He must believe my smile, because he grins.
“I thought you would say yes,” he says. “It’s something I wanted your mother to do with me, before she volunteered to enter the city. But I think she had fallen in love with the place from afar and couldn’t resist it.”
“Fallen in love . . . with the city?” I say. “No accounting for taste, I suppose.”
It’s just a joke, but my heart isn’t in it. Still, David laughs, and I know I’ve said the right thing.
“You were . . . close with my mother, while she was here?” I say. “I’ve been reading her journal, but she’s not very wordy.”
“No, she wouldn’t be, would she? Natalie was always very straightforward. Yes, we were close, your mother and I.” His voice softens when he talks about her—he is no longer the toughened leader of this compound, but an old man, reflecting on some fonder past.
The past that happened before he got her killed.
“We had a similar history. I was also plucked right out of the damaged world as a child . . . my parents were severely dysfunctional people who were both taken to prison when I was young. Rather than succumbing to an adoption system overburdened with orphans, my siblings and I ran to the fringe—the same place where your mother also took refuge, years later—and only I came out of there alive.”
I don’t know what to say to that—I don’t know what to do with the sympathy growing within me, for a man I know has done terrible things. I just stare at my hands, and I imagine that my insides are liquid metal hardening in the air, taking a shape they will never leave again.
“You’ll have to go out there with our patrols tomorrow. You can see the fringe for yourself,” he says. “It’s something that’s important for a future council member to see.”
“I’d be very interested,” I say.
“Lovely. Well, I hate to end our time together, but I have quite a bit of work to catch up on,” he says. “I’ll have someone notify you about the patrols, and our first council meeting is on Friday at ten in the morning, so I’ll be seeing you soon.”
I feel frantic—I didn’t ask him what I wanted to ask him. I don’t think there was ever an opportunity. It’s too late now, anyway. I get up and move toward the doorway, but then he speaks again.
“Tris, I feel like I should be open with you, if we are to trust each other,” he says.
For the first time since I’ve met him, David looks almost . . . afraid. His eyes are wide open, like a child’s. But a moment later, the expression is gone.
“I may have been under the influence of a serum cocktail at the time,” he says, “but I know what you said to them to keep them from shooting at us. I know you told them you would kill me to protect what was in the Weapons Lab.”
My throat feels so tight I can hardly breathe.
“Don’t be alarmed,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons why I offered you this opportunity.”
“W-why?”
“You demonstrated the quality I most need in my advisers,” he says. “Which is the ability to make sacrifices for the greater good. If we are going to win this fight against genetic damage, if we are going to save the experiments from being shut down, we will need to make sacrifices. You understand that, don’t you?”
I feel a flash of anger and force myself to nod. Nita already told us that the experiments were in danger of being disbanded, so I am not surprised to hear it’s true. But David’s desperation to save his life’s work doesn’t excuse killing off a faction, my faction.
For a moment I stand with my hand on the doorknob, trying to gather myself together, and then I decide to take a risk.
“What would have happened, if they had set off another explosion to get into the Weapons Lab?” I say. “Nita said it would trigger a backup security measure if they did, but it seemed like the most obvious solution to their problem, to me.”
“A serum would have been released into the air . . . one that masks could not have protected against, because it is absorbed into the skin,” says David. “One that even the genetically pure cannot fight off. I don’t know how Nita knows about it, since it’s not supposed to be public knowledge, but I suppose we’ll find out some other time.”
“What does the serum do?”
His smile turns into a grimace. “Let’s just say it’s bad enough that Nita would rather be in prison for the rest of her life than come into contact with it.”
He’s right. He doesn’t have to say anything more.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
TOBIAS
“LOOK WHO IT is,” Peter says as I walk into the dormitory. “The traitor.”
There are maps spread across his cot and the one next to his. They are white and pale blue and dull green, and they draw me to them by some strange magnetism. On each one Peter has drawn a wobbly circle—around our city, around Chicago. He’s marking the limits of where he’s been.
I watch that circle shrink into each map, until it’s just a bright red dot, like a drop of blood.
And then I back away, afraid of what it means that I am so small.
“If you think you’re standing on some kind of moral high ground, you’re wrong,” I say to Peter. “Why all the maps?”
“I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it, the size of the world,” he says. “Some of the Bureau people have been helping me learn more about it. Planets and stars and bodies of water, things like that.”
He says it casually, but I know from the frantic scribbling on maps that his interest isn’t casual—it’s obsessive. I was obsessive about my fears, once, in the same way, always trying to make sense of them, over and over again.
“Is it helping?” I say. I realize that I’ve never had a conversation with Peter that didn’t involve yelling at him. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but I don’t know anything about him. I barely remember his last name from the initiate roster. Hayes. Peter Hayes.
“Sort of.” He picks up one of the bigger maps. It shows the entire globe, pressed flat like kneaded dough. I stare at it long enough to make sense of the shapes on it, the blue stretches of water and the multicolored pieces of land. On one of the pieces is a red dot. He points at it. “That dot covers all the places we’ve ever been. You could cut that piece of land out of the ground and sink it into this ocean and no one would even notice.”
