Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  After making herself somewhat presentable, she walked to the elevator, but she didn’t know how to summon it. The night before, Nero had done it with his siphon. But even magical elevators had to break down sometimes, she thought, so she went in search of stairs.

  She found them around the corner, through a door with a sign saying EMERGENCY USE ONLY, which seemed more an idle threat than something to be concerned about. And sure enough, when she turned the handle, no alarm sounded, no lights flashed to warn of security guards coming.

  The stairwell didn’t appear to get much use. The steps were decorated with black and white tiles in wedges and triangles, and the railings were wrought iron shaped into tight curlicues. She descended to the lobby, skimming the iron with her fingertips all the way down. She thought of her morning runs along the lake back in her Chicago, the cold air and the foam that gathered on the beach sand from the crashing of the waves. That, at least, would be the same on Genetrix.

  But when she reached the lobby, which was all marble, gold trim, and art deco diamonds combined with Frank Lloyd Wright lines, she saw a sign pointing toward the library. The thought of an endless supply of information was irresistible, so she followed the arrow down a hallway of stained glass. The multicolored panes were arranged in a pattern of fanned half-circles layered over each other, each segment a different shade of green. The rising sun cast green spots on her shoes.

  The hallway opened into a massive space that smelled like old paper. Sloane stopped and closed her eyes just for a moment, pretending she was home, in the library down the street from her apartment.

  Books smelled the same no matter what dimension you were in.

  The library was C-shaped, as if the room were curled around something to stay warm. Two stories of bookshelves towered over her head on either side of the somewhat narrow space, with walkways on the second level. In the center of the room were tables and desks, and the place was lit from above by skylights and by old-­fashioned lamps with multicolored glass shades glowing in the center of each table. It didn’t much resemble her library back home. For one thing, there were no computer banks crowding out the bookshelves.

  She frowned. She hadn’t actually seen a computer in Genetrix yet, and the people she had seen in the passing cars the night before hadn’t been staring at smartphones either.

  Did Genetrix even have the internet?

  Sloane walked along the inner curve of the library looking for a computer. The place was empty and silent; there was nothing keeping Sloane from running off with a stack of books. Nothing she could see, anyway. But then, she didn’t know what Genetrix magic was capable of.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  She recognized the voice as Nero’s but jumped at the sound anyway. He emerged from the stacks on her left, his hands held up in a placating gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” he said with a smile. He wore a pair of round glasses, and the cloak that had been fastened at his shoulder the night before was now loose, like a cape. “I didn’t know how to avoid startling you.”

  She was glad she hadn’t taken off her bra the night before. “Did you follow me here?” she asked.

  Nero raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly,” he said. “You know, there are some dangerous places you could stumble across in this building if you wander unaccompanied. I myself am working on half a dozen volatile experiments at any given time in my workshop. But more frightening still for you would be coming across Aelia before she’s had her third cup of coffee in the morning.”

  “Well, thank goodness you just happened to come across me, then,” Sloane said flatly.

  “It’s no coincidence,” Nero said. “I made sure that I would be alerted if any of you began wandering.”

  “If your intention was to make us feel like we hadn’t been kidnapped,” Sloane replied, “that wasn’t a great thing to share with me.”

  “I thought you might be more suspicious if I pretended to have simply happened upon you.”

  “I would have been.” Sloane smirked a little. “What tipped you off? The door to the stairwell?”

  “Not telling,” Nero replied.

  The sun was climbing higher now, piercing right through the skylights above them. If she listened carefully, she could hear horns honking outside. Morning traffic beginning.

  “Were you looking for something in particular?” Nero said. “When I was a student, I worked here, so I know my way around.”

  “Maybe.” Sloane sighed. “Do you guys have . . . computers?”

  “Computers,” Nero repeated. “Yes, we have them. But I’m not sure what good they would do you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The accessibility of information?” Sloane said. “I’d like to know at what point our universes diverged. It’ll be easier for us to acclimate if we know.”

  “This is a library,” Nero said. “Computers are for engineers and scientists; if history is what you want, this is where you’ll find it.”

  “So does the internet exist?” Esther was going to be so upset if it didn’t.

  “It exists, but I don’t know anyone who uses it,” Nero said. “Why do you ask?”

  “At home, people carry the internet around in their pockets,” Sloane said. “Everything you could ever want to know, in any language, is right there. That’s how I’m used to getting information.”

  “And you say you don’t have magic.”

  “It’s not magic,” Sloane said.

  “I know.” Nero smiled a little. “It wouldn’t do us much good, I suppose. It’s difficult enough to communicate about magical theory in written form; I can’t fathom trying to share techniques your way. It’s much simpler to gather in person.”

  Sloane couldn’t imagine something that couldn’t be taught over the internet. The year before she had learned how to replace a sink drain from a YouTube video. She had survived shopping for groceries in Germany by using an online translator. Even now, with her water­logged phone back in the bedroom, she felt its phantom buzz in her back pocket, alerting her to an e-mail or reminding her about a doctor’s appointment. She had never had to explain to anyone why it might be useful. It was like having to explain why it was useful to drink water.

