“Sounds like a Stiff way of thinking.” She pauses. “I guess my way is very Candor, though. God, we really can’t escape factions no matter where we go, can we?”
I shrug. “Maybe it’s not so important to escape them.”
Tobias walks into the dormitory, looking pale and exhausted, like he always does these days. His hair is pushed up on one side from lying on his pillow, and he’s still wearing what he wore yesterday. He’s been sleeping in his clothes since we came to the Bureau.
Christina gets up. “Okay, I’m going to go. And leave you two . . . to all this space. Alone.” She gestures at all the empty beds, and then winks conspicuously at me as she walks out of the dormitory.
Tobias smiles a little, but not enough to make me think he’s actually happy. And instead of sitting next to me, he lingers at the foot of my bed, his fingers fumbling over the hem of his shirt.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he says.
“Okay,” I say, and I feel a spike of fear in my chest, like a jump on a heart monitor.
“I want to ask you to promise not to get mad,” he says, “but . . .”
“But you know I don’t make stupid promises,” I say, my throat tight.
“Right.” He does sit, then, in the curve of blankets left unmade on his bed. He avoids my eyes. “Nita left a note under my pillow, telling me to meet her last night. And I did.”
I straighten, and I can feel an angry heat spreading through me as I picture Nita’s pretty face, Nita’s graceful feet, walking toward my boyfriend.
“A pretty girl asks you to meet her late at night, and you go?” I demand. “And then you want me not to get mad about it?”
“It’s not about that with Nita and me. At all,” he says hastily, finally looking at me. “She just wanted to show me something. She doesn’t believe in genetic damage, like she led me to believe. She has a plan to take away some of the Bureau’s power, to make GDs more equal. We went to the fringe.”
He tells me about the underground tunnel that leads outside, and the ramshackle town in the fringe, and the conversation with Rafi and Mary. He explains the war that the government kept hidden so that no one would know that “genetically pure” people are capable of incredible violence, and the way GDs live in the metropolitan areas where the government still has real power.
As he speaks, I feel suspicion toward Nita building inside me, but I don’t know where it comes from—the gut instinct I usually trust, or my jealousy. When he finishes, he looks at me expectantly, and I purse my lips, trying to decide.
“How do you know she’s telling you the truth?” I say.
“I don’t,” he says. “She promised to show me evidence. Tonight.” He takes my hand. “I’d like you to come.”
“And Nita will be okay with that?”
“I don’t really care.” His fingers slide between mine. “If she really needs my help, she’ll have to figure out how to be okay with it.”
I look at our joined fingers, at the fraying cuff of his gray shirt and the worn knee of his jeans. I don’t want to spend time with Nita and Tobias together, knowing that her supposed genetic damage gives her something in common with him that I will never have. But this is important to him, and I want to know if there’s evidence of the Bureau’s wrongdoing as much as he does.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go. But don’t for a second think that I actually believe she’s not interested in you for more than your genetic code.”
“Well,” he says. “Don’t for a second think I’m interested in anyone but you.”
He puts his hand on the back of my neck and draws my mouth toward his.
The kiss and his words both comfort me, but my unease doesn’t completely disappear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TOBIAS
TRIS AND I meet Nita in the hotel lobby after midnight, among the potted plants with their unfurling flowers, a tame wilderness. When Nita sees Tris at my side, her face tightens like she just tasted something bitter.
“You promised you wouldn’t tell her,” she says, pointing at me. “What happened to protecting her?”
“I changed my mind,” I say.
Tris laughs, harshly. “That’s what you told him, that he would be protecting me? That’s a pretty skillful manipulation. Well done.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. I never thought of it as a manipulation, and that scares me a little. I can usually rely on myself to see a person’s ulterior motives, or to invent them in my mind, but I was so used to my desire to protect Tris, especially after almost losing her, that I didn’t even think twice.
Or I was so used to lying instead of telling difficult truths that I welcomed the chance to deceive her.
“It wasn’t a manipulation, it was the truth.” Nita doesn’t look angry anymore, just tired, her hand sliding over her face and then smoothing back her hair. She isn’t defensive, which means she might be telling the truth. “You could be arrested just for knowing what you know and not reporting it. I thought it would be better to avoid that.”
“Well, too late,” I say. “Tris is coming. Is that a problem?”
“I would rather have both of you than neither of you, and I’m sure that’s the implied ultimatum,” Nita says, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Tris, Nita, and I walk back through the silent, still compound to the laboratories where Nita works. None of us speaks, and I am conscious of every squeak of my shoes, every voice in the distance, every snap of every closing door. I feel like we’re doing something forbidden, though technically we aren’t. Not yet, anyway.
Nita stops by the door to the laboratories and scans her card. We follow her past the gene therapy room where I saw a map of my genetic code, farther into the heart of the compound than I have been yet. It’s dark and grim back here, and clumps of dust dance over the floor when we walk past.
Nita pushes another door open with her shoulder, and we walk into a storage room. Dull metal drawers cover the walls, labeled with paper numbers, the ink worn off with time. In the center of the room is a lab table with a computer and a microscope, and a young man with slicked-back blond hair.
“Tobias, Tris, this is my friend Reggie,” Nita says. “He’s also a GD.”
“Nice to meet you,” Reggie says with a smile. He shakes Tris’s hand, then mine, his grip firm.
“Let’s show them the slides first,” Nita says.
Reggie taps the computer screen and beckons us closer. “Not gonna bite.”
Tris and I exchange a glance, then stand behind Reggie at the table to see the screen. Pictures start flashing on it, one after another. They’re in grayscale and look grainy and distorted—they must be very old. It takes me only a few seconds to realize that they are photographs of suffering: narrow, pinched children with huge eyes, ditches full of bodies, huge mounds of burning papers.
