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Jeanine gives me a puzzled look. But she is not puzzled. She is playing with me.
“Tobias,” I say anyway. My hands shake, but not from fear this time—from anger. “Where is he? What are you doing to him?”
“I see no reason to provide that information,” says Jeanine. “And since you are all out of leverage, I see no way for you to give me a reason, unless you would like to change the terms of our agreement. ”
I want to scream at her that of course, of course I would rather know about Tobias than about my Divergence, but I don’t. I can’t make hasty decisions. She will do what she intends to do to Tobias whether I know about it or not. It is more important that I fully understand what is happening to me.
I breathe in through my nose, and out through my nose. I shake my hands. I sit down in the chair.
“Interesting,” she says.
“Aren’t you supposed to be running a faction and planning a war?” I say. “What are you doing here, running tests on a sixteen-year-old girl?”
“You choose different ways of referring to yourself depending on what is convenient,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Sometimes you insist that you are not a little girl, and sometimes you insist that you are. What I am curious to know is: How do you really view yourself? As one or the other? As both? As neither?”
I make my voice flat and factual, like hers. “I see no reason to provide that information. ”
I hear a faint snort. Peter is covering his mouth. Jeanine glares at him, and his laughter effortlessly transforms into a coughing fit.
“Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” she says. “It does not become you. ”
“Mockery is childish, Beatrice,” I repeat in my best imitation of her voice. “It does not become you. ”
“The serum,” Jeanine says, eyeing Peter. He steps forward and fumbles with a black box on the desk, taking out a syringe with a needle already attached to it.
Peter starts toward me, and I hold out my hand.
“Allow me,” I say.
He looks at Jeanine for permission, and she says, “All right, then. ” He hands me the syringe and I shove the needle into the side of my neck, pressing down on the plunger. Jeanine jabs one of the buttons with her finger, and everything goes dark.
My mother stands in the aisle with her arm stretched above her head so she can hold the bar. Her face is turned, not toward the people sitting around me, but toward the city we pass as the bus lurches forward. I see wrinkles in her forehead and around her mouth when she frowns.
“What is it?” I ask her.
“There is so much to be done,” she says with a small gesture toward the bus windows. “And so few of us left to do it. ”
It is clear what she’s referring to. Beyond the bus is rubble as far as I can see. Across the street, a building lies in ruins. Fragments of glass litter the alleyways. I wonder what caused so much destruction.
“Where are we going?” I say.
She smiles at me, and I see different wrinkles than before, at the corners of her eyes. “We’re going to Erudite headquarters. ”
I frown. Most of my life has been spent avoiding Erudite headquarters. My father used to say that he didn’t even like to breathe the air in there. “Why are we going there?”
“They’re going to help us. ”
Why do I feel a pang in my stomach when I think of my father? I picture his face, weathered by a lifetime of frustration with the world around him, and his hair, kept short by Abnegation standard practice, and feel the same kind of pain in my stomach that I get when I have not eaten in too long—a hollow pain.
“Did something happen to Dad?” I say.
She shakes her head. “Why would you ask that?”
“I don’t know. ”
I don’t feel the pain when I look at my mother. But I do feel like every second we spend standing these inches apart is one that I must impress upon my mind until my entire memory conforms to its shape. But if she is not permanent, what is she?
The bus stops, and the doors creak open. My mother starts down the aisle, and I follow her. She is taller than I am, so I stare between her shoulders, at the top of her spine. She looks fragile, but she is not.
I step down onto the pavement. Pieces of glass crinkle beneath my feet. They are blue and, judging by the holes in the building to my right, used to be windows.
“What happened?”
“War,” my mother says. “This is what we’ve been trying so hard to avoid. ”
“And the Erudite will help us . . . by doing what?”
“I worry that all your father’s blustering about Erudite has been to your detriment,” she says gently. “They’ve made mistakes, of course, but they, like everyone else, are a blend of good and bad, not one or the other. What would we do without our doctors, our scientists, our teachers?”
