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“We haven’t taken any of your people,” George says. “We’re not soldiers. We’re just scientists. ”
“Yeah, right,” the boy says. “A bulletproof vest? If that’s not soldier shit, then I’m the richest kid in the States. Now tell me what I need to know!”
I move back so I’m standing behind one of the lean-tos, then put my gun around the edge of the structure and say, “Hey!”
Everyone in the crowd turns at once, but the boy with the gun doesn’t stop aiming at George, like I’d hoped.
“I’ve got you in my sights,” I say. “Leave now and I’ll let you go. ”
“I’ll shoot him!” the boy says.
“I’ll shoot you,” I say. “We’re with the government, but we aren’t soldiers. We don’t know where your people are. If you let him go, we’ll all leave quietly. If you kill him, I guarantee there will be soldiers here soon to arrest you, and they won’t be as forgiving as we are. ”
At that moment Amar emerges into the courtyard behind George, and someone in the crowd screeches, “There are more of them!” And everyone scatters. The boy with the gun dives into the nearest aisle, leaving George, Amar, and me alone. Still, I keep my gun up by my face, in case they decide to come back.
Amar wraps his arms around George, and George thumps his back with a fist. Amar looks at me, his face over George’s shoulder. “Still don’t think genetic damage is to blame for any of these troubles?”
I walk past one of the lean-tos and see a little girl crouching just inside the door, her arms wrapped around her knees. She sees me through the crack in the layered tarps and whimpers a little. I wonder who taught these people to be so terrified of soldiers. I wonder what made a young boy desperate enough to aim a gun at one of them.
“No,” I say. “I don’t. ”
I have better people to blame.
By the time we get back to the truck, Jack and Violet are setting up a surveillance camera that wasn’t stolen by people in the fringe. Violet has a screen in her hands with a long list of numbers on it, and she reads them to Jack, who programs them into his screen.
“Where have you guys been?” he says.
“We were attacked,” George says. “We have to leave, now. ”
“Luckily, that’s the last set of coordinates,” Violet says. “Let’s get going. ”
We pile into the truck again. Amar draws the doors shut behind us, and I set my gun on the floor with the safety on, glad to be rid of it. I didn’t think I would be aiming a dangerous weapon at someone today when I woke up. I didn’t think I would witness those kinds of living conditions, either.
“It’s the Abnegation in you,” Amar says. “That makes you hate that place. I can tell. ”
“It’s a lot of things in me. ”
“It’s just something I noticed in Four, too. Abnegation produces deeply serious people. People who automatically see things like need,” he says. “I’ve noticed that when people switch to Dauntless, it creates some of the same types. Erudite who switch to Dauntless tend to turn cruel and brutal. Candor who switch to Dauntless tend to become boisterous, fight-picking adrenaline junkies. And Abnegation who switch to Dauntless become . . . I don’t know, soldiers, I guess. Revolutionaries.
“That’s what he could be, if he trusted himself more,” he adds. “If Four wasn’t so plagued with self-doubt, he would be one hell of a leader, I think. I’ve always thought that. ”
“I think you’re right,” I say. “It’s when he’s a follower that he gets himself into trouble. Like with Nita. Or Evelyn. ”
What about you? I ask myself. You wanted to make him a follower too.
No, I didn’t, I tell myself, but I’m not sure if I believe it.
Amar nods.
Images from the fringe keep rising up inside me like hiccups. I imagine the child my mother was, crouched in one of those lean-tos, scrambling for weapons because they meant an ounce of safety, choking on smoke to keep warm in the winter. I don’t know why she was so willing to abandon that place after she was rescued. She became absorbed into the compound, and then worked on its behalf for the rest of her life. Did she forget about where she came from?
She couldn’t have. She spent her entire life trying to help the factionless. Maybe it wasn’t a fulfillment of her duty as an Abnegation—maybe it came from a desire to help people like the ones she had left.
Suddenly I can’t stand to think of her, or that place, or the things I saw there. I grab on to the first thought that comes to my mind, to distract myself.
“So you and Tobias were good friends?”
“Is anyone good friends with him?” Amar shakes his head. “I gave him his nickname, though. I watched him face his fears and I saw how troubled he was, and I figured he could use a new life, so I started calling him ‘Four. ’ But no, I wouldn’t say we were good friends. Not as good as I wanted to be. ”
Amar leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. A small smile curls his lips.
“Oh,” I say. “Did you . . . like him?”
“Now why would you ask that?”
I shrug. “Just the way you talk about him. ”
“I don’t like him anymore, if that’s what you’re really asking. But yes, at one time I did, and it was clear that he did not return that particular sentiment, so I backed off,” Amar says. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything. ”
“To Tobias? Of course I won’t. ”
“No, I mean, don’t say anything to anyone. And I’m not talking about just the thing with Tobias. ”
He looks at the back of George’s head, now visible above the considerably diminished pile of equipment.
I raise an eyebrow at him. I’m not surprised he and George were drawn to each other. They’re both Divergent who had to fake their own deaths to survive. Both outsiders in an unfamiliar world.
“You have to understand,” Amar says. “The Bureau is obsessed with procreation—with passing on genes. And George and I are both GPs, so any entanglement that can’t produce a stronger genetic code . . . It’s not encouraged, that’s all. ”
“Ah. ” I nod. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not obsessed with producing strong genes. ” I smile wryly.
“Thank you,” he says.
For a few seconds we sit quietly, watching the ruins turn to a blur as the truck picks up speed.
“I think you’re good for Four, you know,” he says.
I stare at my hands, curled in my lap. I don’t feel like explaining to him that we’re on the verge of breaking up—I don’t know him, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to talk about it. All I can manage to say is, “Oh?”