I feel that fear again, the fear of my own size. “Right. So?”
“So? So everything I’ve ever worried about or said or done, how can it possibly matter?” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t.”
“Of course it does,” I say. “All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter.”
He shakes his head again, and I wonder, suddenly, if this is how he comforts himself: by convincing himself that the bad things he’s done don’t matter. I see how the mammoth planet that terrifies me seems like a haven to him, a place where he can disappear into its great space, never distinguishing himself, and never being held responsible for his actions.
He bends over to untie his shoes. “So, have you been ostracized from your little crowd of devotees?”
“No,” I say automatically. Then I add, “Maybe. But they aren’t my devotees.”
“Please. They’re like the Cult of Four.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Jealous? Wish you had a Cult of Psychopaths to call your very own?”
One of his eyebrows twitches up. “If I was a psychopath, I would have killed you in your sleep by now.”
“And added my eyeballs to your eyeball collection, no doubt.”
Peter laughs too, and I realize that I am exchanging jokes and conversation with the initiate who stabbed Edward in the eye and tried to kill my girlfriend—if she’s still that. But then, he’s also the Dauntless who helped us end the attack simulation and saved Tris from a horrible death. I am not sure which actions should weigh more heavily on my mind. Maybe I should forget them all, let him begin again.
&nbs
p; “Maybe you should join my little group of hated people,” says Peter. “So far Caleb and I are the only members, but given how easy it is to get on that girl’s bad side, I’m sure our numbers will grow.”
I stiffen. “You’re right, it is easy to get on her bad side. All you have to do is try to get her killed.”
My stomach clenches. I almost got her killed. If she had been standing closer to the explosion, she might be like Uriah, hooked up to tubes in the hospital, her mind quiet.
No wonder she doesn’t know if she wants to stay with me or not.
The ease of a moment ago is gone. I cannot forget what Peter did, because he has not changed. He is still the same person who was willing to kill and maim and destroy to climb to the top of his initiate class. And I can’t forget what I did either. I stand.
Peter leans against the wall and laces his fingers over his stomach. “I’m just saying, if she decides someone is worthless, everyone follows suit. That’s a strange talent, for someone who used to be just another boring Stiff, isn’t it? And maybe too much power for one person to have, right?”
“Her talent isn’t for controlling other people’s opinions,” I say, “it’s for usually being right about people.”
He closes his eyes. “Whatever you say, Four.”
All my limbs feel brittle with tension. I leave the dormitory and the maps with their red circles, though I’m not sure where else to go.
To me, Tris has always seemed magnetic in a way I could not describe, and that she was not aware of. I have never feared or hated her for it, the way Peter does, but then, I have always been in a position of strength myself, not threatened by her. Now that I have lost that position, I can feel the tug toward resentment, as strong and sure as a hand around my arm.
I find myself in the atrium garden again, and this time, light glows behind the windows. The flowers look beautiful and savage in the daylight, like vicious creatures suspended in time, motionless.
Cara jogs into the atrium, her hair askew and floating over her forehead. “There you are. It is frighteningly easy to lose people in this place.”
“What is it?”
“Well—are you all right, Four?”
I bite down on my lip so hard I feel a pinch. “I’m fine. What is it?”
“We’re having a meeting, and your presence is required.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”
“GDs and GD sympathizers who don’t want to let the Bureau get away with certain things,” she says, and then she cocks her head to the side. “But better planners than the last ones you fell in with.”
I wonder who told her. “You know about the attack simulation?”
“Better still, I recognized the simulation serum in the microscope when Tris showed it to me,” Cara says. “Yes, I know.”
I shake my head. “Well, I’m not getting involved in this again.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she says. “The truth you heard is still true. These people are still responsible for the deaths of most of the Abnegation and the mental enslavement of the Dauntless and the utter destruction of our way of life, and something has to be done about them.”
I’m not sure I want to be in the same room with Tris, knowing that we might be on the verge of ending, like standing on the edge of a cliff. It’s easier to pretend it’s not happening when I’m not around her. But Cara says it so simply I have to agree with her: yes, something has to be done.
She takes my hand and leads me down the hotel hallway. I know she’s right, but I’m uncertain, uneasy about participating in another attempt at resistance. Still, I am already moving toward it, part of me eager for a chance to move again, instead of standing frozen before the surveillance footage of our city, as I have been.
When she’s sure I’m following her, she releases my hand and tucks her stray hair behind her ears.
“It’s still strange not to see you in blue,” I say.
“It’s time to let all that go, I think,” she answers. “Even if I could go back, I wouldn’t want to, at this point.”
“You don’t miss the factions?”
“I do, actually.” She glances at me. Enough time has passed between Will’s death and now that I no longer see him when I look at her, I just see Cara. I have known her far longer than I knew him. She has just a touch of his good-naturedness, enough to make me feel like I can tease her without offending her. “I thrived in Erudite. So many people devoted to discovery and innovation—it was lovely. But now that I know how large the world is . . . well. I suppose I have grown too large for my faction, as a consequence.” She frowns. “I’m sorry, was that arrogant?”
