A/N: Four, Marcus, and their backstory are the property of Veronica Roth. Trigger warning: Serums play a large role in the plot, with the resulting loss of autonomy to people dosed with them. There is also physical and psychological horror.
One knee won't bend, and when I get it moving and stand, the other crumples under me. My stomach feels hollow, my head aches, and my pants are damp and stink of urine.
"How long was I under?"
"More than a day." Akallabeth puts a hand under my elbow, too tentatively to give me real support. "Come on, Paloma. We don't have much time for your daring escape."
I want to cringe from the dim corridor. We're halfway along it, stumbling and aching, when my brain registers that it's like the library: bars of grayish light, one of them in three lit.
"There should be guards."
"I used the renewal potion on them."
"They'd still. . ."
"I sent them to find a left-handed screwdriver." She pushes us through a door, and I'm wrapped in cool, damp air. The street lamps make the night only a little dimmer than that corridor. The way frogs or maybe crickets echo in the empty streets makes me think it's after midnight.
We're halfway across the square where I parked the van before I look back and realize it's not there. Patting the pocket where I kept the remote would be a tell.
"Your vehicle is safe."
"I shouldn't have been able to control the fear simulation." I want to slap a hand over my mouth to put the words back in. Akallabeth must have visited me twice. She got the remote and then came back for me.
"Word is that you're immune to the truth serum. But you're not Divergent?"
The library's windows glow eerily. What if one of the Erudite is awake and looking out? They work all night, they always did. Then we're past it, in streets of pinkish brick buildings. There's someone in the field planted with vegetables. . . no, it's a stuffed effigy to scare away birds.
"Nobody knows what Divergent means any more."
She's silent for the length of six paces. "It's too soon for everybody to have forgotten about Divergents. Do you mean that people disagree about what it is?"
"Yes. I'm immune to the truth serum, but the fear serum. . . it hits me much worse than normal."
"Do you normally stay under longer than the dosage indicates?"
I need another six steps to make sense of that question. "I don't remember. I was ten when the Bureau tested me."
"Did they ever test combining a serum you're immune to with the fear serum?"
"The serums were meant to belong to each faction. No one should ever be exposed to more than one at a time."
The memory of Christina, giggling and telling knock-knock jokes under the combined influence of the Amity and Candor serums, makes me stumble.
"Truth's a menace, science is a public danger." She says it wearily, as if it's one of the aphorisms loved by the Children of Peace.
"The serum that I'm immune to allowed me to be lucid under the one I'm not immune to."
"It's a hypothesis." Akallabeth herds me through a bottleneck of trees and pinkish buildings, toward a low mass of friendly brown stone with arches and chimneys.
"You're Erudite."
"I have my feet." She guides me toward a breezeway between two segments of the friendly brown building. "This is the house of the newly reborn. Your name is Estelle. Can you remember that?"
"The memory serum. . . I'm immune to that, too."
"Pretend. You have vials of it in your pocket. You must have seen how it works."
Inside, I'm enveloped by nutmeg, lemon, and pine. This place is old like the oldest parts of Chicago, with floors worn into curves and woodwork polished smooth. Akallabeth pushes me into a large room covered in tile and starts at the fastenings of my shirt.
"I'll do it," I say. My fingers are awkward, and I end up needing her help to slip out of my filthy pants. She positions me in front of one of the row of shower heads and turns on the spray with a movement so firm and deft that my brain finally registers that she's done this before, many times. Hardly a drop of water hits her gray dress.
She leaves me to scrub myself clean. My hair's matted with sweat, so I wash that, too, with a soft mass of soap that stings scrapes I don't remember getting.
When I'm done, Akallabeth is standing behind me, holding a towel. Once I'm half-dry, she combs out my hair, smoothing it with herb-scented oil as she murmurs the house rules. There are times for sleeping, working, studying, and eating. I must follow them exactly.
It's simple enough. It gives me a routine, and with a routine in place, I can find the gaps that will allow me to slip away and find Tobias. She settles me in a bedroom by myself - "because you came in so late" - and leaves me with a roll, a chunk of cheese, and a mug of chamomile tea.
The bell that awakens me is too loud to do anything else. In the minute of panic that follows opening my eyes, all I see is an unfamiliar white-walled room and the tray beside my bed with a half-eaten roll. I don't remember coming here. . .
