that."
"I know. I'm sorry." As an intern at the Bureau, I watched on the screens as Erudite did its best to wipe out the very population we were trying to breed, while the scientific debate raged over when and whether interfering would ruin the validity of the experimental results. My foster-mother said outright that this was idiocy, but she was out-voted. Her ineffective but well-meaning stand didn't save her when the rebels from Chicago released the memory serum.
Evelyn opens her desk drawer, only to slam it. "Everybody believes we're all alike now. And we are, as long as the serums are a bogeyman no one believes we use any more. Maybe I should have just had you shoot her after all."
xoxoxoxox
Fortunately, the city engineer at the Water Tower pumping station shuts off the valve before the fear serum in the water spreads beyond a couple buildings in the downtown core.
The Diligent waited for the shift of an engineer who was black as ebony before they made their move. He was originally from the Fringe. . . and, as it happened, sufficiently unaffected that he could see past visions of mobs chasing him with lead pipes, staying calm enough to turn the valve and save the city's sanity.
xoxoxoxox
"How much did you tell Deanna about the Bureau?" I don't want my tone to be accusatory, not when Tobias' face is gray and the corners of his eyes are red, but I need to know.
Marcus would have known about the serums from his time as leader of the Abnegation, but the old Chicago leadership had never figured out that they could be distributed in the water supply. That was Bureau knowledge. The old Erudite had a way of getting so firmly stuck on a line of research that they never saw other possibilities, and Abnegation repudiated the whole concept of asking questions, so I doubt Marcus came up with the pump station plot on his own.
"She wanted to know. I don't know. Everything. She was a good listener." He scrubs his hands over his face. There's a pile of dirty clothing under the boxing dummy hanging from the high ceiling of his apartment. "I can't stop loving her just because she's ill, Paloma."
"If she can't remember you, you may have to accept just being friends."
"She doesn't have to remember me. She just has to get to know me again."
The reason I'm here is that Tobias has applied for an open-ended leave of absence from his work as Johanna's assistant, so that he can tend Deanna. He wants to be with her around the clock.
Her family will probably allow it: explaining things over and over to the memory-wiped gets old fast. I did it for three days when I was ten, telling my parents that my brothers and I lived with them, that they were responsible for us. . . before I ran, not to anywhere, just away. I ran through streets lined with garbage and flooded from broken fire hydrants, with wild dogs and dirty children who'd forgotten their parents, and the people in the white van found me huddled, exhausted and clutching a dirty ragdoll, on the steps of the big marble building in downtown Saint Paul.
"You're very brave to devote so much energy to her. She's lucky to have you."
I would have done this for my foster-mother, but the rebels from Chicago didn't allow it. I keep my hands flat on my thighs, though they want to clench at the thought that I destroyed Deanna, the same way the Bureau destroyed my parents, the same way Chicago destroyed my new family. It is better than death. It is better than the end of civilization. It has to be.
Tobias forces the kind of smile we make over memories of the dead. "Deanna's always been the person I could tell anything to. She wanted to hear all about Tris, the Bureau, the rebellion, everything. I haven't been able to talk to anybody like that, not even Christina."
xoxoxoxox
"I told Tobias not to make her into Tris, and he punched me," Christina says. She lets me fall in step with her as she walks along the block through newly restored buildings north of the old Merciless Mart. A stretch of lower roofs and nearer sky feels both nostalgic and eerily exposed.
Though we're co-workers in the same bureau, it's unusual for us to be out in a neighborhood together. Christina's more of a social worker, as she can't stand being sedentary or indoors, so she's the first person to tell confused immigrants to get their chin up and apply themselves to a new job. She knows my work involves background checks, and that's all she knows.
"Did you like her?"
"No." She bites the word short, but her Candor background won't let her leave it there. "I thought she was way too eager to play the part of Tris. I would have told him to back off and let me be me, but she was always after him to tell her one more Tris story."
"What was she like, growing up in Candor?"
"She'd take the dare option when we played Truth or Dare." Christina smacks at a weedy shrub with her clipboard and nods to a young couple moving a sofa from a solar truck. "Most people don't, unless they're hoping the dare will be something they want to do, like kissing their crush. Deanna would take it just to take it, then she'd be disappointed if it wasn't something like jumping off the roof. I didn't hang out with the younger kids much, but we got along fine, playing Truth or Dare."
