The Divergent Series Complete Collection

by Veronica Roth

  He sits next to me and puts his arm on the back of my chair, leaning close. I don’t stare back—I refuse to stare back.

  I stare back.

  Dark eyes—a peculiar shade of blue, somehow capable of shutting the rest of the cafeteria out, of comforting me and also of reminding me that we are farther away from each other than I want us to be.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I’m all right?” I say.

  “No, I’m pretty sure you’re not all right.” He shakes his head. “I’m going to ask you not to make any decisions until we’ve talked about it.”

  It’s too late, I think. The decision’s made.

  “Until we’ve all talked about it, you mean, since it involves all of us,” says Uriah. “I don’t think anyone should turn themselves in.”

  “No one?” I say.

  “No!” Uriah scowls. “I think we should attack back.”

  “Yeah,” I say hollowly, “let’s provoke the woman who can force half of this compound to kill themselves. That sounds like a great idea.”

  I was too harsh. Uriah tips the contents of his bottle down his throat. He brings the bottle down on the table so hard I’m afraid it will shatter.

  “Don’t talk about it like that,” he says in a growl.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “But you know I’m right. The best way to ensure that half our faction doesn’t die is to sacrifice one life.”

  I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that Uriah, who knows too well what will happen if one of us does not go, would volunteer himself. But he looks down. Unwilling.

  “Tori and Harrison and I decided to increase security. Hopefully if everyone is more aware of these attacks, we will be able to stop them,” Tobias says. “If it doesn’t work, then we will think of another solution. End of discussion. But no one is going to do anything yet. Okay?”

  He looks at me when he asks and raises his eyebrows.

  “Okay,” I say, not quite meeting his eyes.

  After dinner, I try to go back to the dormitory where I’ve been sleeping, but I can’t quite walk through the door. Instead I walk through the corridors, brushing the stone walls with my fingers, listening to the echoes of my footsteps.

  Without meaning to, I pass the water fountain where Peter, Drew, and Al attacked me. I knew it was Al by the way he smelled—I can still call the scent of lemongrass to mind. Now I associate it not with my friend but with the powerlessness I felt as they dragged me to the chasm.

  I walk faster, keeping my eyes wide open so it will be harder to picture the attack in my mind. I have to get away from here, far from the places where my friend attacked me, where Peter stabbed Edward, where a sightless army of my friends began its march toward the Abnegation sector and all this insanity began.

  I go straight toward the last place where I felt safe: Tobias’s small apartment. The second I reach the door, I feel calmer.

  The door is not completely closed. I nudge it open with my foot. He isn’t there, but I don’t leave. I sit on his bed and gather the quilt in my arms, burying my face in the fabric and taking deep breaths of it through my nose. The smell it used to have is almost gone, it’s been so long since he slept on it.

  The door opens and Tobias slips in. My arms go limp, and the quilt falls into my lap. How will I explain my presence here? I’m supposed to be angry with him.

  He doesn’t scowl, but his mouth is so tense that I know he’s angry with me.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he says.

  “An idiot?”

  “You were lying. You said you wouldn’t go to Erudite, and you were lying, and going to Erudite would make you an idiot. So don’t.”

  I set the blanket down and get up.

  “Don’t try to make this simple,” I say. “It’s not. You know as well as I do that this is the right thing to do.”

  “You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!”

  “You’re too important to just . . . die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me—his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry.

  “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say.

  “Who cares about everyone? What about me?”

  He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling.

  Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to.

  I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things.

  “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.”

  He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again.

  This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do.

  But I want to. Oh, I want to.

  I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not.

  He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye.

  He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips.

  I can’t stop.

  I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder.

  I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers.

  Stop, I tell myself.

  Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much.

  He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered.

  “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.”

  Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body.

  Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me.

  But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do.

  I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.”

  “Promise,” he says, frowning.

  The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere—all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHEN HE STARTS to fall asleep, he keeps his arms around me fiercely, a life-preserving prison. But I wait, kept awake by the thought of bodies hitting pavement, until his gri
p loosens and his breathing steadies.

  I will not let Tobias go to Erudite when it happens again, when someone else dies. I will not.

  I slip out of his arms. I shrug on one of his sweatshirts so I can carry the smell of him with me. I slip my feet into my shoes. I don’t take any weapons or keepsakes.

