People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.
“What do you think they’re going to do to us when they find us guilty?” she says after a few minutes of silence have passed.
“Honestly?”
“Does now seem like the time for honesty?”
I look at her from the corner of my eye. “I think they’re going to force us to eat lots of cake and then take an unreasonably long nap.”
She laughs. I try not to—if I let myself laugh, I’ll start to cry, too.
I hear a yell, and peer around the crowd to see where it came from.
“Lynn!” The yell came from Uriah. He runs toward the door, where two Dauntless are carrying Lynn in on a makeshift stretcher, made of what looks like a shelf from a bookcase. She is pale—too pale—and her hands are folded over her stomach.
I jump to my feet and start toward her, but a few factionless guns stop me from going much farther. I put up my hands and stand still, watching.
Uriah walks around the crowd of war criminals and points to a severe-looking Erudite woman with gray hair. “You. Come here.”
The woman gets to her feet and brushes off her pants. She walks, light-footed, to the edge of the seated crowd and looks expectantly at Uriah.
“You’re a doctor, right?” he says.
“I am, yes,” she says.
“Then fix her!” He scowls. “She’s hurt.”
The doctor approaches Lynn and asks the two Dauntless to set her down. They do, and she crouches over the stretcher.
“My dear,” she says. “Please remove your hands from your wound.”
“I can’t,” moans Lynn. “It hurts.”
“I am aware that it hurts,” the doctor says. “But I won’t be able to assess your wound if you do not reveal it to me.”
Uriah kneels across from the doctor and helps her shift Lynn’s hands away from her stomach. The doctor peels Lynn’s shirt back from her stomach. The bullet wound itself is just a round, red circle in Lynn’s skin, but surrounding it is what looks like a bruise. I have never seen a bruise that dark.
The doctor purses her lips, and I know that Lynn is as good as dead.
“Fix her!” says Uriah. “You can fix her, so do it!”
“On the contrary,” the doctor says, looking up at him. “Because you set the hospital floors of this building on fire, I cannot fix her.”
“There are other hospitals!” he says, almost shouting. “You can get stuff from there and heal her!”
“Her condition is far too advanced,” the doctor says, her voice quiet. “If you had not insisted upon burning everything that came into your path, I could have tried, but as the situation stands, trying would be worthless.”
“You shut up!” he says, pointing at the doctor’s chest. “I’m not the one who burned your hospital! She’s my friend, and I . . . I just . . .”
“Uri,” says Lynn. “Shut up. It’s too late.”
Uriah lets his arms fall to his sides, then reaches for Lynn’s hand, his lip quivering.
“I’m her friend too,” I say to the factionless pointing guns at me. “Can you at least point guns at me from over there?”
They let me pass, and I run to Lynn’s side, holding her free hand, which is sticky with blood. I ignore the gun barrels pointed at my head and focus on Lynn’s face, which is now yellowish instead of white.
She doesn’t seem to notice me. She focuses on Uriah.
“I’m just glad I didn’t die while under the simulation,” she says weakly.
“You’re not gonna die now,” he says.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says. “Uri, listen. I loved her too. I did.”
“You loved who?” he says, his voice breaking.
“Marlene,” says Lynn.
“Yeah, we all loved Marlene,” he says.
“No, that’s not what I mean.” She shakes her head. She closes her eyes.
Still, it takes a few minutes before her hand goes limp in mine. I guide it across her stomach, and then take her other hand from Uriah and do the same to it. He wipes his eyes before his tears can fall. Our eyes meet across her body.
“You should tell Shauna,” I say. “And Hector.”
“Right.” He sniffs and presses his palm to Lynn’s face. I wonder if her cheek is still warm. I don’t want to touch her and find that it’s not.
I rise and walk back to Christina.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
MY MIND KEEPS tugging me toward my memories of Lynn, in an attempt to persuade me that she is actually gone, but I push away the short flashes as they come. Someday I will stop doing that, if I’m not executed as a traitor, or whatever our new leaders have planned. But right now I fight to keep my mind blank, to pretend that this room is all that has ever existed and all that will ever exist. It should not be easy, but it is. I have learned how to fend off grief.
Tori and Harrison come to the lobby after a while, Tori limping toward a chair—I almost forgot about her bullet wound again; she was so nimble when she killed Jeanine—and Harrison following her.
Behind both of them is one of the Dauntless with Jeanine’s body slung over his shoulder. He heaves it like a stone on a table in front of the rows of Erudite and Dauntless traitors.
Behind me I hear gasps and mutters, but no sobs. Jeanine was not the kind of leader people cry for.
I stare up at her body, which seems so much smaller in death than it did in life. She is only a few inches taller than I am, her hair only a few shades darker. She looks calm now, almost peaceful. I have trouble connecting this body with the woman I knew, the woman without a conscience.
And even she was more complicated than I thought, keeping a secret that she thought was too terrible to reveal, out of a heinously twisted protective instinct.
Johanna Reyes steps into the lobby, soaked to the bone from all the rain, her red clothes smeared with a darker red. The factionless flank her, but she doesn’t appear to notice them or the guns they carry.
“Hello,” she says to Harrison and Tori. “What is it that you want?”
“I didn’t know the leader of Amity would be so curt,” says Tori with a wry smile. “Isn’t that against your manifesto?”
“If you were actually familiar with Amity’s customs, you would know that they don’t have a formal leader,” says Johanna, her voice simultaneously gentle and firm. “But I’m not the representative of Amity anymore. I stepped down in order to come here.”