Книга - Insurgent
Insurgent
Veronica Roth
Fighting for survival in a shattered world… the truth is her only hope.The thrillingly dark sequel to No. 1 New York Times bestseller, DIVERGENT.I have done bad things. I can’t take them back, and they are part of who I am.Tris has survived a brutal attack on her former home and family. But she has paid a terrible price. Wracked by grief and guilt, she becomes ever more reckless as she struggles to accept her new future.Yet if Tris wants to uncover the truth about her world, she must be stronger than ever… because more shocking choices and sacrifices lie ahead.
Copyright
First published in hardback in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. in 2012 First published in paperback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2012
HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Copyright © 2012 by Veronica Roth.
Veronica Roth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
Insurgent
Copyright © 2012 by Veronica Roth
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007442928
Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007479900
Version 2016-08-26
New York Times Bestseller
Favorite Book Of The Year, Goodreads Choice Awards
Amazon.Com Best Books Of The Year
Publishers Weekly Best Books Of The Year
“DIVERGENT is a captivating, fascinating book that kept me in constant suspense and was never short on surprises. It will be a long time before I quit thinking about this haunting vision of the future.”
—James Dashner, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Maze Runner
“A taut and shiveringly exciting read! Tris is exactly the sort of unflinching and fierce heroine I love. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.”
—Melissa Marr, New York Times Bestselling Author of Wicked Lovely
“Promising author Roth tells the riveting and complex story of a teenage girl forced to choose between her routinized, selfless family and the adventurous, unrestrained future she longs for. A memorable, unpredictable journey from which it is nearly impossible to turn away.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This is one fast-paced read that sticks in your head for days after you put it down, both because of its video-game-like scenes and its thought-provoking premise.”
—Hollywoodcrush.mtv.com
“This gritty, paranoid world is built with careful details and intriguing scope. The plot clips along at an addictive pace, with steady jolts of brutal violence and swoony romance. Fans snared by the ratcheting suspense will be unable to resist speculating on their own factional allegiance. Guaranteed to fly off the shelves.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“With brisk pacing and lavish flights of imagination, DIVERGENT clearly has thrills, but it also movingly explores a more common adolescent anxiety—the painful realization that coming into one’s own sometimes means leaving family behind, both ideologically and physically.”
—New York Times Book Review
“I was most definitely hooked by this superb work of fiction. It had everything a dystopian novel needs: a feisty heroine, an unyielding government, love interests, survival in a harsh world, and shocks and twists galore. In short, it was fantastic! Roth maintains a gripping pace throughout the book, with suspense and plot twists around every corner.”
—Guardian.co.uk
“Roth paints her canvas with the same brush as Suzanne Collins. The plot, scenes, and characters are different but the colors are the same and just as rich. Fans of Collins, dystopias, and strong female characters will love this novel.”
—SLJ
Dedication
To Nelson,
who was worth every risk
Epigraph
Like a wild animal, the truth is too powerful to remain caged.
—From the Candor faction manifesto
Contents
Cover (#ue4b57ca9-ee11-5cea-ba60-f06acc0dcd32)
Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Acknowledgments
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Other Books by Veronica Roth
About the Publisher
I WAKE WITH his name in my mouth.
Will.
Before I open my eyes, I watch him crumple to the pavement again. Dead.
My doing.
Tobias crouches in front of me, his hand on my left shoulder. The train car bumps over the rails, and Marcus, Peter, and Caleb stand by the doorway. I take a deep breath and hold it in an attempt to relieve some of the pressure that is building in my chest.
An hour ago, nothing that happened felt real to me. Now it does.
I breathe out, and the pressure is still there.
“Tris, come on,” Tobias says, his eyes searching mine. “We have to jump.”
It is too dark to see where we are, but if we are getting off, we are probably close to the fence. Tobias helps me to my feet and guides me toward the doorway.
The others jump off one by one: Peter first, then Marcus, then Caleb. I take Tobias’s hand. The wind picks up as we stand at the edge of the car opening, like a hand pushing me back, toward safety.
But we launch ourselves into darkness and land hard on the ground. The impact hurts the bullet wound in my shoulder. I bite my lip to keep from crying out, and search for my brother.
“Okay?” I say when I see him sitting in the grass a few feet away, rubbing his knee.
He nods. I hear him sniff like he’s fending off tears, and I have to turn away.
We landed in the grass near the fence, several yards away from the worn path that the Amity trucks travel to deliver food to the city, and the gate that lets them out—the gate that is currently shut, locking us in. The fence towers over us, too high and flexible to climb over, too sturdy to knock down.
“There are supposed to be Dauntless guards here,” says Marcus. “Where are they?”
“They were probably under the simulation,” Tobias says, “and are now …” He pauses. “Who knows where, doing who knows what.”
We stopped the simulation—the weight of the hard drive in my back pocket reminds me—but we didn’t pause to see the aftermath. What happened to our friends, our peers, our leaders, our factions? There is no way to know.
Tobias approaches a small metal box on the right side of the gate and opens it, revealing a keypad.
“Let’s hope the Erudite didn’t think to change this combination,” he says as he types in a series of numbers. He stops at the eighth one, and the gate clicks open.
“How did you know that?” says Caleb. His voice sounds thick with emotion, so thick I am surprised it does not choke him on the way out.
“I worked in the Dauntless control room, monitoring the security system. We only change the codes twice a year,” Tobias says.
“How lucky,” says Caleb. He gives Tobias a wary look.
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Tobias says. “I only worked there because I wanted to make sure I could get out.”
I shiver. The way he talks about getting out—it’s like he thinks we’re trapped. I never thought about it that way before, and now that seems foolish.
We walk in a small pack, Peter cradling his bloody arm to his chest—the arm that I shot—and Marcus with his hand on Peter’s shoulder, keeping him stable. Caleb wipes his cheeks every few seconds, and I know he’s crying but I don’t know how to comfort him, or why I am not crying myself.
Instead I take the lead, Tobias silent at my side, and though he does not touch me, he steadies me.
Pinpricks of light are the first sign that we are nearing Amity headquarters. Then squares of light that turn into glowing windows. A cluster of wooden and glass buildings.
Before we can reach them, we have to walk through an orchard. My feet sink into the ground, and above me, the branches grow into one another, forming a kind of tunnel. Dark fruit hangs among the leaves, ready to drop. The sharp, sweet smell of rotting apples mixes with the scent of wet earth in my nose.
When we get close, Marcus leaves Peter’s side and walks in front. “I know where to go,” he says.
He leads us past the first building to the second one on the left. All the buildings except the greenhouses are made of the same dark wood, unpainted, rough. I hear laughter through an open window. The contrast between the laughter and the stone stillness within me is jarring.
Marcus opens one of the doors. I would be shocked by the lack of security if we were not at Amity headquarters. They often straddle the line between trust and stupidity.
In this building the only sound is of our squeaking shoes. I don’t hear Caleb crying anymore, but then, he was quiet about it before.
Marcus stops before an open room, where Johanna Reyes, representative of Amity, sits, staring out the window. I recognize her because it is hard to forget Johanna’s face, whether you’ve seen her once or a thousand times. A scar stretches in a thick line from just above her right eyebrow to her lip, rendering her blind in one eye and giving her a lisp when she talks. I have only heard her speak once, but I remember. She would have been a beautiful woman if not for that scar.
“Oh, thank God,” she says when she sees Marcus. She walks toward him with her arms open. Instead of embracing him, she just touches his shoulders, like she remembers the Abnegation’s distaste for casual physical contact.
“The other members of your party got here a few hours ago, but they weren’t sure if you had made it,” she says. She is referring to the group of Abnegation who were with my father and Marcus in the safe house. I didn’t even think to worry about them.
She looks over Marcus’s shoulder, first at Tobias and Caleb, then at me, then at Peter.
“Oh my,” she says, her eyes lingering on the blood soaking Peter’s shirt. “I’ll send for a doctor. I can grant you all permission to stay the night, but tomorrow, our community must decide together. And”—she eyes Tobias and me—“they will likely not be enthusiastic about a Dauntless presence in our compound. I of course ask you to turn over any weapons you might have.”
I wonder, suddenly, how she knows that I am Dauntless. I am still wearing a gray shirt. My father’s shirt.
At that moment, his smell, which is an even mixture of soap and sweat, wafts upward, and it fills my nose, fills my entire head with him. I clench my hands so hard into fists that my fingernails cut into my skin. Not here. Not here.
Tobias hands over his gun, but when I reach behind me to take out my own concealed weapon, he grabs my hand, guiding it away from my back. Then he laces his fingers with mine to cover up what he just did.
I know it’s smart to keep one of our guns. But it would have been a relief to hand it over.
“My name is Johanna Reyes,” she says, extending her hand to me, and then Tobias. A Dauntless greeting. I am impressed by her awareness of the customs of other factions. I always forget how considerate the Amity are until I see it for myself.
“This is T—” Marcus starts, but Tobias interrupts him.
“My name is Four,” he says. “This is Tris, Caleb, and Peter.”
A few days ago, “Tobias” was a name only I knew, among the Dauntless; it was the piece of himself that he gave me. Outside Dauntless headquarters, I remember why he hid that name from the world. It binds him to Marcus.
“Welcome to the Amity compound.” Johanna’s eyes fix on my face, and she smiles crookedly. “Let us take care of you.”
We do let them. An Amity nurse gives me a salve—developed by Erudite to speed healing—to put on my shoulder, and then escorts Peter to the hospital ward to mend his arm. Johanna takes us to the cafeteria, where we find some of the Abnegation who were in the safe house with Caleb and my father. Susan is there, and some of our old neighbors, and rows of wooden tables as long as the room itself. They greet us—especially Marcus—with held-in tears and suppressed smiles.
I cling to Tobias’s arm. I sag under the weight of the members of my parents’ faction, their lives, their tears.
One of the Abnegation puts a cup of steaming liquid under my nose and says, “Drink this. It will help you sleep as it helped some of the others sleep. No dreams.”
The liquid is pink-red, like strawberries. I grab the cup and drink it fast. For a few seconds the heat from the liquid makes me feel like I am full of something again. And as I drain the last drops from the cup, I feel myself relaxing. Someone leads me down the hallway, to a room with a bed in it. That is all.
I OPEN MY eyes, terrified, my hands clutching at the sheets. But I am not running through the streets of the city or the corridors of Dauntless headquarters. I am in a bed in Amity headquarters, and the smell of sawdust is in the air.
I shift, and wince as something digs into my back. I reach behind me, and my fingers wrap around the gun.
For a moment I see Will standing before me, both our guns between us—his hand, I could have shot his hand, why didn’t I, why?—and I almost scream his name.
Then he’s gone.
I get out of bed and lift the mattress with one hand, propping it up on my knee. Then I shove the gun beneath it and let the mattress bury it. Once it is out of sight and no longer pressed to my skin, my head feels clearer.
Now that the adrenaline rush of yesterday is gone, and whatever made me sleep has worn off, the deep ache and shooting pains of my shoulder are intense. I am wearing the same clothes I wore last night. The corner of the hard drive peeks out from under my pillow, where I shoved it right before I fell asleep. On it is the simulation data that controlled the Dauntless, and the record of what the Erudite did. It feels too important for me to even touch, but I can’t leave it here, so I grab it and wedge it between the dresser and the wall. Part of me thinks it would be a good idea to destroy it, but I know it contains the only record of my parents’ deaths, so I’ll settle for keeping it hidden.
Someone knocks on my door. I sit on the edge of the bed and try to smooth my hair down.
“Come in,” I say.
The door opens, and Tobias steps halfway in, the door dividing his body in half. He wears the same jeans as yesterday, but a dark red T-shirt instead of his black one, probably borrowed from one of the Amity. It’s a strange color on him, too bright, but when he leans his head back against the doorframe, I see that it makes the blue in his eyes lighter.
“The Amity are meeting in a half hour.” He quirks his eyebrows and adds, with a touch of melodrama, “To decide our fate.”
I shake my head. “Never thought my fate would be in the hands of a bunch of Amity.”
“Me either. Oh, I brought you something.” He unscrews the cap of a small bottle and holds out a dropper filled with clear liquid. “Pain medicine. Take a dropperful every six hours.”
“Thanks.” I squeeze the dropper into the back of my throat. The medicine tastes like old lemon.
He hooks a thumb in one of his belt loops and says, “How are you, Beatrice?”
“Did you just call me Beatrice?”
“Thought I would give it a try.” He smiles. “Not good?”
“Maybe on special occasions only. Initiation days, Choosing Days …” I pause. I was about to rattle off a few more holidays, but only the Abnegation celebrate them. The Dauntless have holidays of their own, I assume, but I don’t know what they are. And anyway, the idea that we would celebrate anything right now is so ludicrous I don’t continue.
“It’s a deal.” His smile fades. “How are you, Tris?”
It’s not a strange question, after what we’ve been through, but I tense up when he asks it, worried that he’ll somehow see into my mind. I haven’t told him about Will yet. I want to, but I don’t know how. Just the thought of saying the words out loud makes me feel so heavy I could break through the floorboards.
“I’m …” I shake my head a few times. “I don’t know, Four. I’m awake. I …” I am still shaking my head. He slides his hand over my cheek, one finger anchored behind my ear. Then he tilts his head down and kisses me, sending a warm ache through my body. I wrap my hands around his arm, holding him there as long as I can. When he touches me, the hollowed-out feeling in my chest and stomach is not as noticeable.
I don’t have to tell him. I can just try to forget—he can help me forget.
“I know,” he says. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
For a moment all I can think is, How could you possibly know? But something about his expression reminds me that he does know something about loss. He lost his mother when he was young. I don’t remember how she died, just that we attended her funeral.
Suddenly I remember him clutching the curtains in his living room, about nine years old, wearing gray, his dark eyes shut. The image is fleeting, and it could be my imagination, not a memory.
He releases me. “I’ll let you get ready.”
The women’s bathroom is two doors down. The floor is dark brown tile, and each shower stall has wooden walls and a plastic curtain separating it from the central aisle. A sign on the back wall says REMEMBER: TO CONSERVE RESOURCES, SHOWERS RUN FOR ONLY FIVE MINUTES.
The stream of water is cold, so I wouldn’t want the extra minutes even if I could have them. I wash quickly with my left hand, leaving my right hand hanging at my side. The pain medicine Tobias gave me worked fast—the pain in my shoulder has already faded to a dull throb.
