Chapter Eleven: Tris
I dream of the crows again. Frozen in place again - there are no restraints holding my arms and legs in place, but I'm petrified just the same beneath the flurry of dark feathers. Alone, in a little dark place. One of the black birds pecks testingly at my cheek; when I can't flinch away, he tries again; encouraged. And another joins in, then another. I can feel talons scratching at my scalp and making it prickle, and every separate strike of their sharp black beaks falls like a hammer.
Think. Try to move a finger, or flex your toes, try to bend your knee and test the boundaries of this specific scenario. Make the scenario bend for you, and change the scene.
My lungs burn and my ribs heave but the sound won't come out - as if there's a solid blockage in my throat. I want to call for Four, but I can't even do that - the sensation of tiny claws tugging through the strands of my hair is unsettlingly precise. Not so prickly any more; my hair is long again in this dream, which makes another vivid cue to remove myself from this scenario and look at it analytically. That's not me any more. That part of my life belongs somewhere else, the yellow-haired girl with a nose too big for her face and collarbones standing out on her skinny shoulders.
What would Four do? Endure. The blood runs freely down my cheek, as the scene shifts a little - now it's not me on the ground but somebody else, my perspective shifts to a higher angle on some other girl. It can only be Four's mom - a rangy girl with Four's olive skin but none of his good health or strength. Immobile on a narrow gray bed with her hands laced over her pregnant belly, her gray dress showing the bruises on her biceps. It's hard to see the real Evelyn in her, the grown woman who'd let herself get tough, the woman who'd survived this and abandoned her son to it just the same. Evelyn the girl, not Evelyn the woman. Evelyn the girl wants to die.
She needs to move - I need her to move. I need her not to be dead. If she can get up and put her feet on the floor, she'll be all right - if she can lift her head, if she can sit up and braid her dark hair, if she can move her arm and focus on something else other than the feeble heartbeat of whatever is growing inside her. My mind focuses in on that - her thinly muscled arm with freckles on the back of it, crooked against her side, folded across her waist. It hurts, but she needs to move it. If I can make her lift up her arm-
I wake up to Tobias' hands on me. He knows better than to shake me awake, but I'm rigid in a second anyway, ready to defend myself.
His hands are on my shoulders, warm and strong. Securing me not to keep me in place but to keep me from hurting myself.
Somebody is calling my name, probably him. My own voice is sharp in my throat, hoarse from disuse, and before I can even get the word out he's lifting a canteen to wet my lips.
"Four?"
Not Four. Not here. In such claustrophobic close quarters the old way of thinking of him kept hanging around on me like the smell of rot; the ghost of who he used to be. It isn't Four who saved me; it's Tobias. My Tobias.
My arms are around him in an instant, tighter than a vise around his sturdy waist despite the sudden gouge of pain in my own side - he's solid muscle despite his leanness and it's strange to feel him relax into my touch.
Has he been shaking? Not from exhaustion, but from something else. Worry, maybe. There's still blood on his shirt, but not a lot of it, and it's faded to copper-brown in place of angry red. A bullet graze nicked the side of his head, and now there's a tiny seam there under his hair - I can find it with my fingers, sitting up to cup his face and search his soft dark hair for more wounds, and for that moment he closes his eyes. The relief on his face is clear.
He's so warm. Who gave him permission to be this pleasant?
"You're going to be all right. The blade didn't hit anything important, and there's no sign of serious infection. All things considered, you're pretty lucky. If she'd have gotten you in the kidney, you'd be having a much harder time."
"Yeah, well. I've got a lot of blood, what can I say."
Modesty goes out the window in the face of stab wounds. Tobias peels back the blankets while I make my best effort to sit up, lifting my arm so he can get a better look. From my ribs down is a thick swathe of bandages; between the two of us we get them unrolled enough for a good look at the crusty red welt that marks my side.
I don't feel very rested. My tongue feels like it's wearing a foul-tasting sweater and sitting up starts to seem like a terrible idea once the shivers start. Who knows what that woman's knife was made of, or whether she'd ever cleaned it - the open gash in my side has begun to fill in pink, but the edges of the wound are still blanched white, ready to tear further and gape. It doesn't look good.
Tobias tips some of the contents of Uriah's flask onto a cloth pad and begins to swab at the site of my wound. His hands are gentle, but the damp pad is devilishly cold, and the sharp sting of alcohol makes my teeth chatter.
