Veronica Roth - The Fates Divide

First published in hardback in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 2018

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018

Published in this ebook edition in 2018

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,

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The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

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Text © 2018 by Veronica Roth

Map © 2017 by Veronica Roth. All rights reserved.

Map illustrated by Virginia Allyn

Typography by Joel Tippie

Jacket art ™ & © 2018 by Veronica Roth

Jacket art by Jeff Huang

Jacket design by Erin Fitzsimmons

Veronica Roth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008192198

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008192228

Version: 2018-04-09

To my dad, Frank, my brother, Frankie, and my sister, Candice:

we may not share blood, but I’m so lucky we’re family.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Eijeh

Part 1

Chapter 1: Cyra

Chapter 2: Cisi

Chapter 3: Cyra

Chapter 4: Akos

Chapter 5: Cisi

Chapter 6: Akos

Chapter 7: Cisi

Chapter 8: Cisi

Chapter 9: Cyra

Chapter 10: Akos

Chapter 11: Cyra

Chapter 12: Cisi

Chapter 13: Akos

Chapter 14: Cyra

Chapter 15: Cyra

Chapter 16: Akos

Chapter 17: Akos

Chapter 18: Eijeh

Chapter 19: Cyra

Chapter 20: Cisi

Part 2

Chapter 21: Cisi

Chapter 22: Cyra

Chapter 23: Akos

Chapter 24: Cyra

Chapter 25: Cisi

Chapter 26: Akos

Chapter 27: Cyra

Chapter 28: Akos

Chapter 29: Eijeh

Chapter 30: Cyra

Part 3

Chapter 31: Cyra

Chapter 32: Cyra

Chapter 33: Akos

Chapter 34: Akos

Chapter 35: Cyra

Chapter 36: Cisi

Chapter 37: Akos

Chapter 38: Cyra

Chapter 39: Cisi

Chapter 40: Cisi

Part 4

Chapter 41: Akos

Chapter 42: Cyra

Chapter 43: Akos

Chapter 44: Cyra

Chapter 45: Cyra

Chapter 46: Akos

Chapter 47: Cyra

Chapter 48: Cisi

Chapter 49: Akos

Chapter 50: Cyra

Chapter 51: Akos

Chapter 52: Cyra

Part 5

Chapter 53: Cisi

Chapter 54: Cyra

Chapter 55: Akos

Chapter 56: Cyra

Epilogue: Eijeh

Acknowledgments

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Glossary

Books by Veronica Roth

About the Publisher

“WHY SO AFRAID?” WE ask ourself.

“She is coming to kill us,” we reply.

We were once alarmed by this feeling of being in two bodies at once. We have grown accustomed to it in the cycles since the shift occurred, since both our currentgifts dissolved into this new, strange one. We know how to pretend, now, that we are two people instead of one—though we prefer, when we are alone, to relax into the truth. We are one person in two bodies.

We are not on Urek, as we were the last time we knew our location. We are adrift in space, the bend of the blushing currentstream the only interruption in the blackness.

Only one of our two cells has a window. It is a narrow thing, with a thin mattress in it and a bottle of water. The other cell is a storage room that smells of disinfectant, harsh and acrid. The only light comes from the vents in the door, closed now but not fully sealed against the hallway glow.

We stretch two arms—one shorter and browner, the other long and pale—in unison. The former feels lighter, the latter clumsy and heavy. The drugs have faded from one body but not the other.

One heart pounds, hard, and the other maintains a steady rhythm.

“To kill us,” we say to ourself. “Are we sure?”

“As sure as the fates. She wants us dead.”

“The fates.” There is dissonance here. Just as a person can love and hate something at once, we love and hate the fates, we believe and do not believe in them. “What was the word our mother used—” We have two mothers, two fathers, two sisters. And yet only one brother. “Accept your fate, or bear it, or—”

“‘Suffer the fate,’ she said,” we reply. “‘For all else is delusion.’”

LAZMET NOAVEK, MY FATHER and former tyrant of Shotet, had been presumed dead for over ten seasons. We had held a funeral for him on the first sojourn after his passing, sent his old armor into space, because there was no body.

And yet my brother, Ryzek, imprisoned in the belly of this transport ship, had said, Lazmet is still alive.

My mother had called my father “Laz,” sometimes. No one else would have dared but Ylira Noavek. “Laz,” she would say, “let it go.” And he obeyed her, as long as she didn’t command him too often. He respected her, though he respected no one else, not even his own friends.

With her he had some softness, but with everyone else … well.

My brother—who had begun his life soft, and only later hardened into someone who would torture his own sister—had learned to cut out a person’s eye from Lazmet. And how to store it, too, in a preservative, so it wouldn’t rot. Before I truly understood what the jars in the Weapons Hall contained, I had gone there to look at them, on shelves high above my head, glinting in the low light. Green and brown and gray irises, afloat, like fish bobbing to the surface of a tank for food.

My father had never carved a piece of someone with his own hands. Nor had he ordered someone else to do it. He had used his currentgift to control their bodies, to force them to do it to themselves.

Death is not the only punishment you can give a person. You can also give them nightmares.

When Akos Kereseth came to find me, later, it was on the nav deck of the small transport ship that carried us away from my home planet, where my people, the Shotet, now stood on the verge of war with Akos’s home nation of Thuvhe. I sat in the captain’s chair, swiveling back and forth to soothe myself. I meant to tell him what Ryzek had told me, that my father—if he was my father, if Ryzek was even my brother—was alive. Ryzek seemed certain that he and I didn’t actually share blood, that I was not truly a Noavek. That was why, he had said, I hadn’t been able to open the gene lock that kept his rooms secure, why I hadn’t been able to assassinate him the first time I tried.