Chosen Ones (The Chosen Ones, #1)

by Veronica Roth

“I like it this way,” Albie said. “It reminds me that we’re just a handful of people who lost something among thousands of other people who lost something. Not hurting any more or less than any of the families of these people.”

“I’m tired of being special,” Albie said with a shaky laugh. “I’m tired of being celebrated for the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

She was very still for a while. I had rarely encountered a person of her age who could be that still. But she simply said, “This sucks,” and started discussing the logistics with me. OFFICER S: Profound. OFFICER K: Contrary to what you may have seen in movies, our Chosen Ones rarely make poetic declarations. In this case, I believe she was the only subject who truly grasped what was ahead of her.

Sloane was there, wishing there were a socially acceptable way to sponge sweat off one’s armpits so they would stop stinging, but she also wasn’t there. She was by the river, the cold air burning her lungs, as she stared across the bridge at the Dark One right before their last battle. Part of her always would be.

Both of them had had their strengths, and Sloane’s had been getting out of bad situations. She was always looking for exits, even when there weren’t any. On a few occasions when Matt had dug in and decided it was time for them to make their heroic last stand, she had helped them escape instead. It was the only time she had ever felt like she really was a Chosen One.

things harder.” Sloane was quiet for a moment. “I’ve always wondered something,” she said. “I wondered if they found more potential Chosen Ones than just us. I know the criteria were specific, but there are like three hundred million people in this country alone, so—maybe there were a few others.” “And this bothers you.” She nodded. “What if,” she said, tilting her glass with a fingertip, “what separated us from them—what made us Chosen—was just that our parents said yes, and theirs said no?”

“No, that’s not how it went.” Sloane was laughing through each word. “Bert took me aside and he was like, ‘You don’t seem to work well with people watching you.’ ” “And then he told you to be the rogue assassin!” Albie exclaimed. “I’m telling you, that’s how it went.” “How could you tell me how it went—you weren’t even there! Plus, I never assassinated anyone.” “I’m telling you, you were a much more badass Chosen One than I was,” Albie said. “I was like . . . cannon fodder. Like what Bert said to me—‘You’re a good man in a storm, Albie. Matt’s lucky to have you.’ To die in his place so he can go on to save the world, you mean.” Sloane shook her head. “You know that’s not what he meant.” Albie shrugged.

Matt was looking at her in a way she didn’t like. Like she was a car that had broken down on the side of the road and he was looking under the hood to see what the problem was. Like there was something wrong inside her that he could make right. And maybe that was the entire problem with them—he didn’t see her; he saw who she could be with a few adjustments, and all she wanted was to stay busted and be left alone.

“You know,” she said, propping her cheek on her hand, “I like being this way, actually.” “What, drunk? Yeah, lots of people do, Slo,” Matt replied. His hand was still on her shoulder, but it was warm now, from her skin. “Not drunk,” she said. “The way I am all the time. I am that way all the way through. No marshmallow center. Anybody else’ll tell you.” Albie was nodding along. “Maybe like . . . a lemon-juice center. Or a licorice center.” “Maybe other people don’t know you like I do,” Matt said gently. “Except this is me, telling you,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly firmer. “The Dark One sucked out all my insides. I know it. Everyone knows it. Except you.”

These were no well-meaning Wiccans, no modern druids in robes, no tarot-reading psychics or astrologists trying to figure out the position of Mercury (in retrograde at the moment). They were the kind of people you could walk past on the street and never look twice at, mostly men, almost all of them white, wearing blue jeans, and running secret websites about how the Dark One was misrepresented by the media, how all he had wanted to do was balance out the world’s population so they wouldn’t continue to devour Earth’s resources or cleanse North America of its impurities, all racist vitriol disguised as reverence for a dead man. And worse than all that was that they wanted to bring him back, as if he wouldn’t just murder every last one of them if he returned.