Looking down, my bare legs are all covered in scratches. I can't remember how they got there.
"What happened to the little boy?"
"Caleb checked him out for injuries and he ran off. His friends didn't even wait that long."
Tobias hands me the flask and I suck down a burning mouthful. It's a near thing but I manage not to spit it out. Whatever this stuff was, it tastes like it was fermented in an old shoe; Uriah must have been tougher than any of us knew.
The burn chases down my throat and fills my mouth, threatening to clear out my sinuses too with its sharp fumes - it's not for the pain, it's for courage. There was always someone passing a bottle around in the Dauntless compound, and the clear sharp smell always drags up the memory of Al's funeral - it hadn't made any of us brave then. It made us loud and sentimental, making stupid speeches about heroics. That was the only way we could be tender with each other, and that was all we had… stupid, now. We were all just kids.
"What happened to the woman?"
Tobias' mouth twists. "We buried her as soon as the rain stopped. Then we got moving."
Peter sits a few yards clear of the truck, balanced on a crumbling concrete embankment. He's cleaning his gun. I can barely walk a straight line, and the insistent pain in my side cutting through the medicated buzz is a persuasive reason not to try to jog anywhere or vault over anything. But I can still sneak up on him, judging from the way his shoulders jump before he twists around to fix me in an accusing stare.
It's difficult to keep my cool, looking him in the face after that. All I can hear is the sound of the bullet connecting with that woman, the woman who had been doing her best to hurt me if not kill me. My face is fixed in emotionless neutrality, even with the blood roaring in my ears. "That was a good shot back there."
"Don't thank me. I'd have shot her anyway."
"Oh, undoubtedly." It's such little-boy posturing that I could almost laugh, if just breathing alone didn't hurt. Is it kill or be killed out here? Is that the kind of world we're passing into? Or it's the kind of world we've been in for a while now. I want to change that. But Peter brushes his hair back behind his ears, sullenly and without meeting my eyes. He can't look at me.
"I could have shot you too. I thought about it." (How macho is that, if he can't even bear the possibility that one of his actions might be mistaken for altruism. But I don't resent him for it - somehow it all seems serene. Peter is a snake. This is what snakes do; they lash out and bite people.)
"Believe me, Peter, I don't care. I already knew that about you."
"Then you've got the right idea." Peter rubs at his mouth, leaving a streak of gun oil on his smooth cheek. (If Peter shaves, I've never seen him do it; his face is still soft as a girl's.) "Don't get in the way of my shot again."
He hunches his shoulders, rubbing at his muddy face with muddy hands.
Peter doesn't know what's wrong with him. I don't know either. Maybe some people are just like that; they're mean to the bone, and they enjoy it.
Caleb wants to talk. And no offense to him, but I'm not in the mood for navigating thorny familial relationships when I'm trying to drive. Peter and Four are in the back, miraculously not strangling each other, but their silence sounds obtrusively like they're pretending not to be listening - which if I know Four at all, in all his hypervigilant glory, is absolutely true. No one could care about Peter. Heavily armed and in defensive positions, eyes on the horizon. Four is looking out, so I don't have to.
Uriah's canteen is in my lap. My mouth still tingles, and everything's just a little more indistinct thanks to the taste of alcohol, just a little more blurred.
"At least let me present my case!"
"You have five minutes to convince me." Every bump in the road and every steep turn makes my side ache; Four's jacket is wadded up behind me for padding, but it only serves to make the driver's seat more claustrophobic. "Without the use of a diagram, unless you want me to wrap this thing around a tree." Or a signpost. A really big rock. A wild mountain deer. Whatever.
"Serums are a part of the architecture of society. They've existed for at least three generations, when we were studying there were data points that weren't accounted for by the time frame of the Chicago experiment - which means they must have come from outside. You remember Amity, how everyone living there got dosed with a particular mood-altering strain whether they liked it or not-"
"Including guests of the faction. Believe me, I remember." It made you blissed-out and dopey, and had nearly wiped me out entirely - it was better than pain, but nowhere near as liberating as anger, and a standard-sized dose had had me ready to braid Four a flower crown.
"Then how'd they learn to do that? Where'd they get the idea from?"