But I do, through the fog of sleep. Akallabeth has left clothing on the plain chair in the corner: underwear, jeans, a shirt patterned in faded pink and dull green, house slippers shaped like rabbits. Everything that was in my pockets is in a messenger bag. . . no, not everything. The memory serum is there, but she hasn't returned the van remote.
When I find the dining hall, I'm one of the last to the long tables. There's a plastic chair between a man with a bald spot, who hands me a bowl of oatmeal, and a redheaded woman who's deep in conversation with the person on her other side.
"I'm Estelle," I say to the man. The oatmeal tastes of nothing.
"You'll want syrup. I'm Bob." He slides a pitcher toward us from the center of the table.
"Thank you." I don't realize until after I've poured it that the syrup is infused with bits of red berries that float in my oatmeal like blood clots. But it's sweet, and if I don't look at it. . . it's not as bad as eating fried insects, which both crunch and spurt. "Is this your first time here?"
"Only the leader knows." Bob turns to me with the broad grin of a child. "The leader takes our sins upon himself and sets us free into a new life."
Stupid question, Paloma. Only I'm Estelle now, and the key to succeeding at an undercover mission is to think of yourself as exactly who and what you claim to be. I'm Estelle. I was born yesterday.
That excuses my stupid question, at least. There are mottoes painted above the windows in big, blocky letters. All but two words seem more like piles of letters stuck randomly together. My stomach goes cold and heavy. Did mixing the serums wipe out my ability to read?
"I know Experientia docet, but what do the others say?" I ask Bob.
"You can read that? It took me more than a week to read plain English, and my mentor says I'm Erudite material."
Under the table, I kick myself hard in the ankle. My foster-mother threw a tantrum at starting with simple board books about talking animals. "I don't know. I just recognized it. What are the others?"
"They're all in different languages. Nobody here knows them."
"Then why are they here?"
"They've always been here. Our leader came to change our hearts. The words are nothing."
The writing doesn't seem like it could be faded from something darker or more definite, so it hasn't been here long. Five years ago, people like Sharon and Gary were in charge. They knew what these words meant. They put them here for a reason.
I don't remember it. You never knew it, I tell myself, trying to tame with deep breaths the accelerating pulses in my wrists and throat. But I must have studied Madison at some point. I knew about the Leontari. I knew about the matriarchy in Minneapolis and the complex marriage customs there. Madison was between the two settlements, so why wouldn't I have studied it?
"Take a drink of water," Bob says. When I look at him blankly, he adds: "The panic. It's normal, the first time you realize how many burdens have been lifted from you. So few people are ever truly free that we don't know how to deal with it, at first."
Farming collective, my brain supplies once I've gulped half the glass of water. Run by the professors. Descendants of the professors. Modeled on ideal communities from ancient times.
"Why learn things, if it's just a burden? Why not stay free?"
"We are called to service. The good of the community requires that we take up the burden of knowledge. The perfectly free person is alone and cannot survive. Oh!" His voice changes on the last word, losing the cadence of memorization. He points toward Akallabeth, who's walking the aisle between tables with the briskness I remember from last night. "She's the leader's chosen one. She's looking at you."
"I don't know why." That's true. "What does it mean?"
"She's the leader of Abnegation. It's an honor, if she's interested in you."
I can act surprised, I remind myself against a deep breath. Everybody expects me to be surprised about anything and everything. They don't know what I'm surprised about or my normal level of control.
I thought Marcus would be the leader of Abnegation. He was, back in Chicago. He wears gray here. The difference was probably trivial. No, it is not trivial that Marcus, as a Divergent, has set himself up as ruler of factions without belonging to one.
"Estelle," Akallabeth says. Her voice is low, but it's firm, like last night. No I am unworthy when she's away from Marcus, then. Is it only him that she's unworthy in comparison to?
Bob nudges me and whispers, "Call her ma'am."
"Yes, ma'am?" Had they used this word in old Chicago? It seemed too far away to remember: the far side not just of miles, but of years, separated from here and now by the wall and the monitoring screens and endless vials of serum.
"You're to serve tea to Marcus. It's simple. Come along, Estelle."
When I look down at my slippers, she adds: "There are shoes for you in the foyer."
The shoes waiting for me are my own boots, shinier than I've seen them in months. Slipping them on makes my stride seem firmer, so much that Akallabeth puts out a hand to slow me. "You were renewed last night," she whispers. "This is all new to you."
