Allegiant / Эллигент (by Veronica Roth, 2013) - аудиокнига на английском

CHAPTER ONE TRIS I PACE IN our cell in Erudite headquarters, her words echoing in my mind: My name will be Edith Prior, and there is much I am happy to forget. “So you’ve never seen her before? Not even in pictures?” Christina says, her wounded leg propped up on a pillow. She was shot during our desperate attempt to reveal the Edith Prior video to our city. At the time we had no idea what it would say, or that it would shatter the foundation we stand on, the factions, our identities. “Is she a grandmother or an aunt or something?” “I told you, no,” I say, turning when I reach the wall. “Prior is—was—my father’s name, so it would have to be on his side of the family. But Edith is an Abnegation name, and my father’s relatives must have been Erudite, so . . .” “So she must be older,” Cara says, leaning her head against the wall. From this angle she looks just like her brother, Will, my friend, the one I shot. Then she straightens, and the ghost of him is gone. “A few generations back. An ancestor.” “Ancestor.” The word feels old inside me, like crumbling brick. I touch one wall of the cell as I turn around. The panel is cold and white. My ancestor, and this is the inheritance she passed to me: freedom from the factions, and the knowledge that my Divergent identity is more important than I could have known. My existence is a signal that we need to leave this city and offer our help to whoever is outside it. “I want to know,” Cara says, running her hand over her face. “I need to know how long we’ve been here. Would you stop pacing for one minute?” I stop in the middle of the cell and raise my eyebrows at her. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “It’s okay,” Christina says. “We’ve been in here way too long.” It’s been days since Evelyn mastered the chaos in the lobby of Erudite headquarters with a few short commands and had all the prisoners hustled away to cells on the third floor. A factionless woman came to doctor our wounds and distribute painkillers, and we’ve eaten and showered several times, but no one has told us what’s going on outside. No matter how forcefully I’ve asked them. “I thought Tobias would come by now,” I say, dropping to the edge of my cot. “Where is he?” “Maybe he’s still angry that you lied to him and went behind his back to work with his father,” Cara says. I glare at her. “Four wouldn’t be that petty,” Christina says, either to chastise Cara or to reassure me, I’m not sure. “Something’s probably going on that’s keeping him away. He told you to trust him.” In the chaos, when everyone was shouting and the factionless were trying to push us toward the staircase, I curled my fingers in the hem of his shirt so I wouldn’t lose him. He took my wrists in his hands and pushed me away, and those were the words he said. Trust me. Go where they tell you. “I’m trying,” I say, and it’s true. I’m trying to trust him. But every part of me, every fiber and every nerve, is straining toward freedom, not just from this cell but from the prison of the city beyond it. I need to see what’s outside the fence. CHAPTER TWO TOBIAS I CAN’T WALK these hallways without remembering the days I spent as a prisoner here, barefoot, pain pulsing inside me every time I moved. And with that memory is another one, one of waiting for Beatrice Prior to go to her death, of my fists against the door, of her legs slung across Peter’s arms when he told me she was just drugged. I hate this place. It isn’t as clean as it was when it was the Erudite compound; now it is ravaged by war, bullet holes in the walls and the broken glass of shattered lightbulbs everywhere. I walk over dirty footprints and beneath flickering lights to her cell and I am admitted without question, because I bear the factionless symbol—an empty circle—on a black band around my arm and Evelyn’s features on my face. Tobias Eaton was a shameful name, and now it is a powerful one. Tris crouches on the ground inside, shoulder to shoulder with Christina and diagonal from Cara. My Tris should look pale and small—she is pale and small, after all—but instead the room is full of her. Her round eyes find mine and she is on her feet, her arms wound tightly around my waist and her face against my chest. I squeeze her shoulder with one hand and run my other hand over her hair, still surprised when her hair stops above her neck instead of below it. I was happy when she cut it, because it was hair for a warrior and not a girl, and I knew that was what she would need. “How’d you get in?” she says in her low, clear voice. “I’m Tobias Eaton,” I say, and she laughs. “Right. I keep forgetting.” She pulls away just far enough to look at me. There is a wavering expression in her eyes, like she is a heap of leaves about to be scattered by the wind. “What’s happening? What took you so long?” She sounds desperate, pleading. For all the horrible memories this place carries for me, it carries more for her, the walk to her execution, her brother’s betrayal, the fear serum. I have to get her out. Cara looks up with interest. I feel uncomfortable, like I have shifted in my skin and it doesn’t quite fit anymore. I hate having an audience. “Evelyn has the city under lockdown,” I say. “No one goes a step in any direction without her say-so. A few days ago she gave a speech about uniting against our oppressors, the people outside.” “Oppressors?” Christina says. She takes a vial from her pocket and dumps the contents into her mouth—painkillers for the bullet wound in her leg, I assume. I slide my hands into my pockets. “Evelyn—and a lot of people, actually—think we shouldn’t leave the city just to help a bunch of people who shoved us in here so they could use us later. They want to try to heal the city and solve our own problems instead of leaving to solve other people’s. I’m paraphrasing, of course,” I say. “I suspect that opinion is very convenient for my mother, because as long as we’re all contained, she’s in charge. The second we leave, she loses her hold.” “Great.” Tris rolls her eyes. “Of course she would choose the most selfish route possible.” “She has a point.” Christina wraps her fingers around the vial. “I’m not saying I don’t want to leave the city and see what’s out there, but we’ve got enough going on here. How are we supposed to help a bunch of people we’ve never met?” Tris considers this, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I don’t know,” she admits. My watch reads three o’clock. I’ve been here too long—long enough to make Evelyn suspicious. I told her I came to break things off with Tris, that it wouldn’t take much time. I’m not sure she believed me. I say, “Listen, I mostly came to warn you—they’re starting the trials for all the prisoners. They’re going to put you all under truth serum, and if it works, you’ll be convicted as traitors. I think we would all like to avoid that.” “Convicted as traitors?” Tris scowls. “How is revealing the truth to our entire city an act of betrayal?” “It was an act of defiance against your leaders,” I say. “Evelyn and her followers don’t want to leave the city. They won’t thank you for showing that video.” “They’re just like Jeanine!” She makes a fitful gesture, like she wants to hit something but there’s nothing available. “Ready to do anything to stifle the truth, and for what? To be kings of their tiny little world? It’s ridiculous.” I don’t want to say so, but part of me agrees with my mother. I don’t owe the people outside this city anything, whether I am Divergent or not. I’m not sure I want to offer myself to them to solve humanity’s problems, whatever that means. But I do want to leave, in the desperate way that an animal wants to escape a trap. Wild and rabid. Ready to gnaw through bone. “Be that as it may,” I say carefully, “if the truth serum works on you, you will be convicted.” “If it works?” says Cara, narrowing her eyes. “Divergent,” Tris says to her, pointing at her own head. “Remember?” “That’s fascinating.” Cara tucks a stray hair back into the knot just above her neck. “But atypical. In my experience, most Divergent can’t resist the truth serum. I wonder why you can.” “You and every other Erudite who ever stuck a needle in me,” Tris snaps. “Can we focus, please? I would like to avoid having to break you out of prison,” I say. Suddenly desperate for comfort, I reach for Tris’s hand, and she brings her fingers up to meet mine. We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief. “All right, all right,” she says, gently now. “What did you have in mind?” “I’ll get Evelyn to let you testify first, of the three of you,” I say. “All you have to do is come up with a lie that will exonerate both Christina and Cara, and then tell it under truth serum.” “What kind of lie would do that?” “I thought I would leave that to you,” I say. “Since you’re the better liar.” I know as I’m saying the words that they hit a sore spot in both of us. She lied to me so many times. She promised me she wouldn’t go to her death in the Erudite compound when Jeanine demanded the sacrifice of a Divergent, and then she did it anyway. She told me she would stay home during the Erudite attack, and then I found her in Erudite headquarters, working with my father. I understand why she did all those things, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still broken. “Yeah.” She looks at her shoes. “Okay, I’ll think of something.” I set my hand on her arm. “I’ll talk to Evelyn about your trial. I’ll try to make it soon.” “Thank you.” I feel the urge, familiar now, to wrench myself from my body and speak directly into her mind. It is the same urge, I realize, that makes me want to kiss her every time I see her, because even a sliver of distance between us is infuriating. Our fingers, loosely woven a moment ago, now clutch together, her palm tacky with moisture, mine rough in places where I have grabbed too many handles on too many moving trains. Now she looks pale and small, but her eyes make me think of wide-open skies that I have never actually seen, only dreamed of. “If you’re going to kiss, do me a favor and tell me so I can look away,” says Christina. “We are,” Tris says. And we do. I touch her cheek to slow the kiss down, holding her mouth on mine so I can feel every place where our lips touch and every place where they pull away. I savor the air we share in the second afterward and the slip of her nose across mine. I think of something to say, but it is too intimate, so I swallow it. A moment later I decide I don’t care. “I wish we were alone,” I say as I back out of the cell. She smiles. “I almost always wish that.” As I shut the door, I see Christina pretending to vomit, and Cara laughing, and Tris’s hands hanging at her sides. CHAPTER THREE TRIS “I THINK YOU’RE all idiots.” My hands are curled in my lap like a sleeping child’s. My body is heavy with truth serum. Sweat collects on my eyelids. “You should be thanking me, not questioning me.” “We should thank you for defying the instructions of your faction leaders? Thank you for trying to prevent one of your faction leaders from killing Jeanine Matthews? You behaved like a traitor.” Evelyn Johnson spits the word like a snake. We are in the conference room in Erudite headquarters, where the trials have been taking place. I have now been a prisoner for at least a week. I see Tobias, half-hidden in the shadows behind his mother. He has kept his eyes averted since I sat in the chair and they cut the strip of plastic binding my wrists together. For just for a moment, his eyes touch mine, and I know it’s time to start lying. It’s easier now that I know I can do it. As easy as pushing the weight of the truth serum aside in my mind. “I am not a traitor,” I say. “At the time I believed that Marcus was working under Dauntless-factionless orders. Since I couldn’t join the fight as a soldier, I was happy to help with something else.” “Why couldn’t you be a soldier?” Fluorescent light glows behind Evelyn’s hair. I can’t see her face, and I can’t focus on anything for more than a second before the truth serum threatens to pull me down again. “Because.” I bite my lip, as if trying to stop the words from rushing out. I don’t know when I became so good at acting, but I guess it’s not that different from lying, which I have always had a talent for. “Because I couldn’t hold a gun, okay? Not after shooting . . . him. My friend Will. I couldn’t hold a gun without panicking.” Evelyn’s eyes pinch tighter. I suspect that even in the softest parts of her, there is no sympathy for me. “So Marcus told you he was working under my orders,” she says, “and even knowing what you do about his rather tense relationship with both the Dauntless and the factionless, you believed him?” “Yes.” “I can see why you didn’t choose Erudite.” She laughs. My cheeks tingle. I would like to slap her, as I’m sure many of the people in this room would, though they wouldn’t dare to admit it. Evelyn has us all trapped in the city, controlled by armed factionless patrolling the streets. She knows that whoever holds the guns holds the power. And with Jeanine Matthews dead, there is no one left to challenge her for it. From one tyrant to another. That is the world we know, now. “Why didn’t you tell anyone about this?” she says. “I didn’t want to have to admit to any weakness,” I say. “And I didn’t want Four to know I was working with his father. I knew he wouldn’t like it.” I feel new words rising in my throat, prompted by the truth serum. “I brought you the truth about our city and the reason we are in it. If you aren’t thanking me for it, you should at least do something about it instead of sitting here on this mess you made, pretending it’s a throne!” Evelyn’s mocking smile twists like she has just tasted something unpleasant. She leans in close to my face, and I see for the first time how old she is; I see the lines that frame her eyes and mouth, and the unhealthy pallor she wears from years of eating far too little. Still, she is handsome like her son. Near-starvation could not take that. “I am doing something about it. I am making a new world,” she says, and her voice gets even quieter, so that I can barely hear her. “I was Abnegation. I have known the truth far longer than you have, Beatrice Prior. I don’t know how you’re getting away with this, but I promise you, you will not have a place in my new world, especially not with my son.” I smile a little. I shouldn’t, but it’s harder to suppress gestures and expressions than words, with this weight in my veins. She believes that Tobias belongs to her now. She doesn’t know the truth, that he belongs to himself. Evelyn straightens, folding her arms. “The truth serum has revealed that while you may be a fool, you are no traitor. This interrogation is over. You may leave.” “What about my friends?” I say sluggishly. “Christina, Cara. They didn’t do anything wrong either.” “We will deal with them soon,” Evelyn says. I stand, though I’m weak and dizzy from the serum. The room is packed with people, shoulder to shoulder, and I can’t find the exit for a few long seconds, until someone takes my arm, a boy with warm brown skin and a wide smile—Uriah. He guides me to the door. Everyone starts talking. Uriah leads me down the hallway to the elevator bank. The elevator doors spring open when he touches the button, and I follow him in, still not steady on my feet. When the doors close, I say, “You don’t think the part about the mess and the throne was too much?” “No. She expects you to be hotheaded. She might have been suspicious if you hadn’t been.” I feel like everything inside me is vibrating with energy, in anticipation of what is to come. I am free. We’re going to find a way out of the city. No more waiting, pacing a cell, demanding answers that I won’t get from the guards. The guards did tell me a few things about the new factionless order this morning. Former faction members are required to move closer to Erudite headquarters and mix, no more than four members of a particular faction in each dwelling. We have to mix our clothing, too. I was given a yellow Amity shirt and black Candor pants earlier as a result of that particular edict. “All right, we’re this way. . . .” Uriah leads me out of the elevator. This floor of Erudite headquarters is all glass, even the walls. Sunlight refracts through it and casts slivers of rainbows across the floor. I shield my eyes with one hand and follow Uriah to a long, narrow room with beds on either side. Next to each bed is a glass cabinet for clothes and books, and a small table. “It used to be the Erudite initiate dormitory,” Uriah says. “I reserved beds for Christina and Cara already.” Sitting on a bed near the door are three girls in red shirts—Amity girls, I would guess—and on the left side of the room, an older woman lies on one of the beds, her spectacles dangling from one ear—possibly one of the Erudite. I know I should try to stop putting people in factions when I see them, but it’s an old habit, hard to break. Uriah falls on one of the beds in the back corner. I sit on the one next to his, glad to be free and at rest, finally. “Zeke says it sometimes takes a little while for the factionless to process exonerations, so they should be out later,” Uriah says. For a moment I feel relieved that everyone I care about will be out of prison by tonight. But then I remember that Caleb is still there, because he was a well-known lackey of Jeanine Matthews, and the factionless will never exonerate him. But just how far they will go to destroy the mark Jeanine Matthews left on this city, I don’t know. I don’t care, I think. But even as I think it, I know it’s a lie. He’s still my brother. “Good,” I say. “Thanks, Uriah.” He nods, and leans his head against the wall to prop it up. “How are you?” I say. “I mean . . . Lynn . . .” Uriah had been friends with Lynn and Marlene as long as I’d known them, and now both of them are dead. I feel like I might be able to understand—after all, I’ve lost two friends too, Al to the pressures of initiation and Will to the attack simulation and my own hasty actions. But I don’t want to pretend that our suffering is the same. For one thing, Uriah knew his friends better than I did. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Uriah shakes his head. “Or think about it. I just want to keep moving.” “Okay. I understand. Just . . . let me know if you need . . .” “Yeah.” He smiles at me and gets up. “You’re okay here, right? I told my mom I’d visit tonight, so I have to go soon. Oh—almost forgot to tell you—Four said he wants to meet you later.” I pull up straighter. “Really? When? Where?” “A little after ten, at Millennium Park. On the lawn.” He smirks. “Don’t get too excited, your head will explode.” CHAPTER FOUR TOBIAS MY MOTHER ALWAYS sits on the edges of things—chairs, ledges, tables—as if she suspects she will have to flee in an instant. This time it’s Jeanine’s old desk in Erudite headquarters that she sits on the edge of, her toes balanced on the floor and the cloudy light of the city glowing behind her. She is a woman of muscle twisted around bone. “I think we have to talk about your loyalty,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like she’s accusing me of something, she just sounds tired. For a moment she seems so worn that I feel like I can see right through her, but then she straightens, and the feeling is gone. “Ultimately, it was you who helped Tris and got that video released,” she says. “No one else knows that, but I know it.” “Listen.” I lean forward to prop my elbows on my knees. “I didn’t know what was in that file. I trusted Tris’s judgment more than my own. That’s all that happened.” I thought telling Evelyn that I broke up with Tris would make it easier for my mother to trust me, and I was right—she has been warmer, more open, ever since I told that lie. “And now that you’ve seen the footage?” Evelyn says. “What do you think now? Do you think we should leave the city?” I know what she wants me to say—that I see no reason to join the outside world—but I’m not a good liar, so instead I select a part of the truth. “I’m afraid of it,” I say. “I’m not sure it’s smart to leave the city knowing the dangers that might be out there.” She considers me for a moment, biting the inside of her cheek. I learned that habit from her—I used to chew my skin raw as I waited for my father to come home, unsure which version of him I would encounter, the one the Abnegation trusted and revered, or the one whose hands struck me. I run my tongue along the bite scars and swallow the memory like it’s bile. She slides off the desk and moves to the window. “I’ve been receiving disturbing reports of a rebel organization among us.” She looks up, raising an eyebrow. “People always organize into groups. That’s a fact of our existence. I just didn’t expect it to happen this quickly.” “What kind of organization?” “The kind that wants to leave the city,” she says. “They released some kind of manifesto this morning. They call themselves the Allegiant.” When she sees my confused look, she adds, “Because they’re allied with the original purpose of our city, see?” “The original purpose—you mean, what was in the Edith Prior video? That we should send people outside when the city has a large Divergent population?” “That, yes. But also living in factions. The Allegiant claim that we’re meant to be in factions because we’ve been in them since the beginning.” She shakes her head. “Some people will always fear change. But we can’t indulge them.” With the factions dismantled, part of me has felt like a man released from a long imprisonment. I don’t have to evaluate whether every thought I have or choice I make fits into a narrow ideology. I don’t want the factions back. But Evelyn hasn’t liberated us like she thinks—she’s just made us all factionless. She’s afraid of what we would choose, if we were given actual freedom. And that means that no matter what I believe about the factions, I’m relieved that someone, somewhere, is defying her. I arrange my face into an empty expression, but my heart is beating faster than before. I have had to be careful, to stay in Evelyn’s good graces. It’s easy for me to lie to everyone else, but it’s more difficult to lie to her, the only person who knew all the secrets of our Abnegation house, the violence contained within its walls. “What are you going to do about them?” I say. “I am going to get them under control, what else?” The word “control” makes me sit up straight, as rigid as the chair beneath me. In this city, “control” means needles and serums and seeing without seeing; it means simulations, like the one that almost made me kill Tris, or the one that made the Dauntless into an army. “With simulations?” I say slowly. She scowls. “Of course not! I am not Jeanine Matthews!” Her flare of anger sets me off. I say, “Don’t forget that I barely know you, Evelyn.” She winces at the reminder. “Then let me tell you that I will never resort to simulations to get my way. Death would be better.” It’s possible that death is what she will use—killing people would certainly keep them quiet, stifle their revolution before it begins. Whoever the Allegiant are, they need to be warned, and quickly. “I can find out who they are,” I say. “I’m sure that you can. Why else would I have told you about them?” There are plenty of reasons she would tell me. To test me. To catch me. To feed me false information. I know what my mother is—she is someone for whom the end of a thing justifies the means of getting there, the same as my father, and the same, sometimes, as me. “I’ll do it, then. I’ll find them.” I rise, and her fingers, brittle as branches, close around my arm. “Thank you.” I force myself to look at her. Her eyes are close above her nose, which is hooked at the end, like my own. Her skin is a middling color, darker than mine. For a moment I see her in Abnegation gray, her thick hair bound back with a dozen pins, sitting across the dinner table from me. I see her crouched in front of me, fixing my mismatched shirt buttons before I go to school, and standing at the window, watching the uniform street for my father’s car, her hands clasped—no, clenched, her tan knuckles white with tension. We were united in fear then, and now that she isn’t afraid anymore, part of me wants to see what it would be like to unite with her in strength. I feel an ache, like I betrayed her, the woman who used to be my only ally, and I turn away before I can take it all back and apologize. I leave Erudite headquarters amid a crowd of people, my eyes confused, hunting for faction colors automatically when there are none left. I am wearing a gray shirt, blue jeans, black shoes—new clothes, but beneath them, my Dauntless tattoos. It is impossible to erase my choices. Especially these. CHAPTER FIVE TRIS I SET MY watch alarm for ten o’clock and fall asleep right away, without even shifting to a comfortable position. A few hours later the beeps don’t wake me, but the frustrated shout of someone across the room does. I turn off the alarm, run my fingers through my hair, and half walk, half jog to one of the emergency staircases. The exit at the bottom will let me out in the alley, where I probably won’t be stopped. Once I’m outside, the cool air wakes me up. I pull my sleeves down over my fingers to keep them warm. Summer is finally ending. There are a few people milling around the entrance to Erudite headquarters, but none of them notices me creeping across Michigan Avenue. There are some advantages to being small. I see Tobias standing in the middle of the lawn, wearing mixed faction colors—a gray T-shirt, blue jeans, and a black sweatshirt with a hood, representing all the factions my aptitude test told me I was qualified for. A backpack rests against his feet. “How did I do?” I say when I’m close enough for him to hear me. “Very well,” he says. “Evelyn still hates you, but Christina and Cara have been released without questioning.” “Good.” I smile. He pinches the front of my shirt, right over my stomach, and tugs me toward him, kissing me softly. “Come on,” he says as he pulls away. “I have a plan for this evening.” “Oh, really?” “Yes, well, I realized that we’ve never been on an actual date.” “Chaos and destruction do tend to take away a person’s dating possibilities.” “I would like to experience this ‘date’ phenomenon.” He walks backward, toward the mammoth metal structure at the other end of the lawn, and I follow him. “Before you, I only went on group dates, and they were usually a disaster. They always ended up with Zeke making out with whatever girl he intended to make out with, and me sitting in awkward silence with some girl that I had somehow offended in some way early on.” “You’re not very nice,” I say, grinning. “You’re one to talk.” “Hey, I could be nice if I tried.” “Hmm.” He taps his chin. “Say something nice, then.” “You’re very good-looking.” He smiles, his teeth a flash in the dark. “I like this ‘nice’ thing.” We reach the end of the lawn. The metal structure is larger and stranger up close than it was from far away. It’s really a stage, and arcing above it are massive metal plates that curl in different directions, like an exploded aluminum can. We walk around one of the plates on the right side to the back of the stage, which rises at an angle from the ground. There, metal beams support the plates from behind. Tobias secures his backpack on his shoulders and grabs one of the beams. Climbing. “This feels familiar,” I say. One of the first things we did together was scale the Ferris wheel, but that time it was me, not him, who compelled us to climb higher. I push up my sleeves and follow him. My shoulder is still sore from the bullet wound, but it is mostly healed. Still, I bear most of my weight with my left arm and try to push with my feet whenever possible. I look down at the tangle of bars beneath me and beyond them, the ground, and laugh. Tobias climbs to a spot where two metal plates meet in a V, leaving enough room for two people to sit. He scoots back, wedging himself between the two plates, and reaches for my waist to help me when I get close enough. I don’t really need the help, but I don’t say so—I am too busy enjoying his hands on me. He takes a blanket out of his backpack and covers us with it, then produces two plastic cups. “Would you like a clear head or a fuzzy one?” he says, peering into the bag. “Um . . .” I tilt my head. “Clear. I think we have some things to talk about, right?” “Yes.” He takes out a small bottle with clear, bubbling liquid in it, and as he twists open the cap, says, “I stole it from the Erudite kitchens. Apparently it’s delicious.” He pours some in each cup, and I take a sip. Whatever it is, it’s sweet as syrup and lemon-flavored and makes me cringe a little. My second sip is better. “Things to talk about,” he says. “Right.” “Well . . .” Tobias frowns into his cup. “Okay, so I understand why you worked with Marcus, and why you felt like you couldn’t tell me. But . . .” “But you’re angry,” I say. “Because I lied to you. On several occasions.” He nods, not looking at me. “It’s not even the Marcus thing. It’s further back than that. I don’t know if you can understand what it was like to wake up alone, and know that you had gone”—to your death, is what I suspect he wants to say, but he can’t even say the words—“to Erudite headquarters.” “No, I probably can’t.” I take another sip, turning the sugary drink over in my mouth before swallowing. “Listen, I . . . I used to think about giving my life for things, but I didn’t understand what ‘giving your life’ really was until it was right there, about to be taken from me.” I look up at him, and finally, he looks back at me. “I know now,” I say. “I know I want to live. I know I want to be honest with you. But . . . but I can’t do that, I won’t do it, if you won’t trust me, or if you talk to me in that condescending way you sometimes do—” “Condescending?” he says. “You were doing ridiculous, risky things—” “Yeah,” I say. “And do you really think it helped to talk to me like I was a child who didn’t know any better?” “What else was I supposed to do?” he demands. “You wouldn’t see reason!” “Maybe reason wasn’t what I needed!” I sit forward, not able to pretend I am relaxed anymore. “I felt like I was being eaten alive by guilt, and what I needed was your patience and your kindness, not for you to yell at me. Oh, and for you to constantly keep your plans from me like I couldn’t possibly handle—” “I didn’t want to burden you more than you already were.” “So do you think I’m a strong person, or not?” I scowl at him. “Because you seem to think I can take it when you’re scolding me, but you don’t think I can handle anything else? What does that mean?” “Of course I think you’re a strong person.” He shakes his head. “I just . . . I’m not used to telling people things. I’m used to handling things on my own.” “I’m reliable,” I say. “You can trust me. And you can let me be the judge of what I can handle.” “Okay,” he says, nodding. “But no more lies. Not ever.” “Okay.” I feel stiff and squeezed, like my body was just forced into something too small for it. But that’s not how I want the conversation to end, so I reach for his hand. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” I say. “I really am.” “Well,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like I didn’t respect you.” We stay there for a while, our hands clasped. I lean back against the metal plate. Above me, the sky is blank and dark, the moon shielded by clouds. I find a star ahead of us, as the clouds shift, but it seems to be the only one. When I tilt my head back, though, I can see the line of buildings along Michigan Avenue, like a row of sentries keeping watch over us. I am quiet until the stiff, squeezed feeling leaves me. In its place I now feel relief. It isn’t usually that easy for me to let go of anger, but the past few weeks have been strange for both of us, and I am happy to release the feelings I have been holding on to, the anger and the fear that he hates me and the guilt from working with his father behind his back. “This stuff is kind of gross,” he says, draining his cup and setting it down. “Yes, it is,” I say, staring at what remains in mine. I drink it in one gulp, wincing as the bubbles burn my throat. “I don’t know what the Erudite are always bragging about. Dauntless cake is much better.” “I wonder what the Abnegation treat would have been, if they had one.” “Stale bread.” He laughs. “Plain oatmeal.” “Milk.” “Sometimes I think I believe everything they taught us,” he says. “But obviously not, since I’m sitting here holding your hand right now without having married you first.” “What do the Dauntless teach about . . . that?” I say, nodding to our hands. “What do the Dauntless teach, hmm.” He smirks. “Do whatever you want, but use protection, is what they teach.” I raise my eyebrows. Suddenly my face feels warm. “I think I’d like to find a middle ground for myself,” he says. “To find that place between what I want and what I think is wise.” “That sounds good.” I pause. “But what do you want?” I think I know the answer, but I want to hear him say it. “Hmm.” He grins, and leans forward onto his knees. He presses his hands to the metal plate, framing my head with his arms, and kisses me, slowly, on my mouth, under my jaw, right above my collarbone. I stay still, nervous about doing anything, in case it’s stupid or he doesn’t like it. But then I feel like a statue, like I am not really here at all, and so I touch his waist, hesitantly. Then his lips are on mine again, and he pulls his shirt out from under my hands so that I am touching his bare skin. I come to life, pressing closer, my hands creeping up his back, sliding over his shoulders. His breaths come faster and so do mine, and I taste the lemon-syrup-fizz we just drank and I smell the wind on his skin and all I want is more, more. I push his shirt up. A moment ago I was cold, but I don’t think either of us is cold now. His arm wraps around my waist, strong and certain, and his free hand tangles in my hair and I slow down, drinking it in—the smoothness of his skin, marked up and down with black ink, and the insistence of the kiss, and the cool air wrapped around us both. I relax, and I no longer feel like some kind of Divergent soldier, defying serums and government leaders alike. I feel softer, lighter, and like it is okay to laugh a little as his fingertips brush over my hips and the small of my back, or to sigh into his ear when he pulls me against him, burying his face in the side of my neck so that he can kiss me there. I feel like myself, strong and weak at once—allowed, at least for a little while, to be both. I don’t know how long it is before we get cold again, and huddle under the blanket together. “It’s getting more difficult to be wise,” he says, laughing into my ear. I smile at him. “I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.” CHAPTER SIX TOBIAS SOMETHING IS BREWING. I can feel it as I walk the cafeteria line with my tray, and see it in the huddled heads of a group of factionless as they lean over their oatmeal. Whatever is about to happen will happen soon. Yesterday when I left Evelyn’s office I lingered in the hallway to eavesdrop on her next meeting. Before she closed the door, I heard her say something about a demonstration. The question that is itching at the back of my mind is: Why didn’t she tell me? She must not trust me. That means I’m not doing as good a job as her pretend right-hand man as I think I am. I sit down with the same breakfast as everyone else: a bowl of oatmeal with a sprinkle of brown sugar on it, and a mug of coffee. I watch the group of factionless as I spoon it into my mouth without tasting it. One of them—a girl, maybe fourteen—keeps flicking her eyes toward the clock. I’m halfway done with breakfast when I hear the shouts. The nervy factionless girl jolts from her seat as if stuck with a live wire, and they all start toward the door. I am right behind them, elbowing my way past slow-movers through the lobby of Erudite headquarters, where the portrait of Jeanine Matthews still lies in shreds on the floor. A group of factionless has already gathered outside, in the middle of Michigan Avenue. A layer of pale clouds covers the sun, making the daylight hazy and dull. I hear someone shout, “Death to the factions!” and others pick up the phrase, turning it into a chant, until it fills my ears, Death to the factions, death to the factions. I see their fists in the air, like excitable Dauntless, but without the Dauntless joy. Their faces are twisted with rage. I push toward the middle of the group, and then I see what they’re all gathered around: The huge, man-sized faction bowls from the Choosing Ceremony are turned on their sides, their contents spilling across the road, coals and glass and stone and earth and water all mingling together. I remember slicing into my palm to add my blood to the coals, my first act of defiance against my father. I remember the surge of power inside me, and the rush of relief. Escape. These bowls were my escape. Edward stands among them, shards of glass ground to dust beneath his heel, a sledgehammer held above his head. He brings it down on one of the overturned bowls, forcing a dent into the metal. Coal dust rises into the air. I have to stop myself from running at him. He can’t destroy it, not that bowl, not the Choosing Ceremony, not the symbol of my triumph. Those things should not be destroyed. The crowd is swelling, not just with factionless wearing black armbands with empty white circles on them, but with people from every former faction, their arms bare. An Erudite man—his faction still indicated by his neatly parted hair—bursts free of the crowd just as Edward is pulling back the sledgehammer for another swing. He wraps his soft, ink-smudged hands around the handle, just above Edward’s, and they push into each other, teeth gritted. I see a blond head across the crowd—Tris, wearing a loose blue shirt without sleeves, showing the edges of the faction tattoos on her shoulders. She tries to run to Edward and the Erudite man, but Christina stops her with both hands. The Erudite man’s face turns purple. Edward is taller and stronger than he is. He has no chance; he’s a fool for trying. Edward rips the sledgehammer handle from the Erudite man’s hands and swings again. But he’s off balance, dizzy with rage—the sledgehammer hits the Erudite man in the shoulder at full force, metal cracking bone. For a moment all I hear is the Erudite man’s screams. It’s like everyone is taking a breath. Then the crowd explodes into a frenzy, everyone running toward the bowls, toward Edward, toward the Erudite man. They collide with one another and then with me, shoulders and elbows and heads hitting me over and over again. I don’t know where to run: to the Erudite man, to Edward, to Tris? I can’t think; I can’t breathe. The crowd carries me toward Edward, and I grab his arm. “Let go!” I shout over the noise. His single bright eye fixes on me, and he bares his teeth, trying to wrench himself away. I bring my knee up, into his side. He stumbles back, losing his grip on the sledgehammer. I hold it close to my leg and start toward Tris. She is somewhere in front of me, struggling toward the Erudite man. I watch as a woman’s elbow hits her in the cheek, sending her reeling backward. Christina shoves the woman away. Then a gun goes off. Once, twice. Three times. The crowd scatters, everyone running in terror from the threat of bullets, and I try to see who, if anyone, was shot, but the rush of bodies is too intense. I can barely see anything. Tris and Christina crouch next to the Erudite man with the shattered shoulder. His face is bloody and his clothes are dirty with footprints. His combed Erudite hair is tousled. He isn’t moving. A few feet away from him, Edward lies in a pool of his own blood. The bullet hit him in the gut. There are other people on the ground too, people I don’t recognize, people who got trampled or shot. I suspect the bullets were meant for Edward and Edward alone—the others were just bystanders. I look around wildly but I don’t see the shooter. Whoever it was seems to have dissolved into the crowd. I drop the sledgehammer next to the dented bowl and kneel beside Edward, Abnegation stones digging into my kneecaps. His remaining eye moves back and forth beneath his eyelid—he’s alive, for now. “We have to get him to the hospital,” I say to whoever is listening. Almost everyone is gone. I look over my shoulder at Tris and the Erudite man, who hasn’t moved. “Is he . . . ?” Her fingers are on his throat, taking his pulse, and her eyes are wide and empty. She shakes her head. No, he is not alive. I didn’t think he was. I close my eyes. The faction bowls are printed on my eyelids, tipped on their sides, their contents in a pile on the street. The symbols of our old way of life, destroyed—a man dead, others injured—and for what? For nothing. For Evelyn’s empty, narrow vision: a city where factions are wrenched away from people against their will. She wanted us to have more than five choices. Now we have none. I know for sure, then, that I can’t be her ally, and I never could have. “We have to go,” Tris says, and I know she’s not talking about leaving Michigan Avenue or taking Edward to the hospital; she’s talking about the city. “We have to go,” I repeat. The makeshift hospital at Erudite headquarters smells like chemicals, almost gritty in my nose. I close my eyes as I wait for Evelyn. I’m so angry I don’t even want to sit here, I just want to pack up my things and leave. She must have planned that demonstration, or she wouldn’t have known about it the day before, and she must have known that it would get out of control, with tensions running as high as they are. But she did it anyway. Making a big statement about the factions was more important to her than safety or the potential loss of lives. I don’t know why that surprises me. I hear the elevator doors slide open, and her voice: “Tobias!” She rushes toward me and seizes my hands, which are sticky with blood. Her dark eyes are wide with fear as she says, “Are you hurt?” She’s worried about me. The thought is a little pinprick of heat inside me—she must love me, to worry about me. She must still be capable of love. “The blood is Edward’s. I helped carry him here.” “How is he?” she says. I shake my head. “Dead.” I don’t know how else to say it. She shrinks back, releasing my hands, and sits on one of the waiting room chairs. My mother embraced Edward after he defected from Dauntless. She must have taught him to be a warrior again, after the loss of his eye and his faction and his footing. I never knew they were so close, but I can see it now, in the gleam of tears in her eyes and the trembling of her fingers. It’s the most emotion I’ve seen her show since I was a child, since my father slammed her into our living room walls. I press the memory away as if stuffing it into a drawer that is too small for it. “I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know if I really mean it or if I’m just saying it so she still thinks I’m on her side. Then I add tentatively, “Why didn’t you tell me about the demonstration?” She shakes her head. “I didn’t know about it.” She’s lying. I know. I decide to let her. In order to stay on her good side, I have to avoid conflict with her. Or maybe I just don’t want to press the issue with Edward’s death looming over both of us. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell where strategy ends and sympathy for her begins. “Oh.” I scratch behind my ear. “You can go in and see him, if you want.” “No.” She seems far away. “I know what bodies look like.” Drifting further. “Maybe I should go.” “Stay,” she says. She touches the empty chair between us. “Please.” I take the seat beside her, and though I tell myself that I am just an undercover agent obeying his supposed leader, I feel like I am a son comforting his grieving mother. We sit with our shoulders touching, our breaths falling into the same rhythm, and we don’t say a word. CHAPTER SEVEN TRIS CHRISTINA TURNS A black stone over and over in her hand as we walk. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s actually a piece of coal, from the Dauntless Choosing Ceremony bowl. “I didn’t really want to bring this up, but I can’t stop thinking about it,” she says. “That of the ten transfer initiates we started with, only six are still alive.” Ahead of us is the Hancock building, and beyond it, Lake Shore Drive, the lazy strip of pavement that I once flew over like a bird. We walk the cracked sidewalk side by side, our clothes smeared with Edward’s blood, now dry. It hasn’t hit me yet: that Edward, by far the most talented transfer initiate we had, the boy whose blood I cleaned off the dormitory floor, is dead. He’s dead now. “And of the nice ones,” I say, “it’s just you, me, and . . . Myra, probably.” I haven’t seen Myra since she left the Dauntless compound with Edward, right after his eye was claimed by a butter knife. I know they broke up not long after that, but I never found out where she went. I don’t think I ever exchanged more than a few words with her anyway. A set of doors to the Hancock building are already open, dangling from their hinges. Uriah said that he would come here early to turn on the generator, and sure enough, when I touch my finger to the elevator button, it glows through my fingernail. “Have you been here before?” I say as we walk into the elevator. “No,” Christina says. “Not inside, I mean. I didn’t get to go zip lining, remember?” “Right.” I lean against the wall. “You should try to go before we leave.” “Yeah.” She’s wearing red lipstick. It reminds me of the way candy stains children’s skin if they eat it too sloppily. “Sometimes I get where Evelyn’s coming from. So many awful things have happened, sometimes it feels like a good idea to stay here and just . . . try to clean up this mess before we get ourselves involved in another.” She smiles a little. “But of course, I’m not going to do that,” she adds. “I’m not even sure why. Curiosity, I guess.” “Have you talked to your parents about it?” Sometimes I forget that Christina isn’t like me, with no family loyalty to tie her to one place anymore. She has a mother and a little sister, both former Candor. “They have to look after my sister,” she says. “They don’t know if it’s safe out there; they don’t want to risk her.” “But they would be okay with you leaving?” “They were okay with me joining another faction. They’ll be okay with this, too,” she says. She looks down at her shoes. “They just want me to live an honest life, you know? And I can’t do that here. I just know that I can’t.” The elevator doors open, and the wind hits us immediately, still warm but woven with threads of winter cold. I hear voices coming from the roof, and I climb the ladder to get to them. It bounces with each of my footsteps, but Christina holds it steady for me until I reach the top. Uriah and Zeke are there, throwing pebbles off the roof and listening for the clatter when they hit the windows. Uriah tries to bump Zeke’s elbow before he throws, to mess him up, but Zeke is too quick for him. “Hey,” they say in unison when they spot Christina and me. “Wait, are you guys related or something?” Christina says, grinning. They both laugh, but Uriah looks a little dazed, like he’s not quite connected to this moment or this place. I guess losing someone the way he lost Marlene can do that to a person, though that’s not what it did to me. There are no slings on the roof for the zip line, and that’s not why we came. I don’t know why the others did, but I wanted to be up high—I wanted to see as far as I could. But all the land west of where I am is black, like it’s draped in a dark blanket. For a moment I think I can make out a glimmer of light on the horizon, but the next it’s gone, just a trick of the eyes. The others are quiet too. I wonder if we’re all thinking the same thing. “What do you think’s out there?” Uriah finally says. Zeke just shrugs, but Christina ventures a guess. “What if it’s just more of the same? Just . . . more crumbling city, more factions, more of everything?” “Can’t be,” Uriah says, shaking his head. “There has to be something else.” “Or there’s nothing,” Zeke suggests. “Those people who put us all in here, they could just be dead. Everything could be empty.” I shiver. I had never thought of that before, but he’s right—we don’t know what’s happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did. We could be the last people left. “It doesn’t matter,” I say, more sternly than I mean to. “It doesn’t matter what’s out there, we have to see it for ourselves. And then we’ll deal with it once we have.” We stand there for a long time. I follow the bumpy edges of buildings with my eyes until all the lit windows smear into a line. Then Uriah asks Christina about the riot, and our still, silent moment passes as if carried away by the wind. The next day, Evelyn stands among the pieces of Jeanine Matthews’s portrait in the Erudite headquarters lobby and announces a new set of rules. Former faction members and factionless alike are gathered in the space and spilling out into the street to hear what our new leader has to say, and factionless soldiers line the walls, their fingers poised over the triggers of their guns. Keeping us under control. “Yesterday’s events made it clear that we are no longer able to trust each other,” she says. She looks ashen and exhausted. “We will be introducing more structure into everyone’s lives until our situation is more stable. The first of these measures is a curfew: Everyone is required to return to their assigned living spaces at nine o’clock at night. They will not leave those spaces until eight o’clock the next morning. Guards will be patrolling the streets at all hours to keep us safe.” I snort and try to cover it up with a cough. Christina elbows me in the side and touches her finger to her lips. I don’t know why she cares—it’s not like Evelyn can hear me from all the way at the front of the room. Tori, former leader of Dauntless, ousted by Evelyn herself, stands a few feet away from me, her arms crossed. Her mouth twitches into a sneer. “It’s also time to prepare for our new, factionless way of life. Starting today, everyone will begin to learn the jobs the factionless have done for as long as we can remember. We will then all do those jobs on a rotation schedule, in addition to the other duties that have traditionally been performed by the factions.” Evelyn smiles without really smiling. I don’t know how she does it. “We will all contribute equally to our new city, as it should be. The factions have divided us, but now we will be united. Now, and forever.” All around me the factionless cheer. I just feel uneasy. I don’t disagree with her, exactly, but the same faction members who rose up against Edward yesterday won’t remain quiet after this, either. Evelyn’s hold on this city is not as strong as she might like. I don’t want to wrestle with the crowds after Evelyn’s announcement, so I weave through the hallways until I find one of the staircases in the back, the one we climbed to reach Jeanine’s laboratory not too long ago. The steps were crowded with bodies then. Now they are clean and cool, like nothing ever happened here. As I walk past the fourth floor, I hear a yell, and some scuffling sounds. I open the door to a cluster of people—young, younger than I am, and all sporting factionless armbands—gathered around a young man on the ground. Not just a young man—a Candor, dressed in black and white from head to toe. I run toward them, and when I see a tall factionless girl draw back her foot to kick again, I shout, “Hey!” No use—the kick hits the Candor boy in the side, and he groans, twisting away from it. “Hey!” I yell again, and this time the girl turns. She’s much taller than I am—a good six inches, in fact—but I’m only angry, not afraid. “Back up,” I say. “Back away from him.” “He’s in violation of the dress code. I’m well within my rights, and I don’t take orders from faction lovers,” she says, her eyes on the ink creeping over my collarbone. “Becks,” the factionless boy beside her says. “That’s the Prior video girl.” The others look impressed, but the girl just sneers. “So?” “So,” I say, “I had to hurt a lot of people to get through Dauntless initiation, and I’ll do it to you, too, if I have to.” I unzip my blue sweatshirt and toss it at the Candor boy, who looks at me from the ground, blood streaming from his eyebrow. He pushes himself up, still holding his side with one hand, and pulls the sweatshirt around his shoulders like a blanket. “There,” I say. “Now he’s not violating the dress code.” The girl tests the situation in her mind, evaluating whether she wants to fight me or not. I can practically hear what she’s thinking—I’m small, so I’m an easy target, but I’m Dauntless, so I’m not that easy to beat. Maybe she knows that I’ve killed people, or maybe she just doesn’t want to get into trouble, but she’s losing her nerve; I can tell by the uncertain set of her mouth. “You’d better watch your back,” she says. “I guarantee you that I don’t need to,” I say. “Now get out of here.” I stay just long enough to see them scatter, then keep walking. The Candor boy calls, “Wait! Your sweatshirt!” “Keep it!” I call back. I turn a corner that I think will take me to another staircase, but I end up in another blank hallway, just like the last one I was in. I think I hear footsteps behind me, and I spin around, ready to fight the factionless girl off, but there’s no one there. I must be getting paranoid. I open one of the doors off the main corridor, hoping to find a window so I can reorient myself, but I find only a ransacked laboratory, beakers and test tubes scattered across each counter. Torn pieces of paper litter the floor, and I’m bending to pick one up when the lights shut off. I lunge toward the door. A hand grabs my arm and drags me to the side. Someone shoves a sack over my head while someone else pushes me against the wall. I thrash against them, struggling with the fabric covering my face, and all I can think is, Not again not again not again. I twist one arm free and punch, hitting someone in a shoulder or a chin, I can’t tell. “Hey!” a voice says. “That hurt!” “We’re sorry for frightening you, Tris,” another voice says, “but anonymity is integral to our operation. We mean you no harm.” “Let go of me, then!” I say, almost growling. All the hands holding me to the wall fall away. “Who are you?” I demand. “We are the Allegiant,” the voice replies. “And we are many, yet we are no one. . . .” I can’t help it: I laugh. Maybe it’s the shock—or the fear, my pounding heart slowing by the second, my hands shaking with relief. The voice continues, “We have heard that you are not loyal to Evelyn Johnson and her factionless lackeys.” “This is ridiculous.” “Not as ridiculous as trusting someone with your identity when you don’t have to.” I try to see through the fibers of whatever is over my head, but they are too dense and it is too dark. I try to relax against the wall, but it’s difficult without my vision to orient me. I crush the side of a beaker under my shoe. “No, I’m not loyal to her,” I say. “Why does that matter?” “Because it means you want to leave,” the voice says. I feel a prickle of excitement. “We want to ask you for a favor, Tris Prior. We’re going to have a meeting tomorrow night, at midnight. We want you to bring your Dauntless friends.” “Okay,” I say. “Let me ask you this: If I’m going to see who you are tomorrow, why is it so important to keep this thing over my head today?” This seems to temporarily stump whoever I’m talking to. “A day contains many dangers,” the voice says. “We’ll see you tomorrow, at midnight, in the place where you made your confession.” All at once, the door swings open, blowing the sack against my cheeks, and I hear running footsteps down the hallway. By the time I’m able to pull the sack from my head, the corridor is silent. I look down at it—it’s a dark-blue pillowcase with the words “Faction before blood” painted on it. Whoever they are, they certainly have a flair for the dramatic. The place where you made your confession. There’s only one place that could be: Candor headquarters, where I succumbed to the truth serum. When I finally make it back to the dormitory that evening, I find a note from Tobias tucked under the glass of water on my bedside table. VI— Your brother’s trial will be tomorrow morning, and it will be private. I can’t go or I’ll raise suspicion, but I’ll get you the verdict as soon as possible. Then we can make some kind of plan. No matter what, this will be over soon. —IV CHAPTER EIGHT TRIS IT’S NINE O’CLOCK. They could be deciding Caleb’s verdict right now, as I tie my shoes, as I straighten my sheets for the fourth time today. I put my hands through my hair. The factionless only make trials private when they feel the verdict is obvious, and Caleb was Jeanine’s right-hand man before she was killed. I shouldn’t worry about his verdict. It’s already decided. All of Jeanine’s closest associates will be executed. Why do you care? I ask myself. He betrayed you. He didn’t try to stop your execution. I don’t care. I do care. I don’t know. “Hey, Tris,” Christina says, rapping her knuckles against the door frame. Uriah lurks behind her. He still smiles all the time, but now his smiles look like they’re made of water, about to drip down his face. “You had some news?” she says. I check the room again, though I already know it’s empty. Everyone is at breakfast, as required by our schedules. I asked Uriah and Christina to skip a meal so that I could tell them something. My stomach is already rumbling. “Yeah,” I say. They sit on the bed across from mine, and I tell them about getting cornered in one of the Erudite laboratories the night before, about the pillowcase and the Allegiant and the meeting. “I’m surprised all you did was punch one of them,” Uriah says. “Well, I was outnumbered,” I say, feeling defensive. It wasn’t very Dauntless of me to just trust them immediately, but these are strange times. And I’m not sure how Dauntless I really am, anyway, now that the factions are gone. I feel a strange little ache at the thought, right in the middle of my chest. Some things are hard to let go of. “So what do you think they want?” Christina says. “Just to leave the city?” “It sounds that way, but I don’t