"It seems pretty intuitive to me, no offense. Somebody in Amity pulled some strings and got the treatment from Erudite, maybe for covert crowd control, and it got out of hand." Thinking about it now was cringeworthy - no doubt there were plenty of people in Amity who were naturally hard-working and naturally giving at the same time, but everybody knew kids from that faction mostly stuck around. They didn't last long anywhere else. Because they were so happy there, right?
"Then what's to say Amity were the only people getting treated without knowing it? Ever since we got past the wall we've been boiling our water and refilling from sources in the water table nobody's touched for a hundred years. Maybe we're only now getting clean."
Clean. Illegal drugs one of the things we learned about in schools before sixteen, one of the undifferentiated horrors of the old world that the faction system was put in place as a bulwark against. Drugs were illegal because they were poison, and furthermore because they were addictive - the kind of thrill you were only supposed to get from a job well done, or a hard day's work, or an adrenaline high jumping off a train headfirst. And because you were never allowed to quit.
Headaches, stress, muscle aches and tremors, bad dreams - but there was nobody alive who could have lived through the last few months without bad dreams.
Like when someone from Amity changed factions - the reason it almost never happened was because the come-down from stopping taking Amity serums was so bad. If you'd never been unhappy before in your life, and then your first taste of misery was Erudite's 12-hour-long standardized tests, or Candor moot courts with you on trial, or Dauntless simulations putting you through the paces of the worst stuff you could imagine - you'd kill yourself, or drop out. Best case scenario had you scavenging for Evelyn, hoping for a little taste of what you used to have. But this wasn't just Amity; this was everyone. A sort of low-level fog dissipating, a patina of something being cleared away. No wonder it messed with Four's head.
If you'd never known freedom before, being plunged into some wide-open spaces with only a outdated map to guide you…
It didn't have to be true. I didn't want it to be true. But what difference would it make to lie?
Caleb's eyes are fixed on me when I glance to his side; they are cool and clear. It would be easy to believe they were wise eyes, and not just indifferent ones. What had he seen, buried in the heart of Erudite's crumbling power structure?
"Caleb, you can't be serious."
"I don't expect you to believe me without proof. Once we get to someplace with the right equipment, I can try and illustrate my theory, but I can't make anyone believe it. Do you remember when it used to start raining on the way back from our work detail? You used to run around with your tongue out, trying to catch water drops?"
Caleb shouldn't have remembered that - I was only a kid then, younger than the kid Peter nearly shot back there, and with someone who cared about me to pull me inside and tell me no. My mother. Caleb was always the slower one, he was always better-behaved and never tried that kind of thing. There was probably a dossier somewhere saying as much. But the water had been so cold, and so sweet. Not cold like a cold shower - cold like a cold morning, before anyone else was awake.
"I do. What's your point?"
"It tasted different, didn't it? You wanted more of it. That's what freedom tastes like."
Cold, empty, and plain. Sounds about right.
The hills loom over everything, dark with densely-packed trees and gouged through with high walls of exposed rock. The roads are fewer here, twisting through the terrain like snakes; there's more wash-outs here, some of them probably no older than the cut in my side.
When we first set out, the game plan had been two days there, max, and two days back. It's been a lot longer than that, and even with water and deer meat, we're running low. Caleb and I avoid the meat where we can, some vestige of our upbringing still echoes even out here - the memory of the blood. This stop will be our last before we get to that unidentified mark on the map. Before we all pile into the unknown.
"We need to stop for fresh food, but it can't be for long. I don't see any place better around here; the river's right there. We can even fish, probably, if we've got anything to use for a hook."
(Which of us is supposed to know how to catch a fish? All the fish we've ever eaten came out of a tank somewhere.)
"There's still plenty of meat and rice, isn't there?" Caleb asks.
"Food other than meat and rice. Some of the deer meat's spoiled." And even Four is sick of dead deer, but I can't tell them that, not Caleb the mighty hunter.
"There's mushrooms all over the place," Peter says. "They're popping up out of the ground and everything. If you don't like meat and rice, knock yourself out."
Caleb looks at him like he just suggested we butcher and eat Four.
"Poisonous mushrooms, you mean. The ones growing wild out here are poisonous."
"Bullshit! There's no such thing as a poisonous mushroom. Snakes are poisonous."
"Why don't you try one and find out? It's your funeral."
"They're not poisonous, they're brown."
"Are you saying brown things can't be poisonous?"
