“Fair enough.”
“So . . . you said you were looking for me?” I say. “Why?”
“Oh!” Zoe touches her forehead. “It slipped my mind. David asked me to find you and take you to the labs. There’s something there that belonged to your mother.”
“My mother?” My voice comes out sounding strangled and too high. She leads me away from the sculpture and toward the security checkpoint again.
“Fair warning: You might get stared at,” Zoe says as we walk through the security scanner. There are more people in the hallways up ahead now than there were earlier—it must be time for them to start work. “Your face is a familiar one here. People in the Bureau watch the screens often, and for the past few months, you’ve been involved in a lot of interesting things. A lot of the younger people think you’re downright heroic.”
“Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.”
Zoe stops. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.”
I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that everyone has been watching us, like I need to cover myself or hide where they can’t look at me anymore. But there’s not much Zoe can do about it, so I don’t say anything.
Most of the people walking the halls wear variations of the same uniform—it comes in dark blue or dull green, and some of them wear the jackets or jumpsuits or sweatshirts open, revealing T-shirts of a wide variety of colors, some with pictures drawn on them.
“Do the colors of the uniforms mean anything?” I ask Zoe.
“Yes, actually. Dark blue means scientist or researcher, and green means support staff—they do maintenance, upkeep, things like that.”
“So they’re like the factionless.”
“No,” she says. “No, the dynamic is different here—everyone does what they can to support the mission. Everyone is valued and important.”
She was right: People do stare at me. Most of them just look at me for a little too long, but some point, and some even say my name, like it belongs to them. It makes me feel cramped, like I can’t move the way I want to.
“A lot of the support staff used to be in the experiment in Indianapolis—another city, not far from here,” Zoe says. “But for them, this transition has been a little bit easier than it will be for you—Indianapolis didn’t have the behavioral components of your city.” She pauses. “The factions, I mean. After a few generations, when your city didn’t tear itself apart and the others did, the Bureau implemented the faction components in the newer cities—Saint Louis, Detroit, and Minneapolis—using the relatively new Indianapolis experiment as a control group. The Bureau always placed experiments in the Midwest, because there’s more space between urban areas here. Out east everything is closer together.”
“So in Indianapolis you just . . . corrected their genes and shoved them in a city somewhere? Without factions?”
“They had a complex system of rules, but . . . yes, that’s essentially what happened.”
“And it didn’t work very well?”
“No.” She purses her lips. “Genetically damaged people who have been conditioned by suffering and are not taught to live differently, as the factions would have taught them to, are very destructive. That experiment failed quickly—within three generations. Chicago—your city—and the other cities that have factions have made it through much more than that.”
Chicago. It’s so strange to have a name for the place that was always just home to me. It makes the city smaller in my mind.
“So you guys have been doing this for a long time,” I say.
“Quite some time, yes. The Bureau is different from most government agencies, because of the focused nature of our work and our contained, relatively remote location. We pass on knowledge and purpose to our children, instead of relying on appointments or hiring. I’ve been training for what I’m doing now for my entire life.”
Through the abundant windows I see a strange vehicle—it’s shaped like a bird, with two wing structures and a pointed nose, but it has wheels, like a car.
“Is that for air travel?” I say, pointing at it.
“Yes.” She smiles. “It’s an airplane. We might be able to take you up in one sometime, if it doesn’t seem too daunting for you.”
I don’t react to the play on words. I can’t quite forget how she recognized me on sight.
David is standing near one of the doors up ahead. He raises his hand in a wave when he sees us.
“Hello, Tris,” he says. “Thank you for bringing her, Zoe.”
“You’re welcome, sir,” Zoe says. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Lots of work to do.”
She smiles at me, then walks away. I don’t want her to leave—now that she’s gone, I’m left with David and the memory of how I yelled at him yesterday. He doesn’t say anything about it, just scans his badge in the door sensor to open it.
The room beyond it is an office with no windows. A young man, maybe Tobias’s age, sits at one desk, and another one, across the room, is empty. The young man looks up when we come in, taps something on his computer screen, and stands.
“Hello, sir,” he says. “Can I help you?”
“Matthew. Where’s your supervisor?” David says.
“He’s foraging for food in the cafeteria,” Matthew says.
“Well, maybe you can help me, then. I’ll need Natalie Wright’s file loaded on a portable screen. Can you do that?”
Wright? I think. Was that my mother’s real last name?
“Of course,” Matthew says, and he sits again. He types something on his computer and pulls up a series of documents that I’m not close enough to see clearly. “Okay, it just has to transfer.
“You must be Natalie’s daughter, Beatrice.” He props his chin on his hand and looks at me critically. His eyes are so dark they look black, and they slant a little at the edges. He does not look impressed or surprised to see me. “You don’t look much like her.”
“Tris,” I say automatically. But I find it comforting that he doesn’t know my nickname—that must mean he doesn’t spend all his time staring at the screens like our lives in the city are entertainment. “And yeah, I know.”