She smooths down my hair.
“Take care to remember that, Beatrice. ”
“I will,” I promise.
We keep walking. But something about what she said bothers me. Is it what she said about my father? No—my father is always complaining about Erudite. Is it what she said about Erudite? I hop over a large shard of glass. No, that can’t be it. She was right about Erudite. All my teachers were Erudite, and so was the doctor who set my mother’s arm when she broke it several years ago.
It’s the last part. “Take care to remember. ” As if she won’t have the opportunity to remind me later.
I feel something shift in my mind, like something that was closed has just opened.
“Mom?” I say.
She looks back at me. A lock of blond hair falls from its knot and touches her cheek.
“I love you. ”
I point at a window to my left, and it explodes. Particles of glass rain over us.
I don’t want to wake up in a room in Erudite headquarters, so I don’t open my eyes right away, not even when the simulation fades. I try to preserve the image of my mother and the hair sticking to her cheekbone for as long as I can. But when all I see is the redness of my own eyelids, I open them.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” I say to Jeanine.
She says, “That was only the beginning. ”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THAT NIGHT I dream, not of Tobias, and not of Will, but of my mother. We stand in the Amity orchards, where the apples are ripe and dangle just inches above our heads. Leaf shadows pattern her face, and she wears black, though I never saw her in black when she was alive. She is teaching me to braid hair, demonstrating on a lock of her own, laughing when my fingers fumble.
I wake wondering how I did not notice, every day I sat across from her at the breakfast table, that she was full to bursting with Dauntless energy. Was it because she hid it well? Or was it because I wasn’t looking?
I bury my face in the thin mattress I slept on. I will never know her. But at least she will never know what I did to Will, either. At this point I don’t think I could bear it if she did.
I am still blinking the haze of sleep from my eyes when I follow Peter down the corridor, seconds or minutes later, I can’t tell.
“Peter. ” My throat aches; I must have screamed while I slept. “What time is it?”
He wears a watch, but the face is covered, so I can’t see it. He doesn’t even bother to look at it.
“Why are you constantly escorting me places?” I say. “Isn’t there a depraved activity you’re supposed to be taking part in? Kicking puppies or spying on girls while they change, or something?”
“I know what you did to Will, you know. Don’t pretend that you’re better than I am, because you and I, we’re exactly the same. ”
The only thing that distinguishes one hallway from another, here, is their length. I decide to label them according to how many steps I take before I turn. Ten. Forty-seven. Twenty-nine.
“You’re wrong,” I say. “We may both be bad, but there’s a huge difference between us—I’m not content with being this way. ”
Peter snorts a little, and we walk between the Erudite lab tables. That’s when I realize where I am, and where we’re going: back to the room Jeanine showed me. The room where I will be executed. I shudder so hard my teeth chatter, and it’s difficult to keep walking, hard to keep my thoughts straight. It’s just a room, I tell myself. Just a room like any other room.
I am such a liar.
This time the execution chamber is not empty. Four Dauntless traitors mill around in one corner, and two of the Erudite, one a dark-skinned woman, one an older man, both wearing lab coats, stand with Jeanine near the metal table in the center. Several machines are set up around it, and there are wires everywhere.
I don’t know what most of those machines do, but among them is a heart monitor. What does Jeanine plan to do that requires a heart monitor?
“Get her on the table,” says Jeanine, sounding bored. I stare for a second at the sheet of steel that awaits me. What if she changed her mind about waiting to execute me? What if this is when I die? Peter’s hands clamp around my arms and I writhe, throwing all my strength into the struggle.
But he just lifts me up, dodging my kicking feet, and slams me down on the metal slab, knocking the wind out of me. I gasp, and fling a fist out at whatever I can hit, which just happens to be Peter’s wrist. He winces, but by now the other Dauntless traitors have come forward to help.