"Trust me, they're harmless. Just because your mother raised you to be scared of your own shadow - whatever, fine. More for me."
Four has too much self-control to roll his eyes, but from his face you can tell he's at least thinking about it. "Guys, not that this isn't interesting, but may Tris and I have a moment? You two won't implode if we leave you alone for five seconds?"
More likely they'd burn the forest down. Caleb to see what happened next, and Peter for the hell of it.
We leave the boys to their breakfast; Caleb's still trying to get the fire started, and Peter is squirreling around in the trees looking for birds' eggs. I hope the birds maul him. There's no city birds all the way out here, and surprisingly few of the big black birds from my nightmares, but the predominant varieties seem to be more of the fat, brown skittish birds that the forests out here are crowded with, and innumerable birds of prey. When the two collide, it can't be pretty. The birds of prey are too smart to come near us, but they're watching us anyway, circling against the gray sky looking for lunch.
We split off in the opposite direction, past the parked van. It's closer to the road than the last time we stopped, in case we needed to make a quick getaway, but Tobias had back to cover it in broken tree boughs - it's hardly enough to camouflage the boxy shape, but the metal no longer catches the eye as we pass. It still gives me a sick prickling feeling to pass it by - someone else might know we're here. Someone else might put us in the ground. We need to be more careful.
Tobias waits until we're in the deepest part of the trees to step in closer behind me, as if he's assured himself that we're not being followed or en route to another ambush.
"Up there, look." There's one of those unbelievably fat brown birds nesting in a tree branch, watching us. "If I had a sling I'd kill it and we'd have breakfast.."
"Birds are mostly bones, from my experience." Tobias reaches for my hand, as I alight on the trunk of a fallen tree and crane my head back for a better look.
"Not this one. Look, it's not even scared of us."
The tree bark is rough against my back. Tobias' hands steer good and clear of my bandaged side and he is so gentle. I don't want gentle right now.
But I still want him. It doesn't seem right that, injured, bandaged, a million miles from home and burning up with borrowed liquor, I should still want him. There's something dangerous in that kind of wanting, something that makes it perfectly clear why everything about our faction's courtship rituals was designed to squelch it before it could occur - and likewise perfectly clear how that desire refused to be beaten down. I'm hungry for him.
Four's hands find their way north to my upper arm through my sleeve, and the pit of my stomach just drops.
"Why didn't you tell me about your arm?"
"I thought you'd notice when we had sex." A prickle of blood still rises to my cheeks. "I wanted you to ask."
"Of course I noticed. I just didn't want to kill the mood."
I put up a hand, laying two fingers over the second bullet graze in his upper arm.
"Tori made me a tracking device. Before she died. Cara helped me put it in - it goes under the skin, like the serum transmitters but in reverse. It should help them locate where we are from back in the city."
His laugh is quietly incredulous. "Wow. And you couldn't put it in your pocket? You really think they're still sending a follow-up team? Tris, we would have seen them already. We'd have heard from them."
"It seemed important at the time. I made a judgment call."
"Yeah, well, it's the least of my worries right now. Did you stop to think who might have access to the other side of that thing? That it might not be what Tori said it was? Did Cara do this to you? Did she?"
"I did think about it. If anybody nasty's coming our way, we already know the terrain better than they do. If anything happens, I'll take responsibility for that."
"That'll be really reassuring the next time we get ambushed out here. What if it were a suicide transmitter? How would you even know the difference? You should have come to me, Tris."
The anger is a dull knot in my throat, as sudden and as jolting as the physical attraction I'd felt only a minute or two before. Because he always asked me first, right? He'd never just do something because he was pissed off and wanted to take it out on somebody, or-
He might have done that to someone else, but never to me.
It's exhausting, being scared, and cautious, and thinking about everyone else before myself. That's what it was for - for someone else, always thinking about someone else, taking precautions for somebody else -
My cheeks are warm, and the wound in my side is steadily throbbing away with pain. But I can't look away from Four.
"You didn't ask me first before pretending to kill my brother. I didn't come all the way out here to be your second-in-command. Whether I live or die is my business."
"You don't believe that for a second. If you seriously thought Tori would ever do anything to harm you, you wouldn't have taken it. I'm not second-guessing your judgment, I just wish you'd told me about it. That's all."