Hahahaha, yeah this is real life

Sloane was moving, now without meaning to, toward the double doors across the room. Her body was burning, and as she drew closer, she smelled something sulfurous and chemical and familiar. Her hands had smelled that way after she did magic. With the artifact. The Needle of Koschei. She hadn’t known when she went with a crew of ARIS agents to the middle of the Pacific Ocean how much the Needle would cost her. In the end, she had been so desperate to get rid of it that she had chewed it out of her own hand.

“If people die because of your help,” she said finally, her throat aching, “you’ll have to carry that around.” “And if people die because I don’t help?” he said, meeting her eyes at last. “Either way, we’ll carry it. We always do.”

All over me is something tingling and burning. It’s not the sting of salt water on the skin around my eyes; it’s more like feeling coming back to a limb that’s gone to sleep. On the way here I asked the ARIS officers if they felt it too. They didn’t. They don’t. Just me.

Obvi the chosen 1

Something bobs to the surface next to me. It looks like a piece of plastic at first, but when I pick it up, it’s soft and slippery. I scream, dropping it when I realize it’s skin. All around me are pieces of skin and muscle and bone and viscera. Everyone is dead. And I’m alone.

Jesus

THEY LEFT ALBIE with Cho so he could try the device. She had promised to get him home when they were finished. Sloane had no doubt that the device worked—she would not have felt its presence so strongly if it didn’t. They all had their own way of relating to magic, and hers was with craving, and seeking, and understanding. She knew the device, and the device knew her. Albie had been more straightforward in his use of magic. Albie with the Freikugeln—the bullets of German legend that struck their targets without fail—had just been a man with a tool, the same as a hammer or a saw. His artifact had not burrowed under his skin, becoming part of him, the way Koschei’s Needle had done to her. He had simply held the bullets, and though they never did what the legend said they would—none of the artifacts they had collected had—they had allowed him to perform rudimentary magic, lighting fires, making objects float, things like that.

Her brother, Cameron, had been studying architecture when he answered the call to fight the Dark One. He had died in one of the Drains, in Minneapolis. They had fought over his decision to put school on hold, even though she had been young at the time, only twelve. You’re not a soldier, she had told him. You’re a skinny nerd and you’ll get yourself killed. A rare moment of prescience, maybe.

He had liked it here. So now Sloane came here, not to the Drain site where he had lost his life, not to their central Illinois haunts, but here, to visit him.

“You mean the giant beanbag you decided to name Frodo Baggins?

Um. Ingenious

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Ines said, shrugging a little. “If the world is breaking—that girl floating toward the sky, my God—maybe we’ll need magic to fix it.” “If anything, magic is what broke it,” Sloane said darkly. “You hate it so much,” Ines said, nodding to the knot of scars on Sloane’s hand. “But you’ve never explained why.” Sloane put her hand under the lip of the counter. “I don’t hate it, exactly,” she said. “I’ve just seen what it can do.” “So have all of us.” “Yeah.” But Sloane didn’t mean the Drains or the leveling of the tower or even the death of the Dark One. She meant the taste of copper and salt on her tongue as she had surfaced after the Dive.

Sloane waited until the door closed behind him, then took the plane out of her back pocket. She unfolded it, and smoothed it out on the casket. Written right in the middle of the paper was I’m sorry. I couldn’t carry it anymore. Sloane’s vision went blurry, and she crumpled the paper in her fist, squeezing it so tightly her knuckles ached. In the time that had passed since Dr. Hart had delivered the news, she hadn’t cried, hadn’t even come close. Not even when she was listening to Esther sob on the phone. Not even when she held Albie’s shirt up to her nose to see if it still smelled like him. Either way, we’ll carry it. We always do.

With Albie, she would remember the Survival Beer they got after every altercation with the Dark One, the looks they exchanged whenever Matt went into hero mode, and the way they had held each other upright when they escaped captivity together. She had half a lifetime of memories of Albie. They had understood each other’s pain in a way no one else had. Now there was no one left who did.

