Allegiant (Divergent 3)

“Great.” Zeke spits at the side of the building. “Well, I guess that’s it.”

“Guess so.”

“I probably won’t be seeing you again, will I? I mean, I know the others might come back, but you . . .” He trails off, but picks up the thought again a moment later. “Just seems like you’ll be happy to leave it behind, that’s all.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” I look at my shoes. “You sure you won’t come?”

“Can’t. Shauna can’t wheel around where you guys are going, and it’s not like I’m gonna leave her, you know?” He touches his jaw, lightly, testing the skin. “Make sure Uri doesn’t drink too much, okay?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“No, I mean it,” he says, and his voice dips down the way it always does when he’s being serious, for once. “Promise you’ll look out for him?”

It’s always been clear to me, since I met them, that Zeke and Uriah were closer than most brothers. They lost their father when they were young, and I suspect Zeke began to walk the line between parent and sibling after that. I can’t imagine what it feels like for Zeke to watch him leave the city now, especially as broken by grief as Uriah is by Marlene’s death.

“I promise,” I say.

I know I should leave, but I have to stay in this moment for a little while, feeling its significance. Zeke was one of the first friends I made in Dauntless, after I survived initiation. Then he worked in the control room with me, watching the cameras and writing stupid programs that spelled out words on the screen or played guessing games with numbers. He never asked me for my real name, or why a first-ranked initiate ended up in security and instruction instead of leadership. He demanded nothing from me.

“Let’s just hug already,” he says.

Keeping one hand firm on Caleb’s arm, I wrap my free arm around Zeke, and he does the same.

When we break apart, I pull Caleb down the alley, and can’t resist calling back, “I’ll miss you.”

“You too, sweetie!”

He grins, and his teeth are white in the twilight. They are the last thing I see of him before I have to turn and set out at a trot for the train.

“You’re going somewhere,” says Caleb, between breaths. “You and some others.”

“Yeah.”

“Is my sister going?”

The question awakes inside me an animal rage that won’t be satisfied by sharp words or insults. It will only be satisfied by smacking his ear hard with the flat of my hand. He winces and hunches his shoulders, preparing for a second strike.

I wonder if that’s what I looked like when my father did it to me.

“She is not your sister,” I say. “You betrayed her. You tortured her. You took away the only family she had left. And because . . . what? Because you wanted to keep Jeanine’s secrets, wanted to stay in the city, safe and sound? You are a coward.”

“I am not a coward!” Caleb says. “I knew if—”

“Let’s go back to the arrangement where you keep your mouth closed.”

“Fine,” he says. “Where are you taking me, anyway? You can kill me just as well here, can’t you?”

I pause. A shape moves along the sidewalk behind us, slippery in my periphery. I twist and hold up my gun, but the shape disappears into the yawn of an alley.

I keep walking, pulling Caleb with me, listening for footsteps behind me. We scatter broken glass with our shoes. I watch the dark buildings and the street signs, dangling from their hinges like late-clinging leaves in autumn. Then I reach the station where we’ll catch the train, and lead Caleb up a flight of metal steps to the platform.

I see the train coming from a long way off, making its last journey through the city. Once, the trains were a force of nature to me, something that continued along their path regardless of what we did inside the city limits, something pulsing and alive and powerful. Now I have met the men and women who operate them, and some of that mystery is gone, but what they mean to me will never be gone—my first act as a Dauntless was to jump on one, and every day afterward they were the source of my freedom, they gave me the power to move within this world when I had once felt so trapped in the Abnegation sector, in the house that was a prison to me.

When it comes closer, I cut the tie around Caleb’s wrists with a pocketknife and keep a firm hold on his arm.

“You know how to do this, right?” I say. “Get in the last car.”

He unbuttons the jacket and drops it on the ground. “Yeah.”

Starting at one end of the platform, we run together along the worn boards, keeping pace with the open door. He doesn’t reach for the handle, so I push him toward it. He stumbles, then grabs it and pulls himself into the last car. I am running out of space—the platform is ending—I seize the handle and swing myself in, my muscles absorbing the pull forward.

Tris stands inside the car, wearing a small, crooked smile. Her black jacket is zipped up to her throat, framing her face in darkness. She grabs my collar and pulls me in for a kiss. As she pulls away, she says, “I always loved watching you do that.”

I grin.

“Is this what you had planned?” Caleb demands from behind me. “For her to be here when you kill me? That’s—”

“Kill him?” Tris asks me, not looking at her brother.

“Yeah, I let him think he was being taken to his execution,” I say, loud enough that he can hear. “You know, sort of like he did to you in Erudite headquarters.”

“I . . . it isn’t true?” His face, lit by the moon, is slack with shock. I notice that his shirt’s buttons are in the wrong buttonholes.

“No,” I say. “I just saved your life, actually.”

He starts to say something, and I interrupt him. “Might not want to thank me just yet. We’re taking you with us. Outside the fence.”

Outside the fence—the place he once tried so hard to avoid that he turned on his own sister. It seems a more fitting punishment than death, anyway. Death is so quick, so certain. Where we’re going now, nothing is certain.

He looks frightened, but not as frightened as I thought he would be. I feel like I understand, then, the way he ranks things in his mind: his life, first; his comfort in a world of his own making, second; and somewhere after that, the lives of the people he is supposed to love. He is the sort of despicable person who has no understanding of how despicable he is, and my badgering him with insults won’t change that; nothing will. Rather than angry, I just feel heavy, useless.