When I get out of the shower, a stack of clothes waits on my bed. It contains some yellow and red, from the Amity, and some gray, from the Abnegation, colors I rarely see side by side. If I had to guess, I would say that one of the Abnegation put the stack there for me. It’s something they would think to do.
I pull on a pair of dark red pants made of denim—so long I have to roll them up three times—and a gray Abnegation shirt that is too big for me. The sleeves come down to my fingertips, and I roll them up too. It hurts to move my right hand, so I keep the movements small and slow.
Someone knocks on the door. “Beatrice?” The soft voice is Susan’s.
I open the door for her. She carries a tray of food, which she sets down on the bed. I search her face for a sign of what she has lost—her father, an Abnegation leader, didn’t survive the attack—but I see only the placid determination characteristic of my old faction.
“I’m sorry the clothes don’t fit,” she says. “I’m sure we can find some better ones for you if the Amity allow us to stay.”
“They’re fine,” I say. “Thank you.”
“I heard you were shot. Do you need my help with your hair? Or your shoes?”
I am about to refuse, but I really do need help.
“Yes, thank you.”
I sit down on a stool in front of the mirror, and she stands behind me, her eyes dutifully trained on the task at hand rather than her reflection. They do not lift, not even for an instant, as she runs a comb through my hair. And she doesn’t ask about my shoulder, how I was shot, what happened when I left the Abnegation safe house to stop the simulation. I get the sense that if I were to whittle her down to her core, she would be Abnegation all the way through.
“Have you seen Robert yet?” I say. Her brother, Robert, chose Amity when I chose Dauntless, so he is somewhere in this compound. I wonder if their reunion will be anything like Caleb’s and mine.
“Briefly, last night,” she says. “I left him to grieve with his faction as I grieve with mine. It is nice to see him again, though.”
I hear a finality in her tone that tells me the subject is closed.
“It’s a shame this happened when it did,” Susan says. “Our leaders were about to do something wonderful.”
“Really? What?”
“I don’t know.” Susan blushes. “I just knew that something was happening. I didn’t mean to be curious; I just noticed things.”
“I wouldn’t blame you for being curious even if you had been.”
She nods and keeps combing. I wonder what the Abnegation leaders—including my father—were doing. And I can’t help but marvel at Susan’s assumption that whatever they were doing was wonderful. I wish I could believe that of people again.
If I ever did.
“The Dauntless wear their hair down, right?” she says.
“Sometimes,” I say. “Do you know how to braid?”
So her deft fingers tuck pieces of my hair into one braid that tickles the middle of my spine. I stare hard at my reflection until she finishes. I thank her when she’s done, and she leaves with a small smile, closing the door behind her.
I keep staring, but I don’t see myself. I can still feel her fingers brushing the back of my neck, so much like my mother’s fingers, the last morning I spent with her. My eyes wet with tears, I rock back and forth on the stool, trying to push the memory from my mind. I am afraid that if I start to sob, I will never stop until I shrivel up like a raisin.
I see a sewing kit on the dresser. In it are two colors of thread, red and yellow, and a pair of scissors.
I feel calm as I undo the braid in my hair and comb it again. I part my hair down the middle and make sure that it is straight and flat. I close the scissors over the hair by my chin.
How can I look the same, when she’s gone and everything is different? I can’t.
I cut in as straight a line as I can, using my jaw as a guide. The tricky part is the back, which I can’t see very well, so I do the best I can by touch instead of sight. Locks of blond hair surround me on the floor in a semicircle.
I leave the room without looking at my reflection again.
When Tobias and Caleb come to get me later, they stare at me like I am not the person they knew yesterday.
“You cut your hair,” says Caleb, his eyebrows high. Grabbing hold of facts in the midst of shock is very Erudite of him. His hair sticks up on one side from where he slept on it, and his eyes are bloodshot.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s … too hot for long hair.”
“Fair enough.”
We walk down the hallway together. The floorboards creak beneath our feet. I miss the way my footsteps echoed in the Dauntless compound; I miss the cool underground air. But mostly I miss the fears of the past few weeks, rendered small by my fears now.
We exit the building. The outside air presses around me like a pillow meant to suffocate me. It smells green, the way a leaf does when you tear it in half.
“Does everyone know you’re Marcus’s son?” Caleb says. “The Abnegation, I mean?”
“Not to my knowledge,” says Tobias, glancing at Caleb. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention it.”
“I don’t need to mention it. Anyone with eyes can see it for themselves.” Caleb frowns at him. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
“And you don’t think you’re too old to be with my little sister?”
Tobias lets out a short laugh. “She isn’t your little anything.”
“Stop it. Both of you,” I say. A crowd of people in yellow walks ahead of us, toward a wide, squat building made entirely of glass. The sunlight reflecting off the panes feels like a pinch to my eyes. I shield my face with my hand and keep walking.
The doors to the building are wide open. Around the edge of the circular greenhouse, plants and trees grow in troughs of water or small pools. Dozens of fans positioned around the room serve only to blow the hot air around, so I am already sweating. But that fades from my mind when the crowd before me thins and I see the rest of the room.
In its center grows a huge tree. Its branches are spread over most of the greenhouse, and its roots bubble up from the ground, forming a dense web of bark. In the spaces between the roots, I see not dirt but water, and metal rods holding the roots in place. I should not be surprised—the Amity spend their lives accomplishing feats of agriculture like this one, with the help of Erudite technology.
Standing on a cluster of roots is Johanna Reyes, her hair falling over the scarred half of her face. I learned in Faction History that the Amity recognize no official leader—they vote on everything, and the result is usually close to unanimous. They are like many parts of a single mind, and Johanna is their mouthpiece.
The Amity sit on the floor, most with their legs crossed, in knots and clusters that vaguely resemble the tree roots to me. The Abnegation sit in tight rows a few yards to my left. My eyes search the crowd for a few seconds before I realize what I’m looking for: my parents.
I swallow hard, and try to forget. Tobias touches the small of my back, guiding me to the edge of the meeting space, behind the Abnegation. Before we sit down, he puts his mouth next to my ear and says, “I like your hair that way.”
I find a small smile to give him, and lean into him when I sit down, my arm against his.
Johanna lifts her hands and bows her head. All conversation in the room ceases before I can draw my next breath. All around me the Amity sit in silence, some with their eyes closed, some with their lips mouthing words I can’t hear, some staring at a point far away.
Every second chafes. By the time Johanna lifts her head I am worn to the bone.
“We have before us today an urgent question,” she says, “which is: How will we conduct ourselves in this time of conflict as people who pursue peace?”
Every Amity in the room turns to the person next to him or her and starts talking.
“How do they get anything done?” I say, as the minutes of chatter wear on.
“They don’t care about efficiency,” Tobias says. “They care about agreement. Watch.”
Two women in yellow dresses a few feet away rise and join a trio of men. A young man shifts so that his small circle becomes a large one with the group next to him. All around the room, the smaller crowds grow and expand, and fewer and fewer voices fill the room, until there are only three or four. I can only hear pieces of what they say: “Peace—Dauntless—Erudite—safe house—involvement—”
“This is bizarre,” I say.
“I think it’s beautiful,” he says.
I give him a look.
“What?” He laughs a little. “They each have an equal role in government; they each feel equally responsible. And it makes them care; it makes them kind. I think that’s beautiful.”
“I think it’s unsustainable,” I say. “Sure, it works for the Amity. But what happens when not everyone wants to strum banjos and grow crops? What happens when someone does something terrible and talking about it can’t solve the problem?”
He shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Eventually someone from each of the big groups stands and approaches Johanna, picking their way carefully over the roots of the big tree. I expect them to address the rest of us, but instead they stand in a circle with Johanna and the other spokespeople and talk quietly. I begin to get the feeling that I will never know what they’re saying.
“They’re not going to let us argue with them, are they,” I say.
“I doubt it,” he says.
We are done for.
When everyone has said his or her piece, they sit down again, leaving Johanna alone in the center of the room. She angles her body toward us and folds her hands in front of her. Where will we go when they tell us to leave? Back into the city, where nothing is safe?
“Our faction has had a close relationship with Erudite for as long as any of us can remember. We need each other to survive, and we have always cooperated with each other,” says Johanna. “But we have also had a strong relationship with Abnegation in the past, and we do not think it is right to revoke the hand of friendship when it has for so long been extended.”
Her voice is honey-sweet, and moves like honey too, slow and careful. I wipe the sweat from my hairline with the back of my hand.
“We feel that the only way to preserve our relationships with both factions is to remain impartial and uninvolved,” she continues. “Your presence here, though welcome, complicates that.”
Here it comes, I think.
“We have arrived at the conclusion that we will establish our faction headquarters as a safe house for members of all factions,” she says, “under a set of conditions. The first is that no weaponry of any kind is allowed on the compound. The second is that if any serious conflict arises, whether verbal or physical, all involved parties will be asked to leave. The third is that the conflict may not be discussed, even privately, within the confines of this compound. And the fourth is that everyone who stays here must contribute to the welfare of this environment by working. We will report this to Erudite, Candor, and Dauntless as soon as we can.”
Her stare drifts to Tobias and me, and stays there.
“You are welcome to stay here if and only if you can abide by our rules,” she says. “That is our decision.”
I think of the gun I hid under my mattress, and the tension between me and Peter, and Tobias and Marcus, and my mouth feels dry. I am not good at avoiding conflict.
“We won’t be able to stay long,” I say to Tobias under my breath.
A moment ago, he was still faintly smiling. Now the corners of his mouth have disappeared into a frown. “No, we won’t.”
THAT EVENING I return to my room and slide my hand beneath my mattress to make sure the gun is still there. My fingers brush over the trigger, and my throat tightens like I am having an allergic reaction. I withdraw my hand and kneel on the edge of the bed, taking hard swallows of air until the feeling subsides.
What is wrong with you? I shake my head. Pull it together.
And that is what it feels like: pulling the different parts of me up and in like a shoelace. I feel suffocated, but at least I feel strong.
I see a flicker of movement in my periphery, and look out the window that faces the apple orchard. Johanna Reyes and Marcus Eaton walk side by side, pausing at the herb garden to pluck mint leaves from their stems. I am out of my room before I can evaluate why I want to follow them.
I sprint through the building so that I don’t lose them. Once I am outside, I have to be more careful. I walk around the far side of the greenhouse and, after I see Johanna and Marcus disappear into one row of trees, I creep down the next row, hoping the branches will hide me if either of them looks back.
“… been confused about is the timing of the attack,” says Johanna. “Is it just that Jeanine finally finished planning it, and acted, or was there an inciting incident of some kind?”
I see Marcus’s face through a divided tree trunk. He presses his lips together and says, “Hmm.”
“I suppose we’ll never know.” Johanna raises her good eyebrow. “Will we?”
“No, perhaps not.”
Johanna places her hand on his arm and turns toward him. I stiffen, afraid for a moment that she will see me, but she looks only at Marcus. I sink into a crouch and crawl toward one of the trees so that the trunk will hide me. The bark itches my spine, but I don’t move.
“But you do know,” she says. “You know why she attacked when she did. I may not be Candor anymore, but I can still tell when someone is keeping the truth from me.”
“Inquisitiveness is self-serving, Johanna.”
If I were Johanna, I would snap at him for a comment like that, but she says kindly, “My faction depends on me to advise them, and if you know information this crucial, it is important that I know it also so that I can share it with them. I’m sure you can understand that, Marcus.”
“There is a reason you don’t know all the things I know. A long time ago, the Abnegation were entrusted with some sensitive information,” says Marcus. “Jeanine attacked us to steal it. And if I am not careful, she will destroy it, so that is all I can tell you.”
“But surely—”
“No,” Marcus cuts her off. “This information is far more important than you can imagine. Most of the leaders of this city risked their lives to protect it from Jeanine and died, and I will not jeopardize it now for the sake of sating your selfish curiosity.”
Johanna is quiet for a few seconds. It’s so dark now I can barely see my own hands. The air smells like dirt and apples, and I try not to breathe it too loudly.
“I’m sorry,” says Johanna. “I must have done something to make you believe I am not trustworthy.”
“The last time I trusted a faction representative with this information, all my friends were murdered,” he replies. “I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
I can’t help it—I lean forward so that I can see around the trunk of the tree. Both Marcus and Johanna are too preoccupied to notice the movement. They are close together, but not touching, and I’ve never seen Marcus look so tired or Johanna so angry. But her face softens, and she touches Marcus’s arm again, this time with a light caress.
“In order to have peace, we must first have trust,” says Johanna. “So I hope you change your mind. Remember that I have always been your friend, Marcus, even when you did not have many to speak of.”
She leans in and kisses his cheek, then walks to the end of the orchard. Marcus stands for a few seconds, apparently stunned, and starts toward the compound.
The revelations of the past half hour buzz in my mind. I thought Jeanine attacked the Abnegation to seize power, but she attacked them to steal information—information only they knew.
Then the buzzing stops as I remember something else Marcus said: Most of the leaders of this city risked their lives for it. Was one of those leaders my father?
I have to know. I have to find out what could possibly be important enough for the Abnegation to die for—and the Erudite to kill for.
I pause before knocking on Tobias’s door, and listen to what’s going on inside.
“No, not like that,” Tobias says through laughter.
“What do you mean, ‘not like that’? I imitated you perfectly.” The second voice belongs to Caleb.
“You did not.”
“Well, do it again, then.”
I push open the door just as Tobias, who is sitting on the floor with one leg stretched out, hurls a butter knife at the opposite wall. It sticks, handle out, from a large hunk of cheese they positioned on top of the dresser. Caleb, standing beside him, stares in disbelief, first at the cheese and then at me.
“Tell me he’s some kind of Dauntless prodigy,” says Caleb. “Can you do this too?”
He looks better than he did earlier—his eyes aren’t red anymore and some of the old spark of curiosity is in them, like he is interested in the world again. His brown hair is tousled, his shirt buttons in the wrong buttonholes. He is handsome in a careless way, my brother, like he has no idea what he looks like most of the time.
“With my right hand, maybe,” I say. “But yes, Four is some kind of Dauntless prodigy. Can I ask why you’re throwing knives at cheese?”