  I pause by the doorway and look at him, half buried under the quilt, peaceful and strong.

  “I love you,” I say quietly, trying out the words. I let the door close behind me.

  It’s time to put everything in order.

  I walk to the dormitory where the Dauntless-born initiates once slept. The room looks just like the one I slept in when I was an initiate: it is long and narrow, with bunk beds on either side and a chalkboard on one wall. I see by a blue light in the corner that no one bothered to erase the rankings that are written there—Uriah’s name is still at the top.

  Christina sleeps in the bottom bunk, beneath Lynn. I don’t want to startle her, but there’s no way to wake her otherwise, so I cover her mouth with my hand. She wakes with a start, her eyes wide until they find me. I touch my finger to my lips and beckon for her to follow me.

  I walk to the end of the hallway and turn a corner. The corridor is lit by a paint-spattered emergency lamp that hangs over one of the exits. Christina isn’t wearing shoes; she curls her toes under to protect them from the cold.

  “What is it?” she says. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yeah, I’m . . .” I have to lie, or she’ll try to stop me. “I’m going to see my brother. He’s with the Abnegation, remember?”

  She narrows her eyes.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” I say. “But there’s something I need you to do. It’s really important.”

  “Okay. Tris, you’re acting really strange. Are you sure you’re not—”

  “I’m not. Listen to me. The timing of the simulation attack wasn’t random. The reason it happened when it did is because the Abnegation were about to do something—I don’t know what it was, but it had to do with some important information, and now Jeanine has that information. . . .”

  “What?” She frowns. “You don’t know what they were about to do? Do you know what the information is?”

  “No.” I must sound crazy. “The thing is, I haven’t been able to find out very much about this, because Marcus Eaton is the only person who knows everything, and he won’t tell me. I just . . . it’s the reason for the attack. It’s the reason. And we need to know it.”

  I don’t know what else to say. But Christina is already nodding.

  “The reason Jeanine forced us to attack innocent people,” she says bitterly. “Yeah. We need to know it.”

  I had almost forgotten—she was under the simulation. How many Abnegation did she kill, guided by the simulation? How did she feel when she awoke from that dream a murderer? I have never asked, and I never will.

  “I want your help, and soon. I need someone to persuade Marcus to cooperate, and I think you can do it.”

  She tilts her head and stares at me for a few seconds.

  “Tris. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  I force a smile. “Why do people keep saying that to me?”

  She grabs my arm. “I’m not kidding around.”

  “I told you, I’m going to visit Caleb. I’ll be back in a few days, and we can make a strategy then. I just thought it would be better if someone else knew about all this before I left. Just in case. Okay?”

  She holds my arm for a few seconds, and then releases me. “Okay,” she says.

  I walk toward the exit. I hold myself together until I’m through the door, and then I feel the tears come.

  The last conversation I’ll ever have with her, and it was full of lies.

  Once I’m outside, I put up the hood of Tobias’s sweatshirt. When I reach the end of the street, I glance up and down, searching for signs of life. There is nothing.

  The cool air prickles in my lungs on the way in, and on the way out unfurls in a cloud of vapor. Winter will be here soon. I wonder if Erudite and Dauntless will still be at a standstill then, waiting for one group to obliterate the other. I’m glad I won’t have to see it.

  Before I chose Dauntless, thoughts like that never occurred to me. I felt assured of my long lifespan, if nothing else. Now there are no reassurances, except that where I go, I go because I choose to.

  I walk in the shadows of buildings, hoping my footsteps won’t attract any attention. None of the city lights are on in this area, but the moon is bright enough that I can walk by it without too much trouble.

  I walk beneath the elevated tracks. They shudder with the movement of an oncoming train. I have to walk fast if I want to get there before anyone notices that I’m gone. I sidestep a large crack in the street, and jump over a fallen streetlight.

  I didn’t think about how far I would have to walk when I set out. It isn’t long before my body warms with the exertion of walking and checking over my shoulder and dodging hazards in the road. I pick up the pace, half walking and half jogging.

  Soon I reach a part of the city that I recognize. The streets are better kept here, swept clean, with few holes. Far away I see the glow of Erudite headquarters, their lights violating our energy conservation laws. I don’t know what I will do when I get there. Demand to see Jeanine? Or just stand there until someone notices me?