The photographs move so fast, like book pages fluttering in the breeze, that I get only impressions of horrors. Then I turn my face away, unable to look any longer. I feel a deep silence grow inside me.
At first, when I look at Tris, her expression is like still water—like the images we just saw caused no ripples. But then her mouth quivers, and she presses her lips together to disguise it.
“Look at these weapons.” Reggie brings up a photograph with a man in uniform holding a gun and points. “That kind of gun is incredibly old. The guns used in the Purity War were much more advanced. Even the Bureau would agree with that. It’s gotta be from a really old conflict. Which must have been waged by genetically pure people, since genetic manipulation didn’t exist back then.”
“How do you hide a war?” I say.
“People are isolated, starving,” Nita says quietly. “They know only what they’re taught, they see only the information that’s made available to them. And who controls all that? The government.”
“Okay.” Tris’s head bobs, and she’s talking too fast, nervous. “So they’re lying about your—our history. That doesn’t mean they’re the enemy, it just means they’re a group of grossly misinformed people trying to . . . better the world. In an ill-advised way.”
Nita and Reggie glance at each other.
“That’s the thing,” Nita says. “They’re hurting people.”
She puts her hand on the counter and leans into it, leans toward us, and again I see the revolutionary building strength inside her, taking over the parts of her that are young woman and GD and laboratory worker.
“When the Abnegation wanted to reveal the great truth of their world sooner than they were supposed to,” she says slowly, “and Jeanine wanted to stifle them . . . the Bureau was all too happy to provide her with an incredibly advanced simulation serum—the attack simulation that enslaved the minds of the Dauntless, that resulted in the destruction of Abnegation.”
I take a moment to let that sink in.
“That can’t be true,” I say. “Jeanine told me that the highest proportion of Divergent—the genetically pure—in any faction was in Abnegation. You just said the Bureau values the genetically pure enough to send someone in to save them; why would they help Jeanine kill them?”
“Jeanine was wrong,” Tris says distantly. “Evelyn said so. The highest proportion of Divergent was among the factionless, not Abnegation.”
I turn to Nita.
“I still don’t see why they would risk that many Divergent,” I say. “I need evidence.”
“Why do you think we came here?” Nita switches on another set of lights that illuminate the drawers, and paces along the left wall. “It took me a long time to get clearance to go in here,” she says. “Even longer to acquire the knowledge to understand what I saw. I had help from one of the GPs, actually. A sympathizer.”
Her hand hovers over one of the low drawers. From it she takes a vial of orange liquid.
“Look familiar?” she asks me.
I try to remember the shot they gave me before the attack simulation began, right before the final round of Tris’s initiation. Max did it, inserted the needle into the side of my neck as I had done myself dozens of times. Right before he did the glass vial caught the light, and it was orange, just like whatever Nita is holding.
“The colors match,” I say. “So?”
Nita carries the vial to the microscope. Reggie takes a slide from a tray near the computer and, using a dropper, puts two drops of the orange liquid in its center, then seals the liquid in place with a second slide. As he places it on the microscope, his fingers are careful but certain; they are the movements of someone who has performed the same action hundreds of times.
Reggie taps the computer screen a few times, opening a program called “MicroScan.”
“This information is free and available to anyone who knows how to use this equipment and has the system password, which the GP sympathizer graciously gave me,” Nita says. “So in other words, it’s not all that hard to access, but no one would think to examine it very closely. And GDs don’t have system passwords, so it’s not like we would have known about it. This storage room is for obsolete experiments—failures, or outdated developments, or useless things.”
She looks through the microscope, using a knob on the side to focus the lens.
“Go ahead,” she says.
Reggie presses a button on the computer, and paragraphs of text appear under the “MicroScan” bar at the top of the screen. He points to a paragraph in the middle of the page, and I read it.
“‘Simulation Serum v4.2. Coordinates a large number of targets. Transmits signals over long distances. Hallucinogen from original formula not included—simulated reality is predetermined by program master.’”
That’s it.
That’s the attack simulation serum.
“Now why would the Bureau have this unless they had developed it?” Nita says. “They were the ones who put the serums into the experiments, but they usually left the serums alone, let the city residents develop them further. If Jeanine was the one who developed it, they wouldn’t have stolen it from her. If it’s here, it’s because they made it.”
I stare at the illuminated slide in the microscope, at the orange droplet swimming in the eyepiece, and release a shaky breath.
Tris says, breathless, “Why?”
“Abnegation was about to reveal the truth to everyone inside the city. And you’ve seen what’s happened now that the city knows the truth: Evelyn is effectively a dictator, the factionless are squashing the faction members, and I’m sure the factions will rise up against them sooner or later. Many people will die. Telling the truth risks the safety of the experiment, no question,” Nita says. “So a few months ago, when the Abnegation were on the verge of causing that destruction and instability by revealing Edith Prior’s video to your city, the Bureau probably thought, better that the Abnegation should suffer a great loss—even at the expense of several Divergent—than the whole city suffer a great loss. Better to end the lives of the Abnegation than to risk the experiment. So they reached out to someone who they knew would agree with them. Jeanine Matthews.”
Her words surround me and bury themselves inside me.
I set my hands on the lab table, letting it cool my palms, and look at my distorted reflection in the brushed metal. I may have hated my father for most of my life, but I never hated his faction. Abnegation’s quiet, their community, their routine, always seemed good to me. And now most of those kind, giving people are dead. Murdered, at the hands of the Dauntless, at the urging of Jeanine, with the power of the Bureau to back her.
Tris’s mother and father were among them.