Tobias’s eyes catch mine on the word “Four.” Caleb doesn’t know that Tobias wears his excellence all the time in his own nickname.
“Caleb came by to discuss something,” Tobias says, leaning his head against the wall as he looks at me. “And knife-throwing just came up somehow.”
“As it so often does,” I say, a small smile inching its way across my face.
He looks so relaxed, his head back, his arm slung over his knee. We stare at each other for a few more seconds than is socially acceptable. Caleb clears his throat.
“Anyway, I should be getting back to my room,” Caleb says, looking from Tobias to me and back again. “I’m reading this book about the water-filtration systems. The kid who gave it to me looked at me like I was crazy for wanting to read it. I think it’s supposed to be a repair manual, but it’s fascinating.” He pauses. “Sorry. You probably think I’m crazy too.”
“Not at all,” Tobias says with mock sincerity. “Maybe you should read that repair manual too, Tris. It sounds like something you might like.”
“I can loan it to you,” Caleb says.
“Maybe later,” I say. When Caleb closes the door behind him, I give Tobias a dirty look.
“Thanks for that,” I say. “Now he’s going to talk my ear off about water filtration and how it works. Though I guess I might prefer that to what he wants to talk to me about.”
“Oh? And what’s that?” Tobias quirks his eyebrows. “Aquaponics?”
“Aqua-what?”
“It’s one of the ways they grow food here. You don’t want to know.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” I say. “What did he come to talk to you about?”
“You,” he says. “I think it was the big-brother talk. ‘Don’t mess around with my sister’ and all that.”
He gets up.
“What did you tell him?”
He comes toward me.
“I told him how we got together—that’s how knife-throwing came up,” he says, “and I told him I wasn’t messing around.”
I feel warm everywhere. He wraps his hands around my hips and presses me gently against the door. His lips find mine.
I don’t remember why I came here in the first place.
And I don’t care.
I wrap my uninjured arm around him, pulling him against me. My fingers find the hem of his T-shirt, and slide beneath it, spreading wide over the small of his back. He feels so strong.
He kisses me again, more insistent this time, his hands squeezing my waist. His breaths, my breaths, his body, my body, we are so close there is no difference.
He pulls back, just a few centimeters. I almost don’t let him get that far.
“This isn’t what you came here for,” he says.
“No.”
“What did you come for, then?”
“Who cares?”
I push my fingers through his hair, and draw his mouth to mine again. He doesn’t resist, but after a few seconds, he mumbles, “Tris,” against my cheek.
“Okay, okay.” I close my eyes. I did come here for something important: to tell him the conversation I overheard.
We sit side by side on Tobias’s bed, and I start from the beginning. I tell him how I followed Marcus and Johanna into the orchard. I tell him Johanna’s question about the timing of the simulation attack, and Marcus’s response, and the argument that followed. As I do, I watch his expression. He does not look shocked or curious. Instead, his mouth works its way into the bitter pucker that accompanies any mention of Marcus.
“Well, what do you think?” I say once I finish.
“I think,” he says carefully, “that it’s Marcus trying to feel more important than he is.”
That was not the response I was expecting.
“So … what? You think he’s just talking nonsense?”
“I think there probably is some information the Abnegation knew that Jeanine wanted to know, but I think he’s exaggerating its importance. Trying to build up his own ego by making Johanna think he’s got something she wants and he won’t give it to her.”
“I don’t …” I frown. “I don’t think you’re right. He didn’t sound like he was lying.”
“You don’t know him like I do. He is an excellent liar.”
He is right—I don’t know Marcus, and certainly not as well as he does. But my instinct was to believe Marcus, and I usually trust my instincts.
“Maybe you’re right,” I say, “but shouldn’t we find out what’s going on? Just to be sure?”
“I think it’s more important that we deal with the situation at hand,” says Tobias. “Go back to the city. Find out what’s going on there. Find a way to take Erudite down. Then maybe we can find out what Marcus was talking about, after this is all resolved. Okay?”
I nod. It sounds like a good plan—a smart plan. But I don’t believe him—I don’t believe it’s more important to move forward than to find out the truth. When I found out that I was Divergent … when I found out that Erudite would attack Abnegation … those revelations changed everything. The truth has a way of changing a person’s plans.
But it is difficult to persuade Tobias to do something he doesn’t want to do, and even more difficult to justify my feelings with no evidence except my intuition.
So I agree. But I do not change my mind.
“BIOTECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN around for a long time, but it wasn’t always very effective,” Caleb says. He starts on the crust of his toast—he ate the middle first, just like he used to when we were little.
He sits across from me in the cafeteria, at the table closest to the windows. Carved into the wood along the table’s edge are the letters “D” and “T” linked together by a heart, so small I almost didn’t see them. I run my fingers over the carving as Caleb speaks.
“But Erudite scientists developed this highly effective mineral solution a while back. It was better for the plants than dirt,” he says. “It’s an earlier version of that salve they put on your shoulder—it accelerates the growth of new cells.”
His eyes are wild with new information. Not all the Erudite are power hungry and devoid of conscience, like their leader, Jeanine Matthews. Some of them are like Caleb: fascinated by everything, dissatisfied until they find out how it works.
I rest my chin on my hand and smile a little at him. He seems upbeat this morning. I am glad he has found something to distract him from his grief.
“So Erudite and Amity work together, then?” I say.
“More closely than Erudite and any other faction,” he says. “Don’t you remember from our Faction History book? It called them the ‘essential factions’—without them, we would be incapable of survival. Some of the Erudite texts called them the ‘enriching factions.’ And one of Erudite’s missions as a faction was to become both—essential and enriching.”
It doesn’t sit well with me, how much our society needs Erudite to function. But they are essential—without them, there would be inefficient farming, insufficient medical treatments, and no technological advance.
I bite my apple.
“You aren’t going to eat your toast?” he says.
“The bread tastes strange,” I say. “You can have it if you want.”
“I’m amazed by how they live here,” he says as he takes the toast from my plate. “They’re completely self-sustaining. They have their own source of power, their own water pumps, their own water filtration, their own food sources…. They’re independent.”
“Independent,” I say, “and uninvolved. Must be nice.”
It is nice, from what I can tell. The large windows beside our table let in so much sunlight I feel like I’m sitting outside. Clusters of Amity sit at the other tables, their clothes bright against their tanned skin. On me the yellow looks dull.
“So I take it Amity wasn’t one of the factions you had an aptitude for,” he says, grinning.
“No.” The group of Amity a few seats away from us bursts into laughter. They haven’t even glanced in our direction since we sat down to eat. “Keep it down, all right? It’s not something I want to broadcast.”
“Sorry,” he says, leaning over the table so that he can talk quieter. “So what were they?”
I feel myself tensing, straightening. “Why do you want to know?”
“Tris,” he says, “I’m your brother. You can tell me anything.”
His green eyes never waver. He’s abandoned the useless spectacles he wore as a member of Erudite in favor of an Abnegation gray shirt and their trademark short haircut. He looks just as he did a few months ago, when we were living across the hall from each other, both of us considering switching factions but not brave enough to tell one another. Not trusting him enough to tell him was a mistake I do not want to make again.
“Abnegation, Dauntless,” I say, “and Erudite.”
“Three factions?” His eyebrows lift.
“Yes. Why?”
“It just seems like a lot,” he says. “We each had to choose a research focus in Erudite initiation, and mine was the aptitude test simulation, so I know a lot about the way it’s designed. It’s really difficult for a person to get two results—the program actually doesn’t allow it. But to get three … I’m not even sure how that’s possible.”
“Well, the test administrator had to alter the test,” I say. “She forced it to go to that situation on the bus so that she could rule out Erudite—except Erudite wasn’t ruled out.”
Caleb props his chin on a fist. “A program override,” he says. “I wonder how your test administrator knew how to do that. It’s not something they’re taught.”
I frown. Tori was a tattoo artist and an aptitude test volunteer—how did she know how to alter the aptitude test program? If she was good with computers, it was only as a hobby, and I doubt that a computer hobby would enable someone to fiddle with an Erudite simulation.
Then something from one of my conversations with her surfaces. My brother and I both transferred from Erudite.
“She was Erudite,” I say. “A faction transfer. Maybe that’s how.”
“Maybe,” he says, tapping his fingers—from left to right—against his cheek. Our breakfasts sit, almost forgotten, between us. “What does this mean about your brain chemistry? Or anatomy?”
I laugh a little. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m always aware during simulations, and sometimes I can wake myself up from them. Sometimes they don’t even work. Like the attack simulation.”
“How do you wake yourself up from them? What do you do?”
“I …” I try to remember. I feel like it has been a long time since I was in one, though it was only a few weeks. “It’s hard to say, because the Dauntless simulations were supposed to end when we had calmed down. But in one of mine … the one where Tobias figured out what I was … I just did something impossible. I broke glass just by putting my hand on it.”
Caleb’s expression becomes distant, like he is looking into faraway places. Nothing like what I just described ever happened to him in the aptitude test simulation, I know. So maybe he is wondering what it felt like, or how it’s possible. My cheeks grow warmer—he is analyzing my brain like he would analyze a computer or a machine.
“Hey,” I say. “Come back.”
“Sorry,” he says, focusing on me again. “It’s just …”
“Fascinating. Yeah, I know. You always look like someone’s sucked the life right out of you when something fascinates you.”
He laughs.
“Can we talk about something else, though?” I say. “There may not be any Erudite or Dauntless traitors around, but it still feels weird, talking about it in public like this.”
“All right.”
Before he can go on, the cafeteria doors open, and a group of Abnegation come in. They wear Amity clothes, like me, but also like me, it’s obvious what faction they are really in. They are silent, but not somber—they smile at the Amity they pass, inclining their heads, a few of them stopping to exchange pleasantries.
Susan sits down next to Caleb with a small smile. Her hair is pulled back in its usual knot, but her blond hair shines like gold. She and Caleb sit just slightly closer than friends would, though they do not touch. She bobs her head to greet me.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Did I interrupt?”
“No,” says Caleb. “How are you?”
“I’m well. How are you?”
I am just about to flee the dining hall rather than participate in careful, polite Abnegation conversation when Tobias comes in, looking harassed. He must have been working in the kitchen this morning, as part of our agreement with the Amity. I have to work in the laundry rooms tomorrow.
“What happened?” I say as he sits down next to me.
“In their enthusiasm for conflict resolution, the Amity have apparently forgotten that meddling creates more conflict,” says Tobias. “If we stay here much longer, I am going to punch someone, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Caleb and Susan both raise their eyebrows at him. A few of the Amity at the table next to ours stop talking to stare.
“You heard me,” Tobias says to them. They all look away.
“As I said,” I say, covering my mouth to hide my smile, “what happened?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
It must have to do with Marcus. Tobias doesn’t like the dubious looks the Abnegation give him when he refers to Marcus’s cruelty, and Susan is sitting right across from him. I clasp my hands in my lap.
The Abnegation sit at our table, but not right next to us—a respectful distance of two seats away, though most of them still nod at us. They were my family’s friends and neighbors and coworkers, and before, their presence would have encouraged me to be quiet and self-effacing. Now it makes me want to talk louder, to be as far from that old identity and the pain that accompanies it as possible.
Tobias goes completely still when a hand falls on my right shoulder, sending prickles of pain down my right arm. I clench my teeth to keep from groaning.
“She got shot in that shoulder,” Tobias says without looking at the man behind me.
“My apologies.” Marcus lifts his hand and sits down on my left. “Hello.”
“What do you want?” I say.
“Beatrice,” Susan says quietly. “There’s no need to—”
“Susan, please,” says Caleb quietly. She presses her lips into a line and looks away.
I frown at Marcus. “I asked you a question.”
“I would like to discuss something with you,” says Marcus. His expression is calm, but he’s angry—the terseness in his voice betrays him. “The other Abnegation and myself have discussed it and decided that we should not stay here. We believe that, given the inevitability of further conflict in our city, it would be selfish of us to stay here while what remains of our faction is inside that fence. We would like to request that you escort us.”
I did not expect that. Why does Marcus want to return to the city? Is it really just an Abnegation decision, or does he intend to do something there—something that has to do with whatever information the Abnegation have?
I stare at him for a few seconds and then look at Tobias. He has relaxed a little, but he keeps his eyes focused on the table. I don’t know why he acts this way around his father. No one, not even Jeanine, makes Tobias cower.
“What do you think?” I say.
“I think we should leave the day after tomorrow,” Tobias says.
“Okay. Thank you,” says Marcus. He gets up and sits at the other end of the table with the rest of the Abnegation.
I inch closer to Tobias, not sure how to comfort him without making things worse. I pick up my apple with my left hand, and grab his hand under the table with my right.
But I can’t keep my eyes away from Marcus. I want to know more about what he said to Johanna. And sometimes, if you want the truth, you have to demand it.
AFTER BREAKFAST, I tell Tobias I’m going for a walk, but instead I follow Marcus. I expect him to walk to the guests’ dormitory, but he crosses the field behind the dining hall and walks into the water-filtration building. I hesitate on the bottom step. Do I really want to do this?
I walk up the steps and through the door that Marcus just closed behind him.
The filtration building is small, just one room with a few huge machines in it. As far as I can tell, some of the machines take in dirty water from the rest of the compound, a few of them purify it, others test it, and the last set pumps clean water back out to the compound. The piping systems are all buried except one, which runs along the ground to send water to the power plant, near the fence. The plant provides power to the entire city, using a combination of wind, water, and solar energy.
Marcus stands near the machines that filter the water. There the pipes are transparent. I can see brown-tinged water rushing through one pipe, disappearing into the machine, and emerging clear. Both of us watch the purification happen, and I wonder if he is thinking what I am: that it would be nice if life worked this way, stripping the dirt from our lives and sending us out into the world clean. But some dirt is destined to linger.
I stare at the back of Marcus’s head. I have to do this now.
Now.
“I heard you, the other day,” I blurt out.
Marcus whips his head around. “What are you doing, Beatrice?”
“I followed you here.” I fold my arms over my chest. “I heard you talking to Johanna about what motivated Jeanine’s attack on Abnegation.”
“Did the Dauntless teach you that it’s all right to invade another person’s privacy, or did you teach yourself?”
“I’m a naturally curious person. Don’t change the subject.”
