I notice that Tobias does not join in the chant, and neither does Christina.
“This doesn’t feel right,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Lynn says as the voices rise around us. “Don’t you remember what they did to us? Put our minds under a simulation and forced us to shoot people without even knowing it? Murdered every single Abnegation leader?”
“Yeah,” says Christina. “It’s just . . . Invading a faction’s headquarters and killing everyone, isn’t that what the Erudite just did to Abnegation?”
“This is different. This is not an attack out of nowhere, unprovoked,” says Lynn, scowling at her.
“Yeah,” Christina says. “Yeah, I know.”
She looks at me. I don’t say anything. She has a point—it doesn’t feel right.
I walk toward the Eaton house in search of silence.
I open the front door and climb the stairs. When I reach Tobias’s old room, I sit on the bed and look out the window, where factionless and Dauntless are gathered around the fires, laughing and talking. But they aren’t mixed together; there is still an uneasy divide between them, factionless on one side and Dauntless on the other.
I watch Lynn, Uriah, and Christina by one of the fires. Uriah snatches at the flames, too quickly to be burned. His smile looks more like a grimace, twisted as it is by grief.
After a few minutes I hear footsteps on the stairs, and Tobias comes into the room, slipping off his shoes by the doorway.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
“Nothing, really,” I say. “I was just thinking, I’m surprised the factionless agreed to work with Dauntless so easily. It’s not like the Dauntless were ever kind to them.”
He stands beside me at the window and leans into the frame.
“It’s not a natural alliance, is it,” he says. “But we have the same goal.”
“Right now. But what happens when the goals change? The factionless want to get rid of factions, and the Dauntless don’t.”
Tobias presses his mouth into a line. I suddenly remember Marcus and Johanna, walking together through the orchard—Marcus wore the same expression when he was keeping something from her.
Did Tobias get that expression from his father? Or does it mean something different?
“You’re in my group,” he says. “During the attack. I hope you don’t mind. We’re supposed to lead the way to the control rooms.”
The attack. If I participate in the attack, I can’t go after the information Jeanine stole from Abnegation. I have to choose one or the other.
Tobias said that dealing with Erudite was more important than finding out the truth. And if he had not promised the factionless control over all of Erudite’s data, he might have been right. But he left me no choice. I have to help Marcus, if there is even a chance that he is telling the truth. I have to work against the people I love best.
And right now, I have to lie.
I twist my fingers together.
“What is it?” he says.
“I still can’t fire a gun.” I look up at him. “And after what happened in Erudite headquarters . . .” I clear my throat. “Risking my life doesn’t seem so appealing anymore.”
“Tris.” He brushes my cheek with his fingertips. “You don’t have to go.”
“I don’t want to seem like a coward.”
“Hey.” His fingers fit beneath my jaw. They are cool against my skin. He looks sternly at me. “You have done more for this faction than any other person. You . . .”
He sighs, and touches his forehead to mine.
“You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. Stay here. Let yourself mend.”
He kisses me, and I feel like I am crumbling again, beginning with the deepest parts of me. He thinks I will be here, but I will be working against him, working with the father he despises. This lie—this lie is the worst I have ever told. I will never be able to take it back.
When we part, I am afraid he will hear my breaths shake, so I turn toward the window.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“OH YEAH. YOU totally look like a banjo-strumming softie,” says Christina.
“Really?”
“No. Not at all, actually. Just . . . let me fix it, okay?”
She rummages in her bag for a few seconds and pulls out a small box. In it are different-sized tubes and containers that I recognize as makeup, but wouldn’t know what to do with.
We are in my parents’ house. It was the only place I could think of to go to get ready. Christina has no reservations about poking around—she already discovered two textbooks wedged between the dresser and the wall, evidence of Caleb’s Erudite leanings.
“Let me get this straight. So you left the Dauntless compound to get ready for war . . . and took your makeup bag with you?”
“Yep. Figured it would be harder for anyone to shoot me if they saw how devastatingly attractive I was,” she says, arching an eyebrow. “Hold still.”
She takes the cap off a black tube about the size of one of my fingers, revealing a red stick. Lipstick, obviously. She touches it to my mouth and dabs it until my lips are covered in color. I can see it when I purse them.
“Has anyone ever talked to you about the miracle of eyebrow tweezing?” she says, holding up a pair of tweezers.
“Get those away from me.”
“Fine.” She sighs. “I would take out the blush, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the right color for you.”
“Shocking, considering we’re so similar in skin tone.”
“Ha-ha,” she says.
By the time we leave, I have red lips and curled eyelashes, and I’m wearing a bright red dress. And there’s a knife strapped to the inside of my knee. This all makes perfect sense.
“Where’s Marcus, Destroyer of Lives, going to meet us?” Christina says. She wears Amity yellow instead of red, and it glows against her skin.
I laugh. “Behind Abnegation headquarters.”
We walk down the sidewalk in the dark. All the others should be eating dinner now—I made sure of that—but in case we run into someone, we wear black jackets to conceal most of our Amity clothing. I hop over a crack in the cement out of habit.