know,” I say. “How do we know they’re not Evelyn’s people, trying to trick us into betraying her?” “I don’t know that, either,” I say. “But it’s going to be impossible to get out of the city without someone’s help, and I’m not just going to stay here, learning how to drive buses and going to bed when I’m told to.” Christina gives Uriah a worried look. “Hey,” I say. “You don’t have to come, but I need to get out of here. I need to know who Edith Prior was, and who’s waiting for us outside the fence, if anyone. I don’t know why, but I need to.” I take a deep breath. I’m not sure where that swell of desperation came from, but now that I’ve acknowledged it, it’s impossible to ignore, like a living thing has awakened from a long sleep inside me. It writhes in my stomach and throat. I need to leave. I need the truth. For once, the weak smile playing over Uriah’s lips is gone. “So do I,” he says. “Okay,” Christina says. Her dark eyes are still troubled, but she shrugs. “So we go to the meeting.” “Good. Can one of you tell Tobias? I’m supposed to be keeping my distance, since we’re ‘broken up,’” I say. “Let’s meet in the alley at eleven thirty.” “I’ll tell him. I think I’m in his group today,” Uriah says. “Learning about the factories. I can’t wait.” He smirks. “Can I tell Zeke, too? Or is he not trustworthy enough?” “Go ahead. Just make sure he doesn’t spread it around.” I check my watch again. Nine fifteen. Caleb’s verdict has to be decided by now; it’s almost time for everyone to go learn their factionless jobs. I feel like the slightest thing could make me jump right out of my skin. My knee bounces of its own volition. Christina puts her hand on my shoulder, but she doesn’t ask me about it, and I’m grateful. I don’t know what I would say. Christina and I weave a complicated path through Erudite headquarters on our way to the back staircase, avoiding patrolling factionless. I pull my sleeve down over my wrist. I drew a map on my arm before I left—I know how to get to Candor headquarters from here, but I don’t know the side streets that will keep us away from prying factionless eyes. Uriah waits for us just outside the door. He wears all black, but I can see a hint of Abnegation gray peeking over the collar of his sweatshirt. It’s strange to see my Dauntless friends in Abnegation colors, as if they’ve been with me my entire life. Sometimes it feels that way anyway. “I told Four and Zeke, but they’re going to meet us there,” Uriah says. “Let’s go.” We run in a pack down the alley toward Monroe Street. I resist the urge to wince at each of our loud footsteps. It’s more important to be quick than silent at this point, anyway. We turn onto Monroe, and I check behind us for factionless patrols. I see dark shapes moving closer to Michigan Avenue, but they disappear behind the row of buildings without stopping. “Where’s Cara?” I whisper to Christina, when we’re on State Street and far enough away from Erudite headquarters that it’s safe to talk. “I don’t know, I don’t think she got an invitation,” Christina says. “Which is really bizarre. I know she wants to—” “Shh!” Uriah says. “Next turn?” I use my watch light to see the words written on my arm. “Randolph Street!” We settle into a rhythm, our shoes slapping on the pavement, our breaths pulsing almost in unison. Despite the burn in my muscles, it feels good to run. My legs ache by the time we reach the bridge, but then I see the Merciless Mart across the marshy river, abandoned and unlit, and I smile through the pain. My pace slows when I am across the bridge, and Uriah slings an arm across my shoulders. “And now,” he says, “we get to walk up a million flights of stairs.” “Maybe they turned the elevators on?” “Not a chance.” He shakes his head. “I bet Evelyn’s monitoring all the electricity usage—it’s the best way to figure out if people are meeting in secret.” I sigh. I may like to run, but I hate climbing stairs. When we finally reach the top of the stairs, our chests heaving, it is five minutes to midnight. The others go ahead while I catch my breath near the elevator bank. Uriah was right—there isn’t a single light on that I can see, apart from the exit signs. It is in their blue glow that I see Tobias emerge from the interrogation room up ahead. Since our date I have spoken to him only in covert messages. I have to resist the urge to throw myself at him and brush my fingers over the curl of his lip and the crease in his cheek when he smiles and the hard line of his eyebrow and jaw. But it’s two minutes to midnight. We don’t have any time. He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight for a few seconds. His breaths tickle my ear, and I close my eyes, letting myself finally relax. He smells like wind and sweat and soap, like Tobias and like safety. “Should we go in?” he says. “Whoever they are, they’re probably prompt.” “Yes.” My legs are trembling from overexertion—I can’t imagine going down the stairs and running back to Erudite headquarters later. “Did you find out about Caleb?” He winces. “Maybe we should talk about that later.” That’s all the answer I need. “They’re going to execute him, aren’t they,” I say softly. He nods, and takes my hand. I don’t know how to feel. I try not to feel anything. Together we walk into the room where Tobias and I were once interrogated under the influence of truth serum. The place where you made your confession. A circle of lit candles is arranged on the floor over one of the Candor scales set into the tile. There is a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces in the room: Susan and Robert stand together, talking; Peter is alone on the side of the room, his arms crossed; Uriah and Zeke are with Tori and a few other Dauntless; Christina is with her mother and sister; and in a corner are two nervous-looking Erudite. New outfits can’t erase the divisions between us; they are ingrained. Christina beckons to me. “This is my mom, Stephanie,” she says, indicating a woman with gray streaks in her dark curly hair. “And my sister, Rose. Mom, Rose, this is my friend Tris, and my initiation instructor, Four.” “Obviously,” Stephanie says. “We saw their interrogations several weeks ago, Christina.” “I know that, I was just being polite—” “Politeness is deception in—” “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Christina rolls her eyes. Her mother and sister, I notice, look at each other with something like wariness or anger or both. Then her sister turns to me and says, “So you killed Christina’s boyfriend.” Her words create a cold feeling inside me, like a streak of ice divides one side of my body from the other. I want to answer, to defend myself, but I can’t find the words. “Rose!” Christina says, scowling at her. At my side, Tobias straightens, his muscles tensing. Ready for a fight, as always. “I just thought we would air everything out,” Rose says. “It wastes less time.” “And you wonder why I left our faction,” Christina says. “Being honest doesn’t mean you say whatever you want, whenever you want. It means that what you choose to say is true.” “A lie of omission is still a lie.” “You want the truth? I’m uncomfortable and don’t want to be here right now. I’ll see you guys later.” She takes my arm and walks Tobias and me away from her family, shaking her head the whole time. “Sorry about that. They’re not really the forgiving type.” “It’s fine,” I say, though it’s not. I thought that when I received Christina’s forgiveness, the hard part of Will’s death would be over. But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you’ve done. My watch reads twelve o’clock. A door across the room opens, and in walk two lean silhouettes. The first is Johanna Reyes, former spokesperson of Amity, identifiable by the scar that crosses her face and the hint of yellow peeking out from under her black jacket. The second is another woman, but I can’t see her face, just that she is wearing blue. I feel a spike of terror. She looks almost like . . . Jeanine. No, I saw her die. Jeanine is dead. The woman comes closer. She is statuesque and blond, like Jeanine. A pair of glasses dangles from her front pocket, and her hair is in a braid. An Erudite from head to foot, but not Jeanine Matthews. Cara. Cara and Johanna are the leaders of the Allegiant? “Hello,” Cara says, and all conversation stops. She smiles, but on her the expression looks compulsory, like she’s just adhering to a social convention. “We aren’t supposed to be here, so I’m going to keep this meeting short. Some of you—Zeke, Tori—have been helping us for the past few days.” I stare at Zeke. Zeke has been helping Cara? I guess I forgot that he was once a Dauntless spy. Which is probably when he proved his loyalty to Cara—he had some kind of friendship with her before she left Erudite headquarters not long ago. He looks at me, wiggles his eyebrows, and grins. Johanna continues, “Some of you are here because we want to ask for your help. All of you are here because you don’t trust Evelyn Johnson to determine the fate of this city.” Cara touches her palms together in front of her. “We believe in following the guidance of the city’s founders, which has been expressed in two ways: the formation of the factions, and the Divergent mission expressed by Edith Prior, to send people outside the fence to help whoever is out there once we have a large Divergent population. We believe that even if we have not reached that Divergent population size, the situation in our city has become dire enough to send people outside the fence anyway. “In accordance with the intentions of our city’s founders, we have two goals: to overthrow Evelyn and the factionless so that we can reestablish the factions, and to send some of our number outside the city to see what’s out there. Johanna will be heading up the former effort, and I will be heading up the latter, which is what we will mostly be focusing on tonight.” She presses a loose strand of hair back into her braid. “Not many of us will be able to go, because a crowd that large would draw too much attention. Evelyn won’t let us leave without a fight, so I thought it would be best to recruit people who I know to be experienced with surviving danger.” I glance at Tobias. We certainly are experienced with danger. “Christina, Tris, Tobias, Tori, Zeke, and Peter are my selections,” Cara says. “You have all proven your skills to me in one way or another, and it’s for that reason that I’d like to ask you to come with me outside the city. You are under no obligation to agree, of course.” “Peter?” I demand, without thinking. I can’t imagine what Peter could have done to “prove his skills” to Cara. “He kept the Erudite from killing you,” Cara says mildly. “Who do you think provided him with the technology to fake your death?” I raise my eyebrows. I had never thought about it before—too much happened after my failed execution for me to dwell on the details of my rescue. But of course, Cara was the only well-known defector from Erudite at that time, the only person Peter would have known to ask for help. Who else could have helped him? Who else would have known how? I don’t raise another objection. I don’t want to leave this city with Peter, but I’m too desperate to leave to make a fuss about it. “That’s a lot of Dauntless,” a girl at the side of the room says, looking skeptical. She has thick eyebrows that don’t stop growing in the middle, and pale skin. When she turns her head, I see black ink right behind her ear. A Dauntless transfer to Erudite, no doubt. “True,” Cara says. “But what we need right now are people with the skills to get out of the city unscathed, and I think Dauntless training makes them highly qualified for that task.” “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can go,” Zeke says. “I couldn’t leave Shauna here. Not after her sister just . . . well, you know.” “I’ll go,” Uriah says, his hand popping up. “I’m Dauntless. I’m a good shot. And I provide much-needed eye candy.” I laugh. Cara does not seem to be amused, but she nods. “Thank you.” “Cara, you’ll need to get out of the city fast,” the Dauntless-turned-Erudite girl says. “Which means you should get someone to operate the trains.” “Good point,” Cara says. “Does anyone here know how to drive a train?” “Oh. I do,” the girl says. “Was that not implied?” The pieces of the plan come together. Johanna suggests we take Amity trucks from the end of the railroad tracks out of the city, and she volunteers to supply them to us. Robert offers to help her. Stephanie and Rose volunteer to monitor Evelyn’s movements in the hours before the escape, and to report any unusual behavior to the Amity compound by two-way radio. The Dauntless who came with Tori offer to find weapons for us. The Erudite girl prods at any weaknesses she sees, and so does Cara, and soon they are all shored up, like we have just built a secure structure. There is only one question left. Cara asks it: “When should we go?” And I volunteer an answer: “Tomorrow night.” CHAPTER NINE TOBIAS THE NIGHT AIR slips into my lungs, and I feel like it is one of my last breaths. Tomorrow I will leave this place and seek another. Uriah, Zeke, and Christina start toward Erudite headquarters, and I hold Tris’s hand to keep her back. “Wait,” I say. “Let’s go somewhere.” “Go somewhere? But . . .” “Just for a little while.” I tug her toward the corner of the building. At night I can almost see what the water looked like when it filled the empty canal, dark and patterned with moonlit ripples. “You’re with me, remember? They’re not going to arrest you.” A twitch at the corner of her mouth—almost a smile. Around the corner, she leans against the wall and I stand in front of her, the river at my back. She’s wearing something dark around her eyes to make their color stand out, bright and striking. “I don’t know what to do.” She presses her hands to her face, curling her fingers into her hair. “About Caleb, I mean.” “You don’t?” She moves one hand aside to look at me. “Tris.” I set my hands on the wall on either side of her face and lean into them. “You don’t want him to die. I know you don’t.” “The thing is . . .” She closes her eyes. “I’m so . . . angry. I try not to think about him because when I do I just want to . . .” “I know. God, I know.” My entire life I’ve daydreamed about killing Marcus. Once I even decided how I would do it—with a knife, so I could feel the warmth leave him, so I could be close enough to watch the light leave his eyes. Making that decision frightened me as much as his violence ever did. “My parents would want me to save him, though.” Her eyes open and lift to the sky. “They would say it’s selfish to let someone die just because they wronged you. Forgive, forgive, forgive.” “This isn’t about what they want, Tris.” “Yes, it is!” She presses away from the wall. “It’s always about what they want. Because he belongs to them more than he belongs to me. And I want to make them proud of me. It’s all I want.” Her pale eyes are steady on mine, determined. I have never had parents who set good examples, parents whose expectations were worth living up to, but she did. I can see them within her, the courage and the beauty they pressed into her like a handprint. I touch her cheek, sliding my fingers into her hair. “I’ll get him out.” “What?” “I’ll get him out of his cell. Tomorrow, before we leave.” I nod. “I’ll do it.” “Really? Are you sure?” “Of course I’m sure.” “I . . .” She frowns up at me. “Thank you. You’re . . . amazing.” “Don’t say that. You haven’t found out about my ulterior motives yet.” I grin. “You see, I didn’t bring you here to talk to you about Caleb, actually.” “Oh?” I set my hands on her hips and push her gently back against the wall. She looks up at me, her eyes clear and eager. I lean in close enough to taste her breaths, but pull back when she leans in, teasing. She hooks her fingers in my belt loops and pulls me against her, so I have to catch myself on my forearms. She tries to kiss me but I tilt my head to dodge her, kissing just under her ear, then along her jaw to her throat. Her skin is soft and tastes like salt, like a night run. “Do me a favor,” she whispers into my ear, “and never have pure motives again.” She puts her hands on me, touching all the places I am marked, down my back and over my sides. Her fingertips slip under the waistband of my jeans and hold me against her. I breathe against the side of her neck, unable to move. Finally we kiss, and it is a relief. She sighs, and I feel a wicked smile creep across my face. I lift her up, letting the wall bear most of her weight, and her legs drape around my waist. She laughs into another kiss, and I feel strong, but so does she, her fingers stern around my arms. The night air slips into my lungs, and I feel like it is one of my first breaths. CHAPTER TEN TOBIAS THE BROKEN BUILDINGS in the Dauntless sector look like doorways to other worlds. Ahead of me I see the Pire piercing the sky. The pulse in my fingertips marks the passing seconds. The air still feels rich in my lungs, though summer is drawing to a close. I used to run all the time and fight all the time because I cared about muscles. Now my feet have saved me too often, and I can’t separate running and fighting from what they are: a way to escape danger, a way to stay alive. When I reach the building, I pace before the entrance to catch my breath. Above me, panes of glass reflect light in every direction. Somewhere up there is the chair I sat in while I was running the attack simulation, and a smear of Tris’s father’s blood on the wall. Somewhere up there, Tris’s voice pierced the simulation I was under, and I felt her hand on my chest, drawing me back to reality. I open the door to the fear landscape room and flip open the small black box that was in my back pocket to see the syringes inside. This is the box I have always used, padded around the needles; it is a sign of something sick inside me, or something brave. I position the needle over my throat and close my eyes as I press down on the plunger. The black box clatters to the ground, but by the time I open my eyes, it has disappeared. I stand on the roof of the Hancock building, near the zip line where the Dauntless flirt with death. The clouds are black with rain, and the wind fills my mouth when I open it to breathe. To my right, the zip line snaps, the wire cord whipping back and shattering the windows below me. My vision tightens around the roof edge, trapping it in the center of a pinhole. I can hear my own exhales despite the whistling wind. I force myself to walk to the edge. The rain pounds against my shoulders and head, dragging me toward the ground. I tip my weight forward just a little and fall, my jaw clamped around my screams, muffled and suffocated by my own fear. After I land, I don’t have a second to rest before the walls close in around me, the wood slamming into my spine, and then my head, and then my legs. Claustrophobia. I pull my arms in to my chest, close my eyes, and try not to panic. I think of Eric in his fear landscape, willing his terror into submission with deep breathing and logic. And Tris, conjuring weapons out of thin air to attack her worst nightmares. But I am not Eric, and I am not Tris. What am I? What do I need, to overcome my fears? I know the answer, of course I do: I need to deny them the power to control me. I need to know that I am stronger than they are. I breathe in and slam my palms against the walls to my left and right. The box creaks, and then breaks, the boards crashing to the concrete floor. I stand above them in the dark. Amar, my initiation instructor, taught us that our fear landscapes were always in flux, shifting with our moods and changing with the little whispers of our nightmares. Mine was always the same, until a few weeks ago. Until I proved to myself that I could overpower my father. Until I discovered someone I was terrified to lose. I don’t know what I will see next. I wait for a long time without anything changing. The room is still dark, the floor still cold and hard, my heart still beating faster than normal. I look down to check my watch and discover that it’s on the wrong hand—I usually wear mine on my left, not my right, and my watchband isn’t gray, it’s black. Then I notice bristly hairs on my fingers that weren’t there before. The calluses on my knuckles are gone. I look down, and I am wearing gray slacks and a gray shirt; I am thicker around the middle and thinner through the shoulders. I lift my eyes to a mirror that now stands in front of me. The face staring back at mine is Marcus’s. He winks at me, and I feel the muscles around my eye contracting as he does, though I didn’t tell them to. Without warning, his—my—our arms jerk toward the glass and reach into it, closing around the neck of my reflection. But then the mirror disappears, and my—his—our hands are around our own throat, dark patches creeping into the edge of our vision. We sink to the ground, and the grip is as tight as iron. I can’t think. I can’t think of a way out of this one. By instinct, I scream. The sound vibrates against my hands. I picture those hands as mine really are, large with slender fingers and calloused knuckles from hours at the punching bag. I imagine my reflection as water running over Marcus’s skin, replacing every piece of him with a piece of me. I remake myself in my own image. I am kneeling on the concrete, gasping for air. My hands tremble, and I run my fingers over my neck, my shoulders, my arms. Just to make sure. I told Tris, on the train to meet Evelyn a few weeks ago, that Marcus was still in my fear landscape, but that he had changed. I spent a long time thinking about it; it crowded my thoughts every night before I slept and clamored for attention every time I woke. I was still afraid of him, I knew, but in a different way—I was no longer a child, afraid of the threat my terrifying father posed to my safety. I was a man, afraid of the threat he posed to my character, to my future, to my identity. But even that fear, I know, does not compare to the one that comes next. Even though I know it’s coming, I want to open a vein and drain the serum from my body rather than see it again. A pool of light appears on the concrete in front of me. A hand, the fingers bent into a claw, reaches into the light, followed by another hand, and then a head, with stringy blond hair. The woman coughs and drags herself into the circle of light, inch by inch. I try to move toward her, to help her, but I am frozen. The woman turns her face toward the light, and I see that she is Tris. Blood spills over her lips and curls around her chin. Her bloodshot eyes find mine, and she wheezes, “Help.” She coughs red onto the floor, and I throw myself toward her, somehow knowing that if I don’t get to her soon, the light will leave her eyes. Hands wrap around my arms and shoulders and chest, forming a cage of flesh and bone, but I keep straining toward her. I claw at the hands holding me, but I only end up scratching myself. I shout her name, and she coughs again, this time more blood. She screams for help, and I scream for her, and I don’t hear anything, I don’t feel anything, but my heartbeat, but my own terror. She drops to the ground, tensionless, and her eyes roll back into her head. It’s too late. The darkness lifts. The lights return. Graffiti covers the walls of the fear landscape room, and across from me are the mirror-windows to the observation room, and in the corners are the cameras that record each session, all where they??re supposed to be. My neck and back are covered in sweat. I wipe my face with the hem of my shirt and walk to the opposite door, leaving my black box with its syringe and needle behind. I don’t need to relive my fears anymore. All I need to do now is try to overcome them. I know from experience that confidence alone can get a person into a forbidden place. Like the cells on the third floor of Erudite headquarters. Not here, though, apparently. A factionless man stops me with the end of his gun before I reach the door, and I am nervous, choking. “Where you going?” I put my hand on his gun and push it away from my arm. “Don’t point that thing at me. I’m here on Evelyn’s orders. I’m going to see a prisoner.” “I didn’t hear about any after-hours visits today.” I drop my voice low, so he feels like he’s hearing a secret. “That’s because she didn’t want it on the record.” “Chuck!” someone calls out from the stairs above us. It’s Therese. She makes a waving motion as she walks down. “Let him through. He’s fine.” I nod to Therese and keep moving. The debris in the hallway has been swept clean, but the broken lightbulbs haven’t been replaced, so I walk through stretches of darkness, like patches of bruises, on my way to the right cell. When I reach the north corridor, I don’t go straight to the cell, but rather to the woman who stands at the end. She is middle-aged, with eyes that droop at the edges and a mouth held in a pucker. She looks like everything exhausts her, including me. “Hi,” I say. “My name is Tobias Eaton. I’m here to collect a prisoner, on orders from Evelyn Johnson.” Her expression doesn’t change when she hears my name, so for a few seconds I’m sure I’ll have to knock her unconscious to get what I want. She takes a piece of crumpled paper from her pocket and flattens it against her left palm. On it is a list of prisoners’ names and their corresponding room numbers. “Name?” she says. “Caleb Prior. 