TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER 5 страница

One of the bullets found her stomach, and the other found her chest. There is

no way she will recover from this. I may be angry with her for fighting me in Jeanine’s laboratory, but she’s still Tori, the woman who guarded the secret of my Divergence. My throat tightens as I remember following her into the aptitude test room, my eyes on her hawk tattoo.

Her eyes shift in my direction and focus on me. Her eyebrows furrow, but she doesn’t speak.

I shift the flashlight into the crook of my thumb and reach for her hand to squeeze her sweaty fingers.

I hear someone approaching, and I aim flashlight and gun in the same direction. The beam hits a woman wearing a factionless armband, with a

gun pointed at my head. I fire, clenching my teeth so hard they squeak.

The bullet hits the woman in the stomach and she screams, firing blindly into the night.

I look back down at Tori, and her eyes are closed, her body still. Pointing my flashlight at the ground, I sprint away from her and from the woman I just shot. My legs ache and my lungs burn. I don’t know where I’m going, if I’m running into danger or away from it, but I keep running as long as I can.

Finally I see a light in the distance. At first I think it’s another flashlight, but as I draw closer I realize it is larger and steadier than a flashlight—it’s a headlight. I hear an engine, and crouch in

the tall grass to hide, switching my flashlight off and keeping my gun ready. The truck slows, and I hear a voice:

“Tori?”

It sounds like Christina. The truck is red and rusted, an Amity vehicle. I straighten, pointing the light at myself so she’ll see me. The truck stops a few feet ahead of me, and Christina leaps out of the passenger seat, throwing her arms around me. I replay it in my mind to make it real, Tori’s body falling, the factionless woman’s hands covering her stomach. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t feel real.

“Thank God,” Christina says. “Get in. We’re going to find Tori.”

“Tori’s dead,” I say plainly, and the word “dead” makes it real for me. I wipe tears from my cheeks with the heels of my hands and struggle to control my shuddering breaths. “I—I shot the woman who killed her.”

“What?” Johanna sounds frantic. She leans over from the driver’s seat. “What did you say?”

“Tori’s gone,” I say. “I saw it happen.”

Johanna’s expression is shrouded by her hair. She presses her next breath out.

“Well, let’s find the others, then.”

I get into the truck. The engine roars as Johanna presses the gas pedal, and we bump over the grass in search of the

others.

“Did you see any of them?” I say. “A few. Cara, Uriah.” Johanna

shakes her head. “No one else.”

I wrap my hand around the door handle and squeeze. If I had tried harder to find Tobias... if I hadn’t stopped for Tori...

What if Tobias didn’t make it?

“I’m sure they’re all right,” Johanna says. “That boy of yours knows how to take care of himself.”

I nod, without conviction. Tobias can take care of himself, but in an attack, surviving is an accident. It doesn’t take skill to stand in a place where no bullets find you, or to fire into the dark and hit a man you didn’t see. It is all luck, or

providence, depending on what you believe. And I don’t know—have never known—exactly what I believe.

He’s all right he’s all right he’s all right.

Tobias is all right.

My hands tremble, and Christina squeezes my knee. Johanna steers us toward the rendezvous point, where she saw Uriah and Cara. I watch the speedometer needle climb, then hold steady at seventy-five. We jostle one another in the cab, thrown this way and that way by the uneven ground.

“There!” Christina points. There is a cluster of lights ahead of us, some just pinpricks, like flashlights, and others

round, like headlights.

We pull up close, and I see him. Tobias sits on the hood of the other truck, his arm soaked with blood. Cara stands in front of him with a first aid kit. Caleb and Peter sit on the grass a few feet away. Before Johanna has stopped the truck completely, I open the door and get out, running toward him. Tobias stands up, ignoring Cara’s orders to stay put, and we collide, his uninjured arm wrapping around my back and lifting me off my feet. His back is wet with sweat, and when he kisses me, he tastes like salt.

All the knots of tension inside me come apart at once. I feel, just for a moment, like I am remade, like I am

brand-new.

He’s all right. We’re out of the city. He’s all right.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

TOBIAS

MY ARM THROBS like a second heartbeat from the bullet graze. Tris’s knuckles brush mine as she lifts her hand to point at something on our right: a series of long, low buildings lit by blue emergency lamps.

“What are those?” Tris says.

“The other greenhouses,” Johanna says. “They don’t require much

manpower, but we grow and raise things in large quantities there—animals, raw material for fabric, wheat, and so on.”

Their panes glow in the starlight, obscuring the treasures I imagine to be inside them, small plants with berries dangling from their branches, rows of potato plants buried in the earth.

