Allegiant (20 page)

“Tris,” Tobias says, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right?”

I shake my head, still struggling for air, and crush him against the wall with my body, my lips finding his. For a moment he tries to push me away, but then he must decide that he doesn’t care if I’m all right, doesn’t care if he’s all right, doesn’t care. We haven’t been alone together in days. Weeks. Months.

His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep, for the rest of my life.

He leans down and kisses my throat, hard, and his hands smooth over me, securing themselves at my waist. I hook my fingers in his belt loops, my eyes closing. In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.

I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart. Someone—probably Uriah—whistles, but I barely hear it over the pulsing in my ears.

Tobias’s eyes meet mine, and it’s like the first time I really looked at him during my initiation, after my fear simulation; we stare too long, too intently. “Shut up,” I call out to Uriah, without looking away.

Uriah and Christina walk into the dormitory, and Tobias and I follow them, like nothing happened.

T
OBIAS

T
HAT NIGHT WHEN
my head hits the pillow, heavy with thoughts, I hear something crinkle beneath my cheek. A note under my pillowcase.

T—

Meet me outside the hotel entrance at eleven. I need to talk to you.

—Nita

I look at Tris’s cot. She’s sprawled on her back, and there is a piece of hair covering her nose and mouth that shifts with each exhale. I don’t want to wake her, but I feel strange, going to meet a girl in the middle of the night without telling her about it. Especially now that we’re trying so hard to be honest with each other.

I check my watch. It’s ten to eleven.

Nita’s just a friend. You can tell Tris tomorrow. It might be urgent.

I push the blankets back and shove my feet into my shoes—I sleep in my clothes these days. I pass Peter’s cot, then Uriah’s. The top of a flask peeks out from beneath Uriah’s pillow. I pinch it between my fingers and carry it toward the door, where I slide it under the pillow on one of the empty cots. I haven’t been looking after him as well as I promised Zeke I would.

Once I’m in the hallway, I tie my shoes and smooth my hair down. I stopped cutting it like the Abnegation when I wanted the Dauntless to see me as a potential leader, but I miss the ritual of the old way, the buzz of the clippers and the careful movements of my hands, knowing more by touch than by sight. When I was young, my father used to do it, in the hallway on the top floor of our Abnegation house. He was always too careless with the blade, and scraped the back of my neck, or nicked my ear. But he never complained about having to cut my hair for me. That’s something, I guess.

Nita is tapping her foot. This time she wears a white short-sleeved shirt, her hair pulled back. She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“You look worried,” I say.

“That’s because I am,” she answers. “Come on, there’s a place I’ve been wanting to show you.”

She leads me down dim hallways, empty except for the occasional janitor. They all seem to know Nita—they wave at her, or smile. She puts her hands in her pockets, guiding her eyes carefully away from mine every time we happen to look at each other.

We go through a door without a security sensor to keep it locked. The room beyond it is a wide circle with a chandelier marking its center with dangling glass. The floors are polished wood, dark, and the walls, covered in sheets of bronze, gleam where the light touches them. There are names inscribed on the bronze panels, dozens of names.

Nita stands beneath the glass chandelier and holds her arms out, wide, to encompass the room in her gesture.

“These are the Chicago family trees,” she says. “Your family trees.”

I move closer to one of the walls and read through the names, searching for one that looks familiar. At the end, I find one: Uriah Pedrad and Ezekiel Pedrad. Next to each name is a small “DD,” and there is a dot next to Uriah’s name, and it looks freshly carved. Marking him as Divergent, probably.

“Do you know where mine is?” I say.

She crosses the room and touches one of the panels. “The generations are matrilineal. That’s why Jeanine’s records said Tris was ‘second generation’—because her mother came from outside the city. I’m not sure how Jeanine knew that, but I guess we’ll never find out.”