David pulls a chair over, letting it screech on the tile, and pats it.
“Sit. I’ll give you a screen with all Natalie’s files on it so that you and your brother can read them yourselves, but while they’re loading I might as well tell you the story.”
I sit on the edge of the chair, and he sits behind the desk of Matthew’s supervisor, turning a half-empty coffee cup in circles on the metal.
“Let me start by saying that your mother was a fantastic discovery. We located her almost by accident inside the damaged world, and her genes were nearly perfect.” David beams. “We took her out of a bad situation and brought her here. She spent several years here, but then we encountered a crisis within your city’s walls, and she volunteered to be placed inside to resolve it. I’m sure you know all about that, though.”
For a few seconds all I can do is blink at him. My mother came from outside this place? Where?
It hits me, again, that she walked these halls, watched the city on the screens in the control room. Had she sat in this chair? Had her feet touched these tiles? Suddenly I feel like there are invisible marks of my mother everywhere, on every wall and doorknob and pillar.
I grip the edge of the seat and try to organize my thoughts enough to ask a question.
“No, I don’t know,” I say. “What crisis?”
“The Erudite representative had just begun to kill the Divergent, of course,” he says. “His name was Nor—Norman?”
“Norton,” says Matthew. “Jeanine’s predecessor. Seems he passed on the idea of killing off the Divergent to her, right before his heart attack.”
“Thank you. Anyway, we sent Natalie in to investigate the situation and to stop the deaths. We never dreamed she would be in there for so long, of co
urse, but she was useful—we had never thought about having an insider before, and she was able to do many things that were invaluable to us. As well as building a life for herself, which obviously includes you.”
I frown. “But the Divergent were still being killed when I was an initiate.”
“You only know about the ones who died,” David says. “Not about the ones who didn’t die. Some of them are here, in this compound. I believe you met Amar earlier? He’s one of them. Some of the rescued Divergent needed some distance from your experiment—it was too hard for them to watch the people they had once known and loved going about their lives, so they were trained to integrate into life outside the Bureau. But yes, she did important work, your mother.”
She also told quite a few lies, and very few truths. I wonder if my father knew who she was, where she was really from. He was an Abnegation leader, after all, and as such, one of the keepers of the truth. I have a sudden, horrifying thought: What if she only married him because she was supposed to, as part of her mission in the city? What if their entire relationship was a sham?
“So she wasn’t really born Dauntless,” I say as I sort through the lies that must have been.
“When she first entered the city, it was as a Dauntless, because she already had tattoos and that would have been hard to explain to the natives. She was sixteen, but we said she was fifteen so she would have some time to adjust. Our intention was for her to . . .” He lifts a shoulder. “Well, you should read her file. I can’t do a sixteen-year-old perspective justice.”
As if on cue, Matthew opens a desk drawer and takes out a small, flat piece of glass. He taps it with one fingertip, and an image appears on it. It’s one of the documents he just had open on his computer. He offers the tablet to me. It’s sturdier than I expected it to be, hard and strong.
“Don’t worry, it’s practically indestructible,” David says. “I’m sure you want to return to your friends. Matthew, would you please walk Miss Prior back to the hotel? I have some things to take care of.”
“And I don’t?” Matthew says. Then he winks. “Kidding, sir. I’ll take her.”
“Thank you,” I say to David, before he walks out.
“Of course,” he says. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
“Ready?” Matthew says.
He’s tall, maybe the same height as Caleb, and his black hair is artfully tousled in the front, like he spent a lot of time making it look like he’d just rolled out of bed that way. Under his dark blue uniform he wears a plain black T-shirt and a black string around his throat. It shifts over his Adam’s apple when he swallows.
I walk with him out of the small office and down the hallway again. The crowd that was here before has thinned. They must have settled in to work, or breakfast. There are whole lives being lived in this place, sleeping and eating and working, bearing children and raising families and dying. This is a place my mother called home, once.
“I wonder when you’re going to freak out,” he says. “After finding out all this stuff at once.”
“I’m not going to freak out,” I say, feeling defensive. I already did, I think, but I’m not going to admit to that.
Matthew shrugs. “I would. But fair enough.”
I see a sign that says HOTEL ENTRANCE up ahead. I clutch the screen to my chest, eager to get back to the dormitory and tell Tobias about my mother.
“Listen, one of the things my supervisor and I do is genetic testing,” Matthew says. “I was wondering if you and that other guy—Marcus Eaton’s son?—would mind coming in so that I can test your genes.”
“Why?”
“Curiosity.” He shrugs. “We haven’t gotten to test the genes of someone in such a late generation of the experiment before, and you and Tobias seem to be somewhat . . . odd, in your manifestations of certain things.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“You, for example, have displayed extraordinary serum resistance—most of the Divergent aren’t as capable of resisting serums as you are,” Matthew says. “And Tobias can resist simulations, but he doesn’t display some of the characteristics we’ve come to expect of the Divergent. I can explain in more detail later.”