“Where are you two going?” Peter’s voice says. I look over my shoulder. He’s standing on the sidewalk behind us. I wonder how long he’s been there.
“Why aren’t you with your attack group, eating dinner?” I say.
“I don’t have one.” He taps the arm I shot. “I’m injured.”
“Yeah right, you are!” says Christina.
“Well, I don’t want to go to battle with a bunch of factionless,” he says, his green eyes glinting. “So I’m going to stay here.”
“Like a coward,” says Christina, her lip curled in disgust. “Let everyone else clean up the mess for you.”
“Yep!” he says with a kind of malicious cheer. He claps his hands. “Have fun dying.”
He crosses the street, whistling, and walks in the other direction.
“Well, we distracted him,” she says. “He didn’t ask where we were going again.”
“Yeah. Good.” I clear my throat. “So, this plan. It’s kind of stupid, right?”
“It’s not . . . stupid.”
“Oh, come on. Trusting Marcus is stupid. Trying to get past the Dauntless at the fence is stupid. Going against the Dauntless and factionless is stupid. All three combined is . . . a different kind of stupid formerly unheard of by humankind.”
“Unfortunately it’s also the best plan we have,” she points out. “If we want everyone to know the truth.”
I trusted Christina to take up this mission when I thought I would die, so it seemed stupid not to trust her now. I was worried she wouldn’t want to come with me, but I forgot where Christina came from: Candor, where the pursuit of truth is more important than anything else. She may be Dauntless now, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s that we never leave our old factions behind.
“So this
is where you grew up. Did you like it here?” She frowns. “I guess you couldn’t have, if you wanted to leave.”
The sun inches toward the horizon as we walk. I never used to like evening light because it made everything in the Abnegation sector look more monochromatic than it already is, but now I find the unchanging gray comforting.
“I liked some things and hated some things,” I say. “And there were some things I didn’t know I had until I lost them.”
We reach Abnegation headquarters, and its face is just a cement square like everything else in the Abnegation sector. I would love to walk into the meeting room and breathe the smell of old wood, but we don’t have time. We slip into the alley next to the building and walk to the back, where Marcus told me he would be waiting.
A powder-blue pickup truck waits there, its engine running. Marcus is behind the wheel. I let Christina walk ahead of me so that she can be the one to slide into the middle. I don’t want to sit close to him if I can help it. I feel like hating him while I work with him lessens my betrayal of Tobias somehow.
You have no other choice, I tell myself. There is no other way.
With that in mind, I pull the door shut and look for a seat belt to buckle. I find only the frayed end of a seat belt and a broken buckle.
“Where did you find this piece of junk?” says Christina.
“I stole it from the factionless. They fix them up. It wasn’t easy to get it to start. Better ditch those jackets, girls.”
I ball up our jackets and toss them out the half-open window. Marcus shifts the truck into drive, and it groans. I half expect it to stay still when he presses the gas pedal, but it moves.
From what I remember, it takes about an hour to drive from the Abnegation sector to Amity headquarters, and the trip requires a skilled driver. Marcus pulls onto one of the main thoroughfares and pushes his foot into the gas pedal. We lurch forward, narrowly avoiding a gaping hole in the road. I grab the dashboard to steady myself.
“Relax, Beatrice,” says Marcus. “I’ve driven a car before.”
“I’ve done a lot of things before, but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at them!”
Marcus smiles and jerks the truck to the left so that we don’t hit a fallen stoplight. Christina whoops as we bump over another piece of debris, like she’s having the time of her life.
“A different kind of stupid, right?” she says, her voice loud enough to be heard over the rush of wind through the cab.
I clutch the seat beneath me and try not to think of what I ate for dinner.
When we reach the fence, we see the Dauntless standing in our headlight beams, blocking the gate. Their blue armbands stand out against the rest of their clothing. I try to keep my expression pleasant. I will not be able to fool them into thinking I’m Amity with a scowl on my face.
A dark-skinned man with a gun in hand approaches Marcus’s window. He shines a flashlight at Marcus first, then Christina, then me. I squint into the beam, and force a smile at the man like I don’t mind bright lights in the eyes and guns pointed at my head in the slightest.
The Amity must be deranged if this is how they really think. Or they’ve been eating too much of that bread.
“So tell me,” the man says. “What’s an Abnegation member doing in a truck with two Amity?”
“These two girls volunteered to bring provisions to the city,” Marcus says, “and I volunteered to escort them so that they would be safe.”
“Also, we don’t know how to drive,” says Christina, grinning. “My dad tried to teach me years ago but I kept confusing the gas pedal for the brake pedal, and you can imagine what a disaster that was! Anyway, it was really nice of Joshua to volunteer to take us, because it would have taken us forever otherwise, and the boxes were so heavy—”
The Dauntless man holds up his hand. “Okay, I get it.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry.” Christina giggles. “I just thought I would explain, because you seemed so confused, and no wonder, because how many times do you encounter this—”
“Right,” the man says. “And do you intend to return to the city?”
“Not anytime soon,” Marcus says.