Marcus’s forehead is creased, especially between the eyebrows, and there are deep lines next to his mouth. He looks like a man who has spent most of his life frowning. He might have been handsome when he was younger—perhaps he still is, to women his age, like Johanna—but all I see when I look at him are the black-pit eyes from Tobias’s fear landscape.
“If you heard me talking to Johanna, then you know that I didn’t even tell her about this. So what makes you think that I would share the information with you?”
I don’t have an answer at first. But then it comes to me.
“My father,” I say. “My father is dead.” It’s the first time I’ve said it since I told Tobias, on the train ride over, that my parents died for me. “Died” was just a fact to me then, detached from emotion. But “dead,” mingling with the churning and bubbling noises in this room, strikes a blow like a hammer to my chest, and the monster of grief awakens, clawing at my eyes and throat.
I force myself to continue.
“He may not have actually died for whatever information you were referring to,” I say. “But I want to know if it was something he risked his life for.”
Marcus’s mouth twitches.
“Yes,” he says. “It was.”
My eyes fill with tears. I blink them away.
“Well,” I say, almost choking, “then what on earth was it? Was it something you were trying to protect? Or steal? Or what?”
“It was …” Marcus shakes his head. “I’m not going to tell you that.”
I step toward him. “But you want it back. And Jeanine has it.”
Marcus is a good liar—or at least, someone who is skilled at hiding secrets. He does not react. I wish I could see like Johanna sees, like the Candor see—I wish I could read his expression. He could be close to telling me the truth. If I press just hard enough, maybe he’ll crack.
“I could help you,” I say.
Marcus’s upper lip curls. “You have no idea how ridiculous that sounds.” He spits the words at me. “You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time.”
This is the Marcus that Tobias knows. The one who knows right where to hit to cause the most damage.
My body shudders with anger. “Tobias is right about you,” I say. “You’re nothing but an arrogant, lying piece of garbage.”
“He said that, did he?” Marcus raises his eyebrows.
“No,” I say. “He doesn’t mention you enough to say anything like that. I figured it out all on my own.” I clench my teeth. “You’re almost nothing to him, you know. And as time goes on, you become less and less.”
Marcus doesn’t answer me. He turns back to the water purifier. I stand for a moment in my triumph, the sound of rushing water combining with the heartbeat in my ears. Then I leave the building, and it isn’t until I’m halfway across the field that I realize I didn’t win. Marcus did.
Whatever the truth is, I’ll have to get it from somewhere else, because I won’t be asking him again.
That night I dream that I am in a field, and I encounter a flock of crows clustered on the ground. When I swat a few of them away, I realize that they are perched on top of a man, pecking at his clothes, which are Abnegation gray. Without warning, they take flight, and I realize that the man is Will.
Then I wake up.
I turn my face into the pillow and release, instead of his name, a sob that throws my body against the mattress. I feel the monster of grief again, writhing in the empty space where my heart and stomach used to be.
I gasp, pressing both palms to my chest. Now the monstrous thing has its claws around my throat, squeezing my airway. I twist and put my head between my knees, breathing until the strangled feeling leaves me.
Even though the air is warm, I shiver. I get out of bed and creep down the hallway toward Tobias’s room. My bare legs almost glow in the dark. His door creaks when I pull it open, loud enough to wake him. He stares at me for a second.
“C’mere,” he says, sluggish from sleep. He shifts back on the bed to leave space for me.
I should have thought this through. I sleep in a long T-shirt one of the Amity lent me. It comes down just past my butt, and I didn’t think to put on a pair of shorts before I came here. Tobias’s eyes skim my bare legs, making my face warm. I lie down, facing him.
“Bad dream?” he says.
I nod.
“What happened?”
I shake my head. I can’t tell him that I’m having nightmares about Will, or I would have to explain why. What would he think of me, if he knew what I had done? How would he look at me?
He keeps his hand on my cheek, moving his thumb over my cheekbone idly.
“We’re all right, you know,” he says. “You and me. Okay?”
My chest aches, and I nod.
“Nothing else is all right.” His whisper tickles my cheek. “But we are.”
“Tobias,” I say. But whatever I was about to say gets lost in my head, and I press my mouth to his, because I know that kissing him will distract me from everything.
He kisses me back. His hand starts on my cheek, and then brushes over my side, fitting to the bend in my waist, curving over my hip, sliding to my bare leg, making me shiver. I press closer to him and wrap my leg around him. My head buzzes with nervousness, but the rest of me seems to know exactly what it’s doing, because it all pulses to the same rhythm, all wants the same thing: to escape itself and become a part of him instead.
His mouth moves against mine, and his hand slips under the hem of the T-shirt, and I don’t stop him, though I know I should. Instead a faint sigh escapes me, and heat rushes into my cheeks, embarrassment. Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care, because he presses his palm to my lower back, presses me closer. His fingers move slowly up my back, tracing my spine. My shirt creeps up my body, and I don’t pull it down, even when I feel cool air on my stomach.
He kisses my neck, and I grab his shoulder to steady myself, gathering his shirt into my fist. His hand reaches the top of my back and curls around my neck. My shirt is twisted around his arm, and our kisses become desperate. I know my hands are shaking from all the nervous energy inside me, so I tighten my grip on his shoulder so he won’t notice.
Then his fingers brush the bandage on my shoulder, and a dart of pain goes through me. It didn’t hurt much, but it brings me back to reality. I can’t be with him in that way if one of my reasons for wanting it is to distract myself from grief.
I lean back and carefully pull the hem of my shirt down so it covers me again. For a second we just lie there, our heavy breaths mixing. I don’t mean to cry—now is not a good time to cry; no, it has to stop—but I can’t get the tears out of my eyes, no matter how many times I blink.
“Sorry,” I say.
He says almost sternly, “Don’t apologize.” He brushes the tears from my cheeks.
I know that I am birdlike, made narrow and small as if for taking flight, built straight-waisted and fragile. But when he touches me like he can’t bear to take his hand away, I don’t wish I was any different.
“I don’t mean to be such a mess,” I say, my voice cracking. “I just feel so …” I shake my head.
“It’s wrong,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if your parents are in a better place—they aren’t here with you, and that’s wrong, Tris. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have happened to you. And anyone who tells you it’s okay is a liar.”
A sob racks my body again, and he wraps his arms around me so tightly I find it difficult to breathe, but it doesn’t matter. My dignified weeping gives way to full-on ugliness, my mouth open and my face contorted and sounds like a dying animal coming from my throat. If this continues I will break apart, and maybe that would be better, maybe it would be better to shatter and bear nothing.
He doesn’t speak for a long time, until I am quiet again.
“Sleep,” he says. “I’ll fight the bad dreams off if they come to get you.”
“With what?”
“My bare hands, obviously.”
I wrap my arm around his waist and take a deep breath of his shoulder. He smells like sweat and fresh air and mint, from the salve he sometimes uses to relax his sore muscles. He smells safe, too, like sunlit walks in the orchard and silent breakfasts in the dining hall. And in the moments before I drift off to sleep, I almost forget about our war-torn city and all the conflict that will come to find us soon, if we don’t find it first.
In the moments before I drift off to sleep, I hear him whisper, “I love you, Tris.”
And maybe I would say it back, but I am too far gone.
THAT MORNING I wake up to the buzz of an electric razor. Tobias stands in front of the mirror, his head tilted so he can see the corner of his jaw.
I hug my knees, covered by the sheet, and watch him.
“Good morning,” he says. “How did you sleep?”
“Okay.” I get up, and as he tilts his head back to address his chin with the razor, I wrap my arms around him, pressing my forehead to his back where the Dauntless tattoo peeks out from beneath his shirt.
He sets the razor down and folds his hands over mine. Neither of us breaks the silence. I listen to him breathe, and he strokes my fingers idly, the task at hand forgotten.
“I should go get ready,” I say after a while. I am reluctant to leave, but I am supposed to work in the laundry rooms, and I don’t want the Amity to say I’m not fulfilling my part of the deal they offered us.
“I’ll get you something to wear,” he says.
I walk barefoot down the hallway a few minutes later, wearing the shirt I slept in and a pair of shorts Tobias borrowed from the Amity. When I get back to my bedroom, Peter is standing next to my bed.
Instinct makes me straighten up and search the room for a blunt object.
“Get out,” I say as steadily as I can. But it’s hard to keep my voice from shaking. I can’t help but remember the look in his eyes as he held me over the chasm by my throat or slammed me against the wall in the Dauntless compound.
He turns to look at me. Lately when he looks at me it’s without his usual malice—instead he just seems exhausted, his posture slouched, his wounded arm in a sling. But I am not fooled.
“What are you doing in my room?”
He walks closer to me. “What are you doing stalking Marcus? I saw you after breakfast yesterday.”
I match his stare with my own. “That’s none of your business. Get out.”
“I’m here because I don’t know why you get to keep track of that hard drive,” he says. “It’s not like you’re particularly stable these days.”
“I’m unstable?” I laugh. “I find that a little funny, coming from you.”
Peter pinches his lips together and says nothing.
I narrow my eyes. “Why are you so interested in the hard drive anyway?”
“I’m not stupid,” he says. “I know it contains more than the simulation data.”
“No, you aren’t stupid, are you?” I say. “You think if you deliver it to the Erudite, they’ll forgive your indiscretion and let you back in their good graces.”
“I don’t want to be back in their good graces,” he says, stepping forward again. “If I had, I wouldn’t have helped you in the Dauntless compound.”
I jab his sternum with my index finger, digging in my fingernail. “You helped me because you didn’t want me to shoot you again.”
“I may not be an Abnegation-loving faction traitor.” He seizes my finger. “But no one gets to control me, especially not the Erudite.”
I yank my hand back, twisting so that he won’t be able to hold on. My hands are sweaty.
“I don’t expect you to understand.” I wipe my hands on the hem of my shirt as I inch toward the dresser. “I’m sure if it had been Candor and not Abnegation that got attacked, you would have just let your family get shot between the eyes without protest. But I’m not like that.”
“Careful what you say about my family, Stiff.” He moves with me, toward the dresser, but I carefully shift so that I stand between him and the drawers. I’m not going to reveal the hard drive’s location by getting it out while he’s in here, but I don’t want to leave the path to it clear, either.
His eyes shift to the dresser behind me, to the left side, where the hard drive is hidden. I frown at him, and then notice something I didn’t before: a rectangular bulge in one of his pockets.
“Give it to me,” I say. “Now.”
“No.”
“Give it to me, or so help me, I will kill you in your sleep.”
He smirks. “If only you could see how ridiculous you look when you threaten people. Like a little girl telling me she’s going to strangle me with her jump rope.”
I start toward him, and he shifts back, into the hallway.
“Don’t call me ‘little girl.’”
“I’ll call you whatever I want.”
I jerk into action, aiming my left fist where I know it will hurt the worst: at the bullet wound in his arm. He dodges the punch, but instead of trying again, I seize his arm as hard as I can and wrench it to the side. Peter screams at the top of his lungs, and while he’s distracted by the pain, I kick him hard in the knee, and he falls to the ground.
People rush into the hallway, wearing gray and black and yellow and red. Peter surges toward me in a half crouch, and punches me in the stomach. I hunch over, but the pain doesn’t stop me—I let out something between a groan and a scream, and launch myself at him, my left elbow pulled back near my mouth so that I can slam it into his face.
One of the Amity grabs me by the arms and half lifts, half pulls me away from Peter. The wound in my shoulder throbs, but I hardly feel it through the pulse of adrenaline. I strain toward him and try to ignore the stunned faces of the Amity and the Abnegation—and Tobias—around me, and the woman kneels next to Peter, whispering words in a soothing tone of voice. I try to ignore his groans of pain and the guilt stabbing at my stomach. I hate him. I don’t care. I hate him.
“Tris, calm down!” Tobias says.
“He has the hard drive!” I yell. “He stole it from me! He has it!”
Tobias walks over to Peter, ignoring the woman crouched beside him, and presses his foot into Peter’s rib cage to keep him in place. He then reaches into Peter’s pocket and takes out the hard drive.
Tobias says to him—very quietly—“We won’t be in a safe house forever, and this wasn’t very smart of you.” Then he turns toward me and adds, “Not very smart of you, either. Do you want to get us kicked out?”
I scowl. The Amity man with his hand on my arm starts to pull me down the hallway. I try to wrench my body out of his grasp.
“What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!”
“You violated the terms of our peace agreement,” he says gently. “We must follow protocol.”
“Just go,” says Tobias. “You need to cool down.”
I search the faces of the crowd that has gathered. No one argues with Tobias. Their eyes skirt mine. So I allow two Amity men to escort me down the hallway.
“Watch your step,” one of them says. “The floorboards are uneven here.”
My head pounds, a sign that I am calming down. The graying Amity man opens a door on the left. A label on the door says CONFLICT ROOM.
“Are you putting me in time-out or something?” I scowl. That is something the Amity would do: put me in time-out, and then teach me to do cleansing breaths or think positive thoughts.
The room is so bright I have to squint to see. The opposite wall has large windows that look out over the orchard. Despite this, the room feels small, probably because the ceiling, like the walls and floor, is also covered with wooden boards.
“Please sit,” the older man says, gesturing toward the stool in the middle of the room. It, like all other furniture in the Amity compound, is made of unpolished wood, and looks sturdy, like it is still attached to the earth. I do not sit.
“The fight is over,” I say. “I won’t do it again. Not here.”
“We have to follow protocol,” the younger man says. “Please sit, and we’ll discuss what happened, and then we’ll let you go.”
All their voices are so soft. Not hushed, like the Abnegation speak, always treading holy ground and trying not to disturb. Soft, soothing, low—I wonder, then, if that is something they teach their initiates here. How best to speak, move, smile, to encourage peace.
I don’t want to sit down, but I do, perched on the edge of the chair so I can get up fast, if necessary. The younger man stands in front of me. Hinges creak behind me. I look over my shoulder—the older man is fumbling with something on a counter behind me.
“What are you doing?”
“I am making tea,” he says.
“I don’t think tea is really the solution to this.”
“Then tell us,” the younger man says, drawing my attention back to the windows. He smiles at me. “What do you believe is the solution?”
“Throwing Peter out of this compound.”
“It seems to me,” the man says gently, “that you are the one who attacked him—indeed, that you are the one who shot him in the arm.”