I approach the panel that bears my name with trepidation, though I’m not sure what I have to fear from seeing my name and my parents’ names carved into bronze. I see a vertical line connecting Kristin Johnson to Evelyn Johnson, and a horizontal one connecting Evelyn Johnson to Marcus Eaton. Below the two names is just one: Tobias Eaton. The small letters beside my name are “AD,” and there’s a dot there too, though I now know I’m not actually Divergent.

“The first letter is your faction of origin,” she says, “and the second is your faction of choice. They thought that keeping track of the factions would help them trace the path of the genes.”

My mother’s letters: “EAF.” The “F” is for “factionless,” I assume.

My father’s letters: “AA,” with a dot.

I touch the line connecting me to them, and the line connecting Evelyn to her parents, and the line connecting them to their parents, all the way back through eight generations, counting my own. This is a map of what I’ve always known, that I am tied to them, bound forever to this empty inheritance no matter how far I run.

“While I appreciate you showing me this,” I say, and I feel sad, and tired, “I’m not sure why it had to happen in the middle of the night.”

“I thought you might want to see it. And I had something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“More reassurance that my limitations don’t define me?” I shake my head. “No thanks, I’ve had enough of that.”

“No,” she says. “But I’m glad you said that.”

She leans against the panel, covering Evelyn’s name with her shoulder. I step back, not wanting to be so close to her that I can see the ring of lighter brown around her pupils.

“That conversation I had with you last night, about genetic damage . . . it was actually a test. I wanted to see how you would react to what I said about damaged genes, so I would know whether I could trust you or not,” she says. “If you accepted what I said about your limitations, the answer would have been no.” She slides a little closer to me, so her shoulder covers Marcus’s name too. “See, I’m not really on board with being classified as ‘damaged.’”

I think of the way she spat out the explanation of the tattoo of broken glass on her back like it was poison.

My heart starts to beat harder, so I can feel my pulse in my throat. Bitterness has replaced the good humor in her voice, and her eyes have lost their warmth. I am afraid of her, afraid of what she says—and thrilled by it too, because it means I don’t have to accept that I am smaller than I once believed.

“I take it you aren’t on board with it either,” she says.

“No. I’m not.”

“There are a lot of secrets in this place,” she says. “One of them is that, to them, a GD is expendable. Another is that some of us are not just going to sit back and take it.”

“What do you mean, expendable?” I say.

“The crimes they have committed against people like us are serious,” Nita says. “And hidden. I can show you evidence, but that will have to come later. For now, what I can tell you is that we’re working against the Bureau, for good reasons, and we want you with us.”

I narrow my eyes. “Why? What is it you want from me, exactly?”

“Right now I want to offer you an opportunity to see what the world is like outside the compound.”

“And what you get in return is . . . ?”

“Your protection,” she says. “I’m going to a dangerous place, and I can’t tell anyone else from the Bureau about it. You’re an outsider, which means it’s safer for me to trust you, and I know you know how to defend yourself. And if you come with me, I’ll show you that evidence you want to see.”

She touches her heart, lightly, as if swearing on it. My skepticism is strong, but my curiosity is stronger. It’s not hard for me to believe that the Bureau would do bad things, because every government I’ve ever known has done bad things, even the Abnegation oligarchy, of which my father was the head. And even beyond that reasonable suspicion, I have brewing inside me the desperate hope that I am not damaged, that I am worth more than the corrected genes I pass on to any children I might have.

So I decide to go along with this. For now.

“Fine,” I say.

“First,” she says, “before I show you anything, you have to accept that you won’t be able to tell anyone—even Tris—about what you see. Are you all right with that?”

“She’s trustworthy, you know.” I promised Tris I wouldn’t keep secrets from her anymore. I shouldn’t get into situations where I’ll have to do it again. “Why can’t I tell her?”

“I’m not saying she isn’t trustworthy. It’s just that she doesn’t have the skill set we need, and we don’t want to put anyone at risk that we don’t have to. See, the Bureau doesn’t want us to organize. If we believe we’re not ‘damaged,’ then we’re saying that everything they’re doing—the experiments, the genetic alterations, all of it—is a waste of time. And no one wants to hear that their life’s work is a sham.”

