Chosen Ones

by Veronica Roth

  “Yeah,” she said, picking up where their conversation had left off. “Who did you think they were summoning? Random mercenaries? They’ve all been Chosen Ones—people who have defeated some kind of evil figure in their own worlds.”

  Mox’s eyes were unfocused, likely from the pain, when he blinked up at her. “I didn’t know,” he said. “At first I tried to—talk to them. But they wouldn’t stop.” His face went blank. “So I killed them instead.”

  Fear prickled in Sloane’s chest. But a moment later, Mox blinked, and his expression changed. It was almost like he had come back to the surface of his own mind.

  “You could have hurt me in the cultural center,” she said. “And then again in the Tankard. But you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t know how many of you there were or what I would be up against,” Mox said. “I always wanted to know why they wanted me dead, these warriors from other worlds. Wanted to know what was in it for them.”

  “But isn’t it obvious why they wanted you dead?” She swallowed hard. Maybe it wasn’t wise to press him on this issue, but she had to. “The Drain. They wanted to stop the Drain.”

  “As I said before,” he replied, looking up at her, “I suppose I should be flattered that you think I could cause that level of destruction by myself. But I can’t.”

  “So the Drains—they aren’t you.”

  Mox shook his head.

  “Who controls them, then?”

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “But my theory is they’re a natural phenomenon. A . . . byproduct, you might say. Of the connection between universes.”

  “No, they aren’t. Here, take this.” Sloane waited until his hand had replaced hers on the gauze, then fumbled with the contents of the first-aid kit, looking for a bandage. All she could find was a packet made of stiff plastic. “The Dark One—the evil figure in my world, the one we defeated—caused Drains all the time. They stopped once he was gone.”

  Mox’s hand stilled hers. He took the packet from her and flicked it open. What fell from it was a long, flat siphon, like the one the doctor had attached to her broken ankle. It looked like a bracelet with wide, flat metal links. Plain, unpolished, but still elegant. Mox held it over his hip, removed the gauze he was using to stanch the bleeding, and placed the siphon over the entry and exit wounds both.

  “It stops bleeding, deters infection, and speeds healing,” he said, almost as if he were reciting something he had read in a textbook or an ad.

  Sloane frowned at the strip of pale skin still visible over the waistband of his pants. “You can’t be saying the Dark One didn’t cause our Drains. He was present at every single one of them, and they stopped when he disappeared. What else could it have been?”

  Mox frowned back at her. “I don’t know everything that can be done with magic,” he said. “Especially across universes. Dimensions. But I know what I can’t do. And I know that I’ve never encountered anyone here as powerful as I am. Maybe your Dark One was.” He shrugged. “Unlikely.”

  She snorted. “Not suffering from a lack of confidence, are you?”

  “No,” he replied, but he didn’t sound boastful, only . . . sad. “Not when it comes to raw power, I’m not. But there are more important things—you know that. It’s how you escaped.” He smirked a little. “Very clever, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” she said stiffly.

  Mox stood, using the table to steady himself, and went to a small cabinet in the corner of the room. Inside it was a small stack of clothes—all dark colors, of course, because supposedly evil sorcerers who commanded armies of undead couldn’t wander around in bright orange, after all. He took a shirt from the stack and limped into the bathroom behind the half-wall to change. “It’s my turn,” he said. “For a question.”

  Sloane sat in the other chair and started gathering the scraps of gauze and wrappers from her stint as nurse—exactly what she had told him she wouldn’t be. Not a good precedent to set, she knew, but it was already done.

  “You said—when you were trapped—that you didn’t choose to come here,” he said. She could only see the back of his head and one of his shoulders over the crumbling wall, but the flash of bare skin made her feel uneasy.

  “You mean when you kidnapped me and held me against my will?” Sloane tilted her head. “Yeah. Before I got pulled into Gene­trix, I was in the middle of a funeral, and the next thing I knew, I was almost drowning in the Chicago River.”

  “And—you weren’t given a choice to return.”

  “No.” Sloane almost sighed with relief when Mox came back into the room with a shirt on, his hair tied back in a low knot. “They told us that the fate of our world and the fate of Genetrix were inter­twined. And that we would need to fight the Resurrectionist—I mean you—if we wanted to save them both.”

  Mox stared at her for a moment. His shoulders started to shake. For a single, horrifying moment, Sloane thought he was sobbing—and then she saw he was laughing, holding one hand against the wound in his side.

  “My God,” Mox said, sounding almost giddy. “This is what I meant. What’s more important than raw power? Elegant lies, that’s what.”

  “So . . .” Sloane narrowed her eyes. “Earth’s and Genetrix’s fates aren’t intertwined?”

  Mox flapped a hand at her. “Not that part. The part about me. Fighting me. Killing me. As if you could. As if it would help anything at all.”

  “First of all, if I had decided to stab you in the jugular instead of having a conversation earlier, I would totally have been able to kill you,” Sloane said. “Magic is great and all, but you’re still just a sack of meat at the end of the day.”

  Mox spread his hands—big even without the siphons to add bulk to them—in acknowledgment.