Both of us know what Tori is capable of. There's no need to play dumb about what kind of person she was - brilliant, yes, humane for sure, but ruthless, absolutely. The sense of relief is palpable, but so is the embarrassment.
"Good. It was my decision, and I'm holding to it, unless you feel like doing more road surgery."
It wouldn't just be me, if I'd made the bad choice back there. If I died out here I'd be leaving everyone else at a disadvantage - I'd be leaving Four behind, with these guys. I'd be leaving Four behind. Tobias didn't come out here with me because he was curious about who our predecessors were, or because he wanted to go on a nature hike. He came here to be with me.
"I'm not going to hold you down," Four finally says, exhaustedly, with such sweetness in his eyes that my heart wrenches in my chest. "I love you, Tris. I worry about you. That's all."
"If we did get separated, what would you do?"
"I'd find you. I wouldn't need any help to do that."
My body is pressed flush against his, I can feel all my bones and all my scars and all his scars too. The topography of his body is familiar now after all our different kinds of intimacy, but there's still so much left to know - new freckles or muscles or dimples. In the middle of a blasted wasteland I want to read my boyfriend's body like a map, how's that for priorities?
"If I - if we died out here, I want someone back home to know. I want someone to know we made it all this way. I don't just want to disappear." There must be a hundred, a thousand ways to die in the woods. Infection, starvation, heatstroke, wild animals, broken bones, dehydration, a bullet to the back of the head. All of them shuffle through my mind like playing cards. "I don't want to die lost. Does that make sense?"
Four thumbs at my temples, brushing back the soft short prickling hairs along my hairline. "I'd find you even then, Tris. I'd find you anywhere."
We could live here - alone. Even if it wasn't pretty - there's metal and wood, stuff to start fires with, I'd learn to wind fibers out of the tall grass or figure out how they used to tan leather here. Four could be peaceful here, millions of miles away from anyone he could hurt, from anyone who ever hurt him.
I reach for Four's hand, fumbling to grasp his first two fingers in my palm.
"We should go back."
"Right."
The first thing I notice is the acid smell of bile. Somebody's been sick here, and it makes my gorge rise in sympathy with the sudden bitterness. My brother's book bag is here on the ground, and his canteen sits on top of a stack of printed maps. Either it's starting to rain again, or the leaves have begun to drip a little; a few stray water drops have bled into the paper, making the crisp annotations in pen - my brother's handwriting - start to run. Caleb's coat is here, neatly folded; on top of it rests a trio of mottled brown eggs.
The fire pit is a charred ruin. Caleb was here; I spot his genius fire design in the rubble, a heap of charred wood like a tent, and somebody's stuck a stone in the ashes to cook on that's now blackened with animal fat and flecks of white flesh. I nudge it with the toe of my boot, dislodging a piece of sooty scorched bark.
Tobias is rigid, silent, on alert.
"Looks like they're done with dinner."
He holds up a hand sign: listen. My gun is out already, and my finger itches on the trigger - there's a rustling in the foliage, and my brain is screaming - get out of here, get out of here, get in the car and fucking drive.
Bootprints in the dirt, the smudge of an impact. Somebody hit the ground here. Somebody got dragged. They're back - the stragglers who ambushed us are back. They're back with reinforcements.
"Caleb?" I call my brother's name a few more times, until it starts to sound stupid in my throat.
Down the slope, there's a shallow depression like a slash in the ground - a creek used to run here that's now just a series of muddy pits criss-crossed with fallen trees. Four balances on the edge of the drop-off, balancing on a rotten tree trunk that now lies horizontal.
He sees something I don't.
"Tris, get back."
But I'm down the ridge in a second, boots pounding through mud and rainwater. Peter lies in the dirt and leaves, curled up on his side. He isn't moving; every line in his body's posture announces suffering. His shirtfront is soaked dark red.
My hands dig through his jacket, looking for a wound like all of the bodies back at the Bureau. Somewhere there has to be something.
One of his hands has begun to tremble. Dead men can't do that, at least. It's not just blood that's spilled on him. The bitter watery smell of vomit is heavy on him, and I can't even be disgusted - none of this fits together, none of this makes sense. Something bad happened here, sure, but not an attack. More like a mistake. Something really, really… stupid.
One of those twitching hands seizes me by the wrist.
"I'm fine," Peter says, staring at me with unfocused eyes. It's like "Don't touch me-"
I recoil a couple feet, scrambling in the rotten leaves back up the slope.