308A.” “You’re Evelyn’s son, right?” “Yeah. I mean . . . yes.” She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who likes the word “yeah.” She leads me to a blank metal door with 308A on it—I wonder what it was used for when our city didn’t require so many cells. She types in the code, and the door springs open. “I guess I’m supposed to pretend I don’t see what you’re about to do?” she says. She must think I’m here to kill him. I decide to let her. “Yes,” I say. “Do me a favor and put in a good word for me with Evelyn. I don’t want so many night shifts. The name’s Drea.” “You got it.” She gathers the paper into her fist and shoves it back into her pocket as she walks away. I keep my hand on the door handle until she reaches her post again and turns to the side so she isn’t facing me. It seems like she’s done this a few times before. I wonder how many people have disappeared from these cells at Evelyn’s command. I walk in. Caleb Prior sits at a metal desk, bent over a book, his hair piled on one side of his head. “What do you want?” he says. “I hate to break this to you—” I pause. I decided a few hours ago how I wanted to handle this—I want to teach Caleb a lesson. And it will involve a few lies. “You know, actually, I kind of don’t hate it. Your execution’s been moved up a few weeks. To tonight.” That gets his attention. He twists in his chair and stares at me, his eyes wild and wide, like prey faced with a predator. “Is that a joke?” “I’m really bad at telling jokes.” “No.” He shakes his head. “No, I have a few weeks, it’s not tonight, no—” “If you shut up, I’ll give you an hour to adjust to this new information. If you don’t shut up, I’ll knock you out and shoot you in the alley outside before you wake up. Make your choice now.” Seeing an Erudite process something is like watching the inside of a watch, the gears all turning, shifting, adjusting, working together to form a particular function, which in this case is to make sense of his imminent demise. Caleb’s eyes shift to the open door behind me, and he seizes the chair, turning and swinging it into my body. The legs hit me, hard, which slows me down just enough to let him slip by. I follow him into the hallway, my arms burning from where the chair hit me. I am faster than he is—I slam into his back and he hits the floor face-first, without bracing himself. With my knee against his back, I pull his wrists together and squeeze them into a plastic loop. He groans, and when I pull him to his feet, his nose is bright with blood. Drea’s eyes touch mine for just a moment, then move away. I drag him down the hallway, not the way I came, but another way, toward an emergency exit. We walk down a flight of narrow stairs where the echo of our footsteps layers over itself, dissonant and hollow. Once I’m at the bottom, I knock on the exit door. Zeke opens it, a stupid grin on his face. “No trouble with the guard?” “No.” “I figured Drea would be easy to get by. She doesn’t care about anything.” “It sounded like she had looked the other way before.” “That doesn’t surprise me. Is this Prior?” “In the flesh.” “Why’s he bleeding?” “Because he’s an idiot.” Zeke offers me a black jacket with a factionless symbol stitched into the collar. “I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.” I wrap the jacket around Caleb’s shoulders and fasten one of the buttons over his chest. He avoids my eyes. “I think it’s a new phenomenon,” I say. “The alley’s clear?” “Made sure of it.” Zeke holds out his gun, handle first. “Careful, it’s loaded. Now it would be great if you would hit me so I’m more convincing when I tell the factionless you stole it from me.” “You want me to hit you?” “Oh, like you’ve never wanted to. Just do it, Four.” I do like to hit people—I like the explosion of power and energy, and the feeling that I am untouchable because I can hurt people. But I hate that part of myself, because it is the part of me that is the most broken. Zeke braces himself and I curl my hand into a fist. “Do it fast, you pansycake,” he says. I decide to aim for the jaw, which is too strong to break but will still show a good bruise. I swing, hitting him right where I mean to. Zeke groans, clutching his face with both hands. Pain shoots up my arm, and I shake my hand out. “Great.” Zeke spits at the side of the building. “Well, I guess that’s it.” “Guess so.” “I probably won’t be seeing you again, will I? I mean, I know the others might come back, but you . . .” He trails off, but picks up the thought again a moment later. “Just seems like you’ll be happy to leave it behind, that’s all.” “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I look at my shoes. “You sure you won’t come?” “Can’t. Shauna can’t wheel around where you guys are going, and it’s not like I’m gonna leave her, you know?” He touches his jaw, lightly, testing the skin. “Make sure Uri doesn’t drink too much, okay?” “Yeah,” I say. “No, I mean it,” he says, and his voice dips down the way it always does when he’s being serious, for once. “Promise you’ll look out for him?” It’s always been clear to me, since I met them, that Zeke and Uriah were closer than most brothers. They lost their father when they were young, and I suspect Zeke began to walk the line between parent and sibling after that. I can’t imagine what it feels like for Zeke to watch him leave the city now, especially as broken by grief as Uriah is by Marlene’s death. “I promise,” I say. I know I should leave, but I have to stay in this moment for a little while, feeling its significance. Zeke was one of the first friends I made in Dauntless, after I survived initiation. Then he worked in the control room with me, watching the cameras and writing stupid programs that spelled out words on the screen or played guessing games with numbers. He never asked me for my real name, or why a first-ranked initiate ended up in security and instruction instead of leadership. He demanded nothing from me. “Let’s just hug already,” he says. Keeping one hand firm on Caleb’s arm, I wrap my free arm around Zeke, and he does the same. When we break apart, I pull Caleb down the alley, and can’t resist calling back, “I’ll miss you.” “You too, sweetie!” He grins, and his teeth are white in the twilight. They are the last thing I see of him before I have to turn and set out at a trot for the train. “You’re going somewhere,” says Caleb, between breaths. “You and some others.” “Yeah.” “Is my sister going?” The question awakes inside me an animal rage that won’t be satisfied by sharp words or insults. It will only be satisfied by smacking his ear hard with the flat of my hand. He winces and hunches his shoulders, preparing for a second strike. I wonder if that’s what I looked like when my father did it to me. “She is not your sister,” I say. “You betrayed her. You tortured her. You took away the only family she had left. And because . . . what? Because you wanted to keep Jeanine’s secrets, wanted to stay in the city, safe and sound? You are a coward.” “I am not a coward!” Caleb says. “I knew if—” “Let’s go back to the arrangement where you keep your mouth closed.” “Fine,” he says. “Where are you taking me, anyway? You can kill me just as well here, can’t you?” I pause. A shape moves along the sidewalk behind us, slippery in my periphery. I twist and hold up my gun, but the shape disappears into the yawn of an alley. I keep walking, pulling Caleb with me, listening for footsteps behind me. We scatter broken glass with our shoes. I watch the dark buildings and the street signs, dangling from their hinges like late-clinging leaves in autumn. Then I reach the station where we’ll catch the train, and lead Caleb up a flight of metal steps to the platform. I see the train coming from a long way off, making its last journey through the city. Once, the trains were a force of nature to me, something that continued along their path regardless of what we did inside the city limits, something pulsing and alive and powerful. Now I have met the men and women who operate them, and some of that mystery is gone, but what they mean to me will never be gone—my first act as a Dauntless was to jump on one, and every day afterward they were the source of my freedom, they gave me the power to move within this world when I had once felt so trapped in the Abnegation sector, in the house that was a prison to me. When it comes closer, I cut the tie around Caleb’s wrists with a pocketknife and keep a firm hold on his arm. “You know how to do this, right?” I say. “Get in the last car.” He unbuttons the jacket and drops it on the ground. “Yeah.” Starting at one end of the platform, we run together along the worn boards, keeping pace with the open door. He doesn’t reach for the handle, so I push him toward it. He stumbles, then grabs it and pulls himself into the last car. I am running out of space—the platform is ending—I seize the handle and swing myself in, my muscles absorbing the pull forward. Tris stands inside the car, wearing a small, crooked smile. Her black jacket is zipped up to her throat, framing her face in darkness. She grabs my collar and pulls me in for a kiss. As she pulls away, she says, “I always loved watching you do that.” I grin. “Is this what you had planned?” Caleb demands from behind me. “For her to be here when you kill me? That’s—” “Kill him?” Tris asks me, not looking at her brother. “Yeah, I let him think he was being taken to his execution,” I say, loud enough that he can hear. “You know, sort of like he did to you in Erudite headquarters.” “I . . . it isn’t true?” His face, lit by the moon, is slack with shock. I notice that his shirt’s buttons are in the wrong buttonholes. “No,” I say. “I just saved your life, actually.” He starts to say something, and I interrupt him. “Might not want to thank me just yet. We’re taking you with us. Outside the fence.” Outside the fence—the place he once tried so hard to avoid that he turned on his own sister. It seems a more fitting punishment than death, anyway. Death is so quick, so certain. Where we’re going now, nothing is certain. He looks frightened, but not as frightened as I thought he would be. I feel like I understand, then, the way he ranks things in his mind: his life, first; his comfort in a world of his own making, second; and somewhere after that, the lives of the people he is supposed to love. He is the sort of despicable person who has no understanding of how despicable he is, and my badgering him with insults won’t change that; nothing will. Rather than angry, I just feel heavy, useless. I don’t want to think about him anymore. I take Tris’s hand and lead her to the other side of the car, so we can watch the city disappear behind us. We stand side by side in the open doorway, each of us holding one of the handles. The buildings create a dark, jagged pattern on the sky. “We were followed,” I say. “We’ll be careful,” she answers. “Where are the others?” “In the first few cars,” she says. “I thought we should be alone. Or as alone as we can get.” She smiles at me. These are our last moments in the city. Of course we should spend them alone. “I’m really going to miss this place,” she says. “Really?” I say. “My thoughts are more like, ‘Good riddance.’” “There’s nothing you’ll miss? No good memories?” She elbows me. “Fine.” I smile. “There are a few.” “Any that don’t involve me?” she says. “That sounds self-centered. You know what I mean.” “Sure, I guess,” I say, shrugging. “I mean, I got to have a different life in Dauntless, a different name. I got to be Four, thanks to my initiation instructor. He gave me the name.” “Really?” She tilts her head. “Why haven’t I met him?” “Because he’s dead. He was Divergent.” I shrug again, but I don’t feel casual about it. Amar was the first person who noticed that I was Divergent, and he helped me to hide it. But he couldn’t hide his own Divergence, and that killed him. She touches my arm, lightly, but doesn’t say anything. I shift, uncomfortable. “See?” I say. “Too many bad memories here. I’m ready to leave.” I feel empty, not because of sadness, but because of relief, all the tension flowing out of me. Evelyn is in that city, and Marcus, and all the grief and nightmares and bad memories, and the factions that kept me trapped inside one version of myself. I squeeze Tris’s hand. “Look,” I say, pointing at a distant cluster of buildings. “There’s the Abnegation sector.” She smiles, but her eyes are glassy, like a dormant part of her is fighting its way out and spilling over. The train hisses over the rails, a tear drops down Tris’s cheek, and the city disappears into the darkness. CHAPTER ELEVEN TRIS THE TRAIN SLOWS down when we get closer to the fence, a signal from the driver that we should get off soon. Tobias and I sit in the doorway of the car as it moves lazily over the tracks. He puts his arm around me and touches his nose to my hair, taking a breath. I look at him, at the collarbone peeking out from the neck of his T-shirt, at the faint curl of his lip, and I feel something heating up inside me. “What are you thinking about?” he says into my ear, softly. I jerk to attention. I look at him all the time, but not always like that—I feel like he just caught me doing something embarrassing. “Nothing! Why?” “No reason.” He pulls me closer to his side, and I rest my head on his shoulder, taking deep breaths of the cool air. It still smells like summer, like grass baking in the heat of the sun. “It looks like we’re getting close to the fence,” I say. I can tell because the buildings are disappearing, leaving just fields, dotted with the rhythmic glow of lightning bugs. Behind me, Caleb sits near the other door, hugging his knees. His eyes find mine at just the wrong moment, and I want to scream into the darkest parts of him so he can finally hear me, finally understand what he did to me, but instead I just hold his stare until he can’t take it anymore and he looks away. I stand, using the handle to steady me, and Tobias and Caleb do the same. At first Caleb tries to stand behind us, but Tobias pushes him forward, right up to the edge of the car. “You first. On my mark!” he says. “And . . . go!” He gives Caleb a push, just enough to get him off the car floor, and my brother disappears. Tobias goes next, leaving me alone in the train car. It’s stupid to miss a thing when there are so many people to miss instead, but I miss this train already, and all the others that carried me through the city, my city, after I was brave enough to ride them. I brush my fingers over the car wall, just once, and then jump. The train is moving so slowly that I overcompensate with my landing, too used to running off the momentum, and I fall. The dry grass scrapes my palms and I push myself to my feet, searching the darkness for Tobias and Caleb. Before I find them, I hear Christina. “Tris!” She and Uriah come toward me. He is holding a flashlight, and he looks far more alert than he did this afternoon, which is a good sign. Behind them are more lights, more voices. “Did your brother make it?” Uriah says. “Yeah.” Finally I see Tobias, his hand gripping Caleb’s arm, coming toward us. “Not sure why an Erudite like you can’t get it through his head,” Tobias is saying, “but you aren’t going to be able to outrun me.” “He’s right,” says Uriah. “Four’s fast. Not as fast as me, but definitely faster than a Nose like you.” Christina laughs. “A what?” “Nose.” Uriah touches the side of his nose. “It’s a play on words. ‘Knows’ with a ‘K,’ knowledge, Erudite . . . get it? It’s like Stiff.” “The Dauntless have the weirdest slang. Pansycake, Nose . . . is there a term for the Candor?” “Of course.” Uriah grins. “Jerks.” Christina shoves Uriah, hard, making him drop the flashlight. Tobias, laughing, leads us to the rest of the group, standing a few feet away. Tori waves her flashlight in the air to get everyone’s attention, then says, “All right, Johanna and the trucks will be about a ten-minute walk from here, so let’s get going. And if I hear a word from anyone, I will beat you senseless. We’re not out yet.” We move closer together like sections of a tightened shoelace. Tori walks a few feet in front of us, and from the back, in the dark, she reminds me of Evelyn, her limbs lean and wiry, her shoulders back, so sure of herself it’s almost frightening. By the light of the flashlights I can just make out the tattoo of a hawk on the back of her neck, the first thing I spoke to her about when she administered my aptitude test. She told me it was a symbol of a fear she had overcome, a fear of the dark. I wonder if that fear still creeps up on her now, though she worked so hard to face it—I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us. She moves farther away from us by the minute, her pace more like a jog than a walk. She is eager to leave, to escape this place where her brother was murdered and she rose to prominence only to be thwarted by a factionless woman who wasn’t supposed to be alive. She is so far ahead that when the shots go off, I only see her flashlight fall, not her body. “Split up!” Tobias’s voice roars over the sound of our cries, our chaos. “Run!” I search in the dark for his hand, but I don’t find it. I grab the gun Uriah gave me before we left and hold it out from my body, ignoring the way my throat tightens at the feel of it. I can’t run into the night. I need light. I sprint in the direction of Tori’s body—of her fallen flashlight. I hear but do not hear the gunshots, and the shouting, and the running footsteps. I hear but do not hear my heartbeat. I crouch next to the shaft of light she dropped and pick up the flashlight, intending to just grab it and keep running, but in its glow I see her face. It shines with sweat, and her eyes roll beneath her eyelids, like she is searching for something but is too tired to find it. One of the bullets found her stomach, and the other found her chest. There is no way she will recover from this. I may be angry with her for fighting me in Jeanine’s laboratory, but she’s still Tori, the woman who guarded the secret of my Divergence. My throat tightens as I remember following her into the aptitude test room, my eyes on her hawk tattoo. Her eyes shift in my direction and focus on me. Her eyebrows furrow, but she doesn’t speak. I shift the flashlight into the crook of my thumb and reach for her hand to squeeze her sweaty fingers. I hear someone approaching, and I aim flashlight and gun in the same direction. The beam hits a woman wearing a factionless armband, with a gun pointed at my head. I fire, clenching my teeth so hard they squeak. The bullet hits the woman in the stomach and she screams, firing blindly into the night. I look back down at Tori, and her eyes are closed, her body still. Pointing my flashlight at the ground, I sprint away from her and from the woman I just shot. My legs ache and my lungs burn. I don’t know where I’m going, if I’m running into danger or away from it, but I keep running as long as I can. Finally I see a light in the distance. At first I think it’s another flashlight, but as I draw closer I realize it is larger and steadier than a flashlight—it’s a headlight. I hear an engine, and crouch in the tall grass to hide, switching my flashlight off and keeping my gun ready. The truck slows, and I hear a voice: “Tori?” It sounds like 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 TOBIAS MY 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 lampposts, old power lines. Every so often, there is an isolated square of sidewalk with weeds forcing their way through the concrete, or a pile of rotting wood, a collapsed dwelling. The more time I spend thinking about this landscape that every Dauntless patrol was told was normal, the more I see an old city rising up around me, the buildings lower than the ones we left behind, but just as numerous. An old city that was transformed into empty land for the Amity to farm. In other words, an old city that was razed, burned to cinders, and crushed into the ground, even the roads disappearing, the earth left to run wild over the wreckage. I put my hand out the window, and the wind wraps around my fingers like locks of hair. When I was very young, my mother pretended she could shape things from the wind, and she would give them to me to use, like hammers and nails, or swords, or roller skates. It was a game we played in the evenings, on the front lawn, before Marcus got home. It took away our dread. In the bed of the truck, behind us, are Caleb, Christina, and Uriah. Christina and Uriah sit close enough for their shoulders to touch, but they are looking in opposite directions, more like strangers than friends. Just behind us is another truck, driven by Robert, which carries Cara and Peter. Tori was supposed to be with them. The thought makes me feel hollow, empty. She administered my aptitude test. She made me think, for the first time, that I could leave Abnegation—that I had to. I feel like I owe her something, and she died before I could give it to her. “This is it,” Johanna says. “The outer limit of the Dauntless patrols.” No fence or wall marks the divide between the Amity compound and the outer world, but I remember monitoring the Dauntless patrols from the control room, making sure they didn’t go farther than the limit, which is marked by a series of signs with Xs on them. The patrols were structured so that the trucks would run out of gas if they went too far, a delicate system of checks and balances that preserved our safety and theirs—and, I now realize, the secret the Abnegation kept. “Have they ever gone past the limit?” says Tris. “A few times,” says Johanna. “It was our responsibility to deal with that situation when it came up.” Tris gives her a look, and she shrugs. “Every faction has a serum,” Johanna says. “The Dauntless serum gives hallucinated realities, Candor’s gives the truth, Amity’s gives peace, Erudite’s gives death—” At this, Tris visibly shudders, but Johanna continues as if it didn’t happen. “And Abnegation’s resets memory.” “Resets memory?” “Like Amanda Ritter’s memory,” I say. “She said, ‘There are many things I am happy to forget,’ remember?” “Yes, exactly,” says Johanna. “The Amity are charged with administering the Abnegation serum to anyone who goes out past the limit, just enough to make them forget the experience. I’m sure some of them have slipped past us, but not many.” We are silent then. I turn the information over and over in my mind. There is something deeply wrong with taking a person’s memories—even though I know it was necessary to keep our city safe for as long as it needed to be, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Take a person’s memories, and you change who they are. Swelling inside me is the feeling that I am about to jump out of my own skin, because the farther we get outside the outer limit of the Dauntless patrols, the closer we get to seeing what lies outside the only world I’ve ever known. I am terrified and thrilled and confused and a hundred different things at once. I see something up ahead of us, in the light of early morning, and grab Tris’s hand. “Look,” I say. CHAPTER THIRTEEN TRIS THE WORLD BEYOND ours is full of roads and dark buildings and collapsing power lines. There is no life in it, as far as I can see; no movement, no sound but the wind and my own footsteps. It’s like the landscape is an interrupted sentence, one side dangling in the air, unfinished, and the other, a completely different subject. On our side of that sentence is empty land, grass and stretches of road. On the other side are two concrete walls with half a dozen sets of train tracks between them. Up ahead, there is a concrete bridge built across the walls, and framing the tracks are buildings, wood and brick and glass, their windows dark, trees growing around them, so wild their branches have grown together. A sign on the right says 90. “What do we do now?” Uriah asks. “We follow the tracks,” I say, but quietly, so only I hear it. We get out of the trucks at the divide between our world and theirs—whoever “they” are. Robert and Johanna say a brief good-bye, turn the trucks around, and drive back into the city. I watch them go. I can’t imagine coming this far and then turning back, but I guess there are things they have to do in the city. Johanna still has an Allegiant rebellion to organize. The rest of us—me, Tobias, Caleb, Peter, Christina, Uriah, and Cara—set out with our meager possessions along the railroad tracks. The tracks are not like the ones in the city. They are polished and sleek, and instead of boards running perpendicular to their path, there are sheets of textured metal. Up ahead I see one of the trains that runs along them, abandoned near the wall. It is metal-plated on the top and front, like a mirror, with tinted windows all along the side. When we draw closer, I see rows of benches inside it with maroon cushions on them. People must not jump on and off these trains. Tobias walks behind me on one of the rails, his arms held out from his sides to maintain his balance. The others are spread out over the tracks, Peter and Caleb near one wall, Cara near the other. No one talks much, except to point out something new, a sign or a building or a hint of what this world was like, when there were people in it. The concrete walls alone hold my attention—they are covered with strange pictures of people with skin so smooth they hardly look like people anymore, or colorful bottles with shampoo or conditioner or vitamins or unfamiliar substances inside them, words I don’t understand, “vodka” and “Coca-Cola” and “energy drink.” The colors and shapes and words and pictures are so garish, so abundant, that they are mesmerizing. “Tris.” Tobias puts his hand on my shoulder, and I stop. He tilts his head and says, “Do you hear that?” I hear footsteps and the quiet voices of our companions. I hear my own breaths, and his. But running beneath them is a quiet rumble, inconsistent in its intensity. It sounds like an engine. “Everyone stop!” I shout. To my surprise, everyone does, even Peter, and we gather together in the center of the tracks. I see Peter draw his gun and hold it up, and I do the same, both hands joined together to steady it, remembering the ease with which I used to lift it. That ease is gone now. Something appears around the bend up ahead. A black truck, but larger than any truck I’ve ever seen, large enough to hold more than a dozen people in its covered bed. I shudder. The truck bumps over the tracks and comes to a stop twenty feet away from us. I can see the man driving it—he has dark skin and long hair that is in a knot at the back of his head. “God,” Tobias says, and his hands tighten around his own gun. A woman gets out of the front seat. She looks to be around Johanna’s age, her skin patterned with dense freckles and her hair so dark it’s almost black. She hops to the ground and puts up both hands, so we can see that she isn’t armed. “Hello,” she says, and smiles nervously. “My name is Zoe. This is Amar.” She jerks her head to the side to indicate the driver, who has gotten out of the truck too. “Amar is dead,” Tobias says. “No, I’m not. Come on, Four,” Amar says. Tobias’s face is tight with fear. I don’t blame him. It’s not every day you see someone you care about come back from the dead. The faces of all the people I’ve lost flash into my mind. Lynn. Marlene. Will. Al. My father. My mother. What if they’re still alive, like Amar? What if the curtain that separates us is not death but a chain-link fence and some land? I can’t stop myself from hoping, foolish as it is. “We work for the same organization that founded your city,” Zoe says as she glares at Amar. “The same organization Edith Prior came from. And . . .” She reaches into her pocket and takes out a partially crumpled photograph. She holds it out, and then her eyes find mine in the crowd of people and guns. “I think you should look at this, Tris,” she says. “I’ll step forward and leave it on the ground, then back up. All right?” She knows my name. My throat tightens with fear. How does she know my name? And not just my name—my nickname, the name I chose when I joined Dauntless? “All right,” I say, but my voice is hoarse, so the words barely escape. Zoe steps forward, sets the photograph down on the train tracks, then moves back to her original position. I leave the safety of our numbers and crouch near the photograph, watching her the whole time. Then I back up, photograph in hand. It shows a row of people in front of a chain-link fence, their arms slung across one another’s shoulders and backs. I see a child version of Zoe, recognizable by her freckles, and a few people I don’t recognize. I am about to ask her what the point of me looking at this picture is when I recognize the young woman with dull blond hair, tied back, and a wide smile. My mother. What is my mother doing next to these people? Something—grief, pain, longing—squeezes my chest. “There is a lot to explain,” Zoe says. “But this isn’t really the best place to do it. We’d like to take you to our headquarters. It’s a short drive from here.” Still holding up his gun, Tobias touches my wrist with his free hand, guiding the photograph closer to his face. “That’s your mother?” he asks me. “It’s Mom?” Caleb says. He pushes past Tobias to see the picture over my shoulder. “Yes,” I say to both of them. “Think we should trust them?” Tobias says to me in a low voice. Zoe doesn’t look like a liar, and she doesn’t sound like one either. And if she knows who I am, and knew how to find us here, it’s probably because she has some form of access to the city, which means she is probably telling the truth about being with the group that Edith Prior came from. And then there’s Amar, who is watching every movement Tobias makes. “We came out here because we wanted to find these people,” I say. “We have to trust someone, don’t we? Or else we’re just walking around in a wasteland, possibly starving to death.” Tobias releases my wrist and lowers his gun. I do the same. The others follow suit slowly, with Christina putting hers down last. “Wherever we go, we have to be free to leave at any time,” Christina says. “Okay?” Zoe places her hand on her chest, right over her heart. “You have my word.” I hope, for all our sakes, that her word is worth having. CHAPTER FOURTEEN TOBIAS I STAND ON the edge of the truck bed, holding the structure that supports the cloth cover. I want this new reality to be a simulation that I could manipulate if I could only make sense of it. But it’s not, and I can’t make sense of it. Amar is alive. “Adapt!” was one of his favorite commands during my initiation. Sometimes he yelled it so often that I would dream it; it woke me like an alarm clock, requiring more of me than I could provide. Adapt. Adapt faster, adapt better, adapt to things that no man should have to. Like this: leaving a wholly formed world and discovering another one. Or this: discovering that your dead friend is actually alive and driving the truck you’re riding in. Tris sits behind me, on the bench that wraps around the truck bed, the creased photo in her hands. Her fingers hover over her mother’s face, almost touching it but not quite. Christina sits on one side of her, and Caleb is on the other. She must be letting him stay just to see the photograph; her entire body recoils from him, pressing into Christina’s side. “That’s your mom?” Christina says. Tris and Caleb both nod. “She’s so young there. Pretty, too,” Christina adds. “Yes she is. Was, I mean.” I expect Tris to sound sad as she replies, like she’s aching at the memory of her mother’s fading beauty. Instead her voice is nervous, her lips pursed in anticipation. I hope that she isn’t brewing false hope. “Let me see it,” Caleb says, stretching his hand out to his sister. Silently, and without really looking at him, she passes him the photograph. I turn back to the world we are driving away from—the end of the train tracks. The huge expanses of field. And in the distance, the Hub, barely visible in the haze that covers the city’s skyline. It’s a strange feeling, seeing it from this place, like I can still touch it if I stretch my hand far enough, though I have traveled so far away from it. Peter moves toward the edge of the truck bed next to me, holding the canvas to steady himself. The train tracks curve away from us now, and I can’t see the fields anymore. The walls on either side of us gradually disappear as the land flattens out, and I see buildings everywhere, some small, like the Abnegation houses, and some wide, like city buildings turned on their sides. Trees, overgrown and huge, grow beyond the cement fixtures intended to keep them enclosed, their roots sprawling over the pavement. Perched on the edge of one rooftop is a row of black birds like the ones tattooed on Tris’s collarbone. As the truck passes, they squawk and scatter into the air. This is a wild world. Just like that, it is too much for me to bear, and I have to back up and sit on one of the benches. I cradle my head in my hands, keeping my eyes shut so I can’t take in any new information. I feel Tris’s strong arm across my