I breathe in, deeply, trying to fill my lungs not just with the sharpness of morning dew or the sweetness of flowers, but also with the memory of how my foster-mother walked, that first day after her memory was taken from her.
Mostly, she sat, looking at her hands and trembling. Nobody knew what was happening to us or what to do. My neighbors in Saint Paul ran, but they were fleeing. . . something. Deanna, sitting across from me with her kale smoothie that I'd dosed with memory serum, smiled as she looked around the Water Tower Place atrium, but even Deanna seemed subdued.
Be Deanna. Walk as if I'm still in slippers, lifting my feet so that I don't revert to shuffling. Look around, but blankly. It's okay to reach out to touch: a pink flower, a pinkish building, a lamp post. Turn to look immediately at the revving of a motor or a shouted greeting.
I trip on the step down from sidewalk to road. Akallabeth steadies my elbow. "It's all right."
It's not all right. If I pay attention to everything - the slight chill to the morning breeze, the shadows of the leaves against the pink stone buildings, the sound of birds and bicycles - then I can focus on nothing. I don't know what's important.
I narrow my attention to two clusters of things: the road ahead of me and Akallabeth beside me. The road's simple enough. It's smooth, with fresh-looking blacker patches, so the Diligent have some way of fixing it, and they bother. They pick up litter, too. A scrap of paper blowing in the wind looks out of place. And they move walk briskly, with their hands busy: pushing a cart or steering a bicycle or carrying a box or cradling a baby. The one man standing still in a doorway is holding a broom.
"They're all so busy," I say.
"Slackers don't loiter in view of the leader's window."
Her voice is level, neutral. Akallabeth isn't one for facial expressions. Maybe like Evelyn, she's had them beaten or starved out of her. Her hands, when she helped me shower, were soft and without callouses. Her gray dress is as long as the old Abnegation gowns but not as baggy. It skims curves but isn't tight where farm work would have given her muscles. She could have been indoors for the whole past five years, and all traces of life before that, erased.
"Abnegation are shells for the service of others," she says.
Aren't all the factions supposed to serve? I stop myself from asking it because Estelle doesn't know about factions. Estelle knows nothing but that we're climbing the steps to a tall building. Estelle doesn't remember that this is the tower with the leader's apartments.
It isn't difficult to treat this place as unfamiliar. Tobias and I were hurried through the lobby and up an elevator, not too differently from how Akallabeth hurries me now. She guides me into a room that isn't Marcus' chamber. It's very small, with no window and just a set of white-painted cabinets and equipment that I realize, almost as if I had been memory-wiped, is a kitchen.
"Do you know how to make tea, Estelle?"
I nod. "Yes. I think so."
"Get it ready. When you hear a bell, bring it on a tray."
When she opens a second door to leave, I catch a glimpse of light and distance. The greeting she murmurs is answered by Marcus' voice.
There's a kettle sitting on the stove, so I fill it and start water heating. For the other tea fixings - the tea itself, cups, a tray, the tiny biscuits - I have to go through the cupboards and drawers.
In the second drawer down, I find the remote control for my van.
Next to it, nestled between two wooden spoons, is my gun in its holster.
Akallabeth has a plan.
Strapping the gun to my waist, beneath my shirt, seems obvious. I check first that it's loaded, which it is. The remote goes in one pants pocket.
A memory serum vial comes out of the other pocket. I can't believe she doesn't intend me to use it. Most tea won't hide the flavor, though. Unlike the sweet Candor truth serum or the faintly salty Amity mellow serum, the memory serum tastes bitter.
She probably doesn't know that. I look through the cupboards for a tea that's meant to be strong and bitter, one that's can be loaded with milk and honey.
The labels on the jars of herbs don't tell me much, once I'm beyond the familiar. I have to taste, hoping the scent and astringency of powdery dried leaves is accurate to how they'll steep. Chamomile, peppermint, dandelion. . . all these I know are too weak. Horehound. My nose wrinkles against the taste. This might work.
The voices through the door aren't quite distinguishable, but that's a problem that can be fixed with by holding a glass to the surface.
"What do you have, back in Chicago?" Marcus says.
"That depends what you left us." The voice belongs to Tobias. Maybe it's the glass that distorts his tone, so he doesn't sound defiant.
"I've just given your mother a few things to keep her busy. I don't want Chicago destroyed. It's my home, too."
"You were exiled."
"The city needs a stronger hand than Evelyn can give it. She's losing her grip."