“Yeah. I can see what you bring out in him. You don’t know this because you’ve never experienced it, but Four without you is a much different person. He’s . . . obsessive, explosive, insecure . . . ”
“Obsessive?”
“What else do you call someone who repeatedly goes through his own fear landscape?”
“I don’t know . . . determined. ” I pause. “Brave. ”
“Yeah, sure. But also a little bit crazy, right? I mean, most Dauntless would rather leap into the chasm than keep going through their fear landscapes. There’s bravery and then there’s masochism, and the line got a little hazy with him. ”
“I’m familiar with the line,” I say.
“I know. ” Amar grins. “Anyway, all I’m saying is, any time you mash two different people against each other, you’ll get problems, but I can see that what you guys have is worthwhile, that’s all. ”
I wrinkle my nose. “Mash people against each other, really?”
Amar presses his palms together and twists them back and forth, to illustrate. I laugh, but I can’t ignore the achy feeling in my chest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
TOBIAS
I WALK TO the cluster of chairs closest to the windows in the control room and bring up the footage from different cameras throughout the city, one by one, searching for my parents. I find Evelyn first—she is in the lobby of Erudite headquarters, talking in a close huddle with Therese and a factionless man, her second and third in command now that I am gone. I turn up the volume on the microphone, but I still can’t hear anything but muttering.
Through the windows along the back of the control room, I see the same empty night sky as the one above the city, interrupted only by small blue and red lights marking the runways for airplanes. It’s strange to think we have that in common when everything else is so different here.
By now the people in the control room know that I was the one who disabled the security system the night before the attack, though I wasn’t the one who slipped one of their night shift workers peace serum so that I could do it—that was Nita. But for the most part, they ignore me, as long as I stay away from their desks.
On another screen, I scroll through the footage again, looking for Marcus or Johanna, anything that can show me what’s happening with the Allegiant. Every part of the city shows up on the screen, the bridge near the Merciless Mart and the Pire and the main thoroughfare of the Abnegation sector, the Hub and the Ferris wheel and the Amity fields, now worked by all the factions. But none of the cameras shows me anything.
“You’ve been coming here a lot,” Cara says as she approaches. “Are you afraid of the rest of the compound? Or of something else?”
She’s right, I have been coming to the control room a lot. It’s just something to pass the time as I wait for my sentence from Tris, as I wait for our plan to strike the Bureau to come together, as I wait for something, anything.
“No,” I say. “I’m just keeping an eye on my parents. ”
“The parents you hate?” She stands next to me, her arms folded. “Yes, I can see why you would want to spend every waking hour staring at people you want nothing to do with. It makes perfect sense. ”
“They’re dangerous,” I say. “More dangerous because no one else knows how dangerous they are but me. ”
“And what are you going to do from here, if they do something terrible? Send a smoke signal?”
I glare at her.
“Fine, fine. ” She puts up her hands in surrender. “I’m just trying to remind you that you aren’t in their world anymore, you’re in this one. That’s all. ”
“Point taken. ”
I never thought of the Erudite as being particularly perceptive about relationships, or emotions, but Cara’s discerning eyes see all kinds of things. My fear. My search for a distraction in my past. It’s almost alarming.
I scroll past one of the camera angles and then pause, and scroll back. The scene is dark, because of the hour, but I see people alighting like a flock of birds around a building I don’t recognize, their movements synchronized.
“They’re doing it,” Cara says, excited. “The Allegiant are actually attacking. ”
“Hey!” I shout to one of the women at the control room desks. The older one, who always gives me a nasty look when I show up, lifts her head. “Camera twenty-four! Hurry!”
She taps her screen, and everyone milling around the surveillance area gathers around her. People passing by in the hallway stop to see what’s happening, and I turn to Cara.
“Can you go get the others?” I say. “I think they should see this. ”
She nods, her eyes wild, and rushes away from the control room.
The people around the unfamiliar building wear no uniform to distinguish them, but they don’t wear factionless armbands either, and they carry guns. I try to pick out a face, anything I recognize, but the footage is too blurry. I watch them arrange themselves, motioning to one another to communicate, dark arms waving in the darker night.
I wedge my thumbnail between my teeth, impatient for something, anything to happen. A few minutes later Cara arrives with the others at her back. When they reach the crowd of people around the primary screens, Peter says, “Excuse me!” loud enough to make people turn around. When they see who he is, they part for him.
“What’s up?” Peter says to me when he’s closer. “What’s going on?”
“The Allegiant have formed an army,” I say, pointing at the screen on the left. “There are people from every faction in it, even Amity and Erudite. I’ve been watching a lot lately. ”
“Erudite?” Caleb says.
“The Allegiant are the enemies of the new enemies, the factionless,” Cara replies. “Which gives the Erudite and the Allegiant a common goal: to usurp Evelyn. ”
“Did you say there were Amity in an army?” Christina asks me.
“They’re not really participating in the violence,” I say. “But they are participating in the effort. ”
“The Allegiant raided their first weapons storehouse a few days ago,” the young woman sitting at the control room desk nearest to us says over her shoulder. “This is their second. That’s where they got those weapons. After the first raid, Evelyn had most of the weapons relocated, but this storehouse didn’t make it in time. ”
My father knows what Evelyn knew: that the power to make people fear you is the only power you need. Weapons will do that for him.
“What’s their goal?” Caleb says.
“The Allegiant are motivated by the desire to return to our original purpose in the city,” Cara says. “Whether that means sending a group of people outside of it, as instructed by Edith Prior—which we thought was important at the time, though I’ve since learned that her instructions didn’t really matter—or reinstating the factions by force. They’re building up to an attack on the factionless stronghold. That’s what Johanna and I discussed before I left. We did not discuss allying with your father, Tobias, but I suppose she’s capable of making her own decisions. ”