back, pulling me sideways into her narrow frame. My hands are numb. “Just focus on what’s right here, right now,” Cara says from across the truck. “Like how the truck is moving. It’ll help.” I try it. I think about how hard the bench is beneath me and how the truck always vibrates, even on flat ground, buzzing in my bones. I detect its tiny movements left and right, forward and back, and absorb each bounce as it rolls over the rails. I focus until everything goes dark around us, and I don’t feel the passage of time or the panic of discovery, I feel only our movement over the earth. “You should probably look around now,” Tris says, and she sounds weak. Christina and Uriah stand where I stood, peering around the edge of the canvas wall. I look over their shoulders to see what we’re driving toward. There is a tall fence stretching wide across the landscape, which looks empty compared to the densely packed buildings I saw before I sat down. The fence has vertical black bars with pointed ends that bend outward, as if to skewer anyone who might try to climb over it. A few feet past it is another fence, this one chain-link, like the one around the city, with barbed wire looped over the top. I hear a loud buzz coming from the second fence, an electric charge. People walk the space between them, carrying guns that look a little like our paintball guns, but far more lethal, powerful pieces of machinery. A sign on the first fence reads BUREAU OF GENETIC WELFARE. I hear Amar’s voice, speaking to the armed guards, but I don’t know what he’s saying. A gate in the first fence opens to admit us, and then a gate in the second. Beyond the two fences is . . . order. As far as I can see, there are low buildings separated by trimmed grass and fledgling trees. The roads that connect them are well maintained and well marked, with arrows pointing to various destinations: GREENHOUSES, straight ahead; SECURITY OUTPOST, left; OFFICERS’ RESIDENCES, right; COMPOUND MAIN, straight ahead. I get up and lean around the truck to see the compound, half my body hanging over the road. The Bureau of Genetic Welfare isn’t tall, but it’s still huge, wider than I can see, a mammoth of glass and steel and concrete. Behind the compound are a few tall towers with bulges at the top—I don’t know why, but I think of the control room when I see them, and wonder if that’s what they are. Aside from the guards between the fences, there are few people outside. Those who are stop to watch us, but we drive away so quickly I don’t see their expressions. The truck stops before a set of double doors, and Peter is the first to jump down. The rest of us spill out on the pavement behind him, and we are shoulder to shoulder, standing so close I can hear how fast everyone is breathing. In the city we were divided by faction, by age, by history, but here all those divisions fall away. We are all we have. “Here we go,” mutters Tris, as Zoe and Amar approach. Here we go, I say to myself. “Welcome to the compound,” says Zoe. “This building used to be O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country. Now it’s the headquarters of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare—or just the Bureau, as we call it around here. It’s an agency of the United States government.” I feel my face going slack. I know all the words she’s saying—except I’m not sure what an “airport” or “united states” is—but they don’t make sense to me all together. I’m not the only one who looks confused—Peter raises both eyebrows as if asking a question. “Sorry,” she says. “I keep forgetting how little you all know.” “I believe it’s your fault if we don’t know anything, not ours,” Peter points out. “I should rephrase.” Zoe smiles gently. “I keep forgetting how little information we provided you with. An airport is a hub for air travel, and—” “Air travel?” says Christina, incredulous. “One of the technological developments that wasn’t necessary for us to know about when we were inside the city was air travel,” says Amar. “It’s safe, fast, and amazing.” “Wow,” says Tris. She looks excited. I, however, think of speeding through the air, high above the compound, and feel like I might throw up. “Anyway. When the experiments were first developed, the airport was converted into this compound so that we could monitor the experiments from a distance,” Zoe says. “I’m going to walk you to the control room to meet David, the leader of the Bureau. You will see a lot of things you don’t understand, but it may be best to get some preliminary explanations before you start asking me about them. So take note of the things you want to learn more about, and feel free to ask me or Amar later.” She starts toward the entrance, and the doors part for her, pulled open by two armed guards who smile in greeting as she passes them. The contrast between the friendly greeting and the weapons propped against their shoulders is almost humorous. The guns are huge, and I wonder how they feel to shoot, if you can feel the deadly power in them just by curling your finger around the trigger. Cool air rushes over my face as I walk into the compound. Windows arch high above my head, letting in pale light, but that is the most appealing part about the place—the tile floor is dull with dirt and age, and the walls are gray and blank. Ahead of us is a sea of people and machinery, with a sign over it that says SECURITY CHECKPOINT. I don’t understand why they need so much security if they’re already protected by two layers of fence, one of which is electrified, and a few layers of guards, but this is not my world to question. No, this is not my world at all. Tris touches my shoulder and points down the long entryway. “Look at that.” Standing at the far end of the room, outside the security checkpoint, is a huge block of stone with a glass apparatus suspended above it. It’s a clear example of the things we will see here that we don’t understand. I also don’t understand the hunger in Tris’s eyes, devouring everything around us as if it alone can sustain her. Sometimes I feel like we are the same, but sometimes, like right now, I feel the separation between our personalities like I’ve just run into a wall. Christina says something to Tris, and they both grin. Everything I hear is muffled and distorted. “Are you all right?” Cara asks me. “Yeah,” I say automatically. “You know, it would be perfectly logical for you to be panicking right now,” she says. “No need to continually insist upon your unshakable masculinity.” “My . . . what?” She smiles, and I realize that she was joking. All the people at the security checkpoint step aside, forming a tunnel for us to walk through. Ahead of us, Zoe announces, “Weapons are not allowed inside this facility, but if you leave them at the security checkpoint you can pick them up as you exit, if you choose to do so. After you drop them off, we’ll go through the scanners and be on our way.” “That woman is irritating,” Cara says. “What?” I say. “Why?” “She can’t separate herself from her own knowledge,” she says as she draws her weapon. “She keeps saying things like they’re obvious when they are not, in fact, obvious.” “You’re right,” I say without conviction. “That is irritating.” Ahead of me, I see Zoe putting her gun into a gray container and then walking into a scanner—it is a man-sized box with a tunnel through the middle, just wide enough for a body. I draw my own gun, which is heavy with unused bullets, and put it in the container the security guard holds out to me, where all the others’ guns are. I watch Zoe go through the scanner, then Amar, Peter, Caleb, Cara, and Christina. As I stand at the edge of it, at the walls that will squeeze my body between them, I feel the beginnings of panic again, the numb hands and the tight chest. The scanner reminds me of the wooden box that traps me in my fear landscape, squeezing my bones together. I cannot, will not panic here. I force my feet to move into the scanner, and stand in the middle, where all the others stood. I hear something moving in the walls on either side of me, and then there’s a high-pitched beep. I shudder, and all I can see is the guard’s hand, motioning me forward. It is now okay to escape. I stumble out of the scanner, and the air opens up around me. Cara gives me a pointed look, but doesn’t say anything. When Tris takes my hand after going through the scanner herself, I barely feel it. I remember going through my fear landscape with her, our bodies pressed together in the wooden box that enclosed us, my palm against her chest, feeling her heartbeat. It’s enough to ground me in reality again. Once Uriah is through, Zoe waves us forward again. Beyond the security checkpoint, the facility is not as dingy as it was before. The floors are still tile, but they are polished to perfection, and there are windows everywhere. Down one long hallway I see rows of lab tables and computers, and it reminds me of Erudite headquarters, but it’s brighter here, and nothing seems to be hidden. Zoe leads us down a darker passageway on the right. As we walk past people, they stop to watch, and I feel their eyes on me like little beams of heat, making me warm from throat to cheeks. We walk for a long time, deeper into the compound, and then Zoe stops, facing us. Behind her is a large circle of blank screens, like moths circling a flame. People within the circle sit at low desks, typing furiously on still more screens, these ones facing out instead of in. It’s a control room, but it’s out in the open, and I’m not sure what they’re observing here, since all the screens are dark. Clustered around the screens that face in are chairs and benches and tables, like people gather here to watch at their leisure. A few feet in front of the control room is an older man wearing a smile and a dark blue uniform, just like all the others. When he sees us approaching, he spreads his hands as if to welcome us. David, I assume. “This,” the man says, “is what we’ve waited for since the very beginning.” CHAPTER FIFTEEN TRIS I TAKE THE photograph from my pocket. The man in front of me—David—is in it, next to my mother, his face a little smoother, his middle a little trimmer. I cover my mother’s face with my fingertip. All the hope growing inside me has withered. If my mother, or my father, or my friends were still alive, they would have been waiting by the doors for our arrival. I should have known better than to think what happened with Amar—whatever it was—could happen again. “My name is David. As Zoe probably told you already, I am the leader of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. I’m going to do my best to explain things,” David says. “The first thing you should know is that the information Edith Prior gave you is only partly true.” At the name “Prior” his eyes settle on me. My body shakes with anticipation—ever since I saw that video I’ve been desperate for answers, and I’m about to get them. “She provided only as much information as you needed to meet the goals of our experiments,” says David. “And in many cases, that meant oversimplifying, omitting, and even outright falsehood. Now that you are here, there is no need for any of those things.” “You all keep talking about ‘experiments,’” Tobias says. “What experiments?” “Yes, well, I was getting to that.” David looks at Amar. “Where did they start when they explained it to you?” “Doesn’t matter where you start. You can’t make it easier to take,” Amar says, picking at his cuticles. David considers this for a moment, then clears his throat. “A long time ago, the United States government—” “The united what?” Uriah asks. “It’s a country,” says Amar. “A large one. It has specific borders and its own governing body, and we’re in the middle of it right now. We can talk about it later. Go ahead, sir.” David presses his thumb into his palm and massages his hand, clearly disconcerted by all the interruptions. He begins again: “A few centuries ago, the government of this country became interested in enforcing certain desirable behaviors in its citizens. There had been studies that indicated that violent tendencies could be partially traced to a person’s genes—a gene called ‘the murder gene’ was the first of these, but there were quite a few more, genetic predispositions toward cowardice, dishonesty, low intelligence—all the qualities, in other words, that ultimately contribute to a broken society.” We were taught that the factions were formed to solve a problem, the problem of our flawed natures. Apparently the people David is describing, whoever they were, believed in that problem too. I know so little about genetics—just what I can see passed down from parent to child, in my face and in friends’ faces. I can’t imagine isolating a gene for murder, or cowardice, or dishonesty. Those things seem too nebulous to have a concrete location in a person’s body. But I’m not a scientist. “Obviously there are quite a few factors that determine personality, including a person’s upbringing and experiences,” David continues, “but despite the peace and prosperity that had reigned in this country for nearly a century, it seemed advantageous to our ancestors to reduce the risk of these undesirable qualities showing up in our population by correcting them. In other words, by editing humanity. “That’s how the genetic manipulation experiment was born. It takes several generations for any kind of genetic manipulation to manifest, but people were selected from the general population in large numbers, according to their backgrounds or behavior, and they were given the option to give a gift to our future generations, a genetic alteration that would make their descendants just a little bit better.” I look around at the others. Peter’s mouth is puckered with disdain. Caleb is scowling. Cara’s mouth has fallen open, like she is hungry for answers and intends to eat them from the air. Christina just looks skeptical, one eyebrow raised, and Tobias is staring at his shoes. I feel like I am not hearing anything new—just the same philosophy that spawned the factions, driving people to manipulate their genes instead of separating into virtue-based groups. I understand it. On some level I even agree with it. But I don’t know how it relates to us, here, now. “But when the genetic manipulations began to take effect, the alterations had disastrous consequences. As it turns out, the attempt had resulted not in corrected genes, but in damaged ones,” David says. “Take away someone’s fear, or low intelligence, or dishonesty . . . and you take away their compassion. Take away someone’s aggression and you take away their motivation, or their ability to assert themselves. Take away their selfishness and you take away their sense of self-preservation. If you think about it, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.” I tick off each quality in my mind as he says it—fear, low intelligence, dishonesty, aggression, selfishness. He is talking about the factions. And he’s right to say that every faction loses something when it gains a virtue: the Dauntless, brave but cruel; the Erudite, intelligent but vain; the Amity, peaceful but passive; the Candor, honest but inconsiderate; the Abnegation, selfless but stifling. “Humanity has never been perfect, but the genetic alterations made it worse than it had ever been before. This manifested itself in what we call the Purity War. A civil war, waged by those with damaged genes, against the government and everyone with pure genes. The Purity War caused a level of destruction formerly unheard of on American soil, eliminating almost half of the country’s population.” “The visual is up,” says one of the people at a desk in the control room. A map appears on the screen above David’s head. It is an unfamiliar shape, so I’m not sure what it’s supposed to represent, but it is covered with patches of pink, red, and dark-crimson lights. “This is our country before the Purity War,” David says. “And this is after—” The lights start to recede, the patches shrinking like puddles of water drying in the sun. Then I realize that the red lights were people—people, disappearing, their lights going out. I stare at the screen, unable to wrap my mind around such a substantial loss. David continues, “When the war was finally over, the people demanded a permanent solution to the genetic problem. And that is why the Bureau of Genetic Welfare was formed. Armed with all the scientific knowledge at our government’s disposal, our predecessors designed experiments to restore humanity to its genetically pure state. “They called for genetically damaged individuals to come forward so that the Bureau could alter their genes. The Bureau then placed them in secure environments to settle in for the long haul, equipped with basic versions of the serums to help them control their society. They would wait for the passage of time—for the generations to pass, for each one to produce more genetically healed humans. Or, as you currently know them . . . the Divergent.” Ever since Tori told me the word for what I am—Divergent—I have wanted to know what it means. And here is the simplest answer I have received: “Divergent” means that my genes are healed. Pure. Whole. I should feel relieved to know the real answer at last. But I just feel like something is off, itching in the back of my mind. I thought that “Divergent” explained everything that I am and everything that I could be. Maybe I was wrong. I am starting to feel short of breath as the revelations begin to work their way into my mind and heart, as David peels the layers of lies and secrets away. I touch my chest to feel my heartbeat, to try to steady myself. “Your city is one of those experiments for genetic healing, and by far the most successful one, because of the behavioral modification portion. The factions, that is.” David smiles at us, like it’s something we should be proud of, but I am not proud. They created us, they shaped our world, they told us what to believe. If they told us what to believe, and we didn’t come to it on our own, is it still true? I press my hand harder against my chest. Steady. “The factions were our predecessors’ attempt to incorporate a ‘nurture’ element to the experiment—they discovered that mere genetic correction was not enough to change the way people behaved. A new social order, combined with the genetic modification, was determined to be the most complete solution to the behavioral problems that the genetic damage had created.” David’s smile fades as he looks around at all of us. I don’t know what he expected—for us to smile back? He continues, “The factions were later introduced to most of our other experiments, three of which are currently active. We have gone to great lengths to protect you, observe you, and learn from you.” Cara runs her hands over her hair, as if checking for loose strands. Finding none, she says, “So when Edith Prior said we were supposed to determine the cause of Divergence and come out and help you, that was . . .” “‘Divergent’ is the name we decided to give to those who have reached the desired level of genetic healing,” says David. “We wanted to make sure that the leaders of your city valued them. We didn’t expect the leader of Erudite to start hunting them down—or for the Abnegation to even tell her what they were—and contrary to what Edith Prior said, we never really intended for you to send a Divergent army out to us. We don’t, after all, truly need your help. We just need your healed genes to remain intact and to be passed on to future generations.” “So what you’re saying is that if we’re not Divergent, we’re damaged,” Caleb says. His voice is shaking. I never thought I would see Caleb on the verge of tears because of something like this, but he is. Steady, I tell myself again, and take another deep, slow breath. “Genetically damaged, yes,” says David. “However, we were surprised to discover that the behavioral modification component of our city’s experiment was quite effective—up until recently, it actually helped quite a bit with the behavioral problems that made the genetic manipulation so problematic to begin with. So generally, you would not be able to tell whether a person’s genes were damaged or healed from their behavior.” “I’m smart,” Caleb says. “So you’re saying that because my ancestors were altered to be smart, I, their descendant, can’t be fully compassionate. I, and every other genetically damaged person, am limited by my damaged genes. And the Divergent are not.” “Well,” says David, lifting a shoulder. “Think about it.” Caleb looks at me for the first time in days, and I stare back. Is that the explanation for Caleb’s betrayal—his damaged genes? Like a disease that he can’t heal, and can’t control? It doesn’t seem right. “Genes aren’t everything,” Amar says. “People, even genetically damaged people, make choices. That’s what matters.” I think of my father, a born Erudite, not Divergent; a man who could not help but be smart, choosing Abnegation, engaging in a lifelong struggle against his own nature, and ultimately fulfilling it. A man warring with himself, just as I war with myself. That internal war doesn’t seem like a product of genetic damage—it seems completely, purely human. I look at Tobias. He is so washed out, so slouched, he looks like he might pass out. He’s not alone in his reaction: Christina, Peter, Uriah, and Caleb all look stunned. Cara has the hem of her shirt pinched between her fingers, and she is moving her thumb over the fabric, frowning. “This is a lot to process,” says David. That is an understatement. Beside me, Christina snorts. “And you’ve all been up all night,” David finishes, like there was no interruption. “So I’ll show you to a place where you can get some rest and food.” “Wait,” I say. I think of the photograph in my pocket, and how Zoe knew my name when she gave it to me. I think of what David said, about observing us and learning from us. I think of the rows of screens, blank, right in front of me. “You said you’ve been observing us. How?” Zoe purses her lips. David nods to one of the people at the desks behind him. All at once, all the screens turn on, each of them showing footage from different cameras. On the ones nearest to me, I see Dauntless headquarters. The Merciless Mart. Millennium Park. The Hancock building. The Hub. “You’ve always known that the Dauntless observe the city with security cameras,” David says. “Well, we have access to those cameras too.” They’ve been watching us. I think about leaving. We walk past the security checkpoint on our way to wherever David is taking us, and I think about walking through it again, picking up my gun, and running from this place where they’ve been watching me. Since I was small. My first steps, my first words, my first day of school, my first kiss. Watching, when Peter attacked me. When my faction was put under a simulation and turned into an army. When my parents died. What else have they seen? The only thing that stops me from going is the photograph in my pocket. I can’t leave these people before I find out how they knew my mother. David takes us through the compound to a carpeted area with potted plants on either side. The wallpaper is old and yellowed, peeling from the corners of the walls. We follow him into a large room with high ceilings and wood floors and lights that glow orange-yellow. There are cots arranged in two straight rows, with trunks beside them for what we brought with us, and large windows with elegant curtains on the opposite end of the room. When I get closer to them, I see that they’re worn and frayed at the edges. David tells us that this part of the compound was a hotel, connected to the airport by a tunnel, and this room was once the ballroom. Again the words mean nothing to us, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “This is just a temporary dwelling, of course. Once you decide what to do, we will settle you somewhere else, whether it’s in this compound or elsewhere. Zoe will ensure that you are well taken care of,” he says. “I will be back tomorrow to see how you’re all doing.” I look back at Tobias, who is pacing back and forth in front of the windows, gnawing on his fingernails. I never realized he had that habit. Maybe he was never distressed enough to do it before. I could stay and try to comfort him, but I need answers about my mother, and I’m not going to wait any longer. I’m sure that Tobias, of all people, will understand. I follow David into the hallway. Just outside the room he leans against the wall and scratches the back of his neck. “Hi,” I say. “My name is Tris. I believe you knew my mother.” He jumps a little, but eventually smiles at me. I cross my arms. I feel the same way I did when Peter pulled my towel away during Dauntless initiation, to be cruel: exposed, embarrassed, angry. Maybe it’s not fair to direct all of that at David, but I can’t help it. He’s the leader of this compound—of the Bureau. “Yes, of course,” he says. “I recognize you.” From where? The creepy cameras that followed my every move? I pull my arms tighter across my chest. “Right.” I wait a beat, then say, “I need to know about my mother. Zoe gave me a picture of her, and you were standing right next to her in it, so I figured you could help.” “Ah,” he says. “Can I see the picture?” I take it out of my pocket and offer it to him. He smooths it down with his fingertips, and there is a strange smile on his face as he looks at it, like he’s caressing it with his eyes. I shift my weight from one foot to the other—I feel like I’m intruding on a private moment. “She took a trip back to us once,” he says. “Before she settled into motherhood. That’s when we took this.” “Back to you?” I say. “Was she one of you?” “Yes,” David says simply, like it’s not a word that changes my entire world. “She came from this place. We sent her into the city when she was young to resolve a problem in the experiment.” “So she knew,” I say, and my voice shakes, but I don’t know why. “She knew about this place, and what was outside the fence.” David looks puzzled, his bushy eyebrows furrowed. “Well, of course.” The shaking moves down my arms and into my hands, and soon my entire body is shuddering, as if rejecting some kind of poison that I’ve swallowed, and the poison is knowledge, the knowledge of this place and its screens and all the lies I built my life on. “She knew you were watching us at every moment . . . watching as she died and my father died and everyone started killing each other! And did you send in someone to help her, to help me? No! No, all you did was take notes.” “Tris . . .” He tries to reach for me, and I push his hand away. “Don’t call me that. You shouldn’t know that name. You shouldn’t know anything about us.” Shivering, I walk back into the room. Back inside, the others have picked their beds and put their things down. It’s just us in here, no intruders. I lean against the wall by the door and push my palms down the front of my pants to get the sweat off. No one seems to be adjusting well. Peter lies facing the wall. Uriah and Christina sit side by side, having a conversation in low voices. Caleb is massaging his temples with his fingertips. Tobias is still pacing and gnawing on his fingernails. And Cara is on her own, dragging her hand over her face. For the first time since I met her, she looks upset, the Erudite armor gone. I sit down across from her. “You don’t look so good.” Her hair, usually smooth and perfect in its knot, is disheveled. She glowers at me. “That’s kind of you to say.” “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it that way.” “I know.” She sighs. “I’m . . . I’m an Erudite, you know.” I smile a little. “Yeah, I know.” “No.” Cara shakes her head. “It’s the only thing I am. Erudite. And now they’ve told me that’s the result of some kind of flaw in my genetics . . . and that the factions themselves are just a mental prison to keep us under control. Just like Evelyn Johnson and the factionless said.” She pauses. “So why form the Allegiant? Why bother to come out here?” I didn’t realize how much Cara had already cleaved to the idea of being an Allegiant, loyal to the faction system, loyal to our founders. For me it was just a temporary identity, powerful because it could get me out of the city. For her the attachment must have been much deeper. “It’s still good that we came out here,” I say. “We found out the truth. That’s not valuable to you?” “Of course it is,” Cara says softly. “But it means I need other words for what I am.” Just after my mother died, I grabbed hold of my Divergence like it was a hand outstretched to save me. I needed that word to tell me who I was when everything else was coming apart around me. But now I’m wondering if I need it anymore, if we ever really need these words, “Dauntless,” “Erudite,” “Divergent,” “Allegiant,” or if we can just be friends or lovers or siblings, defined instead by the choices we make and the love and loyalty that binds us. “Better check on him,” Cara says, nodding to Tobias. “Yeah,” I say. I cross the room and stand in front of the windows, staring at what we can see of the compound, which is just more of the same glass and steel, pavement and grass and fences. When he sees me, he stops pacing and stands next to me instead. “You all right?” I say