"What about the others? Tobias, Caleb, my friends?"
"They'll care for each other," she says. "That's what people do."
I know it's the truth. My friends will take care of each other. Tobias will be fine. A memory tugs at the edges of my mind. "You know that's a lie." But he would recover, in time. And I somehow know I'd be happy if I left, that it would be easier than all of this. My mother holds that promise in her eyes.
If I go with her I will be happy, things will be easy again.
But then I realize, nothing I've done so far has been easy. I chose Dauntless when I could've stayed in Abnegation. I survived initiation and was ranked first. I stopped the simulations; I went to Erudite when I could've stayed behind with Tobias. All those choices I made for myself, from different places within me but with the same force driving me. Ever since my choosing ceremony, nothing has been easy.
Since I chose my life that day, I've never done easy. I don't want it.
"Mom…I…don't think I'm ready." As I say it, or think it, I know it's true. The same certainty that filled me while at Erudite headquarters fills me now, my body collecting strength from where I thought there was none. I can't leave, not like this. I have to fight. I don't want to be done. I'm not done with life yet.
My mother doesn't say anything.
She just reaches down and caresses my cheek with a tenderness that makes me ache, that makes me want to hold on to her hand and leave all of this destruction and pain behind, but then I think of Tobias, of his warm embrace and smile, and my friends, and even my brother. And I can't, I just can't.
"Your father and I love you, Beatrice...and we'll be there when you're ready." Her voice is kind and it sounds like home to me. But it's one I left months ago, during my choosing ceremony. And then she smiles, the same smile she used to give me after I thanked her for cutting my hair, in what feels like years ago.
My head feels heavy and my vision swims with tears and after I blink them away she's gone, taking the heavy, numb filling with her. My body seems to be on fire, like there are raw embers inside me instead of organs, every single part of me throbbing with pain coming from the two bullet wounds on my back.
But I'm still here. I'm alive.