He drags himself up onto his knees, but can't even get a foot under himself before collapsing bonelessly in a sick heap.
"Where's Caleb?"
His face is fixed, gone waxy white apart from the muddy smear down his chin, and his eyes stare out at me like I just asked a really stupid question. "Gone- gone looking for you. I mean, obviously-"
Peter throws up again on his hands, and with even less dignity he faints.
Tobias tries to ease a little water into Peter's mouth, with the same kind of doctorly care he'd used on me, but most of it spills down his chin. His grip on Peter's shoulder is firm, but gentler than a doctor's - he must have been trained for something like these kinds of occurrences if they let him look out for the next crop of Dauntless' best recruits. Couldn't have us killing ourselves with spoiled food or alcohol poisoning before we got deployed, after all.
A branch snaps at the edge of the clearing; two sets of eyes swivel around to fix on it, and I'd be willing to bet Four and I flinch for our weapons at the exact same time. There stands Caleb, hands raised in surrender.
"Look who's late to the party." There's an edge of tension in Tobias' voice that betrays his apparent calm.
"I've been looking for you guys everywhere." He doesn't just walk to Peter's side, he runs, skidding in the dirt and very nearly landing on his rear. Peter has been laid out on one of the fire-resistant blankets, with Tobias' coat balled up under his head so he can't aspirate any of his own vomit. What a way to go. "It was the mushrooms. He was fine for a while, but we were working on the maps together, and-"
"You should have let me die there," Peter interrupts, speaking to him or to me or to anyone who will listen. His eyes are still shut, freckled with burst blood vessels, but his eyelids strain like they're on the verge of rolling back into his head.
He may not be dead yet, but it's easy to believe he's dying.
Caleb catches me by the elbow, like he means to move me aside, and I don't appreciate the gesture. "He needs activated charcoal. It'll soak up some of the poison, at least for now."
"This is where you tell me you packed for exactly this kind of contingency, isn't it." I can see the satisfaction on his face even beneath the sharply-drawn lines of anxiety. The part of him that's still Erudite is a real asshole, but I love him right now despite myself. He dips into the medical kit and pulls out a sealed plastic sachet.
"Sedating him might help with the convulsions."
"Yeah, he'll love that." Instant visions of him doped to the eyes on Amity complacency. Maybe it'd be good for him, planting potatoes and weaving baskets.
"Not like he's in any shape to complain."
The fire's still out. Relighting it might attract wild animals, or worse, so we scatter ashes on any conspicuous spots of throw-up and sit around like a bunch of jerks while Caleb packs up. Sleep seems unlikely, but I doze against Tobias' shoulder - he's reluctant to hold me too tightly in my current condition, but the warmth and solidity of him gives me a little comfort in the damp. Before long, Caleb is resting with his head propped up on his bag, and even Four is starting to unwind beneath me.
"Somebody should go check on him. No, don't - don't get up, I'll go."
He can barely keep his eyes open. I won't be going far, anyway. My kiss feels cool against his temple, and his hand locks in mine for a sleepy moment before he lets me go.
Pulling away, I heft my bag's strap up higher on my shoulders, wary of the pain in my left side as it diffuses into a dull ache. That might never go away, for all I know. Caleb took the liberty of filling Peter's canteen for him - an unwarranted small kindness, an act of mercy - and it weighs heavy at the bottom of my bag.
Peter's makeshift bed is in the darkest shadows, a heap of balled outer garments and dryish leaves and damp bark.
"Hey, Peter - you still alive? You haven't thrown up in a while." I mean it honestly, but it comes out sounding like something he'd say, and I could kick myself for it. I try to keep my distance, just in case. The flashlight beam rakes the ground, and a flash of white sends me rocking back on my heels.
Peter's hand gouges into the dirt, scratching deep lines.
"No such thing as poison mushrooms," he mutters hoarsely in the dark, "god, fucking idiot. There's no such thing as poison mushrooms, Peter,sure."
"Are you going to be all right, or what?"
"Oh yeah, your boyfriend's taking great care of me." There's a dreamy slackness to his voice - Caleb must have sedated him after all. I can't imagine Peter will be pleased with him once his head's cleared again.