  “Everything here seems backward to us,” she said. “Like traveling back in time.”

  “You seem somewhat backward to us as well,” Nero said. “Let me show you. Tell me something you want to search for. Anything.”

  “Okay.” She didn’t know what to say at first. There were so many things they needed to know about Genetrix in order to find a way home—even if they did it by defeating their Resurrectionist, which Sloane still wasn’t sure about. But she didn’t want to ask Nero to look up something about magic. She didn’t want Nero to be responsible for the information at all when she wasn’t sure that she could trust him. So maybe she could look up something he had said. Just to make sure he had been honest with them. “You said there’s a connection between this universe and ours,” she said. “I’d like to find some proof.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll be able to do that here,” Nero said. “Our knowledge of the connection is rooted in analyses of magical energy fields and—”

  Sloane wasn’t paying attention. She was thinking of the footage ARIS had showed them in the Dome, the footage that was supposed to prove that the world was breaking. The trees hovering over the water, their origin unknown; the cornfield that had appeared on the ocean floor and no missing-persons report to match the farmer trapped in his tractor. If she assumed that Nero was correct about the connection between universes, maybe that farmer hadn’t been from Earth but from Genetrix.

  “What’s the date? Day and year?” she said.

  “April twenty-ninth, 2020,” he replied.

  “Shit,” Sloane said. “It’s only March back home.”

  “Time discrepancies seem to be common when traveling between universes,” Nero said. “We’ve found some ways to stabilize it, but we can only approximate.”

  Sloane i
ndulged in a moment of terror when she realized that even if they managed to get Nero and Aelia to send them back home, they might be thrust millennia into the future or, worse, into the past. Then she pushed the thought aside. She couldn’t worry about that now. “I’m looking for a missing-persons report from about . . . a few months ago, I guess, our time,” she said. “An odd case—a farmer from somewhere in the Midwest. A corn farmer. Just . . . disappeared while on his tractor. A John Deere, so probably American.”

  Nero raised his eyebrows but didn’t ask her anything. Instead, he put his whistle between his lips and turned toward the stacks. He raised a hand, then waved it carelessly as he let out a high, sweet note like the trill of a bird. “Certain frequencies are like pathways for particular workings,” he said, taking the whistle out of his mouth to speak. “And there are a lot of categories for workings. But once you find the right pathway, intent is what guides the magic, not striking the right note. So I must know my heart’s intent and be able to shape it. I want to find this for you. But I need a more specific intent. The missing tractor, I think, is more specific than your date range.”

  He tucked the whistle between his lips and blew it again, a long, slow note. His eyes closed, and Sloane waited for something to happen. But when Nero opened his eyes and spat out the whistle, nothing in the library seemed to have changed. He smirked and gestured for her to follow him.

  He led her away from the towers of books and into a back room, where newspapers were stacked in neat piles on every surface. Most bore the name Chicago Post, which wasn’t a newspaper Sloane was familiar with, although the New York Times made an appearance too. But what Sloane had first dismissed as reflected daylight was a glow coming from a few of the piles as particular newspapers lit up within them. She moved toward one of them, eyes wide and hands outstretched, and searched out the right issue from the layers that had dulled its brightness. She read headlines as she flipped through the papers: “Resurrectionist Sighted Near South Side Grocery Store”; “New Siphon Regulations Issued by European Union Might Cause Problems for Refugees”; “Birmingham: The Next Haven City?”; “Airborne Killer Whale Spotted Near Alaskan Coast.”

  The glowing newspaper was the Peoria Chronicle, and on the front page was the headline “Farmer in Iowa Goes Missing—Along with Half His Crops.” The text beneath it read:

  Trevor Sherman, who owns a corn farm in central Iowa, disappeared while driving home in his tractor one week ago, as did an irrigation system and a square quarter-mile of corn. The Chronicle’s Midwest correspondent was able to verify this in person.

  Beneath the article was a half-page photo of a circle of bare dirt and half an irrigation pivot in the middle of a cornfield. Something had sliced cleanly through some of the remaining corn stalks, cutting them at a neat diagonal. The same was true of the metal irrigation pivot.

  Sloane said, “Before we came to Genetrix, we saw a report of a man and his tractor appearing on the ocean floor out of nowhere. I wondered if that man was from Genetrix. Looks like the answer is yes.”

  “Not our first disappearance,” Nero said. He tapped the newspaper she held. “Keep reading.”

  Sloane skimmed past descriptions of the man’s children (three of them, all teenagers) and the quotes from his wife to one of the later paragraphs:

  Disappearances and reappearances of this nature have been occurring across the globe in recent months, including the incident on the Sunshine Coast in Australia just last year in which a large iceberg appeared on the beach. Some magical theorists have proposed the multiverse theory as an explanation, but scientists reject this, as there has not been any concrete proof that any contact between multiverses is possible at this juncture, much less evidence that matter can be removed from one universe and inserted into another.

  Sloane looked up at Nero, who had been reading over her shoulder. “People here don’t know that you’ve figured out how to access another universe,” she said.