“You don’t show them to visitors,” I say. “We never saw them.”

“Amity keeps a number of secrets,” Johanna says, and she sounds proud.

The road ahead of us is long and straight, marked with cracks and swollen patches. Alongside it are gnarled trees, broken lampposts, old power lines. Every so often, there is an isolated square of sidewalk with weeds forcing

their way through the concrete, or a pile of rotting wood, a collapsed dwelling.

The more time I spend thinking about this landscape that every Dauntless patrol was told was normal, the more I see an old city rising up around me, the buildings lower than the ones we left behind, but just as numerous. An old city that was transformed into empty land for the Amity to farm. In other words, an old city that was razed, burned to cinders, and crushed into the ground, even the roads disappearing, the earth left to run wild over the wreckage.

I put my hand out the window, and the wind wraps around my fingers like locks of hair. When I was very young,

my mother pretended she could shape things from the wind, and she would give them to me to use, like hammers and nails, or swords, or roller skates. It was a game we played in the evenings, on the front lawn, before Marcus got home. It took away our dread.

In the bed of the truck, behind us, are Caleb, Christina, and Uriah. Christina and Uriah sit close enough for their shoulders to touch, but they are looking in opposite directions, more like strangers than friends. Just behind us is another truck, driven by Robert, which carries Cara and Peter. Tori was supposed to be with them. The thought makes me feel hollow, empty. She administered my aptitude test. She made

me think, for the first time, that I could leave Abnegation—that I had to. I feel like I owe her something, and she died before I could give it to her.

“This is it,” Johanna says. “The outer limit of the Dauntless patrols.”

No fence or wall marks the divide between the Amity compound and the outer world, but I remember monitoring the Dauntless patrols from the control room, making sure they didn’t go farther than the limit, which is marked by a series of signs with Xs on them. The patrols were structured so that the trucks would run out of gas if they went too far, a delicate system of checks and balances that preserved our safety and theirs—

and, I now realize, the secret the Abnegation kept.

“Have they ever gone past the limit?” says Tris.

“A few times,” says Johanna. “It was our responsibility to deal with that situation when it came up.”

Tris gives her a look, and she shrugs. “Every faction has a serum,” Johanna says. “The Dauntless serum gives hallucinated realities, Candor’s gives the truth, Amity’s gives peace, Erudite’s gives death—” At this, Tris visibly shudders, but Johanna continues as if it didn’t happen. “And

Abnegation’s resets memory.” “Resets memory?”

“Like Amanda Ritter’s memory,” I

say. “She said, ‘There are many things I am happy to forget,’ remember?”

“Yes, exactly,” says Johanna. “The Amity are charged with administering the Abnegation serum to anyone who goes out past the limit, just enough to make them forget the experience. I’m sure some of them have slipped past us, but not many.”

We are silent then. I turn the information over and over in my mind. There is something deeply wrong with taking a person’s memories—even though I know it was necessary to keep our city safe for as long as it needed to be, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Take a person’s memories, and you

change who they are.

Swelling inside me is the feeling that I am about to jump out of my own skin, because the farther we get outside the outer limit of the Dauntless patrols, the closer we get to seeing what lies outside the only world I’ve ever known. I am terrified and thrilled and confused and a hundred different things at once.

I see something up ahead of us, in the light of early morning, and grab Tris’s hand.

“Look,” I say.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

TRIS

THE WORLD BEYOND ours is full of roads and dark buildings and collapsing power lines.

There is no life in it, as far as I can see; no movement, no sound but the wind and my own footsteps.

It’s like the landscape is an interrupted sentence, one side dangling in the air, unfinished, and the other, a

completely different subject. On our side of that sentence is empty land, grass and stretches of road. On the other side are two concrete walls with half a dozen sets of train tracks between them. Up ahead, there is a concrete bridge built across the walls, and framing the tracks are buildings, wood and brick and glass, their windows dark, trees growing around them, so wild their branches have grown together.

A sign on the right says 90.

“What do we do now?” Uriah asks. “We follow the tracks,” I say, but

quietly, so only I hear it.

We get out of the trucks at the divide

between our world and theirs—whoever “they” are. Robert and Johanna say a brief good-bye, turn the trucks around, and drive back into the city. I watch them go. I can’t imagine coming this far and then turning back, but I guess there are things they have to do in the city. Johanna still has an Allegiant rebellion to organize.

The rest of us—me, Tobias, Caleb, Peter, Christina, Uriah, and Cara—set out with our meager possessions along the railroad tracks.