  “Second—what’s the point of all this?” she said. “Why do they want you dead so badly they would take people from another dimension but won’t go after you themselves?”

  “Not they—he,” Mox said, now agitated. He paced away from her. “Nero.”

  “Nero,” Sloane repeated. “Not that I doubt you, but he seems kind of . . . nonthreatening. Are you sure he’s—”

  “Am I sure?” Mox spun on his heel, and the pile of cans along the wall lifted from the floor all at once. They slammed into the ceiling, then flew in all directions. Sloane ducked as one rocketed toward her head; it hit the wall behind her and started leaking yellow juice.

  Both of them were breathless, Sloane with fear, and Mox, she assumed from his wild-eyed stare, with anger.

  “There’s no need to have a fucking tantrum about it,” she said. “All I’ve seen of Nero is that he’s Aelia’s lackey most of the time. Not exactly evil-mastermind material. Especially compared to a guy who just attacked an innocent can of green beans.”

  She picked the can up and slammed it on the table, the dented side facing him.

  “Raw power,” Mox said, “isn’t everything.”

  “Clearly,” she said, disguising the quiver in her hands by making fists.

  “He doesn’t just . . . do things,” Mox said. He started pacing again. “He gets other people to do them for him. He’s good at it. He’s whoever you need him to be whenever you need him to be it. Until suddenly—he’s not anymore. He brought you here—keeps bringing people here, over and over—to kill me. And if they fail, well, fine, it keeps everyone distracted from what he’s doing. Either way, he wins.”

  Sloane cast a net in her memories of Nero, trying to catch a single instance of what Mox was describing. But the only time she had seen him deviate from his affable persona was after she and Esther had broken into his workshop. His voice had been so cold. But that wasn’t enough.

  “What is he doing,” she said quietly, “that he wants to distract every­one from?”

  Mox’s pacing slowed. “I’m not sure, but my guess is a working. Something that will make him more powerful than I am. Than anyone is. Fill him with magic.”

  The words reminded her of the Dark One and how she had though
t of him as no more than a mouth, devouring. That crafty as he was, the true horror of him was simple: Nothing, not magic, not pain, not power, would ever be enough. He ate just for the sake of eating. And there was no argument she could make to someone like that to get him to stop hurting Albie, to let them both go, to do anything other than what he wanted.

  She stared at her boots.

  Bare feet meant the past. Boots meant the present.

  She crossed her arms. “Do you have any proof?”

  Mox stopped pacing altogether and faced her.

  “Surely you understand why I can’t just believe you,” she said. “There has to be something other than your word that I can rely on.”

  “I haven’t killed you yet,” he suggested.

  “Lots of people haven’t killed me yet,” Sloane replied. “That doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth about Nero.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s Sibyl.”

  “Sibyl?”

  “The prophet. The one who made Genetrix’s doomsday prophecy.” He sat again, across from her. He was so different now than he had been when she knew him only as Mox. He had been charming and levelheaded then—no sign of the chaos beneath. She wondered how he had managed it, even for a few minutes at a time. He didn’t seem capable of it now.

  “She knows who I am,” he said. “She knows who Nero is. And she can tell you how the end will come.”

  “Where is she?”

  “A haven city. Where no magic can touch her. She hates it, the way it feels. Hates the way I feel too. But she’ll bear it for an hour or two if I ask her to.” He scratched the back of his neck, nails raking red lines into his pale skin. “St. Louis. Does your world have a St. Louis?”

  Sloane nodded.

  “I can take you,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But no . . . path of destruction, okay? No killing. We keep it quiet.”

  “I’ll never apologize for defending my life,” he said, his dark eyes finding hers with that focus that made Sloane feel like she was under a blowtorch.

  “I’ll never ask you to,” she said.

  He gave her a peculiar look, like he had never heard such a thing before.

  EXCERPT FROM

  The Mammoth Treasury of Unrealist Poetry, Volume 4

  A Message to Haven Cities After the Installation of Magical Dampeners

  by Fake and Bake

  HAVEN CITIES

  We fix you in our gaze of judgment

  our gaze, a gaze

  a walking stick

  a steering wheel

  WE FIX YOU IN OUR GAZE OF JUDGMENT

  haven’t you heard, haven’t you

  that it is illegal to swallow a person’s magic

  and burp up mediocrity?

  you and your siphon dampener, your ball gag, your pacifier, your duct tape across the lips of your hostage citizens

  WE FIX YOU

  we cannot fix you

  we fix ourselves

  floating castles

  paper fireflies

  frozen flames

  we make the impossible possible

  and full of possibilities

  DAMPEN US???

  no, we dampen you

  33

  SLOANE WOKE the next morning with a start, then slid her hand underneath her pillow for the pair of scissors she had put there before falling asleep. She knew that scissors wouldn’t do her any good against either ridiculously powerful sorcerers or walking corpses—as Mox had pointed out when he saw her take them—but she hated to be without tools.

  Ziva was crouched at her bedside. Her bulging eyes swiveled to the scissors, and she let out a huff that might have been a laugh.

  “A humdrum girl in a magical world,” Ziva wheezed. “What are you going to do, trim my fingernails?”