Their use of magic had always been unpredictable, which was why it had been good for all five of them to be present at any given time, to maximize their odds of success. If people die because of your help, she had said to him, you’ll have to carry that around. Like a prophet.

Figuring out what bait he wouldn’t be able to resist. Which, uh . . . was me. I was the bait. SENATOR GOO: Because . . . ESTHER PARK: Because he was kind of obsessed with her, okay? SLOANE ANDREWS: I think he—he said we were similar. Can we move on? I don’t get it either, I promise.

She pushed the Dark One’s words out of her mind and chased the feeling down, only then allowing herself to articulate what she had always known: That the feeling of magic speaking to her was the feeling of something coming back to life. A new pulse, new circulation in an unused limb. It made her into something new.

Next to Sloane, Matt was frowning at his phone. “I just got a news alert,” he said. “Something happened at the Dome.” He looked up at Sloane. She stared back steadily. If he asked her, she decided, she wouldn’t lie. She was done with that. Maybe it was her fault that Matt thought she was better than she was; she had spent so much time pretending, for his sake. Maybe it was time he knew what he was really dealing with. Heat rushed into her face, and she was ready, ready for him to ask, ready to tell him— “Well,” Ines said. “Shall we?”

Ines opened the lid of the canister. Inside it were the gray ashes, and on top of them, something yellow and bright. A paper crane. Mrs. Summers spotted it first. And started to laugh. They all laughed, then, not because it was funny but because it wasn’t, because laughter was a full-body hiccup, wild and strange, and death was wild and strange, too.

He is magic too

In other words, for something to be magic, it must be an impossible want.

Like Albie to come back. Of course, he wouldn't want it and she wouldn't purposefully do that :(

“My name is Aelia,” the woman said. “I am praetor of Cordus and tribune of the Army of Flickering.” “Did she just say words?” Esther asked Sloane. “Did you just say words, lady?”

Lol, Essy

Matt’s lips quirked at the corner. For a few years, while they hunted the Dark One, that was the only smile he had ever worn. But after the Dark One fell, she had seen it less and less often as he softened and relaxed, no longer responsible for any life but his own.

Nature is bloody, and as a whole, it favors strength over compassion.

“They were surprised by how many of us came out of that river,” Sloane said. “They expected only one. A parallel Chosen One.” “Yeah, could you have claimed that title any faster, Matt, by the way?” Esther said.

So they had wheeled Sloane into Albie’s room, and everyone had gotten drunk.

At 16, in a hospital, on drugs?

“All right,” I said. “What have you been doing in here?” “Watching,” he replied. “Watching?” “Yeah, the—strings.” He wiggled his fingers. “If I concentrate, I can see them.” “Strings,” I repeated. “What do they look like?” “They’re like when you see the sun through fog,” he said. “In rays. Bright, a little hazy.”

String theory

“Anyway, first I got the librarian to search for our names, just to make sure there weren’t parallel versions of us running around out there—thank God she didn’t find anything or I’d probably lose every last marble I had left.” Sloane had been so busy processing the other aspects of occupying a parallel universe that she hadn’t spared a thought for AlternaSloane. Or her parallel parents. Paralleloparents, she thought, and it was a joke she might have made to Albie, who was remarkably patient with wordplay. But Albie was dead.

“Looks like a movie set,” Esther said with a snort. She was right. The dark alcoves, the stone walls, the tables with candles burning on top of them—it was a scene from a fantasy movie or a place in a theme park. Except here, the magical effects were real: a lemon wedge floating over a gin and tonic, squeezing every time a woman took a sip; a martini with a bouncing, glowing olive; a glass of flaming whiskey whose fire didn’t burn out when a man drank from it.