"Mostly because you're greasing it."
"Merely hurrying along an inevitable process. You could be leader of the Dauntless again."
The whistle of the kettle drowns out Tobias' answer. It shouldn't matter. The temptation shouldn't make my hands shake so the hot water sloshes on the scuffed counter. Tobias hated assuming leadership of the Dauntless, we all knew that, it was insane of Marcus to even bring it up when that was why Tobias had beaten him. . .
"Another beating like that," Tobias says.
Marcus chuckles. "My boy, that was all symbolism. I'd do it again if that's what it took to make a man of you."
I hook the tea ball gently over the rim of the pot and step back from the acrid fumes. Milk in its pitcher. . . honey in a shallow pot. . .
Thinking a beating builds character made sense for Dauntless, but not for Abnegation. If Tobias were truly Abnegation at heart, it shouldn't have worked.
The memory serum didn't work on Tris. Marcus is more Divergent than Tris.
My hand moves to pour out the tea and start over. There's no point in risking dosing Tobias with the memory serum if it won't work on Marcus. By the logic of the Bureau, Marcus should be immune, as Tris was immune. But Tobias isn't genetically perfect, despite having Divergent parents.
Keep the tea. Let him wonder.
"All right," Tobias says, and I don't know what he's agreeing to, but my blood chills anyway. Maybe we're going home now. Has he even asked where I've been for the past day?
"You won't regret this," Marcus says. "We can start by updating the map of Chicago. That should be easy work for you."
Tobias has sold us out. I want to charge through the door, but that can't be Akallabeth's plan. I want to reassure myself that Tobias is laying a trap for Marcus, but Tobias doesn't know how to lie like that. He withholds information. He doesn't tell direct falsehoods. He ought to have tested Candor, at least.
"If you hadn't shown me how happy the factionless are here. . ."
"People are happiest in their right places. That was the true secret of the faction system. Everyone needs to believe they belong somewhere. It doesn't matter if what puts you there is a test or the judgment of your team leader. The random way of life advocated by your mother doesn't meet that need."
"I know." There's a pause, and then Tobias says: "Paloma should have stayed to see this."
"She never intended to listen to me. The plan was always to dump you and run back to Chicago."
Marcus claims to be Candor, but Marcus lies.
I pour the vial of memory serum into the tea because that's what I've come here to do. Maybe Marcus isn't immune. He's Candor, and he lies.
He's Dauntless, and he lets others fight his battles.
He's Amity, and he spreads discord.
He's Abnegation, and he's completely selfish.
He's Erudite - and unless he's completely stupid, he's going to recognize me.
A bell rings. I steady the tea tray on one arm and open the door with the other. Look as if you don't remember, I remind myself against the pounding of my heart. It's not difficult to walk hesitantly. The tea tray is heavy and unbalanced. Tobias' face is shading from purple to yellowish green as his bruises age.
Marcus, seated in his big chair, pats Akallabeth's curly hair as she kneels at his feet. "This is a surprise," he says.
"Her name's Estelle."
Tobias gawks at me as I set the tray on the table, pour a cup of tea, and flavor it with milk and honey. My hands move so delicately that they surprise me by not shaking.
Marcus' hand is warm as it brushes mine to accept the tea. He drains the cup in a single long swallow and looks at me, then at Akallabeth. "She wasn't memory-wiped at all, was she, dear?"
His free hand tightens around Akallabeth's neck, and I'm not standing for that. I pull the gun from my waist and level it at Marcus' head. "Let her go."
"Paloma, don't," Tobias says. "He won't hurt her. He's a just leader. We need him in Chicago."
I shoot.
What happens next makes sense only in the instant after it happens. Akallabeth is pushing herself backwards on her knees, away from Marcus. Tobias slumps in front of his father, one hand to his stomach, whimpering.
My second shot goes cleanly through Marcus' forehead, and he sags in his big chair.
"Are you okay?" I ask Akallabeth before I go to Tobias.
"Yes." She pushes herself to her feet. Her face is red and her hands ball into fists.
"He tried to save you." My entire body feels slippery with sweat.
"No." She stands just beyond the pool of blood growing around Tobias. "He tried to save his father."
She holds out her hand for the gun, and I give it to her, even though I know where this is going, even though I'm going to have to go back to Chicago and tell Evelyn about it.
"This is for Cassandra," I say as Akallabeth puts a bullet through Tobias' brain.