  My fingertips skim a window in the building beside me. Not long now. Tremors go through my body now that I am close, making it difficult to walk. Breathing is tricky too; I stop trying to be quiet, and let air wheeze in and out of my lungs. What will they do with me when I get there? What plans do they have for me before I outlive my usefulness, and they kill me? I don’t doubt that they will kill me eventually. I concentrate on forward motion, on moving my legs even though they seem to be unwilling to support my weight.

  And then I’m standing in front of Erudite headquarters.

  Inside, crowds of blue-shirted people sit around tables, typing on computers or bent over books or passing sheets of paper back and forth. Some of them are decent people who do not understand what their faction has done, but if their entire building collapsed in on them before my eyes, I might not find it in myself to care.

  This is the last moment I will be able to turn back. The cold air stings my cheeks and my hands as I hesitate. I can walk away now. Take refuge in the Dauntless compound. Hope and pray and wish that no one else dies because of my selfishness.

  But I can’t walk away, or the guilt, the weight of Will’s life, and my parents’ lives, and now Marlene’s life, will break my bones, will make it impossible to breathe.

  I slowly walk toward the building and push open the doors.

  This is the only way to keep from suffocating.

  For a second after my feet touch the wood floors, and I stand before the giant portrait of Jeanine Matthews hung on the opposite wall, no one notices me, not even the two Dauntless traitor guards milling around near the entryway. I walk up to the front desk, where a middle-aged man with a bald patch on the crown of his head sits, sorting through a stack of paper. I set my hands on the desk.

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  “Give me a moment,” he says without looking up.

  “No.”

  At that he looks up, his glasses askew, scowling like he’s about to chastise me. Whatever words he was about to use seem to stick in his throat. He stares at me with an open mouth, his eyes skipping from my face to the black sweatshirt I wear.

  In my terror, his expression seems amusing. I smile a little and conceal my hands, which are trembling.

  “I believe Jeanine Matthews wanted to see me,” I say. “So I would appreciate it if you would contact her.”

  He signals to the Dauntless traitors by the door, but there is no need. The guards have finally caught on. Dauntless soldiers from the other parts of the room have also started forward, and they all surround me, but don’t touch me, and don’t speak to me. I scan their faces, trying to look as placi
d as possible.

  “Divergent?” one of them finally asks as the man behind the desk picks up the receiver of the building’s communication system.

  If I close my hands into fists, I can stop them from shaking. I nod.

  My eyes shift to the Dauntless coming out of the elevator on the left side of the room, and the muscles in my face go slack. Peter is coming toward us.

  A thousand potential reactions, ranging from launching myself at Peter’s throat to crying to making some kind of joke, rush through my mind at once. I can’t decide on one. So I stand still and watch him. Jeanine must have known that I would come, she must have chosen Peter on purpose to collect me, she must have.

  “We’ve been instructed to take you upstairs,” says Peter.

  I mean to say something sharp, or nonchalant, but the only sound that escapes me is an assenting noise, squeezed tight by my swollen throat. Peter starts toward the elevators, and I follow him.

  We walk down a series of sleek corridors. Despite the fact that we climb a few flights of stairs, I still feel like I am plunging into the earth.

  I expect them to take me to Jeanine, but they don’t. They stop walking in a short hallway with a series of metal doors on each side. Peter types in a code to open one of the doors, and the traitor Dauntless surround me, shoulder to shoulder, forming a narrow tunnel for me to pass through on my way into the room.

  The room is small, maybe six feet long by six feet wide. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling are all made of the same light panels, dim now, that glowed in the aptitude test room. In each corner is a tiny black camera.

  I finally let myself panic.

  I look from corner to corner, at the cameras, and fight the scream building in my stomach, chest, and throat, the scream that fills every part of me. Again I feel guilt and grief clawing inside me, warring with each other for dominance, but terror is stronger than both. I breathe in, and don’t breathe out. My father once told me it was a cure for hiccups. I asked him if I could die from holding my breath.

  “No,” he said. “Your body’s instincts will take over, and force you to breathe.”

  A shame, really. I could use a way out. The thought makes me want to laugh. And then scream.