to him. “Yeah.” He sits on the windowsill, facing me, so we’re at eye level. “I mean, no, not really. Right now I’m just thinking about how meaningless it all was. The faction system, I mean.” He rubs the back of his neck, and I wonder if he’s thinking about the tattoos on his back. “We put everything we had into it,” he says. “All of us. Even if we didn’t realize we were doing it.” “That’s what you’re thinking about?” I raise my eyebrows. “Tobias, they were watching us. Everything that happened, everything we did. They didn’t intervene, they just invaded our privacy. Constantly.” He rubs his temple with his fingertips. “I guess. That’s not what’s bothering me, though.” I must give him an incredulous look without meaning to, because he shakes his head. “Tris, I worked in the Dauntless control room. There were cameras everywhere, all the time. I tried to warn you that people were watching you during your initiation, remember?” I remember his eyes shifting to the ceiling, to the corner. His cryptic warnings, hissed between his teeth. I never realized he was warning me about cameras—it just never occurred to me before. “It used to bother me,” he says. “But I got over it a long time ago. We always thought we were on our own, and now it turns out we were right—they left us on our own. That’s just the way it is.” “I guess I don’t accept that,” I say. “If you see someone in trouble, you should help them. Experiment or not. And . . . God.” I cringe. “All the things they saw.” He smiles at me, a little. “What?” I demand. “I was just thinking of some of the things they saw,” he says, putting his hand on my waist. I glare at him for a moment, but I can’t sustain it, not with him grinning at me like that. Not knowing that he’s trying to make me feel better. I smile a little. I sit next to him on the windowsill, my hands wedged between my legs and the wood. “You know, the Bureau setting up the factions is not much different than what we thought happened: A long time ago, a group of people decided that the faction system would be the best way to live—or the way to get people to live the best lives they could.” He doesn’t respond at first, just chews on the inside of his lip and looks at our feet, side by side on the floor. My toes brush the ground, not quite reaching it. “That helps, actually,” he says. “But there’s so much that was a lie, it’s hard to figure out what was true, what was real, what matters.” I take his hand, slipping my fingers between his. He touches his forehead to mine. I catch myself thinking, Thank God for this, out of habit, and then I understand what he’s so concerned about. What if my parents’ God, their whole belief system, is just something concocted by a bunch of scientists to keep us under control? And not just their beliefs about God and whatever else is out there, but about right and wrong, about selflessness? Do all those things have to change because we know how our world was made? I don’t know. The thought rattles me. So I kiss him—slowly, so I can feel the warmth of his mouth and the gentle pressure and his breaths as we pull away. “Why is it,” I say, “that we always find ourselves surrounded by people?” “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe because we’re stupid.” I laugh, and it’s laughter, not light, that casts out the darkness building within me, that reminds me I am still alive, even in this strange place where everything I’ve ever known is coming apart. I know some things—I know that I’m not alone, that I have friends, that I’m in love. I know where I came from. I know that I don’t want to die, and for me, that’s something—more than I could have said a few weeks ago. That night we push our cots just a little closer together, and look into each other’s eyes in the moments before we fall asleep. When he finally drifts off, our fingers are twisted together in the space between the beds. I smile a little, and let myself go too. CHAPTER SIXTEEN TOBIAS THE SUN STILL hasn’t completely set when we fall asleep, but I wake a few hours later, at midnight, my mind too busy for rest, swarming with thoughts and questions and doubts. Tris released me earlier, and her fingers now brush the floor. She is sprawled over the mattress, her hair covering her eyes. I shove my feet into my shoes and walk the hallways, shoelaces slapping the carpets. I am so accustomed to the Dauntless compound that I am not used to the creak of wooden floors beneath me—I am used to the scrape and echo of stone, and the roar and pulse of water in the chasm. A week into my initiation, Amar—worried that I was becoming increasingly isolated and obsessive—invited me to join some of the older Dauntless for a game of Dare. For my dare, we went back to the Pit for me to get my first tattoo, the patch of Dauntless flames covering my rib cage. It was agonizing. I relished every second of it. I reach the end of one hallway and find myself in an atrium, surrounded by the smell of wet earth. Everywhere plants and trees are suspended in water, the same way they were in the Amity greenhouses. In the center of the room is a tree in a giant water tank, lifted high above the floor so I can see the tangle of roots beneath it, strangely human, like nerves. “You’re not nearly as vigilant as you used to be,” Amar says from behind me. “Followed you all the way here from the hotel lobby.” “What do you want?” I tap the tank with my knuckles, sending ripples through the water. “I thought you might like an explanation for why I’m not dead,” he says. “I thought about it,” I say. “They never let us see your body. It wouldn’t be that hard to fake a death if you never show the body.” “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” Amar claps his hands together. “Well, I’ll just go, then, if you’re not curious. . . .” I cross my arms. Amar runs a hand over his black hair, tying it back with a rubber band. “They faked my death because I was Divergent, and Jeanine had started killing the Divergent. They tried to save as many as they could before she got to them, but it was tricky, you know, because she was always a step ahead.” “Are there others?” I say. “A few,” he says. “Any named Prior?” Amar shakes his head. “No, Natalie Prior is actually dead, unfortunately. She was the one who helped me get out. She also helped this other guy too . . . George Wu. Know him? He’s on a patrol right now, or he would have come with me to get you. His sister is still inside the city.” The name clutches at my stomach. “Oh God,” I say, and I lean into the tank wall. “What? You know him?” I shake my head. I can’t imagine it. There were just a few hours between Tori’s death and our arrival. On a normal day, a few hours can contain long stretches of watch-checking, of empty time. But yesterday, just a few hours placed an impenetrable barrier between Tori and her brother. “Tori is his sister,” I say. “She tried to leave the city with us.” “Tried to,” repeats Amar. “Ah. Wow. That’s . . .” Both of us are quiet for a while. George will never get to reunite with his sister, and she died thinking he had been murdered by Jeanine. There isn’t anything to say—at least, not anything that’s worth saying. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the light, I can see that the plants in this room were selected for beauty, not practicality—flowers and ivy and clusters of purple or red leaves. The only flowers I’ve ever seen are wildflowers, or apple blossoms in the Amity orchards. These are more extravagant than those, vibrant and complex, petals folded into petals. Whatever this place is, it has not needed to be as pragmatic as our city. “That woman who found your body,” I say. “Was she just . . . lying about it?” “People can’t really be trusted to lie consistently.” He quirks his eyebrows. “Never thought I would say that phrase—it’s true, anyway. She was reset—her memory was altered to include me jumping off the Pire, and the body that was planted wasn’t actually me. But it was too messed up for anyone to notice.” “She was reset. You mean, with the Abnegation serum.” “We call it ‘memory serum,’ since it doesn’t technically just belong to the Abnegation, but yeah. That’s the one.” I was angry with him before. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I was just angry that the world had become such a complicated place, that I have never known even a fraction of the truth about it. Or that I allowed myself to grieve for someone who was never really gone, the same way I grieved for my mother all the years I thought she was dead. Tricking someone into grief is one of the cruelest tricks a person can play, and it’s been played on me twice. But as I look at him, my anger ebbs away, like the changing of the tide. And standing in the place of my anger is my initiation instructor and friend, alive again. I grin. “So you’re alive,” I say. “More importantly,” he says, pointing at me, “you are no longer upset about it.” He grabs my arm and pulls me into an embrace, slapping my back with one hand. I try to return his enthusiasm, but it doesn’t come naturally—when we break apart, my face is hot. And judging by how he bursts into laughter, it’s also bright red. “Once a Stiff, always a Stiff,” he says. “Whatever,” I say. “So do you like it here, then?” Amar shrugs. “I don’t really have a choice, but yeah, I like it fine. I work in security, obviously, since that’s all I was trained to do. We’d love to have you, but you’re probably too good for it.” “I haven’t quite resigned myself to staying here just yet,” I say. “But thanks, I guess.” “There’s nowhere better out there,” he says. “All the other cities—that’s where most of the country lives, in these big metropolitan areas, like our city—are dirty and dangerous, unless you know the right people. Here at least there’s clean water and food and safety.” I shift my weight, uncomfortable. I don’t want to think about staying here, making this my home. I already feel trapped by my own disappointment. This is not what I imagined when I thought of escaping my parents and the bad memories they gave me. But I don’t want to disturb the peace with Amar now that I finally feel like I have my friend back, so I just say, “I’ll take that under advisement.” “Listen, there’s something else you should know.” “What? More resurrections?” “It’s not exactly a resurrection if I was never dead, is it?” Amar shakes his head. “No, it’s about the city. Someone heard it in the control room today—Marcus’s trial is scheduled for tomorrow morning.” I knew it was coming—I knew Evelyn would save him for last, would savor every moment she spent watching him squirm under truth serum like he was her last meal. I just didn’t realize that I would be able to see it, if I wanted to. I thought I was finally free of them, all of them, forever. “Oh,” is all I can say. I still feel numb and confused when I walk back to the dormitory later and crawl back into bed. I don’t know what I’ll do. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TRIS I WAKE JUST before the sun. No one else stirs in their cot—Tobias’s arm is draped over his eyes, but his shoes are now on, like he got up and walked around in the middle of the night. Christina’s head is buried beneath her pillow. I lay for a few minutes, finding patterns in the ceiling, then put on my shoes and run my fingers through my hair to flatten it. The hallways in the compound are empty except for a few stragglers. I assume they are just finishing the night shift, because they are hunched over screens, their chins propped on their hands, or slumped against broomsticks, barely remembering to sweep. I put my hands in my pockets and follow the signs to the entrance. I want to get a better look at the sculpture I saw yesterday. Whoever built this place must have loved light. There is glass in the curve of each hallway’s ceiling and along each lower wall. Even now, when it is barely morning, there is plenty of light to see by. I check my back pocket for the badge Zoe handed to me at dinner last night, and pass the security checkpoint with it in hand. Then I see the sculpture, a few hundred yards away from the doors we entered through yesterday, gloomy and massive and mysterious, like a living entity. It is a huge slab of dark stone, square and rough, like the rocks at the bottom of the chasm. A large crack runs through the middle of it, and there are streaks of lighter rock near the edges. Suspended above the slab is a glass tank of the same dimensions, full of water. A light placed above the center of the tank shines through the water, refracting as it ripples. I hear a faint noise, a drop of water hitting the stone. It comes from a small tube running through the center of the tank. At first I think the tank is just leaking, but another drop falls, then a third, and a fourth, at the same interval. A few drops collect, and then disappear down a narrow channel in the stone. They must be intentional. “Hello.” Zoe stands on the other side of the sculpture. “I’m sorry, I was about to go to the dormitory for you, then saw you heading this way and wondered if you were lost.” “No, I’m not lost,” I say. “This is where I meant to go.” “Ah.” She stands beside me and crosses her arms. She is about as tall as I am, but she stands straighter, so she seems taller. “Yeah, it’s pretty weird, right?” As she talks I watch the freckles on her cheeks, dappled like sunlight through dense leaves. “Does it mean something?” “It’s the symbol of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare,” she says. “The slab of stone is the problem we’re facing. The tank of water is our potential for changing that problem. And the drop of water is what we’re actually able to do, at any given time.” I can’t help it—I laugh. “Not very encouraging, is it?” She smiles. “That’s one way of looking at it. I prefer to look at it another way—which is that if they are persistent enough, even tiny drops of water, over time, can change the rock forever. And it will never change back.” She points to the center of the slab, where there is a small impression, like a shallow bowl carved into the stone. “That, for example, wasn’t there when they installed this thing.” I nod, and watch the next drop fall. Even though I’m wary of the Bureau and everyone in it, I can feel the quiet hope of the sculpture working its way through me. It’s a practical symbol, communicating the patient attitude that has allowed the people here to stay for so long, watching and waiting. But I have to ask. “Wouldn’t it be more effective to unleash the whole tank at once?” I imagine the wave of water colliding with the rock and spilling over the tile floor, collecting around my shoes. Doing a little at once can fix something, eventually, but I feel like when you believe that something is truly a problem, you throw everything you have at it, because you just can’t help yourself. “Momentarily,” she says. “But then we wouldn’t have any water left to do anything else, and genetic damage isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved with one big charge.” “I understand that,” I say. “I’m just wondering if it’s a good thing to resign yourself quite this much to small steps when you could take some big ones.” “Like what?” I shrug. “I guess I don’t really know. But it’s worth thinking about.” “Fair enough.” “So . . . you said you were looking for me?” I say. “Why?” “Oh!” Zoe touches her forehead. “It slipped my mind. David asked me to find you and take you to the labs. There’s something there that belonged to your mother.” “My mother?” My voice comes out sounding strangled and too high. She leads me away from the sculpture and toward the security checkpoint again. “Fair warning: You might get stared at,” Zoe says as we walk through the security scanner. There are more people in the hallways up ahead now than there were earlier—it must be time for them to start work. “Your face is a familiar one here. People in the Bureau watch the screens often, and for the past few months, you’ve been involved in a lot of interesting things. A lot of the younger people think you’re downright heroic.” “Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.” Zoe stops. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.” I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that everyone has been watching us, like I need to cover myself or hide where they can’t look at me anymore. But there’s not much Zoe can do about it, so I don’t say anything. Most of the people walking the halls wear variations of the same uniform—it comes in dark blue or dull green, and some of them wear the jackets or jumpsuits or sweatshirts open, revealing T-shirts of a wide variety of colors, some with pictures drawn on them. “Do the colors of the uniforms mean anything?” I ask Zoe. “Yes, actually. Dark blue means scientist or researcher, and green means support staff—they do maintenance, upkeep, things like that.” “So they’re like the factionless.” “No,” she says. “No, the dynamic is different here—everyone does what they can to support the mission. Everyone is valued and important.” She was right: People do stare at me. Most of them just look at me for a little too long, but some point, and some even say my name, like it belongs to them. It makes me feel cramped, like I can’t move the way I want to. “A lot of the support staff used to be in the experiment in Indianapolis—another city, not far from here,” Zoe says. “But for them, this transition has been a little bit easier than it will be for you—Indianapolis didn’t have the behavioral components of your city.” She pauses. “The factions, I mean. After a few generations, when your city didn’t tear itself apart and the others did, the Bureau implemented the faction components in the newer cities—Saint Louis, Detroit, and Minneapolis—using the relatively new Indianapolis experiment as a control group. The Bureau always placed experiments in the Midwest, because there’s more space between urban areas here. Out east everything is closer together.” “So in Indianapolis you just . . . corrected their genes and shoved them in a city somewhere? Without factions?” “They had a complex system of rules, but . . . yes, that’s essentially what happened.” “And it didn’t work very well?” “No.” She purses her lips. “Genetically damaged people who have been conditioned by suffering and are not taught to live differently, as the factions would have taught them to, are very destructive. That experiment failed quickly—within three generations. Chicago—your city—and the other cities that have factions have made it through much more than that.” Chicago. It’s so strange to have a name for the place that was always just home to me. It makes the city smaller in my mind. “So you guys have been doing this for a long time,” I say. “Quite some time, yes. The Bureau is different from most government agencies, because of the focused nature of our work and our contained, relatively remote location. We pass on knowledge and purpose to our children, instead of relying on appointments or hiring. I’ve been training for what I’m doing now for my entire life.” Through the abundant windows I see a strange vehicle—it’s shaped like a bird, with two wing structures and a pointed nose, but it has wheels, like a car. “Is that for air travel?” I say, pointing at it. “Yes.” She smiles. “It’s an airplane. We might be able to take you up in one sometime, if it doesn’t seem too daunting for you.” I don’t react to the play on words. I can’t quite forget how she recognized me on sight. David is standing near one of the doors up ahead. He raises his hand in a wave when he sees us. “Hello, Tris,” he says. “Thank you for bringing her, Zoe.” “You’re welcome, sir,” Zoe says. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Lots of work to do.” She smiles at me, then walks away. I don’t want her to leave—now that she’s gone, I’m left with David and the memory of how I yelled at him yesterday. He doesn’t say anything about it, just scans his badge in the door sensor to open it. The room beyond it is an office with no windows. A young man, maybe Tobias’s age, sits at one desk, and another one, across the room, is empty. The young man looks up when we come in, taps something on his computer screen, and stands. “Hello, sir,” he says. “Can I help you?” “Matthew. Where’s your supervisor?” David says. “He’s foraging for food in the cafeteria,” Matthew says. “Well, maybe you can help me, then. I’ll need Natalie Wright’s file loaded on a portable screen. Can you do that?” Wright? I think. Was that my mother’s real last name? “Of course,” Matthew says, and he sits again. He types something on his computer and pulls up a series of documents that I’m not close enough to see clearly. “Okay, it just has to transfer. “You must be Natalie’s daughter, Beatrice.” He props his chin on his hand and looks at me critically. His eyes are so dark they look black, and they slant a little at the edges. He does not look impressed or surprised to see me. “You don’t look much like her.” “Tris,” I say automatically. But I find it comforting that he doesn’t know my nickname—that must mean he doesn’t spend all his time staring at the screens like our lives in the city are entertainment. “And yeah, I know.” David pulls a chair over, letting it screech on the tile, and pats it. “Sit. I’ll give you a screen with all Natalie’s files on it so that you and your brother can read them yourselves, but while they’re loading I might as well tell you the story.” I sit on the edge of the chair, and he sits behind the desk of Matthew’s supervisor, turning a half-empty coffee cup in circles on the metal. “Let me start by saying that your mother was a fantastic discovery. We located her almost by accident inside the damaged world, and her genes were nearly perfect.” David beams. “We took her out of a bad situation and brought her here. She spent several years here, but then we encountered a crisis within your city’s walls, and she volunteered to be placed inside to resolve it. I’m sure you know all about that, though.” For a few seconds all I can do is blink at him. My mother came from outside this place? Where? It hits me, again, that she walked these halls, watched the city on the screens in the control room. Had she sat in this chair? Had her feet touched these tiles? Suddenly I feel like there are invisible marks of my mother everywhere, on every wall and doorknob and pillar. I grip the edge of the seat and try to organize my thoughts enough to ask a question. “No, I don’t know,” I say. “What crisis?” “The Erudite representative had just begun to kill the Divergent, of course,” he says. “His name was Nor—Norman?” “Norton,” says Matthew. “Jeanine’s predecessor. Seems he passed on the idea of killing off the Divergent to her, right before his heart attack.” “Thank you. Anyway, we sent Natalie in to investigate the situation and to stop the deaths. We never dreamed she would be in there for so long, of course, but she was useful—we had never thought about having an insider before, and she was able to do many things that were invaluable to us. As well as building a life for herself, which obviously includes you.” I frown. “But the Divergent were still being killed when I was an initiate.” “You only know about the ones who died,” David says. “Not about the ones who didn’t die. Some of them are here, in this compound. I believe you met Amar earlier? He’s one of them. Some of the rescued Divergent needed some distance from your experiment—it was too hard for them to watch the people they had once known and loved going about their lives, so they were trained to integrate into life outside the Bureau. But yes, she did important work, your mother.” She also told quite a few lies, and very few truths. I wonder if my father knew who she was, where she was really from. He was an Abnegation leader, after all, and as such, one of the keepers of the truth. I have a sudden, horrifying thought: What if she only married him because she was supposed to, as part of her mission in the city? What if their entire relationship was a sham? “So she wasn’t really born Dauntless,” I say as I sort through the lies that must have been. “When she first entered the city, it was as a Dauntless, because she already had tattoos and that would have been hard to explain to the natives. She was sixteen, but we said she was fifteen so she would have some time to adjust. Our intention was for her to . . .” He lifts a shoulder. “Well, you should read her file. I can’t do a sixteen-year-old perspective justice.” As if on cue, Matthew opens a desk drawer and takes out a small, flat piece of glass. He taps it with one fingertip, and an image appears on it. It’s one of the documents he just had open on his computer. He offers the tablet to me. It’s sturdier than I expected it to be, hard and strong. “Don’t worry, it’s practically indestructible,” David says. “I’m sure you want to return to your friends. Matthew, would you please walk Miss Prior back to the hotel? I have some things to take care of.” “And I don’t?” Matthew says. Then he winks. “Kidding, sir. I’ll take her.” “Thank you,” I say to David, before he walks out. “Of course,” he says. “Let me know if you have any questions.” “Ready?” Matthew says. He’s tall, maybe the same height as Caleb, and his black hair is artfully tousled in the front, like he spent a lot of time making it look like he’d just rolled out of bed that way. Under his dark blue uniform he wears a plain black T-shirt and a black string around his throat. It shifts over his Adam’s apple when he swallows. I walk with him out of the small office and down the hallway again. The crowd that was here before has thinned. They must have settled in to work, or breakfast. There are whole lives being lived in this place, sleeping and eating and working, bearing children and raising families and dying. This is a place my mother called home, once. “I wonder when you’re going to freak out,” he says. “After finding out all this stuff at once.” “I’m not going to freak out,” I say, feeling defensive. I already did, I think, but I’m not going to admit to that. Matthew shrugs. “I would. But fair enough.” I see a sign that says HOTEL ENTRANCE up ahead. I clutch the screen to my chest, eager to get back to the dormitory and tell Tobias about my mother. “Listen, one of the things my supervisor and I do is genetic testing,” Matthew says. “I was wondering if you and that other guy—Marcus Eaton’s son?—would mind coming in so that I can test your genes.” “Why?” “Curiosity.” He shrugs. “We haven’t gotten to test the genes of someone in such a late generation of the experiment before, and you and Tobias seem to be somewhat . . . odd, in your manifestations of certain things.” I raise my eyebrows. “You, for example, have displayed extraordinary serum resistance—most of the Divergent aren’t as capable of resisting serums as you are,” Matthew says. “And Tobias can resist simulations, but he doesn’t display some of the characteristics we’ve come to expect of the Divergent. I can explain in more detail later.” I hesitate, not sure if I want to see my genes, or Tobias’s genes, or to compare them, like it matters. But Matthew’s expression seems eager, almost childlike, and I understand curiosity. “I’ll ask him if he’s up for it,” I say. “But I would be willing. When?” “This morning okay?” he says. “I can come get you in an hour or so. You can’t get into the labs without me anyway.” I nod. I feel excited, suddenly, to learn more about my genes, which feels like the same thing as reading my mother’s journal: I will get pieces of her back. