Tobias
As I pull up the car next to the abandoned security checkpoint, Cara's face is frantic. Her respiratory rate is at sixty breaths per minute – deep, tortured gasps for air, as if the air sacs of her lungs have been replaced by bloated bags of polyethylene. I roll down my window.
"What is it?" I say.
Cara opens her mouth, but even before then, I realize: of course Tris would go into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb.
Of course she would.
"We – have – to – hurry – " she breathes.
She can't get any more air out of her lungs, but I lipread the rest: Something's wrong. She might still be alive.
I bellow at Cara to jump inside, but her face is cyanotic. She's not ready. She needs a doctor, and I am not one.
She's squealing something about magnets and antigravity. She's long gone.
Before she can muster the will to reach out to the door handle, I slam my foot into the gas pedal.
As I soar over a speed bump, bypassing several unnecessary twists and turns in the road, I glance at my rearview mirror.
Cara is kneeling on the road, clutching her chest and gawping after us, even as a swarm of mosquitoes swerve in and out of her open mouth.
In the backseat are Christina and Peter. Peter is staring dreamily out of his window, waving at the butterflies. I don't see Christina's face because she's hugging the driver's seat, holding on for her life. It's then that I realize that the door on her side has flown clean off its hinges; maybe Cara did reach the door handle, after all. I should have been impressed.
Christina isn't Divergent. She's Dauntless. She'll make it. But memory-wiped Peter is only adding extra weight to my car, slowing it down by three-point-two miles per hour –
Why did I decide to bring that imbecile Peter along oh why oh why oh why –
"Where are we going?" Christina shrieks over the windstorm of inflowing air.
"To the Weapons Lab!" I shout back. "On the fiftieth floor!"
Tris
"How did you inoculate yourself against the death serum?" David asks me. He's sitting in his wheelchair.
I blink at him, still dazed. But not dazed enough to ignore that he has a gun.
"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." He pauses to squint at me. "You can't survive the death serum without an inoculation."
"I just did," I say.
He starts talking again. He thinks I'm here to steal the weapons that will reset the experiments, not deploy one of them. Of course he does.
"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.
He continues his shouting rant – as if he's trying to excuse his own actions in front of a military tribunal. I wait for him to finish.
I already know that he used to love my mother. I can see it his eyes. That is, if any emotion from a man like him can be termed "love."
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.
But where is the memory serum? I sweep my eyes across the room, searching for the device that Matthew once described to Caleb in painstaking detail.
"My mother wasn't a fool," I say, in an effort to distract him. "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."
Just then, I see it.
No – that can't be.
It's floating outside. Ten feet from the window.
We are fifty floors up.
I'll have to get past David.
I continue my speech.
Tobias
"Out! Now!" I shout.
Without waiting for my brakes to slow down my car, I leap out the door. Over my shoulder, I watch as the car barrels past the dolphin fountain, into the nearest office at twenty miles an hour, and creates its own garage.
I am now standing at the foot of the skyscraper that houses the Weapons Lab. Fifty floors stand in the way between me and Tris.
Christina has made it out of the car. In fact, she's already running to the entrance of the building. She passed Dauntless initiation, after all.
Peter surprises me – he's made it out, too, and although he has faceplanted on the concrete sidewalk, he's still breathing. I guess Dauntless initiation nurtures muscle memory that can't be erased by serums.
I lunge forward, following Christina.
Something – or someone – strikes my ankle. Hard.
Tris
"She taught me all about real sacrifice," I say. "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."
Without warning, I lunge at his wheelchair, close my fingers around the gun on his lap, and soar toward the window.
There's a deafening crack.
Tobias
Searing pain pulses from my foot up to my thigh. I remain standing.
He is also standing there with a crimson cantaloupe on his forehead. He has my gun. He slipped it out of my back pocket while I was driving. Now he's pressing the barrel against my forehead.
"I thought you knew," Peter says, smirking. "I always thought you knew."
Christina inside the building. By all likelihood, she is stampeding past the tenth floor by now. She will be too late.
"But David didn't think you would know. You're damaged, after all."
Tris
The gun goes off. I kick off the windowsill and launch myself into the sky.
Dimly, I register that he always had a second gun. The first one was a trap, a decoy.
I taste my blood. It is sour – strangely flavorful. Like Dauntless hamburger.
Time is slow. For a fleeting moment, I'm floating in the mist. The device – suspended fifty stories above ground by antigravity – is just out of reach.
I didn't jump far enough. I'll never press the green button.
I slip the other gun out of my pocket, cross my arms, and fire both at once.
The device shatters. Glass falls; a cloud of green gas spreads out from it on all sides. But I'm already far beneath it.
My other bullet hits David just as his gun goes off once more.
But I didn't need to – he's slumping in his seat. And the soldiers have reached him.
Tobias
Peter tenses his finger over the trigger. I look up to the sky.
Tris
I'm hurtling past dozens of floors. I feel something warm on my neck. Red. Blood is a strange color. Dark.
My mother 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."
She helps me slip my arms out of my jacket, as if I am ten years old again, coming home from school during a winter storm.
And then she's gone.
I fire again, this time toward my feet.
Christina
Nita's holding me by my neck against the wall. She intends to throw me off the tenth floor.
A bullet strikes Nita in the forehead, and she crumples. I rush toward the window just in time to spot the comet plunging – no, parachuting - toward the earth.
Tobias
Peter's arm soaks with blood; he sinks to his knees. I rush toward the fountain at the center of the square, where the comet has landed.
For a moment, she stands upright on her own two feet, on the nose of the crumbling dolphin. She raises her gun-wielding fist into the air, as if her arm is a lighthouse on the water. Her jacket flutters into the water beneath her.
I'm there, wading into the fountain to catch her as she falls.
Tris
"You still owe me one," I say, tilting my head in Peter's direction.
Tobias tries to say something.
"I think you're overestimating my character." I cough, and my phlegm is my blood.
"Tris," he says, his voice more desperate than I've ever remembered, "what made you think you could – "
Before he can finish, I say, "It must be because you're so approachable." Then I smile at him.
"Tris – "
My mother's hand reaches over Tobias' shoulder, and she draws me into her arms.
And I go gladly into their embrace.
Tobias
She's gone before I touch my lips to hers.
The cloud of memory serum washes over us, but I grip onto the memory of the miracle who lies in my arms. Fight it, her voice tells me. Fight it.
That's how Christina, Cara, and Zeke find us, ten minutes later - in the fountain, water trickling over us and onto the stones beneath our feet.