I hesitate, not sure if I want to see my genes, or Tobias’s genes, or to compare them, like it matters. But Matthew’s expression seems eager, almost childlike, and I understand curiosity.
“I’ll ask him if he’s up for it,” I say. “But I would be willing. When?”
“This morning okay?” he says. “I can come get you in an hour or so. You can’t get into the labs without me anyway.”
I nod. I feel excited, suddenly, to learn more about my genes, which feels like the same thing as reading my mother’s journal: I will get pieces of her back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TOBIAS
IT’S STRANGE TO see people you don’t know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks; to know that Christina is cheerful in the morning, and Peter wakes up with his hair perfectly flat, but Cara communicates only through a series of grunts, inching her way, limb by limb, toward coffee.
The first thing I do is shower and change into the clothes they provided for us, which aren’t much different from the clothes I am accustomed to, but all the colors are mixed together like they don’t mean anything to the people here, and they probably don’t. I wear a black shirt and blue jeans and try to convince myself that it feels normal, that I feel normal, that I am adapting.
My father’s trial is today. I haven’t decided if I’m going to watch it or not.
When I return, Tris is already fully dressed, perched on the edge of one of the cots, like she’s ready to leap to her feet at any moment. Just like Evelyn.
I grab a muffin from the tray of breakfast food that someone brought us, and sit across from her. “Good morning. You were up early.”
“Yeah,” she says, scooting her foot forward so it’s wedged between mine. “Zoe found me at that big sculpture thing this morning—David had something to show me.” She picks up the glass screen resting on the cot beside her. It glows when she touches it, showing a document. “It’s my mother’s file. She wrote a journal—a small one, from the look of it, but still.” She shifts like she’s uncomfortable. “I haven’t looked at it much yet.”
“So,” I say, “why aren’t you reading it?”
“I don’t know.” She puts it down, and the screen turns off automatically. “I think I’m afraid of it.”
Abnegation children rarely know their parents in any significant way, because Abnegation parents never reveal themselves the way other parents do when their children grow to a particular age. They keep themselves wrapped in gray cloth armor and selfless acts, convinced that to share is to be self-indulgent. This is not just a piece of Tris’s mother, recovered; it’s one of the first and last honest glimpses Tris will ever get of who Natalie Prior was.
I understand, then, why she holds it like it’s a magical object, something that could disappear in a moment. And why she wants to leave it undiscovered for a while, which is the same way I feel about my father’s trial. It could tell her something she doesn’t want to know.
I follow her eyes across the room to where Caleb sits, chewing on a bite of cereal—morosely, like a pouting child.
“Are you going to show it to him?” I say.
She doesn’t respond.
“Usually I don’t advocate giving him anything,” I say. “But in this case . . . this doesn’t really just belong to you.”
“I know that,” she says, a little tersely. “Of course I’ll show it to him. But I think I want to be alone with it first.”
I can’t argue with that. Most of my life has been spent keeping information close, turning it over and over in my mind. The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing.
She sighs, then breaks a piece off the muffin in my hand. I flick her fingers as she pulls away. “Hey. There are plenty more just five feet to
your right.”
“Then you shouldn’t be so worried about losing some of yours,” she says, grinning.
“Fair enough.”
She pulls me toward her by the front of my shirt and kisses me. I slip my hand under her chin and hold her still as I kiss her back.
Then I notice that she’s stealing another pinch of muffin, and I pull away, glaring at her.
“Seriously,” I say. “I’ll get you one from that table. It’ll only take me a second.”
She grins. “So, there’s something I wanted to ask you. Would you be up for undergoing a little genetic test this morning?”
The phrase “a little genetic test” strikes me as an oxymoron.
“Why?” I say. Asking to see my genes feels a little like asking me to strip down.
“Well, this guy I met—Matthew is his name—works in one of the labs here, and he says they would be interested in looking at our genetic material for research,” she says. “And he asked about you, specifically, because you’re sort of an anomaly.”
“Anomaly?”
“Apparently you display some Divergent characteristics and you don’t display others,” she says. “I don’t know. He’s just curious about it. You don’t have to do it.”
The air around my head feels warmer and heavier. To alleviate the discomfort I touch the back of my neck, scratching at my hairline.
Sometime in the next hour or so, Marcus and Evelyn will be on the screens. Suddenly I know that I can’t watch.
So even though I don’t really want to let a stranger examine the puzzle pieces that make up my existence, I say, “Sure. I’ll do it.”
“Great,” she says, and she eats another pinch of my muffin. A piece of hair falls into her eyes, and I am brushing it back before she even notices it. She covers my hand with her own, which is warm and strong, and the corners of her mouth curl into a smile.
The door opens, admitting a young man with slanted, angular eyes and black hair. I recognize him immediately as George Wu, Tori’s younger brother. “Georgie” was the name she called him.
He smiles a giddy smile, and I feel the urge to back away, to put more space between me and his impending grief.
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