“All right. Go ahead, then.” He nods to the other Dauntless by the gate. One of them types a series of numbers on the keypad, and the gate slides open to admit us. Marcus nods to the guard who let us through and drives over the worn path to Amity headquarters. The truck’s headlights catch tire tracks and prairie grass and insects weaving back and forth. In the darkness to my right I see fireflies lighting up to a rhythm that is like a heartbeat.
After a few seconds, Marcus glances at Christina. “What on earth was that?”
“There’s nothing the Dauntless hate more than cheerful Amity babble,” says Christina, lifting a shoulder. “I figured if he got annoyed it would distract him and he would let us through.”
I smile with all my teeth. “You are a genius.”
“I know.” She tosses her head like she’s throwing her hair over one shoulder, only she doesn’t have enough to throw.
“Except,” says Marcus, “Joshua is not an Abnegation name.”
“Whatever. As if anyone knows the difference.”
I see the glow of Amity headquarters ahead, the familiar cluster of wooden buildings with the greenhouse in their center. We drive through the apple orchard. The air smells like warm earth.
Again I remember my mother stretching to pick an apple in this orchard, years ago when we came to help the Amity with the harvest. A pang hurts my chest, but the memory doesn’t overwhelm me as it did a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s because I am on a mission to honor her. Or maybe I am too apprehensive about what’s coming to grieve properly. But something has changed.
Marcus parks the truck behind one of the sleeping cabins. For the first time I notice that there are no keys in the ignition.
“How did you get it to start?” I ask him.
“My father taught me a lot about mechanics and computers,” he says. “Knowledge that I passed to my own son. You didn’t think he figured it all out on his own, did you?”
“Actually yes, I did.” I push the door open and climb out of the truck. Grass brushes my toes and the back of my calves. Christina stands at my right shoulder and tilts her head back.
“It’s so different out here,” she says. “You could almost forget what’s going on in there.” She points her thumb toward the city.
“And they often do,” I say.
“They know what’s beyond the city, though, right?” she asks.
“They know about as much as the Dauntless patrols,” says Marcus. “Which is that the outside world is unknown and potentially dangerous.”
“How do you know what they know?” I say.
“Because that’s what we told them,” he says, and he walks toward the greenhouse.
I exchange a look with Christina. Then we jog to catch up to him.
“What does that mean?”
“When you are entrusted with all the information, you have to decide how much other people should know,” says Marcus. “The Abnegation leaders told them what we had to tell them. Now, let’s hope Johanna is keeping up her normal habits. She is usually in the greenhouse this early in the evening.”
He opens the greenhouse door. The air is just as dense as the last time I was in here, but now it is misty, too. The moisture cools my cheeks.
“Wow,” Christina says.
The room is lit by moonlight, so it is hard to distinguish plant from tree from man-made structure. Leaves brush my face as I make my way around the outer edge of the room. And then I see Johanna, crouched beside a bush with a bowl in her hands, picking what appear to be raspberries. Her hair is pulled back, so I can see her scar.
“I didn’t think I would see you here again, Ms. Prior,” she says.
“Is that because I’m supposed to be dead?” I say.
“I always expect those who live by the gun to die by it. I am often pleasantly surprised.” She balances the b
owl on her knees and looks up at me. “Although I also know better than to think you came back because you like it here.”
“No,” I say. “We came for something else.”
“All right,” she says, standing. “Let’s go talk about it, then.”
She carries the bowl toward the middle of the room, where the Amity meetings are held. We follow her onto the tree roots, where she sits and offers me the bowl of raspberries. I take a small handful of berries and pass the bowl to Christina.
“Johanna, this is Christina,” Marcus says. “Candor-born Dauntless.”
“Welcome to Amity headquarters, Christina.” Johanna smiles knowingly. It seems so strange, that two people born in Candor could end up in such different places: Dauntless, and Amity.
“Tell me, Marcus,” says Johanna. “Why have you come to visit?”
“I think Beatrice should handle that,” he says. “I am merely the transportation.”
She shifts her focus to me without question, but I can tell by the wary look in her eyes that she would rather talk to Marcus. She would deny it if I asked her, but I am almost certain Johanna Reyes hates me.
“Um . . .” I say. Not my most brilliant opening. I wipe my palms on my skirt. “Things have gotten bad.”
The words start to spill out, without finesse or sophistication. I explain that the Dauntless have allied with the factionless, and they plan to destroy all of Erudite, leaving us without one of the two essential factions. I tell her that there is important information in the Erudite compound, in addition to all the knowledge they possess, that especially needs to be recovered. When I finish, I realize I haven’t told her why that has anything to do with her or her faction, but I don’t know how to say it.
“I’m confused, Beatrice,” she says. “What exactly do you want us to do?”
“I didn’t come here to ask you for help,” I say. “I thought you should know that a lot of people are going to die, very soon. And I know you don’t want to stay here doing nothing while that happens, even if some of your faction does.”
She looks down, her crooked mouth betraying just how right I am.
“I also wanted to ask you if we can talk to the Erudite you’re keeping safe here,” I say. “I know they’re hidden, but I need access to them.”
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