  “Underestimating my resourcefulness didn’t work out so great for you last time,” Sloane said. “Remember?”

  Ziva sat back on her heels with another huff.

  “The consul told me to give you these,” she said, and she thrust a stack of clothes at Sloane. They looked like Mox’s, which meant the pants would be long enough, at least. “And to tell you there’s soap in his bathroom if you want to try to shower with a jug of water. Your train is set to leave in two hours.”

  “The consul?” Sloane said.

  Ziva cocked her head. “Did you think we called him the Resurrectionist?”

  “I thought maybe you called him by his name.”

  Ziva made a derisive noise, not through her nose but with the suck of her tongue against her teeth. In order to stand she had to move one of her legs with both hands and then shake out the other knee so it, too, straightened. Sloane wondered if the Resurrectionist’s army had to oil their joints, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

  Sloane walked to Mox’s room—and bathroom—with the clothes tucked under her arm. Last night she had carried a stack of blankets far away from the space where the army was housed to a corner near the stairwell, so she could make a quick exit if necessary. It had taken her a long time to fall asleep—not just because of the strange surroundings or the buzz of all that Mox had told her in the back of her mind, but also because of the guilt over abandoning Matt and Esther in the middle of a mission, without explanation. She had disappointed them in so many ways since they came to Genetrix. She wouldn’t have blamed them if they never spoke to her again after this.

  But the lure of the truth had been too strong. If reading the FOIA documents had convinced her of anything, it was that she had gone on too many missions without knowing everything there was to know. She had never made an informed choice in all her life. Bert had taken advantage of the eagerness of her young mind, and Nero and Aelia had intended to do the same.

  But that wouldn’t happen again.

  Mox wasn’t in his room when Sloane entered, for which she was grateful. She stripped down in the bathroom, a jug of water at her side, and cleaned up the best she could, shuddering from the cold the whole time. Mox’s pants were hopelessly long on her, so she wore her own. She put on his shirt but rolled up the sleeves so they bunched around her elbows. She was braiding her hair when he came in, his hand in the beat-up green siphon he had been wearing when she first met him.

  For a second, they just stared at each other, Sloane’s fingers still tangled in her hair. Then she turned back to the mirror.

  “I guess you don’t have to worry you’ll be recognized,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Only a few know my face. Him included.”

  That was how she might have talked about the Dark One. It was the way she had referred to him with Albie—as if the man were always in the room with them, never needing to be named.

  “In Genetrix’s doomsday prophecy,” she said, “is it one person against another? One Chosen, one . . . destructive?”

  “With Genetrix as the battleground,” Mox said, sounding distant. “Two men colliding.”

  She nodded. “And you think Nero is one of them,” she said. “Your Dark One.”

  “Is that what you called yours?”

  She thought of him, his waxy face twisting with amusement as he told her to choose. Choose, between her and Albie, between one horror and another.

  She swallowed, hard. “Yes.”

  “Then yes,” Mox said. “That’s what I think.”

  Sloane finished her braid and tied it off with the band she kept around her wrist. It was so tight that it tugged at her scalp when she moved her head.

  “Here.” Mox went to the little table where she had gulped down a cold can of soup the night before. He picked up his other wrist siphon. It was no finer than the one he wore, but it was more flexible, made of little black plates like the scales of a fish. He made a trilling sound, and all the plates stiffened, like he had sent an electric charge through them. He held it out to her.

  “I know you can’t use it,” he said, “but in a city like this, you attract attention without one.”

  Sloa
ne sighed and guided her left hand into the empty glove the plates made. As soon as her fingers were in place, the plates collapsed around her hand, draping over it like a piece of chain mail. Mox turned her hand over to tighten the wrist cuff. For a man with such big hands, there was an elegance to his fingers.

  “Well,” she said. “Let’s go have a chat with a prophet, I guess.”

  They made their way to the train station on foot at first, walking along the river. Mox had an ease about him that confused her; he kept his hands in his jacket pockets, his head tilted back to take in the daylight. Sloane, however, felt hypervigilant. She twitched at every footstep or distant shout she heard.

  Away from the Loop, the buildings looked even more like ones she recognized. They were made of the red brick that Chicago favored, rows of two- or three-flats with strips of grass and leafless trees between them. Every so often they passed something that was otherworldly to her: a house that was just an orb, turning slowly between two needle-like structures; a sculpture that looked like it was collapsing in on itself from one angle and rebuilding itself from another; a store façade that put art nouveau vines together with linear stickwork under a mansard roof, a visual mash-up that made Sloane cringe.

  When they reached 31st Street, Mox hailed a taxi with a flash of light from his palm and a squeak from the whistle fastened behind his tooth. Sloane had seen other people wear whistles that way, silver glinting when they smiled and clicking when they ate. It was more convenient than sticking a whistle in your mouth whenever you wanted to do something, she assumed.

  They were silent in the taxi, both listening to the radio playing from the dashboard.

  “Stocks of Siphona Technica are at a record high this week, after hitting rock bottom last year when reports of misconduct—” The driver changed the station to one with instrumental music that sounded like deep-sea recordings of whales.