"You jumped off roofs?"
"Not the way Dauntless do, from a moving train, seven stories up, but I'd done a second-story balcony. And I'd climbed up four stories, but I got to climb back down. Deanna could at least think of good dares, I'll give her that."
Christina tosses a handful of candies to kids who call her missus, shoots me a sideways glance, and adds: "I wouldn't have expected her to join the Diligent. When Tobias and I got back from. . . the place you came from. . . everyone seemed different. I figured it was because we'd changed. I didn't think about whether they'd changed."
I'm trying to decide how to ask her why she thinks Deanna was in the Diligent, without giving away that she's guessed right and that I know she's guessed right, when Christina suddenly giggles.
"You know what's funny?" she says in the breaths between laughter. "We saw the Dauntless kids jump on and off trains every day, and it never occurred to us to dare each other to do that. Isn't that the most?"
The couple with the sofa has set it on the sidewalk and are sprawled across it, clutching their bellies as they laugh.
Amity serum. In the air. It has to be.
I'm immune to that, too. The scientists at the Bureau tested me: immunities to the Abnegation memory serum, the Amity mood serum, and the Candor truth serum. The effects of the Dauntless fear serum are amplified so that I'm stuck in hours of terrors, while the choosing simulation serum just turns into a chaotic hallucination. Some versions of Erudite's mind-control serum work on me; some don't.
The scientist who became my foster mother drew the line at trying the death serum on me, saying that from what they knew about my genes so far, I was too valuable to risk that way.
Evelyn is, thank goodness, one of the few Chicago leaders who's embraced the new portable phones, like we had at the Bureau. I tell her what's happened, as tersely as I can. There's little she can do other than tell people to cover in place. Stop the trains, take any system that requires judgment down to minimal sustained operation.
Christina is telling me knock-knock jokes that are mostly faction slurs on Erudite. If I leave her here. . . I don't know if the Diligent are trying to make a point, or if there's a follow-up that's going to involve slitting people's throats while they're too busy chuckling to protest. I could be leaving her to her death. I could be running to mine. There could be a second serum on the way that I'm not immune to.
xoxoxoxox
"You really don't know Tobias?" Christina says between hiccups. "That's hilarious."
Deanna pats her hand. Nothing in the air has reached this older neighborhood. Nothing. Yet. "He's very nice."
"Nice is not the word anybody has ever used to describe Tobias."
He glares at Christina. His eyes are always red around the edges, now, and his shoulders never spring back from their hunch. "Deanna knows me better than you do, maybe."
It's Tobias who reaches for the tray carried by Deanna's grandmother. The tray, like everything else originally Candor, is stark black and white: a checkerboard pattern where each tiny, handleless ceramic cup sits neatly on a square surrounding the striped teapot. Half the cups are glazed white, half black.
The tea he pours is greenish, with leaves swirling in its depths. It tastes of flowers and grass.
"I've had so much tea, I feel like I'm going to float away," Deanna says, but she drinks anyway. We all do: the new serum attack may be Amity good-fellowship, but what I feel is mostly fear, and I bet Tobias feels the same.
"Thank you," Deanna says to Tobias as he refills her cup. "That's very nice of you. Are you going to tell me how Tris loved this tea?"
Christina guffawed. "Tris hated tea. She said it was like drinking dishwater."
"That was Abnegation tea," Tobias says. "You don't own her memory, you know."
"Neither do you."
Deanna smiles over her cup. "Sometimes, from the way he keeps chattering about her, I think I must be her, and I just forgot. Is that what happened?"
"No," I say quickly. "Your name is Deanna Schneider. You were born Candor."
"I want you to be Tris," Tobias says. "Sometimes I think I'd have to put you in Abnegation, but there isn't Abnegation any more. They all got killed, except my father, and my father was sent away, so all the Abnegation virtues were lost. Nobody wants to be selfless any more."
"Knock knock," Christina says loudly.
She repeats it so that we can't speak over it. On the third round, I ask: "Who's there?"
"Marcus Eaton."
Tobias winces.
"Marcus Eaton who?" I say, to have this over with.
"Mark us eatin' my words 'cause I'm a big, fat liar." She dissolves into a ripple of laughter.