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN TOBIAS IT’S STRANGE TO see people you don’t know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks; to know that Christina is cheerful in the morning, and Peter wakes up with his hair perfectly flat, but Cara communicates only through a series of grunts, inching her way, limb by limb, toward coffee. The first thing I do is shower and change into the clothes they provided for us, which aren’t much different from the clothes I am accustomed to, but all the colors are mixed together like they don’t mean anything to the people here, and they probably don’t. I wear a black shirt and blue jeans and try to convince myself that it feels normal, that I feel normal, that I am adapting. My father’s trial is today. I haven’t decided if I’m going to watch it or not. When I return, Tris is already fully dressed, perched on the edge of one of the cots, like she’s ready to leap to her feet at any moment. Just like Evelyn. I grab a muffin from the tray of breakfast food that someone brought us, and sit across from her. “Good morning. You were up early.” “Yeah,” she says, scooting her foot forward so it’s wedged between mine. “Zoe found me at that big sculpture thing this morning—David had something to show me.” She picks up the glass screen resting on the cot beside her. It glows when she touches it, showing a document. “It’s my mother’s file. She wrote a journal—a small one, from the look of it, but still.” She shifts like she’s uncomfortable. “I haven’t looked at it much yet.” “So,” I say, “why aren’t you reading it?” “I don’t know.” She puts it down, and the screen turns off automatically. “I think I’m afraid of it.” Abnegation children rarely know their parents in any significant way, because Abnegation parents never reveal themselves the way other parents do when their children grow to a particular age. They keep themselves wrapped in gray cloth armor and selfless acts, convinced that to share is to be self-indulgent. This is not just a piece of Tris’s mother, recovered; it’s one of the first and last honest glimpses Tris will ever get of who Natalie Prior was. I understand, then, why she holds it like it’s a magical object, something that could disappear in a moment. And why she wants to leave it undiscovered for a while, which is the same way I feel about my father’s trial. It could tell her something she doesn’t want to know. I follow her eyes across the room to where Caleb sits, chewing on a bite of cereal—morosely, like a pouting child. “Are you going to show it to him?” I say. She doesn’t respond. “Usually I don’t advocate giving him anything,” I say. “But in this case . . . this doesn’t really just belong to you.” “I know that,” she says, a little tersely. “Of course I’ll show it to him. But I think I want to be alone with it first.” I can’t argue with that. Most of my life has been spent keeping information close, turning it over and over in my mind. The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing. She sighs, then breaks a piece off the muffin in my hand. I flick her fingers as she pulls away. “Hey. There are plenty more just five feet to your right.” “Then you shouldn’t be so worried about losing some of yours,” she says, grinning. “Fair enough.” She pulls me toward her by the front of my shirt and kisses me. I slip my hand under her chin and hold her still as I kiss her back. Then I notice that she’s stealing another pinch of muffin, and I pull away, glaring at her. “Seriously,” I say. “I’ll get you one from that table. It’ll only take me a second.” She grins. “So, there’s something I wanted to ask you. Would you be up for undergoing a little genetic test this morning?” The phrase “a little genetic test” strikes me as an oxymoron. “Why?” I say. Asking to see my genes feels a little like asking me to strip down. “Well, this guy I met—Matthew is his name—works in one of the labs here, and he says they would be interested in looking at our genetic material for research,” she says. “And he asked about you, specifically, because you’re sort of an anomaly.” “Anomaly?” “Apparently you display some Divergent characteristics and you don’t display others,” she says. “I don’t know. He’s just curious about it. You don’t have to do it.” The air around my head feels warmer and heavier. To alleviate the discomfort I touch the back of my neck, scratching at my hairline. Sometime in the next hour or so, Marcus and Evelyn will be on the screens. Suddenly I know that I can’t watch. So even though I don’t really want to let a stranger examine the puzzle pieces that make up my existence, I say, “Sure. I’ll do it.” “Great,” she says, and she eats another pinch of my muffin. A piece of hair falls into her eyes, and I am brushing it back before she even notices it. She covers my hand with her own, which is warm and strong, and the corners of her mouth curl into a smile. The door opens, admitting a young man with slanted, angular eyes and black hair. I recognize him immediately as George Wu, Tori’s younger brother. “Georgie” was the name she called him. He smiles a giddy smile, and I feel the urge to back away, to put more space between me and his impending grief. “I just got back,” he says, breathless. “They told me my sister set out with you guys, and—” Tris and I exchange a troubled look. All around us, the others are noticing George by the door and going quiet, the same kind of quiet you hear at an Abnegation funeral. Even Peter, who I would expect to crave other people’s pain, looks bewildered, shifting his hands from his waist to his pockets and back again. “And . . .” George begins again. “Why are you all looking at me like that?” Cara steps forward, about to bear the bad news, but I can’t imagine Cara sharing it well, so I get up, talking over her. “Your sister did leave with us,” I say. “But we were attacked by the factionless, and she . . . didn’t make it.” There is so much that phrase doesn’t say—how quick it was, and the sound of her body hitting the earth, and the chaos of everyone running into the night, stumbling over the grass. I didn’t go back for her. I should have—of all the people in our party, I knew Tori best, knew how tightly her hands squeezed the tattoo needle and how her laugh sounded rough, like it had been scraped with sandpaper. George touches the wall behind him for stability. “What?” “She gave her life defending us,” Tris says with surprising gentleness. “Without her, none of us would have made it out.” “She’s . . . dead?” George says weakly. He leans his entire body into the wall, and his shoulders sag. I see Amar in the hallway, a piece of toast in his hand and a smile quickly fading from his face. He sets the toast down on a table by the door. “I tried to find you earlier to tell you,” Amar says. Last night Amar said George’s name so casually, I didn’t think they really knew each other. Apparently they do. George’s eyes turn glassy, and Amar pulls him into an embrace with one arm. George’s fingers are bent at harsh angles into Amar’s shirt, the knuckles white with tension. I don’t hear him cry, and maybe he doesn’t, maybe all he needs to do is hold on to something. I have only hazy memories of my own grief over my mother, when I thought she was dead—just the feeling that I was separate from everything around me, and this constant sensation of needing to swallow something. I don’t know what it’s like for other people. Eventually, Amar leads George out of the room, and I watch them walk down the hallway side by side, talking in low voices. I barely remember that I agreed to participate in a genetic test until someone else appears at the door to the dormitory—a boy, or not really a boy, since he looks about as old as I am. He waves to Tris. “Oh, that’s Matthew,” she says. “I guess we should get going.” She takes my hand and leads me toward the doorway. Somehow I missed her mentioning that “Matthew” wasn’t a crusty old scientist. Or maybe she didn’t mention it at all. Don’t be stupid, I think. Matthew sticks out his hand. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Matthew.” “Tobias,” I say, because “Four” sounds strange here, where people would never identify themselves by how many fears they have. “You too.” “So let’s go to the labs, I guess,” he says. “They’re this way.” The compound is thick with people this morning, all dressed in green or dark blue uniforms that pool around the ankles or stop several inches above the shoe, depending on the height of the person. The compound is full of open areas that branch off the major hallways, like chambers of a heart, each marked with a letter and a number, and the people seem to be moving between them, some carrying glass devices like the one Tris brought back this morning, some empty-handed. “What’s with the numbers?” says Tris. “Just a way of labeling each area?” “They used to be gates,” says Matthew. “Meaning that each one has a door and a walkway that led to a particular airplane going to a particular destination. When they converted the airport into the compound, they ripped out all the chairs people used to wait for their flights in and replaced them with lab equipment, mostly taken from schools in the city. This area of the compound is basically a giant laboratory.” “What are they working on? I thought you were just observing the experiments,” I say, watching a woman rush from one side of the hallway to the other with a screen balanced on both palms like an offering. Beams of light stretch across the polished tile, slanting through the ceiling windows. Through the windows everything looks peaceful, every blade of grass trimmed and the wild trees swaying in the distance, and it’s hard to imagine that people are destroying one another out there because of “damaged genes” or living under Evelyn’s strict rules in the city we left. “Some of them are doing that. Everything that they notice in all the remaining experiments has to be recorded and analyzed, so that requires a lot of manpower. But some of them are also working on better ways to treat the genetic damage, or developing the serums for our own use instead of the experiments’ use—dozens of projects. All you have to do is come up with an idea, gather a team together, and propose it to the council that runs the compound under David. They usually approve anything that isn’t too risky.” “Yeah,” says Tris. “Wouldn’t want to take any risks.” She rolls her eyes a little. “They have a good reason for their endeavors,” Matthew says. “Before the factions were introduced, and the serums with them, the experiments all used to be under near-constant assault from within. The serums help the people in the experiment to keep things under control, especially the memory serum. Well, I guess no one’s working on that right now—it’s in the Weapons Lab.” “Weapons Lab.” He says the words like they’re fragile in his mouth. Sacred words. “So the Bureau gave us the serums, in the beginning,” Tris says. “Yes,” he says. “And then the Erudite continued to work on them, to perfect them. Including your brother. To be honest, we got some of our serum developments from them, by observing them in the control room. Only they didn’t do much with the memory serum—the Abnegation serum. We did a lot more with that, since it’s our greatest weapon.” “A weapon,” Tris repeats. “Well, it arms the cities against their own rebellions, for one thing—erase people’s memories and there’s no need to kill them; they just forget what they were fighting about. And we can also use it against rebels from the fringe, which is about an hour from here. Sometimes fringe dwellers try to raid, and the memory serum stops them without killing them.” “That’s . . .” I start. “Still kind of awful?” Matthew supplies. “Yes, it is. But the higher-ups here think of it as our life support, our breathing machine. Here we are.” I raise my eyebrows. He just spoke out against his own leaders so casually I almost missed it. I wonder if that’s the kind of place this is—where dissent can be expressed in public, in the middle of a normal conversation, instead of in secret spaces, with hushed voices. He scans his card at a heavy door on our left, and we walk down another hallway, this one narrow and lit with pale, fluorescent light. He stops at a door marked GENE THERAPY ROOM 1. Inside, a girl with light brown skin and a green jumpsuit is replacing the paper that covers the exam table. “This is Juanita, the lab technician. Juanita, this is—” “Yeah, I know who they are,” she says, smiling. Out of the corner of my eye I see Tris stiffen, chafing against the reminder that our lives have been on camera. But she doesn’t say anything about it. The girl offers me her hand. “Matthew’s supervisor is the only person who calls me Juanita. Except Matthew, apparently. I’m Nita. You’ll need two tests prepared?” Matthew nods. “I’ll get them.” She opens a set of cabinets across the room and starts pulling things out. All of them are encased in plastic and paper and have white labels. The room is full of the sound of crinkling and ripping. “How do you guys like it here so far?” she asks us. “It’s been an adjustment,” I say. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” Nita smiles at me. “I came from one of the other experiments—the one in Indianapolis, the one that failed. Oh, you don’t know where Indianapolis is, do you? It’s not far from here. Less than an hour by plane.” She pauses. “That won’t mean anything to you either. You know what? It’s not important.” She takes a syringe and needle from its plastic-paper wrapping, and Tris tenses. “What’s that for?” Tris says. “It’s what will enable us to read your genes,” Matthew says. “Are you okay?” “Yeah,” Tris says, but she’s still tense. “I just . . . don’t like to be injected with strange substances.” Matthew nods. “I swear it’s just going to read your genes. That’s all it does. Nita can vouch for it.” Nita nods. “Okay,” Tris says. “But . . . can I do it to myself?” “Sure,” Nita says. She prepares the syringe, filling it with whatever they intend to inject us with, and offers it to Tris. “I’ll give you the simplified explanation of how this works,” Matthew says as Nita brushes Tris’s arm with antiseptic. The smell is sour, and it nips at the inside of my nose. “The fluid is packed with microcomputers. They are designed to detect specific genetic markers and transmit the data to a computer. It will take them about an hour to give me as much information as I need, though it would take them much longer to read all your genetic material, obviously.” Tris sticks the needle into her arm and presses the plunger. Nita beckons my arm forward and drags the orange-stained gauze over my skin. The fluid in the syringe is silver-gray, like fish scales, and as it flows into me through the needle, I imagine the microscopic technology chewing through my body, reading me and analyzing me. Beside me, Tris holds a cotton ball to her pricked skin and offers me a small smile. “What are the . . . microcomputers?” Matthew nods, and I continue. “What are they looking for, exactly?” “Well, when our predecessors at the Bureau inserted ‘corrected’ genes into your ancestors, they also included a genetic tracker, which is basically something that shows us that a person has achieved genetic healing. In this case, the genetic tracker is awareness during simulations—it’s something we can easily test for, which shows us if your genes are healed or not. That’s one of the reasons why everyone in the city has to take the aptitude test at sixteen—if they’re aware during the test, that shows us that they might have healed genes.” I add the aptitude test to a mental list of things that were once so important to me, cast aside because it was just a ruse to get these people the information or result they wanted. I can’t believe that awareness during simulations, something that made me feel powerful and unique, something Jeanine and the Erudite killed people for, is actually just a sign of genetic healing to these people. Like a special code word, telling them I’m in their genetically healed society. Matthew continues, “The only problem with the genetic tracker is that being aware during simulations and resisting serums doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is Divergent, it’s just a strong correlation. Sometimes people will be aware during simulations or be able to resist serums even if they still have damaged genes.” He shrugs. “That’s why I’m interested in your genes, Tobias. I’m curious to see if you’re actually Divergent, or if your simulation awareness just makes it look like you are.” Nita, who is clearing the counter, presses her lips together like she is holding words inside her mouth. I feel suddenly uneasy. There’s a chance I’m not actually Divergent? “All that’s left is to sit and wait,” Matthew says. “I’m going to go get breakfast. Do either of you want something to eat?” Tris and I both shake our heads. “I’ll be back soon. Nita, keep them company, would you?” Matthew leaves without waiting for Nita’s response, and Tris sits on the examination table, the paper crinkling beneath her and tearing where her leg hangs over the edge. Nita puts her hands in her jumpsuit pockets and looks at us. Her eyes are dark, with the same sheen as a puddle of oil beneath a leaking engine. She hands me a cotton ball, and I press it to the bubble of blood inside my elbow. “So you came from a city experiment,” says Tris. “How long have you been here?” “Since the Indianapolis experiment was disbanded, which was about eight years ago. I could have integrated into the greater population, outside the experiments, but that felt too overwhelming.” Nita leans against the counter. “So I volunteered to come here. I used to be a janitor. I’m moving through the ranks, I guess.” She says it with a certain amount of bitterness. I suspect that here, as in Dauntless, there is a limit to her climb through the ranks, and she is reaching it earlier than she would like to. The same way I did, when I chose my job in the control room. “And your city, it didn’t have factions?” Tris says. “No, it was the control group—it helped them to figure out that the factions were actually effective by comparison. It had a lot of rules, though—curfew, wake-up times, safety regulations. No weapons allowed. Stuff like that.” “What happened?” I say, and a moment later I wish I hadn’t asked, because the corners of Nita’s mouth turn down, like the memory hangs heavy from each side. “Well, a few of the people inside still knew how to make weapons. They made a bomb—you know, an explosive—and set it off in the government building,” she says. “Lots of people died. And after that, the Bureau decided our experiment was a failure. They erased the memories of the bombers and relocated the rest of us. I’m one of the only ones who wanted to come here.” “I’m sorry,” Tris says softly. Sometimes I still forget to look for the gentler parts of her. For so long all I saw was the strength, standing out like the wiry muscles in her arms or the black ink marking her collarbone with flight. “It’s all right. It’s not like you guys don’t know about stuff like this,” says Nita. “With what Jeanine Matthews did, and all.” “Why haven’t they shut our city down?” Tris says. “The same way they did to yours?” “They might still shut it down,” says Nita. “But I think the Chicago experiment, in particular, has been a success for so long that they’ll be a little reluctant to just ditch it now. It was the first one with factions.” I take the cotton ball away from my arm. There is a tiny red dot where the needle went in, but it isn’t bleeding anymore. “I like to think I would have chosen Dauntless,” says Nita. “But I don’t think I would have had the stomach for it.” “You’d be surprised what you have the stomach for, when you have to,” Tris says. I feel a pang in the middle of my chest. She’s right. Desperation can make a person do surprising things. We would both know. Matthew returns right at the hour mark, and he sits at the computer for a long time after that, his eyes flicking back and forth as he reads the screen. A few times he makes a revelatory noise, a “hmm!” or an “ah!” The longer he waits to tell us something, anything, the more tense my muscles become, until my shoulders feel like they are made of stone instead of flesh. Finally he looks up and turns the screen around so we can see what’s on it. “This program helps us to interpret the data in an understandable way. What you see here is a simplified depiction of a particular DNA sequence in Tris’s genetic material,” he says. The picture on the screen is a complicated mass of lines and numbers, with certain parts selected in yellow and red. I can’t make any sense of the picture beyond that—it is above my level of comprehension. “These selections here suggest healed genes. We wouldn’t see them if the genes were damaged.” He taps certain parts of the screen. I don’t understand what he’s pointing at, but he doesn’t seem to notice, caught up in his own explanation. “These selections over here indicate that the program also found the genetic tracker, the simulation awareness. The combination of healed genes and simulation awareness genes is just what I expected to see from a Divergent. Now, this is the strange part.” He touches the screen again, and the screen changes, but it remains just as confusing, a web of lines, tangled threads of numbers. “This is the map of Tobias’s genes,” Matthew says. “As you can see, he has the right genetic components for simulation awareness, but he doesn’t have the same ‘healed’ genes that Tris does.” My throat is dry, and I feel like I’ve been given bad news, but I still haven’t entirely grasped what that bad news is. “What does that mean?” I ask. “It means,” Matthew says, “that you are not Divergent. Your genes are still damaged, but you have a genetic anomaly that allows you to be aware during simulations anyway. You have, in other words, the appearance of a Divergent without actually being one.” I process the information slowly, piece by piece. I’m not Divergent. I’m not like Tris. I’m genetically damaged. The word “damaged” sinks inside me like it’s made of lead. I guess I always knew there was something wrong with me, but I thought it was because of my father, or my mother, and the pain they bequeathed to me like a family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation. And this means that the one good thing my father had—his Divergence—didn’t reach me. I don’t look at Tris—I can’t bear it. Instead I look at Nita. Her expression is hard, almost angry. “Matthew,” she says. “Don’t you want to take this data to your lab to analyze?” “Well, I was planning on discussing it with our subjects here,” Matthew says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Tris says, sharp as a blade. Matthew says something I don’t really hear; I’m listening to the thump of my heart. He taps the screen again, and the picture of my DNA disappears, so the screen is blank, just glass. He leaves, instructing us to visit his lab if we want more information, and Tris, Nita, and I stand in the room in silence. “It’s not that big a deal,” Tris says firmly. “Okay?” “You don’t get to tell me it’s not a big deal!” I say, louder than I mean to be. Nita busies herself at the counter, making sure the containers there are lined up, though they haven’t moved since we first came in. “Yeah, I do!” Tris exclaims. “You’re the same person you were five minutes ago and four months ago and eighteen years ago! This doesn’t change anything about you.” I hear something in her words that’s right, but it’s hard to believe her right now. “So you’re telling me this affects nothing,” I say. “The truth affects nothing.” “What truth?” she says. “These people tell you there’s something wrong with your genes, and you just believe it?” “It was right there.” I gesture to the screen. “You saw it.” “I also see you,” she says fiercely, her hand closing around my arm. “And I know who you are.” I shake my head. I still can’t look at her, can’t look at anything in particular. “I . . . need to take a walk. I’ll see you later.” “Tobias, wait—” I walk out, and some of the pressure inside me releases as soon as I’m not in that room anymore. I walk down the cramped hallway that presses against me like an exhale, and into the sunlit halls beyond it. The sky is bright blue now. I hear footsteps behind me, but they’re too heavy to belong to Tris. “Hey.” Nita twists her foot, making it squeak against the tile. “No pressure, but I’d like to talk to you about all this . . . genetic-damage stuff. If you’re interested, meet me here tonight at nine. And . . . no offense to your girl or anything, but you might not want to bring her.” “Why?” I say. “She’s a GP—genetically pure. So she can’t understand that—well, it’s hard to explain. Just trust me, okay? She’s better off staying away for a little while.” “Okay.” “Okay.” Nita nods. “Gotta go.” I watch her run back toward the gene therapy room, and then I keep walking. I don’t know where I’m going, exactly, just that when I walk, the frenzy of information I’ve learned in the past day stops moving quite so fast, stops shouting quite so loud inside my head. CHAPTER NINETEEN TRIS I DON’T GO after him, because I don’t know what to say. When I found out I was Divergent, I thought of it as a secret power that no one else possessed, something that made me different, better, stronger. Now, after comparing my DNA to Tobias’s on a computer screen, I realize that “Divergent” doesn’t mean as much as I thought it did. It’s just a word for a particular sequence in my DNA, like a word for all people with brown eyes or blond hair. I lean my head into my hands. But these people still think it means something—they still think it means I’m healed in a way that Tobias is not. And they want me to just trust that, believe it. Well, I don’t. And I’m not sure why Tobias does—why he’s so eager to believe that he is damaged. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I leave the gene therapy room just as Nita is walking back to it. “What did you say to him?” I say. She’s pretty. Tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, her skin rich with color. “I just made sure he knew where he was going,” she says. “It’s a confusing place.” “It certainly is.” I start toward—well, I don’t know where I’m going, but it’s away from Nita, the pretty girl who talks to my boyfriend when I’m not there. Then again, it’s not like it was a long conversation. I spot Zoe at the end of the hallway, and she waves me toward her. She looks more relaxed now than she did earlier this morning, her forehead smooth instead of creased, her hair loose over her shoulders. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jumpsuit. “I just told the others,” she says. “We’ve scheduled a plane ride in two hours for those who want to go. Are you up for it?” Fear and excitement squirm together in my stomach, just like they did before I was strapped in on the zip line atop the Hancock building. I imagine hurtling into the air in a car with wings, the energy of the engine and the rush of wind through all the spaces in the walls and the possibility, however slight, that something will fail and I will plummet to my death. “Yes,” I say. “We’re meeting at gate B14. Follow the signs!” She flashes a smile as she leaves. I look through the windows above me. The sky is clear and pale, the same color as my own eyes. There is a kind of inevitability in it, like it has always been waiting for me, maybe because I relish height while others fear it, or maybe because once you have seen the things that I have seen, there is only one frontier left to explore, and it is above. The metal stairs leading down to the pavement screech with each of my footsteps. I have to tilt my head back to look at the airplane, which is bigger than I expected it to be, and silver-white. Just below the wing is a huge cylinder with spinning blades inside it. I imagine the blades sucking me in and spitting me out the other side, and shudder a little. “How can something that big stay in the sky?” Uriah says from behind me. I shake my head. I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it. I follow Zoe up another set of stairs, this one connected to a hole in the side of the plane. My hand shakes when I grab the railing, and I look over my shoulder one last time, to check if Tobias caught up to us. He isn’t there. I haven’t seen him since the genetic test. I duck when I go through the hole, though it’s taller than my head. Inside the airplane are rows and rows of seats covered in ripped, fraying blue fabric. I choose one near the front, next to a window. A metal bar pushes against my spine. It feels like a chair skeleton with barely any flesh to support it. Cara sits behind me, and Peter and Caleb move toward the back of the plane and sit near each other, next to the window. I didn’t know they were friends. It seems fitting, given how despicable they both are. “How old is this thing?” I ask Zoe, who stands near the front. “Pretty old,” she says. “But we’ve completely redone the important stuff. It’s a nice size for what we need.” “What do you use it for?” “Surveillance missions, mostly. We like to keep an eye on what’s happening in the fringe, in case it threatens what’s happening in here.” Zoe pauses. “The fringe is a large, sort of chaotic place between Chicago and the nearest government-regulated metropolitan area, Milwaukee, which is about a three-hour drive from here.” I would like to ask what exactly is happening in the fringe, but Uriah and Christina sit in the seats next to me, and the moment is lost. Uriah puts an armrest down between us and leans over me to look out the window. “If the Dauntless knew about this, everyone would be getting in line to learn how to drive it,” he says. “Including me.” “No, they would be strapping themselves to the wings.” Christina pokes his arm. “Don’t you know your own faction?” Uriah pokes her cheek in response, then turns back to the window again. “Have either of you seen Tobias lately?” I say. “No, haven’t seen him,” Christina says. “Everything okay?” Before I can answer, an older woman with lines around her mouth stands in the aisle between the rows of seats and claps her hands. “My name is Karen, and I’ll be flying this plane today!” she announces. “It may seem frightening, but remember: The odds of us crashing are actually much lower than the odds of a car crash.” “So are the odds of survival if we do crash,” Uriah mutters, but he’s grinning. His dark eyes are alert, and he looks giddy, like a child. I haven’t seen him this way since Marlene died. He’s handsome again. Karen disappears into the front of the plane, and Zoe sits across the aisle from Christina, twisting around to call out instructions like “Buckle your seat belts!” and “Don’t stand up until we’ve reached our cruising altitude!” I’m not sure what cruising altitude is, and she doesn’t explain it, in true Zoe fashion. It was almost a miracle that she remembered to explain the fringe earlier. The plane starts to move backward, and I’m surprised by how smooth it feels, like we’re already floating over the ground. Then it turns and glides over the pavement, which is painted with dozens of lines and symbols. My heart beats faster the farther we go away from the compound, and then Karen’s voice speaks through an intercom: “Prepare for takeoff.” I clench the armrests as the plane lurches into motion. The momentum presses me back against the skeleton chair, and the view out the window turns into a smear of color. Then I feel it—the lift, the rising of the plane, and I see the ground stretching wide beneath us, everything getting smaller by the second. My mouth hangs open and I forget to breathe. I see the compound, shaped like the picture of a neuron I once saw in my science textbook, and the fence that surrounds it. Around it is a web of concrete roads with buildings sandwiched between them. And then suddenly, I can’t even see the roads or the buildings anymore, because there is just a sheet of gray and green and brown beneath us, and farther than I can see in any direction is land, land, land. I don’t know what I expected. To see the place where the world ends, like a giant cliff hanging in the sky? What I didn’t expect is to know that I have been a person standing in a house that I can’t even see from here. That I have walked a street among hundreds—thousands—of other streets. What I didn’t expect is to feel so, so small. “We can’t fly too high or too close to the city because we don’t want to draw attention, so we’ll observe from a great distance. Coming up on the left side of the plane is some of the destruction caused by the Purity War, before the rebels resorted to biological warfare instead of explosives,” Zoe says. I have to blink tears from my eyes before I can see it, what looks at first to be a group of dark buildings. Upon further examination, I realize that the buildings aren’t supposed to be dark—they’re charred beyond recognition. Some of them are flattened. The pavement between them is broken in pieces like a cracked eggshell. It resembles certain parts of the city, but at the same time, it doesn’t. The city’s destruction could have been caused by people. This had to have been caused by something else, something bigger. “And now you’ll get a brief look at Chicago!” Zoe says. “You’ll see that some of the lake was drained so that we could build the fence, but we left as much of it intact as possible.” At her words I see the two-pronged Hub as small as a toy in the distance, the jagged line of our city interrupting the sea of concrete. And beyond it, a brown expanse—the marsh—and just past that . . . blue. Once I slid down a zip line from the Hancock building and imagined what the marsh looked like full of water, blue-gray and gleaming under the sun. And now that I can see farther than I have ever seen, I know that far beyond our city’s limits, it is just like what I imagined, the lake in the distance glinting with streaks of light, marked with the texture of waves. The plane is silent around me except for the steady roar of the engine. “Whoa,” says Uriah. “Shh,” Christina replies. “How big is it compared to the rest of the world?” Peter says from across the plane. He sounds like he’s choking on each word. “Our city, I mean. In terms of land area. What percentage?” “Chicago takes up about two hundred twenty-seven square miles,” says Zoe. “The land area of the planet is a little less than two hundred million square miles. The percentage is . . . so small as to be negligible.” She delivers the facts calmly, as if they mean nothing to her. But they hit me square in the stomach, and I feel squeezed, like something is crushing me into myself. So much space. I wonder what it’s like in the places beyond ours; I wonder how people live there. I look out the window again, taking slow, deep breaths into a body too tense to move. And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents’ God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel. So small as to be negligible. It’s strange, but there’s something in that thought that makes me feel almost . . . free. That evening, when everyone else is at dinner, I sit on the window ledge in the dormitory and turn on the screen David gave me. My hands tremble as I open the file labeled “Journal.” The first entry reads: David keeps asking me to write down what I experienced. I think he expects it to be horrifying, maybe even wants it to be. I guess parts of it were, but they were bad for everyone, so it’s not like I’m special. I grew up in a single-family home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I never knew much about who was inside the territory outside the city (which everyone around here calls “the fringe”), just that I wasn’t supposed to go there. My mom was in law enforcement; she was explosive and impossible to please. My dad was a teacher; he was pliable and supportive and useless. One day they got into it in the living room and things got out of hand, and he grabbed her and she shot him. That night she was burying his body in the backyard while I assembled a good portion of my possessions and left through the front door. I never saw her again. Where I grew up, tragedy is all over the place. Most of my friends’ parents drank themselves stupid or yelled too much or had stopped loving each other a long time ago, and that was just the way of things, no big deal. So when I left I’m sure I was just another item on a long list of awful things that had happened in our neighborhood in the past year. I knew that if I went anyplace official, like to another city, the government types would just make me go home to my mom, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to look at her without seeing the streak of blood my dad’s head left on the living room carpet, so I didn’t go anyplace official. I went to the fringe, where a whole bunch of people are living in a little colony made of tarp and aluminum in some of the postwar wreckage, living on scraps and burning old papers for warmth because the government can’t provide, since they’re spending all their resources trying to put us back together again, and have been for over a century after the war ripped us apart. Or they won’t provide. I don’t know. One day I saw a grown man beating up one of the kids in the fringe, and I hit him over the head with a plank to get him to stop and he died, right there in the street. I was only thirteen. I ran. I got snatched by some guy in a van, some guy who looked like police. But he didn’t take me to the side of the road to shoot me and he didn’t take me to jail; he just took me to this secure area and tested my genes and told me all about the city experiments and how my genes were cleaner than other people’s. He even showed me a map of my genes on a screen to prove it. But I killed a man just like my mother did. David says it’s okay because I didn’t mean to, and because he was about to kill that little kid. But I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t mean to kill my dad, either, so what difference does that make, meaning or not meaning to do something? Accident or on purpose, the result is the same, and that’s one fewer life than there should be in the world. That’s what I experienced, I guess. And to hear David talk about it, it’s like it all happened because a long, long time ago people tried to mess with human nature and ended up making it worse. I guess that makes sense. Or I’d like it to. My teeth dig into my lower lip. Here in the Bureau compound, people are sitting in the cafeteria right now, eating and drinking and laughing. In the city, they’re probably doing the same thing. Ordinary life surrounds me, and I am alone with these revelations. I clutch the screen to my chest. My mother was from here. This place is both my ancient and my recent history. I can feel her in the walls, in the air. I can feel her settled inside me, never to leave again. Death could not erase her; she is permanent. The cold from the glass seeps through my shirt, and I shiver. Uriah and Christina walk through the door to the dormitory, laughing about something. Uriah’s clear eyes and steady footsteps fill me with a sense of relief, and my eyes well up with tears all of a sudden. He and Christina both look alarmed, and they lean against the windows on either side of me. “You okay?” she says. I nod and blink the tears away. “Where have you guys been today?” “After the plane ride we went and watched the screens in the control room for a while,” Uriah says. “It’s really weird to see what they’re up to now that we’re gone. Just more of the same—Evelyn’s a jerk, so are all her lackeys, and so on—but it was like getting a news report.” “I don’t think I’d like to look at those,” I say. “Too . . . creepy and invasive.” Uriah shrugs. “I don’t know, if they want to watch me scratch my butt or eat dinner, I feel like that says more about them than about me.” I laugh. “How often are you scratching your butt, exactly?” He jostles me with his elbow. “Not to derail the conversation from butts, which we can all agree is incredibly important—” Christina smiles a little. “But I’m with you, Tris. Just watching those screens made me feel awful, like I was doing something sneaky. I think I’ll be staying away from now on.” She points to the screen in my lap, where the light still glows around my mother’s words. “What’s that?” “As it turns out,” I say, “my mother was from here. Well, she was from the world outside, but then she came here, and when she was fifteen, she was placed in Chicago as a Dauntless.” Christina says, “Your mother was from here?” I nod. “Yeah. Insane. Even weirder, she wrote this journal and left it with them. That’s what I was reading before you came in.” “Wow,” Christina says softly. “That’s good, right? I mean, that you get to learn more about her.” “Yeah, it’s good. And no, I’m not still upset, you can stop looking at me like that.” The look of concern that had been building on Uriah’s face disappears. I sigh. “I just keep thinking . . . that in some way I belong here. Like maybe this place can be home.” Christina pinches her eyebrows together. “Maybe,” she says, and I feel like she doesn’t believe it, but it’s nice of her to say it anyway. “I don’t know,” Uriah says, and he sounds serious now. “I’m not sure anywhere will feel like home again. Not even if we went back.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe we’re strangers no matter where we go, whether it’s to the world outside the Bureau, or here in the Bureau, or back in the experiment. Everything has changed, and it won’t stop changing anytime soon. Or maybe we’ll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go—which is the way I carry my mother now. Caleb walks into the dormitory. There’s a stain on his shirt that looks like sauce, but he doesn’t seem to notice it—he has the look in his eye that I now recognize as intellectual fascination, and for a moment I wonder what he’s been reading, or watching, to make him look that way. “Hi,” he says, and he almost makes a move toward me, but he must see my revulsion, because he stops in the middle of a step. I cover the screen with my palm, though he can’t see it from across the room, and stare at him, unable—or unwilling—to say anything in reply. “You think you’ll ever speak to me again?” he says sadly, his mouth turning down at the corners. “If she does, I’ll die of shock,” Christina says coldly. I look away. The truth is, sometimes I want to just forget about everything that’s happened and return to the way we were before either of us chose a faction. Even if he was always correcting me, reminding me to be selfless, it was better than this—this feeling that I need to protect even my mother’s journal from him, so that he can’t poison it like he’s done to everything else. I get up and slip it under my pillow. “Come on,” Uriah says to me. “Want to go with us to get some dessert?” “You didn’t already have some?” “So what if I did?” Uriah rolls his eyes and puts his arm across my shoulders, steering me toward the door. Together the three of us walk toward the cafeteria, leaving my brother behind. CHAPTER TWENTY TOBIAS “WASN’T SURE IF you would come,” Nita says to me. When she turns to lead me wherever we’re going, I see that her loose shirt is low in the back, and there’s a tattoo on her spine, but I can’t make out what it is. “You get tattoos too, here?” I say. “Some people do,” she says. “The one on my back is of broken glass.” She pauses, the kind of pause you take when you’re deciding whether or not to share something personal. “I got it because it suggests damage. It’s . . . sort of a joke.” There’s that word again, “damage,” the one that’s been sinking and surfacing, sinking and surfacing in my mind since the genetic test. If it’s a joke, it’s not a funny one even for Nita—she spits out the explanation like it tastes bitter to her. We walk down one of the tiled corridors, nearly empty now at the end of a workday, and down a flight of stairs. As we descend, blue and green and purple and red lights dance over the walls, shifting between colors with each second. The tunnel at the bottom of the stairs is wide and dark, with only the strange light to guide us. The floor here is old tile, and even through my shoe soles, it feels grainy with dirt and dust. “This part of the airport was completely redone and expanded when they first moved in here,” Nita says. “For a while, after the Purity War, all the laboratories were underground, to keep them safer if they were attacked. Now it’s just the support staff who goes down here.” “Is that who you want me to meet?” She nods. “Support staff is more than just a job. Almost all of us are GDs—genetically damaged, leftovers from the failed city experiments or the descendants of other leftovers or people pulled in from the outside, like Tris’s mother, except without her genetic advantage. And all of the scientists and leaders are GPs—genetically pure, descendants of people who resisted the genetic engineering movement in the first place. There are some exceptions, of course, but so few I could list them all for you if I wanted to.” I am about to ask why the division is so strict, but I can figure it out for myself. The so-called “GPs” grew up in this community, their worlds saturated by experiments and observation and learning. The “GDs” grew up in the experiments, where they only had to learn enough to survive until the next generation. The division is based on knowledge, based on qualifications—but as I learned from the factionless, a system that relies on a group of uneducated people to do its dirty work without giving them a way to rise is hardly fair. “I think your girl’s right, you know,” Nita says. “Nothing has changed; now you just have a better idea of your own limitations. Every human being has limitations, even GPs.” “So there’s an upward limit to . . . what? My compassion? My conscience?” I say. “That’s the reassurance you have for me?” Nita’s eyes study me, carefully, and she doesn’t respond. “This is ridiculous,” I say. “Why do you, or they, or anyone get to determine my limits?” “It’s just the way things are, Tobias,” Nita says. “It’s just genetic, nothing more.” “That’s a lie,” I say. “It’s about more than genes, here, and you know it.” I feel like I need to leave, to turn and run back to the dormitory. The anger is boiling and churning inside me, filling me with heat, and I’m not even sure who it’s for. For Nita, who has just accepted that she is somehow limited, or for whoever told her that? Maybe it’s for everyone. We reach the end of the tunnel, and she nudges a heavy wooden door open with her shoulder. Beyond it is a bustling, glowing world. The room is lit by small, bright bulbs on strings, but the strings are so densely packed that a web of yellow and white covers the ceiling. On one end of the room is a wooden counter with glowing bottles behind it, and a sea of glasses on top of it. There are tables and chairs on the left side of the room, and a group of people with musical instruments on the right side. Music fills the air, and the only sounds I recognize—from my limited experience with the Amity—are plucked guitar strings and drums. I feel like I am standing beneath a spotlight and everyone is watching me, waiting for me to move, speak, something. For a moment it’s hard to hear anything over the music and the chatter, but after a few seconds I get used to it, and I hear Nita when she says, “This way! Want a drink?” I’m about to answer when someone runs into the room. He’s short, and the T-shirt he wears hangs from his body, two sizes too large for him. He gestures for the musicians to stop playing, and they do, just long enough for him to shout, “It’s verdict time!” Half the room gets up and rushes toward the door. I give Nita a questioning look, and she frowns, creating a crease in her forehead. “Whose verdict?” I say. “Marcus’s, no doubt,” she replies. And I’m running. I sprint back down the tunnel, finding the open spaces between people and pushing my way through if there are none. Nita runs at my heels, shouting for me to stop, but I can’t stop. I am separate from this place and these people and my own body, and besides, I have always been a good runner. I take the stairs three at a time, clutching the railing for balance. I don’t know what I am so eager for—Marcus’s conviction? His exoneration? Do I hope that Evelyn finds him guilty and executes him, or do I hope that she spares him? I can’t tell. To me each outcome feels like it is made of the same substance. Everything is either Marcus’s evil or Marcus’s mask, Evelyn’s evil or Evelyn’s mask. I don’t have to remember where the control room is, because the people in the hallway lead me to it. When I reach it, I push my way to the front of the crowd and there they are, my parents, shown on half the screens. Everyone moves away from me, whispering, except Nita, who stands beside me, catching her breath. Someone turns up the volume, so we can all hear their voices. They crackle, distorted by the microphones, but I know my father’s voice; I can hear it shift at all the right times, lift in all the right places. I can almost predict his words before he says them. “You took your time,” he says, sneering. “Savoring the moment?” I stiffen. This is not Marcus’s mask. This is not the person who the city knows as my father—the patient, calm leader of Abnegation who would never hurt anyone, least of all his own son or wife. This is the man who slid his belt out loop by loop and wrapped it around his knuckles. This is the Marcus I know best, and the sight of him, like the sight of him in my fear landscape, turns me into a child. “Of course not, Marcus,” my mother says. “You have served this city well for many years. This is not a decision I or any of my advisers have taken lightly.” Marcus is not wearing his mask, but Evelyn is wearing hers. She sounds so genuine she almost convinces me. “I and the former representatives of the factions have had a lot to consider. Your years of service, the loyalty you have inspired among your faction members, my lingering feelings for you as my former husband . . .” I snort. “I am still your husband,” Marcus says. “The Abnegation do not allow divorce.” “They do in cases of spousal abuse,” Evelyn replies, and I feel that same old feeling again, the hollowness and the weight. I can’t believe she just admitted that in public. But then, she now wants the people in the city to see her a certain way—not as the heartless woman who took control of their lives, but as the woman Marcus attacked with his might, the secret he hid behind a clean house and pressed gray clothing. I know, then, what the outcome of this will be. “She’s going to kill him,” I say. “The fact remains,” says Evelyn, almost sweetly, “that you have committed egregious crimes against this city. You deceived innocent children into risking their lives for your purposes. Your refusal to follow the orders of myself and Tori Wu, the former leader of Dauntless, resulted in countless deaths in the Erudite attack. You betrayed your peers by failing to do as we agreed and by failing to fight against Jeanine Matthews. You betrayed your own faction by revealing what was supposed to be a guarded secret.” “I did not—” “I am not finished,” Evelyn says. “Given your record of service to this city, we have decided on an alternate solution. You will not, unlike the other former faction representatives, be forgiven and allowed to consult on issues regarding this city. Nor will you be executed as a traitor. Instead, you will be sent outside the fence, beyond the Amity compound, and you will not be allowed to return.” Marcus looks surprised. I don’t blame him. “Congratulations,” says Evelyn. “You have the privilege of beginning again.” Should I feel relieved, that my father isn’t going to be executed? Angry, that I came so close to finally escaping him, but instead he’ll still be in this world, still hanging over my head? I don’t know. I don’t feel anything. My hands go numb, so I know I’m panicking, but I don’t really feel it, not the way I normally do. I am overwhelmed with the need to be somewhere else, so I turn and leave my parents and Nita and the city where I once lived behind me. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE TRIS THEY ANNOUNCE THE attack drill in the morning, over the intercom, as we eat breakfast. The crisp, female voice instructs us to lock the door to whatever room we are in from the inside, cover the windows, and sit quietly until the alarms no longer sound. “It will take place at the top of the hour,” she says. Tobias looks worn and pale, with dark circles under his eyes. He picks at a muffin, pinching small pieces off and sometimes eating them, sometimes forgetting to. Most of us woke up late, at ten, I suspect because there was no reason not to. When we left the city, we lost our factions, our sense of purpose. Here there is nothing to do but wait for something to happen, and far from making me feel relaxed, it makes me feel jittery and tense. I am used to having something to do, something to fight, all the time. I try to remind myself to relax. “They took us up in a plane yesterday,” I say to Tobias. “Where were you?” “I just had to walk around. Process things.” He sounds terse, irritated. “How was it?” “Amazing, actually.” I sit across from him so that our knees touch in the space between our beds. “The world is . . . a lot bigger than I thought it was.” He nods. “I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Heights, and all.” I don’t know why, but his reaction disappoints me. I want him to say that he wishes he had been there with me, to experience it with me. Or at least to ask me what I mean when I say that it was amazing. But all he can say is that he wouldn’t have liked it? “Are you all right?” I say. “You look like you barely slept.” “Well, yesterday carried quite the revelation,” he says, putting his forehead into his hand. “You can’t really blame me for being upset about it.” “I mean, you can be upset about whatever you want,” I say, frowning. “But from my perspective, it doesn’t seem like there’s much to be upset about. I know it’s a shock, but as I said, you’re still the same person you were yesterday and the day before, no matter what these people say about it.” He shakes his head. “I’m not talking about my genes. I’m talking about Marcus. You really have no idea, do you?” The question is accusatory, but his tone isn’t. He gets up to toss his muffin in the trash. I feel raw and frustrated. Of course I knew about Marcus. It was buzzing around the room when I woke up. But for some reason I didn’t think it would upset him to know his father wasn’t going to be executed. Apparently I was wrong. It doesn’t help that the alarms sound at that exact moment, preventing me from saying anything else to him. They are loud, screeching, so painful to listen to that I can barely think, let alone move. I keep one hand clamped over my ear and slide my other hand under my pillow to pick up the screen with my mother’s journal on it. Tobias locks the door and draws the curtains closed, and everyone sits on their cots. Cara wraps a pillow around her head. Peter just sits with his back against the wall, his eyes closed. I don’t know where Caleb is—researching whatever made him so distant yesterday, probably—or where Christina and Uriah are—exploring the compound, maybe. Yesterday after dessert they seemed determined to discover every corner of the place. I decided to discover my mother’s thoughts about it instead—she wrote several entries about her first impressions of the compound, the strange cleanliness of the place, how everyone smiled all the time, how she fell in love with the city by watching it in the control room. I turn on the screen, hoping to distract myself from the noise. Today I volunteered to go inside the city. David said the Divergent are dying and someone has to stop it, because that’s a waste of our best genetic material. I think that’s a pretty sick way to put it, but David doesn’t mean it that way—he just means that if it wasn’t the Divergent dying, we wouldn’t intervene until a certain level of destruction, but since it’s them it has to be taken care of now. Just a few years, he said. All I have here are a few friends, no family, and I’m young enough that it will be easy to insert me—just wipe and resupply a few people’s memories, and I’m in. They’ll put me in Dauntless, at first, because I already have tattoos, and that would be hard to explain to the people inside the experiment. The only problem is that at my Choosing Ceremony next year I’ll have to join Erudite, because that’s where the killer is, and I’m not sure I’m smart enough to make it through initiation. David says it doesn’t matter, he can alter my results, but that feels wrong. Even if the Bureau thinks the factions don’t mean anything, that they’re just a kind of behavioral modification that will help with the damage, those people believe they do, and it feels wrong to play with their system. I’ve been watching them for a couple years now, so there’s not much I need to know about fitting in. I bet I know the city better than they do, at this point. It’s going to be difficult to send my updates—someone might notice that I’m connecting to a distant server instead of an intra-city server, so my entries will probably come less often, if at all. It will be hard to separate myself from everything I know, but maybe it will be good. Maybe it will be a fresh start. I could really use one of those. It’s a lot to take in, but I find myself rereading the sentence: The only problem is that at my Choosing Ceremony next year I’ll have to join Erudite, because that’s where the killer is. I don’t know what killer she’s referring to—Jeanine Matthews’s predecessor, maybe?—but more confusing even than that is that she didn’t join Erudite. What happened to make her join Abnegation instead? The alarms stop, and my ears feel muffled in their absence. The others trickle out slowly, but Tobias lingers for a moment, tapping his fingers against his leg. I don’t speak to him—I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say right now, when we’re both on edge. But all he says is, “Can I kiss you?” “Yes,” I say, relieved. He bends down and touches my cheek, then kisses me softly. Well, he knows how to improve my mood, at least. “I didn’t think about Marcus. I should have,” I say. He shrugs. “It’s over now.” I know it’s not over. It’s never over with Marcus; the wrongs he committed are too great. But I don’t press the issue. “More journal entries?” he says. “Yes,” I say. “Just some memories of the compound so far. But it’s getting interesting.” “Good,” he says. “I’ll leave you with it.” He smiles a little, but I can tell he’s still tired, still upset. I don’t try to stop him from going. In a way, it feels like we are leaving each other to our grief, his over the loss of his Divergence and whatever hopes he had for Marcus’s trial, and mine, finally, over the loss of my parents. I tap the screen to read the next entry. Dear David, I raise my eyebrows. Now she’s writing to David? Dear David, I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen the way we planned it. I can’t do it. I know you’re just going to think I’m being a stupid teenager, but this is my life and if I’m going to be here for years, I have to do this my way. I’ll still be able to do my job from outside of Erudite. So tomorrow, at the Choosing Ceremony, Andrew and I are going to choose Abnegation together. I hope you’re not angry. I guess even if you are, I won’t hear about it. —Natalie I read the entry again, and again, letting the words sink in. Andrew and I are going to choose Abnegation together. I smile into my hand, lean my head against the window, and let the tears fall in silence. My parents did love each other. Enough to forsake plans and factions. Enough to defy “faction before blood.” Blood before faction—no, love before faction, always. I turn off the screen. I don’t want to read anything that will spoil this feeling: that I am adrift in calm waters. It’s strange how, even though I should be grieving, I feel like I am actually getting back pieces of her, word by word, line by line.