Free Allegiant by Veronica Roth Page B

Christina. The truck is red and rusted, an Amity vehicle. I straighten, pointing the light at myself so she’ll see me. The truck stops a few feet ahead of me, and Christina leaps out of the passenger seat, throwing her arms around me. I replay it in my mind to make it real, Tori’s body falling, the factionless woman’s hands covering her stomach. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel real.
    “Thank God,” Christina says. “Get in. We’re going to find Tori.”
    “Tori’s dead,” I say plainly, and the word “dead” makes it real for me. I wipe tears from my cheeks with the heels of my hands and struggle to control my shuddering breaths. “I—I shot the woman who killed her.”
    “What?” Johanna sounds frantic. She leans over from the driver’s seat. “What did you say?”
    “Tori’s gone,” I say. “I saw it happen.”
    Johanna’s expression is shrouded by her hair. She presses her next breath out.
    “Well, let’s find the others, then.”
    I get into the truck. The engine roars as Johanna presses the gas pedal, and we bump over the grass in search of the others.
    “Did you see any of them?” I say.
    “A few. Cara, Uriah.” Johanna shakes her head. “No one else.”
    I wrap my hand around the door handle and squeeze. If I had tried harder to find Tobias . . . if I hadn’t stopped for Tori . . .
    What if Tobias didn’t make it?
    “I’m sure they’re all right,” Johanna says. “That boy of yours knows how to take care of himself.”
    I nod, without conviction. Tobias can take care of himself, but in an attack, surviving is an accident. It doesn’t take skill to stand in a place where no bullets find you, or to fire into the dark and hit a man you didn’t see. It is all luck, or providence, depending on what you believe. And I don’t know—have never known—exactly what I believe.
    He’s all right he’s all right he’s all right.
    Tobias is all right.
    My hands tremble, and Christina squeezes my knee. Johanna steers us toward the rendezvous point, where she saw Uriah and Cara. I watch the speedometer needle climb, then hold steady at seventy-five. We jostle one another in the cab, thrown this way and that way by the uneven ground.
    “There!” Christina points. There is a cluster of lights ahead of us, some just pinpricks, like flashlights, and others round, like headlights.
    We pull up close, and I see him. Tobias sits on the hood of the other truck, his arm soaked with blood. Cara stands in front of him with a first aid kit. Caleb and Peter sit on the grass a few feet away. Before Johanna has stopped the truck completely, I open the door and get out, running toward him. Tobias stands up, ignoring Cara’s orders to stay put, and we collide, his uninjured arm wrapping around my back and lifting me off my feet. His back is wet with sweat, and when he kisses me, he tastes like salt.
    All the knots of tension inside me come apart at once. I feel, just for a moment, like I am remade, like I am brand-new.
    He’s all right. We’re out of the city. He’s all right.

CHAPTER
TWELVE
    T OBIAS
    M Y ARM THROBS like a second heartbeat from the bullet graze. Tris’s knuckles brush mine as she lifts her hand to point at something on our right: a series of long, low buildings lit by blue emergency lamps.
    “What are those?” Tris says.
    “The other greenhouses,” Johanna says. “They don’t require much manpower, but we grow and raise things in large quantities there—animals, raw material for fabric, wheat, and so on.”
    Their panes glow in the starlight, obscuring the treasures I imagine to be inside them, small plants with berries dangling from their branches, rows of potato plants buried in the earth.
    “You don’t show them to visitors,” I say. “We never saw them.”
    “Amity keeps a number of secrets,” Johanna says, and she sounds proud.
    The road ahead of us is long and straight, marked with cracks and swollen patches. Alongside it are gnarled trees, broken