“You have no idea what he did to deserve those things.” My cheeks get hot again and mimic my heartbeat. “He tried to kill me. And someone else—he stabbed someone else in the eye … with a butter knife. He is evil. I had every right to—”
I feel a sharp pain in my neck. Dark spots cover the man in front of me, obscuring my view of his face.
“I’m sorry, dear,” he says. “We are just following protocol.”
The older man is holding a syringe. A few drops of whatever he injected me with are still in it. They are bright green, the color of grass. I blink rapidly, and the dark spots disappear, but the world still swims before me, like I am tilting forward and back in a rocking chair.
“How do you feel?” the younger man says.
“I feel …” Angry, I was about to say. Angry with Peter, angry with the Amity. But that’s not true, is it? I smile. “I feel good. I feel a little like … like I’m floating. Or swaying. How do you feel?”
“Dizziness is a side effect of the serum. You may want to rest this afternoon. And I’m feeling well. Thank you for asking,” he says. “You may leave now, if you would like.”
“Can you tell me where to find Tobias?” I say. When I imagine his face, affection for him bubbles up inside me, and all I want to do is kiss him. “Four, I mean. He’s handsome, isn’t he? I don’t really know why he likes me so much. I’m not very nice, am I?”
“Not most of the time, no,” the man says. “But I think you could be, if you tried.”
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“I think you’ll find him in the orchard,” he says. “I saw him go outside after the fight.”
I laugh a little. “The fight. What a silly thing …”
And it does seem like a silly thing, slamming your fist into someone else’s body. Like a caress, but too hard. A caress is much nicer. Maybe I should have run my hand along Peter’s arm instead. That would have felt better to both of us. My knuckles wouldn’t ache right now.
I get up and steer myself toward the door. I have to lean against the wall for balance, but it’s sturdy, so I don’t mind. I stumble down the hallway, giggling at my inability to balance. I’m clumsy again, just like I was when I was younger. My mother used to smile at me and say, “Be careful where you put your feet, Beatrice. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
I walk outside and the green on the trees seems greener, so potent I can almost taste it. Maybe I can taste it, and it is like the grass I decided to chew when I was a child just to see what it was like. I almost fall down the stairs because of the swaying and burst into laughter when the grass tickles my bare feet. I wander toward the orchard.
“Four!” I call out. Why am I calling out a number? Oh yes. Because that’s his name. I call out again, “Four! Where are you?”
“Tris?” says a voice from the trees on my right. It almost sounds like the tree is talking to me. I giggle, but of course it’s just Tobias, ducking under a branch.
I run toward him, and the ground lurches to the side, so I almost fall. His hand touches my waist, steadies me. The touch sends a shock through my body, and all my insides burn like his fingers ignited them. I pull closer to him, pressing my body against his, and lift my head to kiss him.
“What did they—” he starts, but I stop him with my lips. He kisses me back, but too quickly, so I sigh heavily.
“That was lame,” I say. “Okay, no it wasn’t, but …”
I stand on my tiptoes to kiss him again, and he presses his finger to my lips to stop me.
“Tris,” he says. “What did they do to you? You’re acting like a lunatic.”
“That’s not very nice of you to say,” I say. “They put me in a good mood, that’s all. And now I really want to kiss you, so if you could just relax—”
“I’m not going to kiss you. I’m going to figure out what’s going on,” he says.
I pout my lower lip for a second, but then I grin as the pieces come together in my mind.
“That’s why you like me!” I exclaim. “Because you’re not very nice either! It makes so much more sense now.”
“Come on,” he says. “We’re going to see Johanna.”
“I like you, too.”
“That’s encouraging,” he replies flatly. “Come on. Oh, for God’s sake. I’ll just carry you.”
He swings me into his arms, one arm under my knees and the other around my back. I wrap my arms around his neck and plant a kiss on his cheek. Then I discover that the air feels nice on my feet when I kick them, so I move my feet up and down as he walks us toward the building where Johanna works.
When we reach her office, she is sitting behind a desk with a stack of paper in front of her, chewing on a pencil eraser. She looks up at us, and her mouth drifts open slightly. A hunk of dark hair covers the left side of her face.
“You really shouldn’t cover up your scar,” I say. “You look prettier with your hair out of your face.”
Tobias sets me down too heavily. The impact is jarring and hurts my shoulder a little, but I like the sound my feet made when they hit the floor. I laugh, but neither Johanna nor Tobias laughs with me. Strange.
“What did you do to her?” Tobias says, terse. “What in God’s name did you do?”
“I …” Johanna frowns at me. “They must have given her too much. She’s very small; they probably didn’t take her height and weight into account.”
“They must have given her too much of what?” he says.
“You have a nice voice,” I say.
“Tris,” he says, “please be quiet.”
“The peace serum,” Johanna says. “In small doses, it has a mild, calming effect and improves the mood. The only side effect is some slight dizziness. We administer it to members of our community who have trouble keeping the peace.”
Tobias snorts. “I’m not an idiot. Every member of your community has trouble keeping the peace, because they’re all human. You probably dump it into the water supply.”
Johanna does not respond for a few seconds. She folds her hands in front of her.
“Clearly you know that is not the case, or this conflict would not have occurred,” she says. “But whatever we agree to do here, we do together, as a faction. If I could give the serum to everyone in this city, I would. You would certainly not be in the situation you are in now if I had.”
“Oh, definitely,” he says. “Drugging the entire population is the best solution to our problem. Great plan.”
“Sarcasm is not kind, Four,” she says gently. “Now, I am sorry about the mistake in giving too much to Tris, I really am. But she violated the terms of our agreement, and I’m afraid that you might not be able to stay here much longer as a result. The conflict between her and the boy—Peter—is not something we can forget.”
“Don’t worry,” says Tobias. “We intend to leave as soon as humanly possible.”
“Good,” she says with a small smile. “Peace between Amity and Dauntless can only happen when we maintain our distance from each other.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Excuse me?” she says. “What are you insinuating?”
“It explains,” he says, gritting his teeth, “why, under a pretense of neutrality—as if such a thing is possible!—you have left us to die at the hands of the Erudite.”
Johanna sighs quietly and looks out the window. Beyond it is a small courtyard with vines growing in it. The vines creep onto the window’s corners, like they are trying to come in and join the conversation.
“The Amity wouldn’t do something like that,” I say. “That’s mean.”
“It is for the sake of peace that we remain uninvolved—” Johanna begins.
“Peace.” Tobias almost spits the word. “Yes, I’m sure it will be very peaceful when we are all either dead or cowering in submission under the threat of mind control or stuck in an endless simulation.”
Johanna’s face contorts, and I mimic her, to see what it feels like to have my face that way. It doesn’t feel very good. I’m not sure why she did it to begin with.
She says slowly, “The decision was not mine to make. If it was, perhaps we would be having a different conversation right now.”
“Are you saying you disagree with them?”
“I am saying,” she says, “that it isn’t my place to disagree with my faction publicly, but I might, in the privacy of my own heart.”
“Tris and I will be gone in two days,” says Tobias. “I hope your faction doesn’t change their decision to make this compound a safe house.”
“Our decisions are not easily unmade. What about Peter?”
“You’ll have to deal with him separately,” he says. “Because he won’t be coming with us.”
Tobias takes my hand, and his skin feels nice against mine, though it’s not smooth or soft. I smile apologetically at Johanna, and her expression remains unchanged.
“Four,” she says. “If you and your friends would like to remain … untouched by our serum, you may want to avoid the bread.”
Tobias says thank you over his shoulder as we make our way down the hallway together, me skipping every other step.
THE SERUM WEARS off five hours later, when the sun is just beginning to set. Tobias shut me in my room for the rest of the day, checking on me every hour. This time when he comes in, I am sitting on the bed, glaring at the wall.
“Thank God,” he says, pressing his forehead to the door. “I was beginning to think it would never wear off and I would have to leave you here to … smell flowers, or whatever you wanted to do while you were on that stuff.”
“I’ll kill them,” I say. “I will kill them.”
“Don’t bother. We’re leaving soon anyway,” he says, closing the door behind him. He takes the hard drive from his back pocket. “I thought we could hide this behind your dresser.”
“That’s where it was before.”
“Yeah, and that’s why Peter won’t look for it here again.” Tobias pulls the dresser away from the wall with one hand and wedges the hard drive behind it with the other.
“Why couldn’t I fight the peace serum?” I say. “If my brain is weird enough to resist the simulation serum, why not this one?”
“I don’t know, really,” he says. He drops down next to me on the bed, jostling the mattress. “Maybe in order to fight off a serum, you have to want to.”
“Well, obviously I wanted to,” I say, frustrated, but without conviction. Did I want to? Or was it nice to forget about anger, forget about pain, forget about everything for a few hours?
“Sometimes,” he says, sliding his arm across my shoulders, “people just want to be happy, even if it’s not real.”
He’s right. Even now, this peace between us comes from not talking about things—about Will, or my parents, or me almost shooting him in the head, or Marcus. But I do not dare to disturb it with the truth, because I am too busy clinging to it for support.
“You might be right,” I say quietly.
“Are you conceding?” he says, his mouth falling open with mock surprise. “Seems like that serum did you some good after all….”
I shove him as hard as I can. “Take that back. Take it back now.”
“Okay, okay!” He puts up his hands. “It’s just … I’m not very nice either, you know. That’s why I like you so—”
“Out!” I shout, pointing at the door.
Laughing to himself, Tobias kisses my cheek and leaves the room.
That evening, I am too embarrassed by what happened to go to dinner, so I spend the time in the branches of an apple tree at the far end of the orchard, picking ripe apples. I climb as high as I dare to get them, muscles burning. I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.
I am wiping my forehead with the hem of my shirt, standing on a branch, when I hear the sound. It is faint, at first, joining the buzz of cicadas. I stand still to listen, and after a moment, I realize what it is: cars.
The Amity own about a dozen trucks that they use for transporting goods, but they only do that on weekends. The back of my neck tingles. If it isn’t the Amity, it’s probably the Erudite. But I have to be sure.
I grab the branch above me with both hands, but pull myself up with only my left arm. I’m surprised I’m still able to do that. I stand hunched, twigs and leaves tangled in my hair. A few apples fall to the ground when I shift my weight. Apple trees aren’t very tall; I may not be able to see far enough.
I use the nearby branches as steps, with my hands to steady me, twisting and leaning around the tree’s maze. I remember climbing the Ferris wheel on the pier, my muscles shaking, my hands throbbing. I am wounded now, but stronger, and the climbing feels easier.
The branches get thinner, weaker. I lick my lips and look at the next one. I need to climb as high as possible, but the branch I’m aiming for is short and looks pliable. I put my foot on it, testing its strength. It bends, but holds. I start to lift myself up, to put the other foot down, and the branch snaps.
I gasp as I fall back, seizing the tree trunk at the last second. This will have to be high enough. I stand on my tiptoes and squint in the direction of the sound.
At first I see nothing but a stretch of farmland, a strip of empty ground, the fence, and the fields and beginnings of buildings that lie beyond it. But approaching the gate are a few moving specks—silver, when the light catches them. Cars with black roofs—solar panels, which means only one thing. Erudite.
A breath hisses between my teeth. I don’t allow myself to think; I just put one foot down, then the other, so fast that bark peels off the branches and drifts toward the ground. As soon as my feet touch the earth, I run.
I count the rows of trees as I pass them. Seven, eight. The branches dip low, and I pass just beneath them. Nine, ten. I hold my right arm against my chest as I sprint faster, the bullet wound in my shoulder throbbing with each footstep. Eleven, twelve.
When I reach the thirteenth row, I throw my body to the right, down one of the aisles. The trees are close together in the thirteenth row. Their branches grow into one another, creating a maze of leaves and twigs and apples.
My lungs sting from a lack of oxygen, but I am not far from the end of the orchard. Sweat runs into my eyebrows. I reach the dining hall and throw open the door, shoving my way through a group of Amity men, and he is there; Tobias sits at one end of the cafeteria with Peter and Caleb and Susan. I can barely see them between the spots on my vision, but Tobias touches my shoulder.
“Erudite,” is all I manage to say.
“Coming here?” he says.
I nod.
“Do we have time to run?”
I am not sure about that.
By now, the Abnegation at the other end of the table are paying attention. They gather around us.
“Why do we need to run?” says Susan. “The Amity established this place as a safe house. No conflict allowed.”
“The Amity will have trouble enforcing that policy,” says Marcus. “How do you stop conflict without conflict?”
Susan nods.
“But we can’t leave,” Peter says. “We don’t have time. They’ll see us.”
“Tris has a gun,” Tobias says. “We can try to fight our way out.”
He starts toward the dormitory.
“Wait,” I say. “I have an idea.” I scan the crowd of Abnegation. “Disguises. The Erudite don’t know for sure that we’re still here. We can pretend to be Amity.”
“Those of us who aren’t dressed like the Amity should go to the dormitories, then,” Marcus says. “The rest of you, put your hair down; try to mimic their behavior.”
The Abnegation who are dressed in gray leave the dining hall in a pack and cross the courtyard to the guests’ dormitory. Once inside, I run to my bedroom, get on my hands and knees, and reach under the mattress for the gun.
I feel around for a few seconds before I find it, and when I do, my throat pinches, and I can’t swallow. I don’t want to touch the gun. I don’t want to touch it again.
Come on, Tris. I shove the gun under the waistband of my red pants. It is lucky they are so baggy. I notice the vials of healing salve and pain medicine on the bedside table and shove them in my pocket, just in case we do manage to escape.
Then I reach behind the dresser for the hard drive.
If the Erudite catch us—which is likely—they will search us, and I don’t want to just hand over the attack simulation again. But this hard drive also contains the surveillance footage from the attack. The record of our losses. Of my parents’ deaths. The only piece of them I have left. And because the Abnegation don’t take photographs, the only documentation I have of how they looked.
Years from now, when my memories begin to fade, what will I have to remind me of what they looked like? Their faces will change in my mind. I will never see them again.
Don’t be stupid. It’s not important.
I squeeze the hard drive so tightly it hurts.
Then why does it feel so important?
“Don’t be stupid,” I say aloud. I grit my teeth and grab the lamp from my bedside table. I yank the plug from the socket, throw the lampshade onto the bed, and crouch over the hard drive. Blinking tears from my eyes, I slam the base of the lamp into it, creating a dent.