  “It seemed prudent to be discreet until we understand the repercussions,” Nero said. “We can’t have just anyone trying to poke their way into another universe, after all.”

  There was a section in the Peoria Chronicle called “Magical Oddities.” Most of the content sounded like something from the National Enquirer: people growing wings and tails, alien-abduction stories, disappearing vehicles (that later turned out to have been towed or stolen). But some of it seemed more believable: a mailbox launching into the sky like a rocket, a cat clawing its way out of a grave, another sighting of the Resurrectionist—this time in Iowa.

  “So you’re an ‘I’ll tell you only what you need to know’ kind of guy, then.” Sloane set the newspaper down. Her fingers were gritty with ink. The light was beginning to fade from behind the headline letters, leaving her vision spotted. “How do I know you’re telling me enough?”

  Nero sighed. “I know I owe you—all of you—an apology,” he said. “It’s inadequate, of course, but—I can’t emphasize enough how desperate we were after the Chosen One’s defeat. It was like . . . the world was ending.”

  Sloane remembered the nights the five of them had thought the world was ending. There had been a few. The one after she and Albie returned from captivity was the worst of them, with Albie and Sloane in the hospital and Matt pacing the hall between their rooms, unable to sleep. Esther’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer just two days before. So they had wheeled Sloane into Albie’s room, and everyone had gotten drunk.

  The feeling was what she remembered best. The exhaustion, but also the frantic need to escape, like she was fighting her way out of a straitjacket. There had to be a way out, a weakness they hadn’t discovered, an avenue they hadn’t explored—

  They had never considered a parallel dimension. But if they had, she was sure that in her fevered state, she would have kidnapped someone to save the world.

  “This Resurrectionist,” she said. “He’s powerful?”

  Nero nodded. “Anyone can use a siphon and do something, but there’s plenty of variation in skill levels. I say skill, but skill really has little to do with it. Talent is perhaps more accurate,” he said. “Wrist siphons are the simplest. Throat siphons are expensive and require a natural affinity. The others suggest a high level of innate magical ability. Ear, eye, mouth. Chest.” He shrugged. “You can put one almost anywhere, though some are illegal because of the type of magic they produce.”

  “Such as?”

  “Ah, well. Placing one on the spine is said to render the wearer subject to another person’s control,” he said. “And placing one on the crotch causes horrific disfigurement.”

  Sloane cringed. “People really will put anything down there, won’t they?”

  Nero nodded sagely, but he was smiling. “In any case, siphons are difficult to master, and most people can’t wear more than two at once or they will fall into a coma,” he said. “The Resurrectionist wears five.”

  Sloane let out a low whistle.

  “His innate ability combined with his nature is . . . catastrophic,” Nero said darkly.

  “What do you know about his nature?” She spoke with care, sensing a shift in Nero’s mood.

  Nero was quiet. The sun was high above the edge of the skylights now, spilling into the stacks and shining between the books. It reached them even in the back room where they stood among the newspapers.

  “My sister assisted the Chosen One,” Nero said. “One night, she was . . . taken. Tortured. And her body was left hovering over this building. It took days to figure out how to get her down so I could bury her.”

  Sloane remembered the day they brought her brother’s body back from the Drain site. In a government-issued casket. It hadn’t fit in any room in the house, so they’d put it in the garage for the night before the funeral. She had gone there after her mother was asleep, just to sit with him. She hadn’t wanted him to be alone, as foolish as that was. She knew he wasn’t there anymore, that whatever was inside that casket was just rotten flesh and bones, but she ha
d stayed there all the same. No one ought to be alone in death. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Her name was Claudia,” Nero said. “As you have likely noticed, names from ancient Rome experienced a swell of popularity here about forty years ago.”

  “I wondered about that,” she said. “Most people don’t have positive associations with the name Nero.”

  “My mother just liked the sound of it.” His smile was small and forced a sharp crease into his cheek. “I don’t like to discuss my sister, but I thought you should know why you were taken from your home. Or, specifically, why I assisted in taking you from your home.”

  “Well,” Sloane said. “Thank you.”

  “I think I should take you back to your room, don’t you?” he said. “Or Aelia will have my head.”

  “She seems a bit grumpy with you.”

  “She blames me for having summoned three of you instead of just one,” Nero said. “Though I wasn’t the only one doing the working.”

  “What kind of siphon opens up another dimension?” Sloane said.

  “Guess,” Nero said.

  “Butt siphon,” Sloane said immediately.

  Nero snorted. “No,” he said. “It’s actually not a body part at all. It requires multiple people standing around a massive siphon built into the floor, called a siphon fortis. There are some moderately large ones in haven cities, but the only ones that boast this particular size are here, in the Hall of Summons, one in Los Angeles, and one in Maine.”

  “Maine?”

  Nero smiled. “Our most prestigious magical university is in Maine, right on the coast. It’s very nice there. Expensive, though.” He checked his wrist—the one not covered by a siphon—to see the time. “Let’s go. I’m sure you’d like a shower and a change of clothes. And maybe breakfast.”