Omg, this is a dream

Esther cocked her head to the side and looked up at Sloane like she was trying to remember the title of a song. “You seem better here,” she said. “Better?” Sloane laughed. “Tell that to Evan Kowalczyk.” “I didn’t say you were normal, just . . . better. Steadier.” “Well,” Sloane replied, “I know how to do this. Fight the big bad, dodge the government goons. Same script, different movie.” Esther nodded. She choked a little when she responded: “I don’t want to do this again.”

size, her head wrapped in a scarf, and still always smiling. None of their parents were the dream of what parents should be. Every one of them had given their child away. But of all of them, Esther’s mother was maybe the closest, fussing over Esther’s diminishing waist, always foisting cookies and tea on them even if she was in someone else’s house. Sloane squeezed Esther’s hand hard and hoped the pressure would steady her. She wasn’t good at consoling people; that had been Albie’s job. “Your mom knows everything she needs to know,” she said. “That her daughter saved the world. And loves her.” Esther’s head bobbed. “Okay.” She swallowed. “Yeah.” A taxi pulled up to the curb. They all piled in, quieting down on the drive back to the Camel. Sloane looked out the window, but she didn’t see anything they passed. All she could think about was how everything that happened now—including getting pulled into a parallel dimension—would be After Albie. Like a new era. Sloane AA. Some things split your life in half.

Esther pinched her nose as if forcing tension away. Sloane kept forgetting how tired Esther had looked when she dragged herself out of the river. Nothing was waiting for Sloane back on Earth except familiarity and an apartment she needed to move out of. But waiting for Esther was a dying parent. Every moment they spent here was, for her, a moment too long.

“Hey,” she whispered into his ear. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” “It was—all I could think was—” His voice was muffled by her shirt. He had buried his face in her shoulder. “All I could think was Not again.”

Even if she had nothing but heartache waiting for her back on Earth—moving out of the apartment she shared with Matt, grieving over Albie, navigating the scrutiny of the media—at least that life belonged to her.

But she couldn’t forget the strange relief of hearing Aelia make her misstep, of finally having a name for what she had been feeling since she pulled herself out of the Chicago River: She was being lied to. And Sloane hated lies unless she was the one telling them.

The Mammoth Treasury of Unrealist Poetry, Volume 2 Le Quoi by Artificielle What is it? Is it IS it? What is is Is itwhatit is I S I S IT! what

Lol, what

“I,” Sloane said, “am not fragile.” “I don’t intend to insult you,” Nero said. “But you suffered a unique trauma at the hands of your Dark One, and—” “Shut up.” It wasn’t Sloane who interrupted him this time, but Esther. She wiped her cheeks dry and tugged at the neck of her stiff blouse to draw attention to her siphon. “Or I will set you on fucking fire.”

“Do not scorn the one who got us bourbon,” Matt said. “Just because you just got affirmed in Trusting No One.” “My worldview is the correct worldview,” Sloane said, “and you expect me not to gloat?”

Esther stared at Sloane, her eyes full of tears. Sloane thought she might always remember Esther this way, her arms slack at her sides, her eyes shining, the moon glowing behind her, no matter what happened to them after this.

“God, Sloane, this is the fucking problem with you, you don’t know how to fight without drawing blood, and you never have!”

It may become clear to us, as we watch magic develop and change in our world, that certain people are not to be trusted with the wealth of power that magic offers. This is not because they are wicked, but because they are damaged beyond repair. They may proceed through the world as if their desires conform to those of the healthy and functional among us, but that may not be the case; when they do magic, their true selves will be laid bare before them and before us all. In other words, magic is a mirror. It reflects us back to ourselves, and we may not always like what we see.

Well, that's rude

Twice will Equals greet each other anew, and the fate of the worlds is in their hands.

It is the same with universes: you must reach out with your magic to “knock,” and someone dwelling in that universe must “open the door.”

Which is why she is the Chosen One. But why did the knock come in the form of Albie's voice?

All of them gave her questions that Nero and Aelia refused to answer. Sloane didn’t like it. Moreover, she didn’t trust it. This world, your world, they destroy themselves. All worlds do. They don’t need me, the Resurrectionist had said. He hadn’t seemed like the Dark One. Not a parallel version of him or the man himself. Another piece she couldn’t fit anywhere.

Destroy how? Literally?