I bring the lamp down again, and again, and again, until the hard drive cracks and pieces of it spread across the floor. Then I kick the shards under the dresser, put the lamp back, and walk into the hallway, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
A few minutes later, a small crowd of gray-clad men and women—and Peter—stand in the hallway, sorting through stacks of clothes.
“Tris,” says Caleb. “You’re still wearing gray.”
I pinch my father’s shirt, and hesitate.
“It’s Dad’s,” I say. If I change out of it, I will have to leave it behind. I bite my lip so that the pain will steady me. I have to get rid of it. It’s just a shirt. That’s all it is.
“I’ll put it on under mine,” Caleb says. “They’ll never see it.”
I nod and grab a red shirt from the dwindling pile of clothes. It is large enough to conceal the bulge of the gun. I duck into a nearby room to change, and hand off the gray shirt to Caleb when I get to the hallway. The door is open, and through it I see Tobias stuffing Abnegation clothes into the trash bin.
“Do you think the Amity will lie for us?” I ask him, leaning out the open doorway.
“To prevent conflict?” Tobias nods. “Absolutely.”
He wears a red collared shirt and a pair of jeans that are fraying at the knee. The combination looks ridiculous on him.
“Nice shirt,” I say.
He wrinkles his nose at me. “It was the only thing that covered up the neck tattoo, okay?”
I smile nervously. I forgot about my tattoos, but the shirt hides them well enough.
The Erudite cars pull up to the compound. There are five of them, all silver with black roofs. Their engines seem to purr as the wheels bump over uneven ground. I slip just inside the building, leaving the door open behind me, and Tobias busies himself with the latch on the trash bin.
The cars all pull to a stop, and the doors pop open, revealing at least five men and women in Erudite blue.
And about fifteen in Dauntless black.
When the Dauntless come closer, I see strips of blue fabric wrapped around their arms that can only signify their allegiance to Erudite. The faction that enslaved their minds.
Tobias takes my hand and leads me into the dormitory.
“I didn’t think our faction would be that stupid,” he says. “You have the gun, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “But there’s no guarantee I can fire it with any accuracy with my left hand.”
“You should work on that,” he says. Always an instructor.
“I will,” I say. I shake a little as I add, “If we live.”
His hands skim my bare arms. “Just bounce a little when you walk,” he says, kissing my forehead, “and pretend you’re afraid of their guns”—another kiss between my eyebrows—“and act like the shrinking violet you could never be”—a kiss on my cheek—“and you’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” I say. My hands tremble as I grip his shirt collar. I pull his mouth down to mine.
A bell sounds, once, twice, three times. It is a summons to the dining hall, where the Amity gather for less formal occasions than the meeting we attended. We join the crowd of Abnegation-turned-Amity.
I pull pins from Susan’s hair—the hairstyle is too severe for Amity. She gives me a small, grateful smile as her hair falls on her shoulders, the first time I have ever seen it that way. It softens her square jaw.
I am supposed to be braver than the Abnegation, but they don’t seem as worried as I am. They offer each other smiles and walk in silence—in too much silence. I wedge my way between them and jab one of the older women in the shoulder.
“Tell the kids to play tag,” I say to her.
“Tag?” she says.
“They’re acting respectful and … Stiff,” I say, cringing as I say the word that was my nickname in Dauntless. “And Amity kids would be causing a ruckus. Just do it, okay?”
The woman touches one Abnegation child on the shoulder and whispers something to him, and a few seconds later a small group of children run down the hallway, dodging Amity feet and yelling, “I touched you! You’re it!” “No, that was my sleeve!”
Caleb catches on, jabbing Susan in the ribs so she shrieks with laughter. I try to relax, injecting a bounce into my step as Tobias suggested, letting my arms swing as I turn corners. It is amazing how pretending to be in a different faction changes everything—even the way I walk. That must be why it’s so strange that I could easily belong in three of them.
We catch up to the Amity in front of us as we cross the courtyard to the dining hall and disperse among them. I keep Tobias in my peripheral vision, not wanting to stray too far from him. The Amity don’t ask questions; they just let us dissolve into their faction.
A pair of Dauntless traitors stand by the door to the dining hall, their guns in hand, and I stiffen. It feels real to me, suddenly, that I am unarmed and being herded into a building surrounded by Erudite and Dauntless, and if they discover me, there will be nowhere to run. They will shoot me on the spot.
I consider making a break for it. But where would I go that they could not catch me? I try to breathe normally. I am almost past them—don’t look, don’t look. A few steps away—eyes away, away.
Susan loops her arm through mine.
“I’m telling you a joke,” she says, “that you find very funny.”
I cover my hand with my mouth and force a giggle that sounds high-pitched and foreign, but judging by the smile she gives me, it was believable. We hang on each other the way Amity girls do, glancing at the Dauntless and then giggling again. I am amazed by how I manage to do it, with the leaden feeling inside me.
“Thank you,” I mutter once we’re inside.
“You’re welcome,” she replies.
Tobias sits across from me at one of the long tables, and Susan sits next to me. The rest of the Abnegation spread throughout the room, and Caleb and Peter are a few seats down from me.
I tap my fingers on my knees as we wait for something to happen. For a long time we just sit there, and I pretend to be listening to an Amity girl telling a story on my left. But every so often I look at Tobias, and he looks back at me, like we’re passing fear back and forth between us.
Finally Johanna walks in with an Erudite woman. Her bright blue shirt seems to glow against her skin, which is dark brown. She searches the room as she speaks to Johanna. I hold my breath as her eyes find me—and then let it out when she moves on without a moment’s hesitation. She did not recognize me.
At least, not yet.
Someone bangs on a tabletop, and the room goes quiet. This is it. This is the moment she either hands us over, or doesn’t.
“Our Erudite and Dauntless friends are looking for some people,” Johanna says. “Several members of Abnegation, three members of Dauntless, and a former Erudite initiate.” She smiles. “In the interest of full cooperation, I told them that the people they were looking for were, in fact, here, but have since moved on. They would like permission to search the premises, which means we have to vote. Does anyone object to a search?”
The tension in her voice suggests that if anyone does object, they should keep their mouth shut. I don’t know if the Amity pick up on that kind of thing, but no one says anything. Johanna nods to the Erudite woman.
“Three of you stick around,” the woman says to the Dauntless guards clustered by the entrance. “The rest of you, search all the buildings and report back if you find anything. Go.”
There is so much they could find. The pieces of the hard drive. Clothes I forgot to throw out. A suspicious lack of trinkets and decorations in our living spaces. I feel my pulse behind my eyes as the three Dauntless soldiers who stayed behind pace up and down the rows of tables.
The back of my neck tingles as one of them walks behind me, his footsteps loud and heavy. Not for the first time in my life, I’m glad that I’m small and plain. I don’t draw people’s eyes to me.
But Tobias does. He wears his pride in his posture, in the way his eyes claim everything they land on. That is not an Amity trait. It can only be a Dauntless one.
The Dauntless woman walking toward him looks at him right away. Her eyes narrow as she walks closer, and then stops directly behind him.
I wish the collar of his shirt were higher. I wish he didn’t have so many tattoos. I wish …
“Your hair is pretty short for an Amity,” she says.
… he did not cut his hair like the Abnegation.
“It’s hot,” he says.
The excuse might work if he knew how to deliver it, but he says it with a snap.
She stretches out her hand and, with her index finger, pulls back the collar of his shirt to see his tattoo.
And Tobias moves.
He grabs the woman’s wrist, yanking her forward so she loses her balance. She hits her head against the edge of the table and falls. Across the room, a gun goes off, someone screams, and everyone dives under the tables or crouches next to the benches.
Everyone except me. I sit where I was before the gunshot sounded, clutching the edge of the table. I know that’s where I am, but I don’t see the cafeteria anymore. I see the alley I escaped down after my mother died. I stare at the gun in my hands, at the smooth skin between Will’s eyebrows.
A small sound gurgles in my throat. It would have been a scream if my teeth had not been clamped shut. The flash of memory fades, but I still can’t move.
Tobias grabs the Dauntless woman by the back of her neck and wrenches her to her feet. He has her gun in his hand. He uses her to shield him as he fires over her right shoulder at the Dauntless soldier across the room.
“Tris!” he shouts. “A little help here?”
I pull my shirt up just far enough to reach the handle of the gun, and my fingers meet metal. It feels so cold that it hurts my fingertips, but that can’t be; it’s so hot in here. A Dauntless man at the end of the aisle aims his own revolver at me. The black spot at the end of the barrel grows around me, and I can hear my heart but nothing else.
Caleb lunges forward and grabs my gun. He holds it in both hands and fires at the knees of the Dauntless man who stands just feet away from him.
The Dauntless man screams and collapses, his hands clutching his leg, which gives Tobias the opportunity to shoot him in the head. His pain is momentary.
My entire body is trembling and I can’t stop it. Tobias still has the Dauntless woman by the throat, but this time, he aims his gun at the Erudite woman.
“Say another word,” says Tobias, “and I’ll shoot.”
The Erudite woman’s mouth is open, but she doesn’t speak.
“Whoever’s with us should start running,” Tobias says, his voice filling the room.
All at once, the Abnegation rise from their places under tables and benches, and start toward the door. Caleb pulls me up from the bench. I start toward the door.
Then I see something. A twitch, a flicker of movement. The Erudite woman lifts a small gun, points it at a man in a yellow shirt in front of me. Instinct, not presence of mind, pushes me into a dive. My hands collide with the man, and the bullet hits the wall instead of him, instead of me.
“Put the gun down,” says Tobias, pointing his revolver at the Erudite woman. “I have very good aim, and I’m betting that you don’t.”
I blink a few times to get the blurriness out of my eyes. Peter stares back at me. I just saved his life. He does not thank me, and I don’t acknowledge him.
The Erudite woman drops her gun. Together Peter and I walk toward the door. Tobias follows us, walking backward so he can keep his gun on the Erudite woman. At the last second before he passes through the threshold, he slams the door between him and her.
And we all run.
We sprint down the center aisle of the orchard in a breathless pack. The night air is heavy as a blanket and smells like rain. Shouts follow us. Car doors slam. I run faster than I can possibly run, like I’m breathing adrenaline instead of air. The purr of engines chases me into the trees. Tobias’s hand closes around mine.
We run through a cornfield in a long line. By then, the cars have caught up to us. The headlights creep through the tall stalks, illuminating a leaf here, an ear of corn there.
“Split up!” someone yells, and it sounds like Marcus.
We divide and spread through the field like spilling water. I grab Caleb’s arm. I hear Susan gasping behind Caleb.
We crash over cornstalks. The heavy leaves cut my cheeks and arms. I stare between Tobias’s shoulder blades as we run. I hear a heavy thump and a scream. There are screams everywhere, to my left, to my right. Gunshots. The Abnegation are dying again, dying like they were when I pretended to be under the simulation. And all I’m doing is running.
Finally we reach the fence. Tobias runs along it, pushing it until he finds a hole. He holds the chain links back so Caleb, Susan, and I can crawl through. Before we start running again, I stop and look back at the cornfield we just left. I see headlights distantly glowing. But I don’t hear anything.
“Where are the others?” whispers Susan.
I say, “Gone.”
Susan sobs. Tobias pulls me to his side roughly, and starts forward. My face burns with shallow cuts from the corn leaves, but my eyes are dry. The Abnegation deaths are just another weight I am unable to set down.
We stay away from the dirt road the Erudite and Dauntless took to get to the Amity compound, following the train tracks toward the city. There is nowhere to hide out here, no trees or buildings that can shield us, but it doesn’t matter. The Erudite can’t drive through the fence anyway, and it will take them a while to reach the gate.
“I have to … stop …” says Susan from somewhere in the darkness behind me.
We stop. Susan collapses to the ground, crying, and Caleb crouches next to her. Tobias and I look toward the city, which is still illuminated, because it’s not midnight yet. I want to feel something. Fear, anger, grief. But I don’t. All I feel is the need to keep moving.
Tobias turns toward me.
“What was that, Tris?” he says.
“What?” I say, and I am ashamed of how weak my voice sounds. I don’t know whether he’s talking about Peter or what came before or something else.
“You froze! Someone was about to kill you and you just sat there!” He is yelling now. “I thought I could rely on you at least to save your own life!”
“Hey!” says Caleb. “Give her a break, all right?”
“No,” says Tobias, staring at me. “She doesn’t need a break.” His voice softens. “What happened?”
He still believes that I am strong. Strong enough that I don’t need his sympathy. I used to think he was right, but now I am not sure. I clear my throat.
“I panicked,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“It won’t,” I say again, louder this time.
“Okay.” He looks unconvinced. “We have to get somewhere safe. They’ll regroup and start looking for us.”
“You think they care that much about us?” I say.
“Us, yes,” he says. “We were probably the only ones they were really after, apart from Marcus, who is most likely dead.”
I don’t know how I expected him to say it—with relief, maybe, because Marcus, his father and the menace of his life, is finally gone. Or with pain and sadness, because his father might have been killed, and sometimes grief doesn’t make much sense. But he says it like it’s just a fact, like the direction we’re moving or the time of day.
“Tobias …” I start to say, but then I realize I don’t know what comes after it.
“Time to go,” Tobias says over his shoulder.
Caleb coaxes Susan to her feet. She moves only with the help of his arm across her back, pressing her forward.
I didn’t realize until that moment that Dauntless initiation had taught me an important lesson: how to keep going.
WE DECIDE TO follow the railroad tracks to the city, because none of us is good at navigation. I walk from tie to tie, Tobias balances on the rail, wobbling only occasionally, and Caleb and Susan shuffle behind us. I twitch at every unidentified noise, tensing until I realize it is just the wind, or the squeak of Tobias’s shoes on the rail. I wish we could keep running, but it’s a feat that my legs are even moving at this point.
Then I hear a low groan from the rails.
I bend down and press my palms to the rail, closing my eyes to focus on the feeling of the metal beneath my hands. The vibration feels like a sigh going through my body. I stare between Susan’s knees down the tracks and see no train light, but that doesn’t mean anything. The train could be running with no horns and no lamps to announce its arrival.
I see the gleam of a small train car, far away now but approaching fast.
