Tobias

When I arrived on the other side of the fence, a wave of relief crashed over me. The attack had been stopped. I knew I would have a long battle ahead of me still: Tris was sure to be a wreck after assisting with her brother's death. This is bound to be worse than the way she reacted to shooting Will. I was also unsure of how to explain to her what happened with Evelyn. I knew she didn't like or trust Evelyn, so telling her that all was well between us wasn't going to be easy. I was expecting there to be some kind of major celebration when I walked into the building, but instead a strange hush fell over the entire room when I walked in. I looked around and saw Cara sitting partially slumped against a wall. She looked up at me with pain in her eyes and an ache formed in the pit of my stomach. What went wrong? Before she could open her mouth, my eyes found Caleb sitting with his head in his hands. He looked back at me with fear in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again as tears welled in his eyes.

"What is going on?" I demanded.

Cara stood and cautiously walked over to me. She stopped about a yard away from me, but then decided to close the gap. She placed her hand on my shoulder and took a long, deep breath.

"Tris went into the weapons lab instead of Caleb," she said.

I cut my eyes over to Caleb and he jumped up with fear. He stumbled towards the doorway with fear, trying to escape my gaze. Before he could even reach the door-handle, my hand was wrapped around his throat. I shoved him into the wall and looked him dead in the eyes, our faces so close that I could feel his stifled breaths.

"How could you let your sister go in there in your place, you sorry piece of -"

"Four, let him go," Cara said as she wrapped her hand around my wrist. "She's alive."

"I'm sorry," Caleb choked out before I dropped him onto the floor.

"How.."

"She survived the serum, Four. I don't know how, no one does. But she did," Cara explained.

"She made me," Caleb stuttered as he stood up slowly. "She made me give her the backpack. I couldn't stop her. She's not the same person she used to be, she's so different. I've never seen her like that," he rambled on.

"Shut up," I said coldly.

I shouldn't be so cruel to him. He watched his sister go to what was supposed to be her death. That shouldn't matter to him, though, since he had already tried to deliver her to her death in Erudite.

"Where is she?" I asked Cara. "That's the part I haven't been able to tell you yet," she responded, looking at the floor. "She's in the hospital. She survived the death serum, but when she got in the lab, David was there. He shot her, Four."

"But you said she's alive."

"She's in a coma. She was so unstable from being exposed to the serum, when David shot her, she fell onto large shards of glass. They had to perform a major surgery to remove all of the glass. They said that if she had fallen a different way, the glass would have done serious damage, including puncturing her lung. The incision from the surgery was so large that they decided to put her in a drug induced coma until it healed a little, so she wouldn't be in so much pain."

All of this information was too much for me to take. Everyone in the room stared at me as if I had suddenly grown a third eye, and it only took me a few seconds to figure out why: none of them had ever seen me cry. I stuffed my hands into my pockets and people slowly started to leave the room. Soon, the only two left with me were Cara and Christina. Until that moment, I hadn't even noticed that Christina was there and that she was almost in as much shock as I was. I could see the stains of dried tears on her face and I could see that she was trying to fight new ones that were forming in the corners of her eyes. Without saying a word, Cara turned and walked slowly away from us. When she realized we weren't following, she stopped. Christina and I casually walked behind her, and we realized that she was taking us to see Tris. It seemed like we walked down a million different hallways that all looked the same until we reached a separate part of the building that looked completely different from the rest. I could tell this was the building that they used as their hospital. All of the walls were white, as were the floors and all of the doors. Some rooms were sectioned off using white curtains, but others were enclosed by large white doors. Cara stopped in front of one of the large white doors. On the wall beside it were the letters ICU. I didn't know what they meant, but I knew it couldn't be good being that they were written in bold red paint.

"I'll let you two decide who goes in first." Cara said as she turned to walk away. "She won't be awake, of course, but you can still talk to her."

"You can go first," I said to Christina.

I didn't wait for a response, I just walked to the other side of the hallway where a chair had been placed in the corner and sat down. I wanted to see Tris, but I still needed a little more time to prepare myself. When I left her earlier, I never imagined that this would have happened. I wouldn't have guessed that she would have gone into that room in Caleb's place. I know she cares about her brother still, but he betrayed her and her parents. She always had to do something crazy, something reckless. I should have known that I couldn't trust her to just deliver Caleb.

I waited for what felt like forever for Christina to come out. When she finally emerged, she looked like she had seen a ghost. She walked by me without saying a word, and without even looking at me. My stomach burned with dread as I made my way towards the door. I stood there with my hand on the knob for what could have been as long as five minutes. I knew that I had to go in. I wanted to go in. I just didn't know how I would react. I pushed the door open slowly and inched my way in. There she was. She looked so small in that giant bed. Her hair had fallen in her eyes, her lips were as pale as her skin. There were bruises on her face and arms. I reached out and brushed the hair out of her eyes, but then I wished that I hadn't. There were large dark circles under her eyes that made her resemble a corpse. I pushed my hand to her chest to ensure that her heart was still beating. There was a slow thump against my palm, and her chest moved up and down slowly. In a way she almost looked peaceful, but I knew that if she'd been awake, she would have been miserable. Tears slid down my face as I looked at her fragile looking body. This wasn't the Tris that I knew. The Tris that I knew was strong and stubborn. Sure she was small, but she never let that stop her. I couldn't look at her this way. I pressed my lips to her forehead the way I had so many times before, and then I turned and walked to the door. I looked back at her one more time, and I knew that I could never look at her this way again.