I almost forgot that Cara was the leader of the Allegiant, before we left. Now I’m not sure she cares whether the factions survive or not, but she still cares about the people. I can tell by the way she watches the screens, eager but afraid.
Even over the chatter of the people around us, I hear the gunfire when it starts, just snaps and claps in the microphones. I tap the glass in front of me a few times, and the camera angle switches to one inside the building the invaders have just forced their way into. On a table within is a pile of small boxes—ammunition—and a few pistols. It’s nothing compared to the guns the people here have, in all their abundance, but in the city, I know it’s valuable.
Several men and women with factionless armbands guard the table, but they are falling fast, outnumbered by the Allegiant. I recognize a familiar face among them—Zeke, slamming the butt of his gun into a factionless man’s jaw. The factionless are overcome within two minutes, falling to bullets I see only when they’re already buried in flesh. The Allegiant spread through the room, stepping over bodies like they are just more debris, and gather everything they can. Zeke piles stray guns on the table, a hard look on his face that I’ve only seen a few times.
He doesn’t even know what happened to Uriah.
The woman at the desk taps the screen in a few places. On one of the smaller screens above her is an image—a piece of the surveillance footage we just watched, frozen at a particular moment in time. She taps again, and the image moves closer to its targets, a man with close-cropped hair and a woman with long, dark hair covering one side of her face.
Marcus, of course. And Johanna—carrying a gun.
“Between them, they have managed to rally most of the loyal faction members to their cause. Surprisingly, though, the Allegiant still don’t outnumber the factionless.” The woman leans back in her chair and shakes her head. “There were far more factionless than we ever anticipated. It’s difficult to get an accurate population count on a scattered population, after all.”
“Johanna? Leading a rebellion? With a weapon? That makes no sense,” Caleb says.
Johanna told me once that if the decisions had been up to her, she would have supported action against Erudite instead of the passivity the rest of her faction advocated. But she was at the mercy of her faction and their fear. Now, with the factions disbanded, it seems she has become something other than the mouthpiece of Amity or even the leader of the Allegiant. She has become a soldier.
“Makes more sense than you’d think,” I say, and Cara nods along with my words.
I watch them empty the room of weapons and ammunition and move on, fast, scattering like seeds on the wind. I feel heavier, like I am bearing a new burden. I wonder if the people around me—Cara, Christina, Peter, even Caleb—feel the same way. The city, our city, is even closer to total destruction than it was before.
We can pretend that we don’t belong there anymore, while we’re living in relative safety in this place, but we do. We always will.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
TRIS
IT’S DARK AND snowing when we drive up to the entrance of the compound. The flakes blow across the road, as light as powdered sugar. It’s just an early autumn snow; it will be gone in the morning. I take off my bulletproof vest as soon as I get out, and offer it to Amar along with my gun. I’m uncomfortable holding it now, and I used to think that my discomfort would go away with time, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it never will, and maybe that’s all right.
Warm air surrounds me as I pass through the doors. The compound looks cleaner than ever before, now that I’ve seen the fringe. The comparison is unsettling. How can I walk these squeaky floors and wear these starchy clothes when I know that those people are out there, wrapping their houses in tarp to stay warm?
But by the time I reach the hotel dormitory, the unsettled feeling is gone.
I scan the room for Christina, or for Tobias, but neither of them is there. Only Peter and Caleb are, Peter with a large book on his lap, scribbling notes on a nearby notepad, and Caleb reading our mother’s journal on the screen, his eyes glassy. I try to ignore that.
“Have either of you seen . . .” But who do I want to talk to, Christina or Tobias?
“Four?” Caleb says, deciding for me. “I saw him in the genealogy room earlier.”
“The . . . what room?”
“They have our ancestors’ names on display in a room. Can I get a piece of paper?” he asks Peter.
Peter tears a sheet from the back of his notepad and hands it to Caleb, who scribbles something on it—directions. Caleb says, “I found our parents’ names there earlier. On the right side of the room, second panel from the door.”
He hands me the directions without looking at me. I look at his neat, even letters. Before I punched him, Caleb would have insisted on walking me himself, desperate for time to explain himself to me. But recently he has kept his distance, either because he’s afraid of me or because he has finally given up.
Neither option makes me feel good.
“Thank you,” I say. “Um . . . how’s your nose?”
“It’s fine,” he says. “I think the bruise really brings out my eyes, don’t you?”
He smiles a little, and so do I. But it’s clear that neither of us knows what to do from here, because we’ve both run out of words.
“Wait, you were gone today, right?” he says after a second. “Something’s happening in the city. The Allegiant rose up against Evelyn, attacked one of her weapons storehouses.”
I stare at him. I haven’t wondered about what was happening in the city for a few days now; I’ve been too wrapped up in what’s happening here.
“The Allegiant?” I say. “The people currently led by Johanna Reyes . . . attacked a storehouse?”
Before we left, I was sure the city was about to explode into another conflict. I guess now it has. But I feel detached from it—almost everyone I care about is here.
“Led by Johanna Reyes and Marcus Eaton,” Caleb says. “But Johanna was there, holding a gun. It was ludicrous. The Bureau people seemed really disturbed by it.”
“Wow.” I shake my head. “I guess it was just a matter of time.”
We lapse into silence again, then walk away from each other at the same time, Caleb returning to his cot and me walking down the hallway, following Caleb’s directions.
I see the genealogy room from a distance. The bronze walls seem to glow with warm light. Standing in the doorway, I feel like I am inside a sunset, the radiance surrounding me. Tobias’s finger runs along the lines of his family tree—I assume—but idly, like he’s not really paying attention to it.
