When I woke up, everything hurt. If I had been asked, I couldn't have pinpointed where it hurt the most; everywhere hurt just as much as everywhere else, almost too much for me to bear. I was cramped inside the mangled and warped cab of my truck, my head resting against the steering wheel, my arms draped around it in a sloppy embrace.

Breathing in itself was an effort, every breath sending a wave of sharp, intense pain that made me grit my teeth to keep from crying out, but I slowly opened my eyes and looked around. While twisting the truck around the way I had appeared to have saved much damage being made to the other side of the truck, the oncoming car couldn't have hit me directly; if it had, I'd have been killed instantly. By the looks of things, the other car had struck more towards the back, spinning the car around.

I looked across, looking to see if Tris and Clara were okay. I could see Tris, her blonde hair matted with blood as she leaned against the window, her hand braced against the dashboard.

I couldn't see Clara.

Frantically, I looked around, but I couldn't see her. The windscreen had been shattered, and I could see blood on the hood of the car. Clara must have been thrown from the car.

"Tris," I groaned, wanting to lift my head but unsure if the bones and muscles in my neck could still support my head. I watched as Tris slowly opened, her blue eyes looking around slowly, until they found me, and she dragged her tongue across her dry bottom lip. "Tobias? Wh – What . . . Ow."

"Clara was thrown from the truck," I said. "Can you see her?"

Tris looked around slowly and then her eyes found me. By the looks of things, she was a lot better off than I was, because she gave a little nod. "About ten metres away."

"Is she breathing?" I asked, wincing as another wave of pain shot through my body and my world spun. Much more of this and I was going to pass out again, I was sure of it.

"Yeah."

"Thank God," I said. I glanced around. "We need to call somebody."

Tris sighed, looking around. She spotted my phone, which was sitting on the seat between us. It must flown out of my jacket pocket when we crashed.

Carefully, slowly, Tris stretched her right arm out towards my phone. Nothing in it looked broken, and when she was sure that nothing was, she snatched it up, dialling a number as quickly as she could.

"Who are you calling?"

"Zeke," Tris replied, leaning back against the frame of the cab. "And an ambulance."

As it turned out, she called the ambulance first. I leaned against the steering wheel, my eyes scanning what I could see of the pavement for Clara as I blocked out the sound of Tris describing our situation to the operator on the other end of the line. I finally found her lying on the pavement – her blue jeans and grey hoodie were spotted with blood, and a portion of her hair, near her temple, was turning a horrible, reddish brown colour, and was matted with blood. I wondered how many bones she'd broken, even as I unrelentingly watched her chest rise and fall with each breath, counting each one.

A click snapped through my counting of Clara's breath and I looked at Tris, moving only my eyes. I could feel some kind of sticky substance drying on one side of my face, starting at my left temple and then running down the side of my face in a stream that finished just underneath my ear and guessed that I must have hit my own head at some point too.

I groaned quietly as another wave of pain ran up my body, but I kept my eyes firmly fixed on Clara, not really trusting myself to look anywhere else.

"Just hang on," Tris said quietly. "The ambulance will be here soon."

"I know," I said quietly. I could hear ambulance sirens distantly in the distance, gradually drawing closer and closer. "It's not me I'm worried about."

"Well I'm not even sure how you're still alive," Tris remarked, still leaning against the door. "You kind of look like death manifested."

"Thanks," I muttered, although I wasn't really paying attention. I was more focused on the effort it was taking to keep myself conscious – black spots kept dancing across my vision and I could now pinpoint that my head hurt the absolute most. It felt like something was pressing against my skull from everywhere, like it was trying condense it, trying to squash the brain that it held. I hoped that I would be able to stay conscious until the ambulance arrived, until Clara and Tris could be hauled away.

"Tobias?" Tris asked. Her voice sounded weak, but she looked better off than I felt.

"Mm-hm?" I asked, still fighting off the urge to pass out. The ambulance was just over a minute away, I guessed by the sound of the sirens. All I had to do was stay conscious for that long.

Easier said than done.

"Did you see who was driving the other car?"

I kept my eyes fixed on Clara, remembering my father's eyes staring at me through his windscreen. At first, I'd thought that he knew that we'd broken into his house and this was payback for it, but the longer I tried to reason it, the more I realised that was a little more than slightly ludicrous; Marcus had looked just as panicked as I'd felt, swerving out of the way of that drunken driver. Although I couldn't say for sure, I didn't think that he'd deliberately run us off the road.

"Marcus," I wheezed.

"Do you think he did it on purpose?"

I never got to answer because the ambulance pulled up. I watched as two medics got out and tended to Clara, and I finally allowed myself to slink back into the darkness.