“Who cares?”
“Some people do. It’s nice to know you aren’t one of them.”
I notice, because I can’t help it, that some of the people we pass on the way to the meeting give me nasty looks, or a wide berth. I have been hated and avoided before, as the son of Evelyn Johnson, factionless tyrant, but it bothers me more now. Now I know that I have done something to make myself worthy of that hatred; I have betrayed them all.
Cara says, “Ignore them. They don’t know what it is to make a difficult decision.”
“You wouldn’t have done it, I bet.”
“That is only because I have been taught to be cautious when I don’t know all the information, and you have been taught that risks can produce great rewards.” She looks at me sideways. “Or, in this case, no rewards.”
She pauses at the door to the labs Matthew and his supervisor use, and knocks. Matthew tugs it open and takes a bite out of the apple he’s holding. We follow him into the room where I found out I was not Divergent.
Tris is there, standing beside Christina, who looks at me like I am something rotten that needs to be discarded. And in the corner by the door is Caleb, his face stained with bruises. I am about to ask what happened to him when I realize that Tris’s knuckles are also discolored, and that she very intentionally isn’t looking at him.
Or at me.
“I think that’s everyone,” Matthew says. “Okay . . . so . . . um. Tris, I suck at this.”
“You do, actually,” she says with a grin. I feel a flare of jealousy. She clears her throat. “So, we know that these people are responsible for the attack on Abnegation, and that they can’t be trusted to safeguard our city any longer. We know that we want to do something about it, and that the previous attempt to do something was . . .” Her eyes drift to mine, and her stare carves me into a smaller man. “Ill-advised,” she finishes. “We can do better.”
“What do you propose?” Cara says.
“All I know right now is that I want to expose them for what they are,” Tris says. “The entire compound can’t possibly know what their leaders have done, and I think we should show them. Maybe then they’ll elect new leaders, ones who won’t treat the people inside the experiments as expendable. I thought, maybe a widespread truth serum ‘infection,’ so to speak—”
I remember the weight of the truth serum, filling me in all my empty places, lungs and belly and face. I remember how impossible it seemed to me that Tris had lifted that weight enough to lie.
“Won’t work,” I say. “They’re GPs, remember? GPs can resist truth serum.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” Matthew says, pinching the string around his neck and then twisting it. “We don’t see that many Divergent resisting truth serum. Just Tris, in recent memory. The capacity for serum resistance seems to be higher in some people than others—take yourself, for example, Tobias.” Matthew shrugs. “Still, this is why I invited you, Caleb. You’ve worked on the serums before. You might know them as well as I do. Maybe we can develop a truth serum that is more difficult to resist.”
“I don’t want to do that kind of work anymore,” Caleb says.
“Oh, shut—” starts Tris, but Matthew interrupts her.
“Please, Caleb,” he says.
Caleb and Tris exchange a look. The skin on his face and on her knuckles is nearly the sam
e color, purple-blue-green, as if drawn with ink. This is what happens when siblings collide—they injure each other the same way. Caleb sinks back against the countertop edge, touching the back of his head to the metal cabinets.
“Fine,” Caleb says. “As long as you promise not to use this against me, Beatrice.”
“Why would I?” Tris says.
“I can help,” Cara says, lifting a hand. “I’ve worked on serums too, as an Erudite.”
“Great.” Matthew claps his hands together. “Meanwhile, Tris will be playing the spy.”
“What about me?” Christina says.
“I was hoping you and Tobias could get in with Reggie,” Tris says. “David wouldn’t tell me about the backup security measures in the Weapons Lab, but Nita can’t have been the only one who knew about them.”
“You want me to get in with the guy who set off the explosives that put Uriah in a coma?” Christina says.
“You don’t have to be friends,” Tris says, “you just need to talk to him about what he knows. Tobias can help you.”
“I don’t need Four; I can do it myself,” Christina says.
She shifts on the exam table, tearing the paper beneath her with her thigh, and gives me another sour look. I know it must be Uriah’s blank face she sees when she looks at me. I feel like there is something stuck in my throat.
“You do need me, actually, because he already trusts me,” I say. “And those people are very secretive, which means this will require subtlety.”
“I can be subtle,” Christina says.
“No, you can’t.”
“He’s got a point . . .” Tris sings with a smile.
Christina smacks her arm, and Tris smacks her back.
“It’s all settled, then,” Matthew says. “I think we should meet again after Tris has been to the council meeting, which is on Friday. Come here at five.”
He approaches Cara and Caleb and says something about chemical compounds I don’t quite understand. Christina walks out, bumping me with her shoulder as she leaves. Tris lifts her eyes to mine.
The Divergent Library: Divergent; Insurgent; Allegiant; Four: The Transfer, The Initiate, The Son, and The Traitor (Divergent Series) Page 87