One of them holds down my ankles, and the other holds down my shoulders as Peter pulls black straps across my body to keep me pinned. I flinch at the pain in my wounded shoulder and stop struggling.
“What the hell is going on?” I demand, craning my neck to look at Jeanine. “We agreed—cooperation in exchange for results! We agreed—”
“This is entirely separate from our agreement,” says Jeanine, glancing at her watch. “This is not about you, Beatrice. ”
The door opens again.
Tobias walks in—limps in—flanked by Dauntless traitors. His face is bruised and there’s a cut above his eyebrow. He does not move with his usual care; he’s holding himself perfectly straight. He must be injured. I try not to think about how he got that way.
“What is this?” he says, his voice rough and creaky.
From screaming, probably.
My throat feels swollen.
“Tris,” he says, and he lurches toward me, but the Dauntless traitors are too quick. They grab him before he can move more than a few steps. “Tris, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Are you?”
He nods. I don’t believe him.
“Rather than waste any more time, Mr. Eaton, I thought I would take the most logical approach. Truth serum would be preferable, of course, but it would take days to coerce Jack Kang into handing some over, as it is jealously guarded by the Candor, and I’d rather not waste a few days. ” She steps forward, a syringe in hand. This serum is tinted gray. It could be a new version of the simulation serum, but I doubt it.
I wonder what it does. It can’t be good, if she looks this pleased with herself.
“In a few seconds, I will inject Tris with this liquid. At that point, I trust, your selfless instincts will take over and you will tell me exactly what I need to know. ”
“What does she need to know?” I say, interrupting her.
“Information about the factionless safe houses,” he replies without looking at me.
My eyes widen. The factionless are the last hope any of us has, now that half the loyal Dauntless and all the Candor are simulation-ready, and half the Abnegation are dead.
“Don’t give it to her. I’m going to die anyway. Don’t give her anything. ”
“Remind me, Mr. Eaton,” says Jeanine. “What do Dauntless simulations do?”
“This isn’t a classroom,” he replies through gritted teeth. “Tell me what you’re going to do. ”
“I will if you answer my very simple question. ”
“Fine. ” Tobias’s eyes shift to me. “The simulations stimulate the amygdala, which is responsible for processing fear, induce a hallucination based on that fear, and then transmit the data to a computer to be processed and observed. ”
It sounds like he’s had that memorized for a long time. Maybe he has—he did spend a lot of time running simulations.
“Very good,” she says. “When I was developing the Dauntless simulations, years ago, we discovered that certain levels of potency overwhelmed the brain and made it too insensible with terror to invent new surroundings, which was when we diluted the solution so that the simulations would be more instructive. But I still remember how to make it. ”
She taps the syringe with her fingernail.
“Fear,” she says, “is more powerful than pain. So is there anything you’d like to say, before I inject Ms. Prior?”
Tobias presses his lips together.
And Jeanine inserts the needle.
It begins quietly, with the pounding of a heart. I am not sure, at first, whose heartbeat I’m hearing, because it’s far too loud to be my own. But then I realize that it is my own, and it’s getting faster and faster.
Sweat collects in my palms and behind my knees.
And then I have to gasp in order to breathe.
That’s when the screaming starts
And I
Can’t
Think.
Tobias is fighting the Dauntless traitors by the door.
I hear what sounds like a child’s scream beside me, and wrench my head around to see where it’s coming from, but there is only a heart monitor. Above me the lines between the ceiling tiles warp and twist into monstrous creatures. The scent of rotting flesh fills the air and I gag. The monstrous creatures take on a more definite shape—they are birds, crows, with beaks as long as my forearm and wings so dark they seem to swallow all the light.
“Tris,” says Tobias. I look away from the crows.
He stands by the door, where he was before I was injected, but now he has a knife. He holds it out from his body and turns it so the blade points in, at his stomach. Then he brings it toward himself, touching the tip of the blade to his stomach.