“It’s coming,” I say. It is an effort to get to my feet when all I want to do is sit down, but I do, brushing my hands on my jeans. “I think we should get on.”
“Even if it’s run by the Erudite?” says Caleb.
“If the Erudite were running the train, they would have taken it to the Amity compound to look for us,” Tobias says. “I think it’s worth the risk. We’ll be able to hide in the city. Here we’re just waiting for them to find us.”
We all get off the tracks. Caleb gives Susan step-by-step instructions for getting on a moving train, the way only a former Erudite can. I watch the first car approach; listen to the rhythmic bump of the car over the ties, the whisper of metal wheel against metal rail.
As the first car passes me, I start to run. I ignore the burning in my legs. Caleb helps Susan into a middle car first, then jumps in himself. I take a quick breath and throw my body to the right, slamming into the floor of the car with my legs dangling over the edge. Caleb grabs my left arm and pulls me in the rest of the way. Tobias uses the handle to swing himself in after me.
I look up, and stop breathing.
Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car, more numerous than we are.
The factionless.
The wind whistles through the car. Everyone is on their feet and armed—except Susan and me, who have no weapons. A factionless man with an eye patch has a gun pointed at Tobias. I wonder how he got it.
Next to him, an older factionless woman holds a knife—the kind I used to cut bread with. Behind him, someone else holds a large plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it.
“I’ve never seen the Amity armed before,” the factionless woman with the knife says.
The factionless man with the gun looks familiar. He wears tattered clothes in different colors—a black T-shirt with a torn Abnegation jacket over it, blue jeans mended with red thread, brown boots. All faction clothing is represented in the group before me: black Candor pants paired with black Dauntless shirts, yellow dresses with blue sweatshirts over them. Most items are torn or smudged in some way, but some are not. Freshly stolen, I imagine.
“They aren’t Amity,” the man with the gun says. “They’re Dauntless.”
Then I recognize him: he is Edward, a fellow initiate who left Dauntless after Peter attacked him with a butter knife. That is why he wears an eye patch.
I remember steadying his head as he lay screaming on the floor, and cleaning the blood he left behind.
“Hello, Edward,” I say.
He inclines his head to me, but doesn’t lower his gun. “Tris.”
“Whatever you are,” the woman says, “you’ll have to get off this train if you want to stay alive.”
“Please,” says Susan, her lip wobbling. Her eyes fill with tears. “We’ve been running … and the rest of them are dead and I don’t …” She starts to sob again. “I don’t think I can keep going, I …”
I get the strange urge to hit my head against the wall. Other people’s sobs make me uncomfortable. It’s selfish of me, maybe.
“We’re running from the Erudite,” says Caleb. “If we get off, it will be easier for them to find us. So we would appreciate it if you let us ride into the city with you.”
“Yeah?” Edward tilts his head. “What have you ever done for us?”
“I helped you when no one else would,” I say. “Remember?”
“You, maybe. But the others?” says Edward. “Not so much.”
Tobias steps forward, so Edward’s gun is almost against his throat.
“My name is Tobias Eaton,” Tobias says. “I don’t think you want to push me off this train.”
The effect of the name on the people in the car is immediate and bewildering: they lower their weapons. They exchange meaningful looks.
“Eaton? Really?” Edward says, eyebrows raised. “I have to admit, I did not see that coming.” He clears his throat. “Fine, you can come. But when we get to the city, you’ve got to come with us.”
Then he smiles a little. “We know someone who’s been looking for you, Tobias Eaton.”
Tobias and I sit on the edge of the car with our legs dangling over the edge.
“Do you know who it is?”
Tobias nods.
“Who, then?”
“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “I have a lot to tell you.”
I lean against him.
“Yeah,” I say. “So do I.”
I don’t know how much time passes before they tell us to get off. But when they do, we are in the part of the city where the factionless live, about a mile from where I grew up. I recognize each building we pass as one I walked by every time I missed the bus home from school. The one with the broken bricks. The one with a fallen streetlight leaning against it.
We stand in the doorway of the train car, all four of us in a line. Susan whimpers.
“What if we get hurt?” she says.
I grab her hand. “We’ll jump together. You and me. I’ve done this a dozen times and never got hurt.”
She nods and squeezes my fingers so hard they hurt.
“On three. One,” I say, “Two. Three.”
I jump, and pull her with me. My feet slam into the ground and continue forward, but Susan just falls to the pavement and rolls onto her side. Aside from a scraped knee, though, she seems to be all right. The others jump off without difficulty—even Caleb, who has only jumped from a train once before, as far as I know.
I’m not sure who could know Tobias among the factionless. It could be Drew or Molly, who failed Dauntless initiation—but they didn’t even know Tobias’s real name, and besides, Edward probably would have killed them by now, judging by how ready he was to shoot us. It must be someone from Abnegation, or from school.
Susan seems to have calmed down. She walks on her own now, next to Caleb, and her cheeks are drying with no new tears to wet them.
Tobias walks beside me, touching my shoulder lightly.
“It’s been a while since I checked that shoulder,” he says. “How is it?”
“Okay. I brought the pain medicine, luckily,” I say. I’m glad to talk about something light—as light as a wound can be, anyway. “I don’t think I’m letting it heal very well. I keep using my arm or landing on it.”
“There will be plenty of time for healing once all this is over.”
“Yeah.” Or it won’t matter if I heal, I add silently, because I’ll be dead.
“Here,” he says, taking a small knife from his back pocket and handing it to me. “Just in case.”
I put it in my own pocket. I feel even more nervous now.
The factionless lead us down the street and left into a grimy alleyway that stinks of garbage. Rats scatter in front of us with squeaks of terror, and I see only their tails, slipping between mounds of waste, empty trash cans, soggy cardboard boxes. I breathe through my mouth so I don’t throw up.
Edward stops next to one of the crumbling brick buildings and forces a steel door open. I wince, half expecting the entire building to fall down if he pulls too hard. The windows are so thick with grime that almost no light penetrates them. We follow Edward into a dank room. In the flickering glow of a lantern, I see … people.
People sitting next to rolls of bedding. People prying open cans of food. People sipping bottles of water. And children, weaving between the groups of adults, not confined to a particular color of clothing—factionless children.
We are in a factionless storehouse, and the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community … are together inside it. Are together, like a faction.
I don’t know what I expected of them, but I am surprised by how normal they seem. They don’t fight one another or avoid one another. Some of them tell jokes, others speak to each other quietly. Gradually, though, they all seem to realize that we aren’t supposed to be there.
“Come on,” Edward says, bending his finger to beckon us toward him. “She’s back here.”
Stares and silence greet us as we follow Edward deeper into the building that is supposed to be abandoned. Finally I can’t contain my questions any longer.
“What’s going on here? Why are you all together like this?”
“You thought they—we—were all split up,” Edward says over his shoulder. “Well, they were, for a while. Too hungry to do much of anything except look for food. But then the Stiffs started giving them food, clothes, tools, everything. And they got stronger, and waited. They were like that when I found them, and they welcomed me.”
We walk into a dark hallway. I feel at home, in the dark and the quiet that are like the tunnels in Dauntless headquarters. Tobias, however, winds a loose thread from his shirt around his finger, backward and forward, over and over. He knows who we’re meeting, but I still have no idea. How is it I know this little about the boy who says he loves me—the boy whose real name is powerful enough to keep us alive in a train car full of enemies?
Edward stops at a metal door and pounds on it with his fist.
“Wait, you said they were waiting?” says Caleb. “What were they waiting for, exactly?”
“For the world to fall apart,” Edward says. “And now it has.”
The door opens, and a severe-looking woman with a lazy eye stands in the doorway. Her steady eye scans the four of us.
“Strays?” she says.
“Not hardly, Therese.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder, at Tobias. “This one’s Tobias Eaton.”
Therese stares at Tobias for a few seconds, then nods. “He certainly is. Hold on.”
She shuts the door again. Tobias swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“You know who she’s going to get, don’t you,” says Caleb to Tobias.
“Caleb,” Tobias says. “Please shut up.”
To my surprise, my brother suppresses his Erudite curiosity.
The door opens again, and Therese steps back to let us in. We walk into an old boiler room with machinery that emerges from the darkness so suddenly I hit it with my knees and elbows. Therese leads us through the maze of metal to the back of the room, where several bulbs dangle from the ceiling over a table.
A middle-aged woman stands behind the table. She has curly black hair and olive skin. Her features are stern, so angular they almost make her unattractive, but not quite.
Tobias clutches my hand. At that moment I realize that he and the woman have the same nose—hooked, a little too big on her face but the right size on his. They also have the same strong jaw, distinct chin, spare upper lip, stick-out ears. Only her eyes are different—instead of blue, they are so dark they look black.
“Evelyn,” he says, his voice shaking a little.
Evelyn was the name of Marcus’s wife and Tobias’s mother. My grip on Tobias’s hand loosens. Just days ago I was remembering her funeral. Her funeral. And now she stands in front of me, her eyes colder than the eyes of any Abnegation woman I’ve ever seen.
“Hello.” She walks around the table, surveying him. “You look older.”
“Yes, well. The passage of time tends to do that to a person.”
He already knew she was alive. How long ago did he find out?
She smiles. “So you’ve finally come—”
“Not for the reason you think,” he interrupts her. “We were running from Erudite, and the only chance of escape we had required me to tell your poorly armed lackeys my name.”
She must have made him angry somehow. But I can’t help but think that if I discovered my mother was alive after thinking she was dead for so long, I would never speak to her the way Tobias speaks to his mother now, no matter what she had done.
The truth of that thought makes me ache. I push it aside and focus instead on what’s in front of me. On the table behind Evelyn is a large map with markers all over it. A map of the city, obviously, but I’m not sure what the markers mean. On the wall behind her is a chalkboard with a chart on it. I can’t decipher the information in the chart; it’s written in shorthand I don’t know.
“I see.” Evelyn’s smile remains, but without its former touch of amusement. “Introduce me to your fellow refugees, then.”
Her eyes drift down to our joined hands. Tobias’s fingers spring apart. He gestures to me first. “This is Tris Prior. Her brother, Caleb. And their friend Susan Black.”
“Prior,” she says. “I know of several Priors, but none of them are named Tris. Beatrice, however …”
“Well,” I say, “I know of several living Eatons, but none of them are named Evelyn.”
“Evelyn Johnson is the name I prefer. Particularly among a pack of Abnegation.”
“Tris is the name I prefer,” I reply. “And we’re not Abnegation. Not all of us, anyway.”
Evelyn gives Tobias a look. “Interesting friends you’ve made.”
“Those are population counts?” says Caleb from behind me. He walks forward, his mouth open. “And … what? Factionless safe houses?” He points to the first line on the chart, which reads 7………. Grn Hse. “I mean, these places, on the map? They’re safe houses, like this one, right?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” says Evelyn, arching an eyebrow. I recognize the expression. It belongs to Tobias—as does her distaste for questions. “For security purposes, I will not answer any of them. Anyway, it is time for dinner.”
She gestures toward the door. Susan and Caleb start toward it, followed by me, and Tobias and his mother are last. We work our way through the maze of machinery again.
“I’m not stupid,” she says in a low voice. “I know you want nothing to do with me—though I still don’t quite understand why—”
Tobias snorts.
“But,” she says, “I will extend my invitation again. We could use your help here, and I know you are like-minded about the faction system—”
“Evelyn,” Tobias says. “I chose Dauntless.”
“Choices can be made again.”
“What makes you think I’m interested in spending time anywhere near you?” he demands. I hear his footsteps stop, and slow down so I can hear how she responds.
“Because I’m your mother,” she says, and her voice almost breaks over the words, uncharacteristically vulnerable. “Because you’re my son.”
“You really don’t get it,” he says. “You don’t have the vaguest conception of what you’ve done to me.” He sounds breathless. “I don’t want to join up with your little band of factionless. I want to get out of here as quickly as possible.”
“My little band of factionless is twice the size of Dauntless,” says Evelyn. “You would do well to take it seriously. Its actions may determine the future of this city.”
With that, she walks ahead of him, and ahead of me. Her words echo in my mind: Twice the size of Dauntless. When did they become so large?
Tobias looks at me, eyebrows lowered.
“How long have you known?” I say.
“About a year.” He slumps against the wall and closes his eyes. “She sent a coded message to me in Dauntless, telling me to meet her at the train yard. I did, because I was curious, and there she was. Alive. It wasn’t a happy reunion, as you can probably guess.”
“Why did she leave Abnegation?”
“She had an affair.” He shakes his head. “And no wonder, since my father …” He shakes his head again. “Well, let’s just say Marcus wasn’t any nicer to her than he was to me.”
“Is … that why you’re angry with her? Because she was unfaithful to him?”
“No,” he says too sternly, his eyes opening. “No, that’s not why I’m angry.”
I walk toward him as if approaching a wild animal, each footstep careful on the cement floor. “Then why?”
“She had to leave my father, I get that,” he says. “But did she think of taking me with her?”
I purse my lips. “Oh. She left you with him.”
She left him alone with his worst nightmare. No wonder he hates her.
“Yeah.” He kicks at the floor. “She did.”
My fingers find his, fumbling, and he guides them into the spaces between his own. I know that’s enough questions, for now, so I let the silence linger between us until he decides to break it.
“It seems to me,” he says, “that the factionless are better friends than enemies.”
“Maybe. But what would the cost of that friendship be?” I say.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. But we may not have any other option.”
ONE OF THE factionless started a fire so we could heat up our food. Those who want to eat sit in a circle around the large metal bowl that contains the fire, first heating the cans, then passing out spoons and forks, then passing cans around so everyone can have a bite of everything. I try not to think about how many diseases could spread this way as I dip my spoon into a can of soup.
Edward drops to the ground next to me and takes the can of soup from my hands.
“So you were all Abnegation, huh?” He shovels several noodles and a piece of carrot into his mouth, and passes the can to the woman on his left.
“We were,” I say. “But obviously Tobias and I transferred, and …” Suddenly it occurs to me that I shouldn’t tell anyone Caleb joined Erudite. “Caleb and Susan are still Abnegation.”
“And he’s your brother. Caleb,” he says. “You ditched your family to become Dauntless?”
“You sound like the Candor,” I say irritably. “Mind keeping your judgments to yourself?”
Therese leans over. “He was Erudite first, actually. Not Candor.”