"Grandma brings me big books on laws and helps me sound out the words, and I think I like those, but then Tobias tells me that Tris hated books and reading." Deanna taps her cup on the tray. "I don't think I hate them. I think it's rude to tell me I shouldn't like things because some dead girl didn't. Who made you the boss of me?"
"Fate. God. I don't know. You're just like Tris. You were. Except for being selfless, and we were working on that. You were getting better."
"Knock knock."
"Who's there?" I ask quickly.
"Four." That was Tobias' old nickname, back in Dauntless. It's one of the things Christina told me when I was dating him, in his short interlude between spunky blond Cassandra, whom I'd tricked into cheating on him after I traced her back to Marcus Eaton, and spunky blond Deanna.
Cassandra had been found floating in the river, her neck broken. If I'd expected her Diligent cronies to take revenge that way, I would have sent her somewhere safe.
"Four who?"
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee."
"Shut up!" Tobias snaps. "You've always had too big a mouth on you-"
"The better to eat you with!" Christina bites playfully at Tobias' arm, but the way he swings it to slam into her mouth isn't playful, and there's blood on her lip, after, even though she can't stop chuckling.
"That's mean," Deanna says. "I don't like you."
"You mouth off any more, there'll be more where that came from."
Words throb against my lips: how he makes himself a patsy about women, how his violence makes him look weak, how I feel sorry for him. These aren't things I want to say. I don't want to see Tobias hurt or angry. I feel as if I'm shoving the words away when I push him so that it's his arm that sends the teapot flying, shattering in a splash of green across the checkerboard tile floor.
"What the hell, Paloma?" He's got the whole glare with his eyebrows drawn together and his dog teeth visible. If I put the sofa between us, he'll interpret it as fear. If I don't, he may take a swing at me next.
I pitch my voice as calmly as I can, although my heart is racing with the urge to flight. There's no away to run to, no white van to rescue me. "There's Candor truth serum in the tea."
"Then tell me. Did you erase Deanna's memory? Were you that jealous of her?"
"No."
"No to which?"
"No is the answer you're getting. Don't shake your fist at me, Tobias."
"You're immune to the truth serum. She's not. You never told me that."
"I can't tell you what I don't know." Being able to lie steadies me. "What difference could it have possibly made to you, anyway?"
"It didn't make a difference because it was just Tris. Tris was special. They told me it was a difference on people's genes, and I believed them, but Tris proved that it didn't matter, that it was just that she was unique, and genetics didn't mean anything for the rest of us. The whole genetic damage thing was made up and we could throw it away, and now it turns out you've got it, when you don't even look like Tris. You aren't Tris, but if Tris wasn't unique, then we're really broken, all of us, after all-"
"Tobias, slow down. You're jumping to conclusions."
"We're broken and people like you lied to us-"
"Knock knock. Knock knock!"
It's Deanna who answers Christina this time. "Who's there?"
"Bloody tooth."
"Bloody tooth who?"
"Bloody twooth is eluthiv." Christina spits blood around gales of laughter. Deanna bites her knuckles.
"Immunity matters only because the Diligent are using the serums to destroy us. Tobias, don't even think of hitting me."
"I'll think whatever I want. I was immune to one of Erudite's serums, too."
"Exactly. It's just a thing. If it weren't for the Diligent misusing the serums, it wouldn't come up. We'd all be equal."
"So it doesn't matter at all, except for the part where it's critical to our survival. That really makes me feel good, Paloma."
xoxoxoxox
"I want to go talk with my father," Tobias tells Evelyn. She's spent the last hour in a meeting where Johanna and the other city leaders argued over whether strategy is even a thing against these latest attacks. I was the person who got to explain how the Bureau never tested mixing serums because there was no conceivable circumstance, under the faction system, where a person would take two serums at once.
"Johanna's considering sending a team to shoot him. Do you want to be on it?"
"Maybe. But I want to talk with him first. Maybe I don't like the future of my city always hanging on how much my parents hate each other on a given day."
The color rising in Evelyn's cheeks matches the red splotches on Tobias'. They look alike: angular, olive-skinned, tense with alertness against threats that are proving all too real.
"You can go on one condition."
"That I shoot him? I won't agree to that."
"That Paloma goes with you, and she has a supply of the memory serum. If she thinks Marcus is a threat, or she thinks he's lying to you, she's authorized to use it."