I feel like I can see that obsessive streak Amar was referring to. I know that Tobias has been watching his parents on the screens, and now he is staring at their names, though there’s nothing in this room he didn’t already know. I was right to say that he was desperate, desperate for a connection to Evelyn, desperate not to be damaged, but I never thought about how those things were connected. I don’t know how it would feel, to hate your own history and to crave love from the people who gave that history to you at the same time. How have I never seen the schism inside his heart? How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?
Caleb told me that our mother said there was evil in everyone, and the first step to loving someone else is to recognize that evil in ourselves, so we can forgive them. So how can I hold Tobias’s desperation against him, like I’m better than him, like I’ve never let my own brokenness blind me?
“Hey,” I say, crushing Caleb’s directions into my back pocket.
He turns, and his expression is stern, familiar. It looks the way it did the first few weeks I knew him, like a sentry guarding his innermost thoughts.
“Listen,” I say. “I thought I was supposed to figure out if I could forgive you or not, but now I’m thinking you didn’t do anything to me that I need to forgive, except maybe accusing me of being jealous of Nita. . . .”
He opens his mouth to interject, but I hold up a hand to stop him.
“If we stay together, I’ll have to forgive you over and over again, and if you’re still in this, you’ll have to forgive me over and over again too,” I say. “So forgiveness isn’t the point. What I really should have been trying to figure out is whether we were still good for each other or not.”
All the way home I thought about what Amar said, about every relationship having its problems. I thought about my parents, who argued more often than any other Abnegation parents I knew, who nonetheless went through each day together until they died.
Then I thought of how strong I have become, how secure I feel with the person I now am, and how all along the way he has told me that I am brave, I am respected, I am loved and worth loving.
“And?” he says, his voice and his eyes and his hands a little unsteady.
“And,” I say, “I think you’re still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me.”
“I am,” he says roughly.
And I kiss him.
His arms slip around me and hold me tight, lifting me onto the tips of my toes. I bury my face in his shoulder and close my eyes, just breathing in the clean smell of him, the smell of wind.
I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that’s true of beginnings, but it’s not true of this, now.
I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
TRIS
I ARRIVE AT David’s office for my first council meeting just as my watch shifts to ten, and he pushes himself into the hallway soon afterward. He looks even paler than he did the last time I saw him, and the dark circles under his eyes are pronounced, like bruises.
“Hello, Tris,” he says. “Eager, are you? You’re right on time.”
I still feel a little weight in my limbs from the truth serum Cara, Caleb, and Matthew tested on me earlier, as part of our plan. They’re trying to develop a powerful truth serum, one that even GPs as serum-resistant as I am are not immune to. I ignore the heavy feeling and say, “Of course I’m eager. It’s my first meeting. Want help? You look tired.”
“Fine, fine.”
I move behind him and press into the handles of the wheelchair to get it moving.
He sighs. “I suppose I am tired. I was up all night dealing with our most recent crisis. Take a left here.”
“What crisis is that?”
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough, let’s not rush it.”
We maneuver through the dim hallways of Terminal 5, as it is labeled—“an old name,” David says—which have no windows, no hint of the world outside. I can almost feel the paranoia emanating from the walls, like the terminal itself is terrified of unfamiliar eyes. If only they knew what my eyes were searching for.
As I walk, I get a glimpse of David’s hands, pressed to the armrests. The skin around his fingernails is raw and red, like he chewed it away overnight. The fingernails themselves are jagged. I remember when my own hands looked that way, when the memories of fear simulations crept into every dream and every idle thought. Maybe it’s David’s memories of the attack that are doing this to him.
I don’t care, I think. Remember what he did. What he would do again.
“Here we are,” David says. I push him through a set of double doors, propped open with doorstops. Most of the council members seem to be there, stirring tiny sticks in tiny cups of coffee, the majority of them men and women David’s age. There are some younger members—Zoe is there, and she gives me a strained, but polite, smile when I walk in.
“Let’s come to order!” David says as he wheels himself to the head of the conference table. I sit in one of the chairs along the edge of the room, next to Zoe. It’s clear we’re not supposed to be at the table with all the important people, and I’m okay with that—it’ll be easier to doze off if things get boring, though if this new crisis is serious enough to keep David awake at night, I doubt it will.
“Last night I received a frantic call from the people in our control room,” David says. “Evidently Chicago is about to erupt into violence again. Faction loyalists calling themselves the Allegiant have rebelled against factionless control, attacking weapons safe houses. What they don’t know is that Evelyn Johnson has discovered a new weapon—stores of death serum kept hidden in Erudite headquarters. As we know, no one is capable of resisting death serum, not even the Divergent. If the Allegiant attack the factionless government, and Evelyn Johnson retaliates, the casualties will obviously be catastrophic.”
I stare at the floor in front of my feet as the room bursts into conversation.
“Quiet,” says David. “The experiments are already in danger of being shut down if we cannot prove to our superiors that we are capable of controlling them. Another revolution in Chicago would only cement their belief that this endeavor has outlived its usefulness—something we cannot allow to happen if we want to continue to fight genetic damage.”
Somewhere behind David’s exhausted, haggard expression is something harder, stronger. I believe him. I believe that he will not allow it to happen.
“It’s time to use the memory serum virus for a mass reset,” he says. “And I think we should use it against all four experiments.”
“Reset them?” I say, because I can’t help myself. Everyone in the room looks at me at once. They seem to have forgotten that I, a former member of the experiments they’re referring to, am in the room.