I know all about that—it’s like finding out that the factions are an artificial system, designed by scientists to keep us under control for as long as possible.

She pulls away from the wall, and then she says the only thing she could possibly say to make me agree:

“If you tell her, you would be depriving her of the choice I’m giving you now. You would force her to become a coconspirator. By keeping this from her, you would be protecting her.”

I run my fingers over my name, carved into the metal panel, Tobias Eaton. These are my genes, this is my mess. I don’t want to pull Tris into it.

“All right,” I say. “Show me.”

I watch her flashlight beam bob up and down with her footsteps. We just retrieved a bag from a mop closet down the hall—she was ready for this. She leads me deep into the underground hallways of the compound, past the place where the GDs gather, to a corridor where the electricity no longer flows. At a certain place she crouches and slides her hand along the ground until her fingers reach a latch. She hands me the flashlight and pulls back the latch, lifting a door from the tile.

“It’s an escape tunnel,” she says. “They dug it when they first came here, so there would always be a way to escape during an emergency.”

From her bag she takes a black tube and twists off the top. It sprays sparks of light that glow red against her skin. She releases it over the doorway and it falls several feet, leaving a streak of light on my eyelids. She sits on the edge of the hole, her backpack secure around her shoulders, and drops.

I know it’s just a short way down, but it feels like more with the space open beneath me. I sit, the silhouette of my shoes dark against the red sparks, and push myself forward.

“Interesting,” Nita says when I land. I lift up the flashlight, and she holds the flare out in front of her as we walk down the tunnel, which is just wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side, and just tall enough for me to straighten up. It smells rich and rotten, like mold and dead air. “I forgot you were afraid of heights.”

“Well, I’m not afraid of much else,” I say.

“No need to get defensive!” She smiles. “I actually have always wanted to ask you about that.”

I step over a puddle, the soles of my shoes gripping the gritty tunnel floor.

“Your third fear,” she says. “Shooting that woman. Who was she?”

The flare goes out, so the flashlight I’m holding is our only guide through the tunnel. I shift my arm to create more space between us, not wanting to skim her arm in the dark.

“She wasn’t anyone in particular,” I say. “The fear was shooting her.”

“You were afraid of shooting people?”

“No,” I say. “I was afraid of my considerable capacity to kill.”

She is silent, and so am I. That’s the first time I’ve ever said those words out loud, and now I hear how strange they are. How many young men fear that there is a monster inside them? People are supposed to fear others, not themselves. People are supposed to aspire to become their fathers, not shudder at the thought.

“I’ve always wondered what would be in my fear landscape.” She says it in a hushed tone, like a prayer. “Sometimes I feel like there is so much to be afraid of, and sometimes I feel like there is nothing left to fear.”

I nod, though she can’t see me, and we keep moving, the flashlight beam bouncing, our shoes scraping, the moldy air rushing toward us from whatever is on the other end.

After twenty minutes of walking, we turn a corner and I smell fresh wind, cold enough to make me shudder. I turn off the flashlight, and the moonlight at the end of the tunnel guides us to our exit.

The tunnel let us out somewhere in the wasteland we drove through to get to the compound, among the crumbling buildings and overgrown trees breaking through the pavement. Parked a few feet away is an old truck, the back covered in shredded, threadbare canvas. Nita kicks one of the tires to test it, then climbs into the driver’s seat. The keys already dangle from the ignition.

“Whose truck?” I say when I get into the passenger’s seat.

“It belongs to the people we’re going to meet. I asked them to park it here,” she says.

“And who are they?”

“Friends of mine.”

I don’t know how she finds her way through the maze of streets before us, but she does, steering the truck around tree roots and fallen streetlights, flashing the headlights at animals that scamper at the edge of my vision.