As he sits up to take the canteen, the light catches on the knot of scar tissue in his shoulder - I did that. My bullet left that mark. Peter must have the fewest tattoos of any Dauntless I've known. There's a thick band of ink marking his skinny forearm - and underneath it I can hardly recognize the wiry muscles I once went up against in the ring. And that took me down, hard. Other Dauntless got tattoos to commemorate loved ones, friends they'd lost or family members they'd left behind - the canvas of Peter's body is practically blank. He's gotten thinner, harder-looking; sickness has left his skin with a yellow cast beneath the bruises and scrapes. We must both look like shit.
I dig around in my pack and toss him a clean tee shirt. It'll fit him better than it fit me. Peter tries to sit up, but it's more of a body-wide flinch.
"Don't say I never got you anything nice."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He can barely keep his eyes open, and they keep slipping out of focus behind his eyelashes. It's very hard to look threatening all doped up to the teeth, and it's impossible not to laugh at him here.
"Feel better. That's an order."
"You should have let me die, Stiff. I mean it."
We can't delay any longer, not when we're so close. Peter gets bundled into the back of the truck with the last of the water and a little whiskey - he's not throwing up any more, but his condition is not improving, and neither is mine. With every moment we've gone further away from certainty. Further away from everything we've known.
The signs for Rapid City are behind us now - another dead city full of dead residents - and the road winds deeper into the mountains. We are in a ruin. Maybe it was once a sacred place, before whoever lived here surrendered it to the woods, but it's a ruin just the same. I've never lived anywhere that wasn't half falling down, half rotting away, and now I have a better sense of why - there used to be a people here that loved to build, men and women who loved to pave roads and cut paths through the mountainside, and now they're gone.
I know next-to-nothing about wilderness. I've never seen this many trees in one place in my life, except out a car window, and they all look alike - I keep turning my head, expecting to see a path or a gap I can turn to my advantage, but there's nothing.
This time there's no fence - the road coming in is a deep bend, the view of more sprawling lots partially obstructed by trees, but we can pass straight by them unobstructed. No stragglers showing up in the middle of the road, just flooded cracked blacktop and the naked posts for signs at regular intervals.
We reach a gate where the signs are still in place, not roughly chopped down; there's a booth by the side of the entryway, like there's supposed to be an attendant there, probably an armed one. But the booth is empty, and the sign hangs from two bolted hooks, creaking a little to and fro from the vibrations of our vehicle. The printing on this one matches the legend on our maps, and above the stencilled text is the same brazen symbol in the same garish green. The symbol for a facility in use, a facility that hasn't been overtaken or worse.
Camp Lysenko. And then beneath that, in smaller rusting letters, Rushmore Vault #: 0016. There are at least fifteen more facilities like this. Maybe more.
"Lysenko. Person, place, or thing?"
"Let's hope it's not a person," Four says grimly. And we roll on through.
We're here, right where we're supposed to be on the map - sandwiched between a low tangle of buildings and a long broken colonnade. In the middle of it all, clearly meant to be the center of things, is a cleared-out stone amphitheater. It could be the big sister of the one at the Hub where we all had our choosing ceremony - built to hold a crowd, but judging from the shattered concrete seats and the plants sprouting up between the fragments of stone, no one has fully occupied this space in decades. I've never seen anything more massive, or more desolate. The bowl of the impression is shallow, and there's a square screen in front, the perfect spot for a podium.
Then, front and center above the treeline, they are there - outcroppings like enormous stone faces. At first they look like any of the other features we've seen, weather-worn into irregularity, but somebody made these things. They're too ugly not to be likenesses, I decide; erosion has rubbed out their distinct features but they're unmistakably man-made.
What was this place?
A dull repetitive sound wraps around my head like a coil of smoke, coming from every direction and none. The thudding sound of turbine blades - echoing off the far hills. Just like before, we're not alone.
Author's note: Caleb's theory - about lifelong low-level serum use as a possible method of social control - is influenced by Trent Reznor's Year Zero and its use of the fictional sedative Parepin. And in general it's just a SF/dystopia thing, I just love the weird cosmic-horror-ness of Year Zero.
I'm a terrible person, I'm so sorry for the delay on this installment! All of you who hung in there for this have been so tremendously patient and I swear the final chapter is on its way. (For anyone reading on ffnet, I also hope to go back and reformat once I'm finished so that my chapter formatting is more consistent.) Thanks for hanging in there, folks.