“Yeah, I know,” I say, “I—”
She interrupts me. “So was I. Had to leave, though.”
“What happened?”
“I wasn’t smart enough.” She shrugs and takes a can of beans from Edward, plunging her spoon into it. “I didn’t get a high enough score on my initiation intelligence test. So they said, ‘Spend your entire life cleaning up the research labs, or leave.’ And I left.”
She looks down and licks her spoon clean. I take the beans from her and pass them along to Tobias, who is staring at the fire.
“Are many of you from Erudite?” I say.
Therese shakes her head. “Most are from Dauntless, actually.” She jerks her head toward Edward, who scowls. “Then Erudite, then Candor, then a handful of Amity. No one fails Abnegation initiation, though, so we have very few of those, except for a bunch who survived the simulation attack and came to us for refuge.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about Dauntless,” I say.
“Well, yeah. You’ve got one of the worst initiations, and there’s that whole old-age thing.”
“Old-age thing?” I say. I glance at Tobias. He is listening now, and he looks almost normal again, his eyes thoughtful and dark in the firelight.
“Once the Dauntless reach a certain level of physical deterioration,” he says, “they are asked to leave. In one way or another.”
“What’s the other way?” My heart pounds, like it already knows an answer I can’t face without prompting.
“Let’s just say,” says Tobias, “that for some, death is preferable to factionlessness.”
“Those people are idiots,” says Edward. “I’d rather be factionless than Dauntless.”
“How fortunate that you ended up where you did, then,” says Tobias coldly.
“Fortunate?” Edward snorts. “Yeah. I’m so fortunate, with my one eye and all.”
“I seem to recall hearing rumors that you provoked that attack,” says Tobias.
“What are you talking about?” I say. “He was winning, that’s all, and Peter was jealous, so he just …”
I see the smirk on Edward’s face and stop talking. Maybe I don’t know everything about what happened during initiation.
“There was an inciting incident,” says Edward. “In which Peter did not come out the victor. But it certainly didn’t warrant a butter knife to the eye.”
“No arguments here,” says Tobias. “If it makes you feel any better, he got shot in the arm from a foot away during the simulation attack.”
And it does seem to make Edward feel better, because his smirk carves a deeper line into his face.
“Who did that?” he says. “You?”
Tobias shakes his head. “Tris did.”
“Well done,” Edward says.
I nod, but I feel a little sick to be congratulated for that.
Well, not that sick. It was Peter, after all.
I stare at the flames wrapping around the fragments of wood that fuel them. They move and shift, like my thoughts. I remember the first time I realized I had never seen an elderly Dauntless. And when I realized my father was too old to climb the paths of the Pit. Now I understand more about that than I’d like to.
“Do you know much about how things are right now?” Tobias asks Edward. “Did all the Dauntless side with Erudite? Has Candor done anything?”
“Dauntless is split in half,” Edward says, talking around the food in his mouth. “Half at Erudite headquarters, half at Candor headquarters. What’s left of Abnegation is with us. Nothing much has happened yet. Except for whatever happened to you, I guess.”
Tobias nods. I feel a little relieved to know that half of the Dauntless, at least, are not traitors.
I eat spoonful after spoonful until my stomach is full. Then Tobias gets us sleeping pallets and blankets, and I find an empty corner for us to lie down in. When he bends over to untie his shoes, I see the symbol of Amity on the small of his back, the branches curling over his spine. When he straightens, I step across the blankets and put my arms around him, brushing the tattoo with my fingers.
Tobias closes his eyes. I trust the dwindling fire to disguise us as I run my hand up his back, touching each tattoo without seeing it. I imagine Erudite’s staring eye, Candor’s unbalanced scales, Abnegation’s clasped hands, and the Dauntless flames. With my other hand I find the patch of fire tattooed over his rib cage. I feel his heavy breaths against my cheek.
“I wish we were alone,” he says.
“I almost always wish that,” I say.
I drift off to sleep, carried by the sound of distant conversations. These days it’s easier for me to fall asleep when there is noise around me. I can focus on the sound instead of whatever thoughts would crawl into my head in silence. Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and the guilty.
I wake when the fire is just a glow, and only a few of the factionless are still up. It takes me a few seconds to figure out why I woke up: I heard Evelyn’s and Tobias’s voices, a few feet away from me. I stay still and hope they don’t discover that I’m awake.
“You’ll have to tell me what’s going on here if you expect me to consider helping you,” he says. “Though I’m still not sure why you need me at all.”
I see Evelyn’s shadow on the wall, flickering with the fire. She is lean and strong, just like Tobias. Her fingers twist into her hair as she speaks.
“What would you like to know, exactly?”
“Tell me about the chart. And the map.”
“Your friend was correct in thinking that the map and the chart listed all of our safe houses,” she says. “He was wrong about the population counts … sort of. The numbers don’t document all the factionless—only certain ones. And I’ll bet you can guess which ones those are.”
“I’m not in the mood for guessing.”
She sighs. “The Divergent. We’re documenting the Divergent.”
“How do you know who they are?”
“Before the simulation attack, part of the Abnegation aid effort involved testing the factionless for a certain genetic anomaly,” she says. “Sometimes that testing involved re-administering the aptitude test. Sometimes it was more complicated than that. But they explained to us that they suspected we might have the highest Divergent population of any group in the city.”
“I don’t understand. Why—”
“Why would the factionless have a high Divergent population?” It sounds like she’s smirking. “Obviously those who can’t confine themselves to a particular way of thinking would be most likely to leave a faction or fail its initiation, right?”
“That’s not what I was going to ask,” he says. “I want to know why you care how many Divergent there are.”
“The Erudite are looking for manpower. They found it temporarily in Dauntless. Now they’ll be looking for more, and we’re the obvious place, unless they figure out that we’ve got more Divergent than any other group. Just in case they don’t, I want to know how many people we’ve got who are resistant to simulations.”
“Fair enough,” he says, “but why were the Abnegation so concerned with finding the Divergent? It wasn’t to help Jeanine, was it?”
“Of course not,” she says. “But I’m afraid I don’t know. The Abnegation were reluctant to provide information that only serves to relieve curiosity. They told us as much as they believed we should know.”
“Strange,” he mumbles.
“Perhaps you should ask your father about it,” she says. “He was the one who told me about you.”
“About me,” says Tobias. “What about me?”
“That he suspected you were Divergent,” she says. “He was always watching you. Noting your behavior. He was very attentive to you. That’s why … that’s why I thought you would be safe with him. Safer with him than with me.”
Tobias says nothing.
“I see now that I must have been wrong.”
He still says nothing.
“I wish—” she starts.
“Don’t you dare try to apologize.” His voice shakes. “This is not something you can bandage with a word or two and some hugging, or something.”
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I won’t.”
“For what purpose are the factionless uniting?” he says. “What do you intend to do?”
“We want to usurp Erudite,” she says. “Once we get rid of them, there’s not much stopping us from controlling the government ourselves.”
“That’s what you expect me to help you with. Overthrowing one corrupt government and instating some kind of factionless tyranny.” He snorts. “Not a chance.”
“We don’t want to be tyrants,” she says. “We want to establish a new society. One without factions.”
My mouth goes dry. No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can’t even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.
Tobias lets out a laugh. “Right. So how are you going to usurp Erudite?”
“Sometimes drastic change requires drastic measures.” Evelyn’s shadow lifts a shoulder. “I imagine it will involve a high level of destruction.”
I shiver at the word “destruction.” Somewhere in the darker parts of me, I crave destruction, as long as it is Erudite being destroyed. But the word carries new meaning for me, now that I have seen what it can look like: gray-clothed bodies slung across curbs and over sidewalks, Abnegation leaders shot on their front lawns, next to their mailboxes. I press my face into the pallet I’m sleeping on, so hard it hurts my forehead, just to force the memory out, out, out.
“As for why we need you,” Evelyn says. “In order to do this, we will need Dauntless’s help. They have the weapons and the combat experience. You could bridge the gap between us and them.”
“Do you think I’m important to the Dauntless? Because I’m not. I’m just someone who isn’t afraid of much.”
“What I am suggesting,” she says, “is that you become important.” She stands, her shadow stretching from ceiling to floor. “I am sure you can find a way, if you want to. Think about it.”
She pulls back her curly hair and ties it in a knot. “The door is always open.”
A few minutes later he lies next to me again. I don’t want to admit that I was eavesdropping, but I want to tell him I don’t trust Evelyn, or the factionless, or anyone who speaks so casually about demolishing an entire faction.
Before I can muster the courage to speak, his breaths become even, and he falls asleep.
I RUN MY hand over the back of my neck to lift the hair that sticks there. My entire body aches, especially my legs, which burn with lactic acid even when I am not moving. And I don’t smell very good. I need to shower.
I wander down the hall and into the bathroom. I am not the only person with bathing in mind—a group of women stand at the sinks, half of them naked, the other half completely unfazed by it. I find a free sink in the corner and stick my head under the faucet, letting cold water spill over my ears.
“Hello,” Susan says. I turn my head to the side. Water courses down my cheek and into my nose. She is carrying two towels: one white, one gray, both frayed at the edges.
“Hi,” I say.
“I have an idea,” she says. She turns her back to me and holds up a towel, blocking my view of the rest of the bathroom. I sigh with relief. Privacy. Or as much of it as possible.
I strip quickly and grab the bar of soap next to the sink.
“How are you?” she says.
“I’m fine.” I know she’s only asking because faction rules dictate that she does. I wish she would just speak to me freely. “How are you, Susan?”
“Better. Therese told me there is a large group of Abnegation refugees in one of the factionless safe houses,” says Susan as I lather soap into my hair.
“Oh?” I say. I shove my head under the faucet again, this time massaging my scalp with my left hand to get the soap out. “Are you going to go?”
“Yes,” says Susan. “Unless you need my help.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I think your faction needs you more,” I say, turning off the faucet. I wish I didn’t have to get dressed. It’s too hot for denim pants. But I grab the other towel from the floor and dry myself in a hurry.
I put on the red shirt I was wearing before. I don’t want to put on something that dirty again, but I have no other choice.
“I suspect some of the factionless women have spare clothes,” says Susan.
“You’re probably right. Okay, your turn.”
I stand with the towel as Susan washes up. My arms start to ache after a while, but she ignored the pain for me, so I’ll do the same for her. Water splashes on my ankles when she washes her hair.
“This is a situation I never thought we would be in together,” I say after a while. “Bathing from the sink of an abandoned building, on the run from the Erudite.”
“I thought we would live near each other,” says Susan. “Go to social events together. Have our kids walk to the bus stop together.”
I bite my lip at that. It is my fault, of course, that that was never a possibility, because I chose another faction.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up,” she says. “I just regret that I didn’t pay more attention. If I had, maybe I would have known what you were going through. I acted selfishly.”
I laugh a little. “Susan, there’s nothing wrong with the way you acted.”
“I’m done,” she says. “Can you hand me that towel?”
I close my eyes and turn so she can grab the towel from my hands. When Therese walks into the bathroom, smoothing her hair into a braid, Susan asks her for spare clothes.
By the time we leave the bathroom, I wear jeans and a black shirt that is so loose up top that it slips off my shoulders, and Susan wears baggy jeans and a white Candor shirt with a collar. She buttons it up to her throat. The Abnegation are modest to the point of discomfort.
When I enter the large room again, some of the factionless are walking out with buckets of paint and paintbrushes. I watch them until the door closes behind them.
“They’re going to write a message to the other safe houses,” says Evelyn from behind me. “On one of the billboards. Codes formed out of personal information—so-and-so’s favorite color, someone else’s childhood pet.”
I am not sure why she would choose to tell me something about the factionless codes until I turn around. I see a familiar look in her eyes—it is the same as the one Jeanine wore when she told Tobias she had developed a serum that could control him: pride.
“Clever,” I say. “Your idea?”
“It was, actually.” She shrugs, but I am not fooled. She is anything but nonchalant. “I was Erudite before I was Abnegation.”
“Oh,” I say. “Guess you couldn’t keep up with a life of academia, then?”
She doesn’t take the bait. “Something like that, yes.” She pauses. “I imagine your father left for the same reason.”
I almost turn away to end the conversation, but her words create a kind of pressure inside my mind, like she is squeezing my brain between her hands. I stare.
“You didn’t know?” She frowns. “I’m sorry; I forgot that faction members rarely discuss their old factions.”
“What?” I say, my voice cracking.
“Your father was born in Erudite,” she says. “His parents were friends with Jeanine Matthews’s parents, before they died. Your father and Jeanine used to play together as children. I used to watch them pass books back and forth at school.”
I imagine my father, a grown man, sitting next to Jeanine, a grown woman, at a lunch table in my old cafeteria, a book between them. The idea is so ridiculous to me that I half snort, half laugh. It can’t be true.
Except.
Except: He never talked about his family or his childhood.
Except: He did not have the quiet demeanor of someone who grew up in Abnegation.
Except: His hatred of Erudite was so vehement it must have been personal.
“I’m sorry, Beatrice,” Evelyn says. “I didn’t mean to reopen closing wounds.”
I frown. “Yes, you did.”
“What do you mean—”
“Listen carefully,” I say, lowering my voice. I check over her shoulder for Tobias, to make sure he isn’t listening in. All I see is Caleb and Susan on the ground in the corner, passing a jar of peanut butter back and forth. No Tobias.
“I’m not stupid,” I say. “I can see that you’re trying to use him. And I’ll tell him so, if he hasn’t figured it out already.”
“My dear girl,” she says. “I am his family. I am permanent. You are only temporary.”
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- Жанр: Детская проза
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 400 стр. 54 иллюстрации
- ISBN: 9780007479900
- Дата выхода книги: 18 мая 2019
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
Fighting for survival in a shattered world… the truth is her only hope.The thrillingly dark sequel to No. 1 New York Times bestseller, DIVERGENT.I have done bad things. I can’t take them back, and they are part of who I am.Tris has survived a brutal attack on her former home and family. But she has paid a terrible price. Wracked by grief and guilt, she becomes ever more reckless as she struggles to accept her new future.Yet if Tris wants to uncover the truth about her world, she must be stronger than ever… because more shocking choices and sacrifices lie ahead.
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Видео по теме - Insurgent Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Shailene Woodley Divergent Sequel HD