The tracks are not like the ones in the city. They are polished and sleek, and instead of boards running perpendicular to their path, there are sheets of textured metal. Up ahead I see one of the trains

that runs along them, abandoned near the wall. It is metal-plated on the top and front, like a mirror, with tinted windows all along the side. When we draw closer, I see rows of benches inside it with maroon cushions on them. People must not jump on and off these trains.

Tobias walks behind me on one of the rails, his arms held out from his sides to maintain his balance. The others are spread out over the tracks, Peter and Caleb near one wall, Cara near the other. No one talks much, except to point out something new, a sign or a building or a hint of what this world was like, when there were people in it.

The concrete walls alone hold my

attention—they are covered with strange pictures of people with skin so smooth they hardly look like people anymore, or colorful bottles with shampoo or conditioner or vitamins or unfamiliar substances inside them, words I don’t understand, “vodka” and “Coca-Cola” and “energy drink.” The colors and shapes and words and pictures are so garish, so abundant, that they are mesmerizing.

“Tris.” Tobias puts his hand on my shoulder, and I stop.

He tilts his head and says, “Do you hear that?”

I hear footsteps and the quiet voices of our companions. I hear my own breaths, and his. But running beneath

them is a quiet rumble, inconsistent in its intensity. It sounds like an engine.

“Everyone stop!” I shout.

To my surprise, everyone does, even Peter, and we gather together in the center of the tracks. I see Peter draw his gun and hold it up, and I do the same, both hands joined together to steady it, remembering the ease with which I used to lift it. That ease is gone now.

Something appears around the bend up ahead. A black truck, but larger than any truck I’ve ever seen, large enough to hold more than a dozen people in its covered bed.

I shudder.

The truck bumps over the tracks and

comes to a stop twenty feet away from us. I can see the man driving it—he has dark skin and long hair that is in a knot at the back of his head.

“God,” Tobias says, and his hands tighten around his own gun.

A woman gets out of the front seat. She looks to be around Johanna’s age, her skin patterned with dense freckles and her hair so dark it’s almost black. She hops to the ground and puts up both hands, so we can see that she isn’t armed.

“Hello,” she says, and smiles nervously. “My name is Zoe. This is Amar.”

She jerks her head to the side to indicate the driver, who has gotten out of

the truck too.

“Amar is dead,” Tobias says.

“No, I’m not. Come on, Four,” Amar says.

Tobias’s face is tight with fear. I don’t blame him. It’s not every day you see someone you care about come back from the dead.

The faces of all the people I’ve lost flash into my mind. Lynn. Marlene. Will. Al.

My father. My mother.

What if they’re still alive, like Amar? What if the curtain that separates us is not death but a chain-link fence and some land?

I can’t stop myself from hoping,

foolish as it is.

“We work for the same organization that founded your city,” Zoe says as she glares at Amar. “The same organization Edith Prior came from. And...”

She reaches into her pocket and takes out a partially crumpled photograph. She holds it out, and then her eyes find mine in the crowd of people and guns.

“I think you should look at this, Tris,” she says. “I’ll step forward and leave it on the ground, then back up. All right?”

She knows my name. My throat tightens with fear. How does she know my name? And not just my name—my nickname, the name I chose when I

joined Dauntless?

“All right,” I say, but my voice is hoarse, so the words barely escape.

Zoe steps forward, sets the photograph down on the train tracks, then moves back to her original position. I leave the safety of our numbers and crouch near the photograph, watching her the whole time. Then I back up, photograph in hand.

It shows a row of people in front of a chain-link fence, their arms slung across one another’s shoulders and backs. I see a child version of Zoe, recognizable by her freckles, and a few people I don’t recognize. I am about to ask her what the point of me looking at

this picture is when I recognize the young woman with dull blond hair, tied back, and a wide smile.

My mother. What is my mother doing next to these people?

Something—grief, pain, longing— squeezes my chest.

“There is a lot to explain,” Zoe says. “But this isn’t really the best place to do it. We’d like to take you to our headquarters. It’s a short drive from here.”

Still holding up his gun, Tobias touches my wrist with his free hand, guiding the photograph closer to his face. “That’s your mother?” he asks me.

“It’s Mom?” Caleb says. He pushes past Tobias to see the picture over my

shoulder.

“Yes,” I say to both of them.

“Think we should trust them?” Tobias says to me in a low voice.

Zoe doesn’t look like a liar, and she doesn’t sound like one either. And if she knows who I am, and knew how to find us here, it’s probably because she has some form of access to the city, which means she is probably telling the truth about being with the group that Edith Prior came from. And then there’s Amar, who is watching every movement Tobias makes.

“We came out here because we wanted to find these people,” I say. “We have to trust someone, don’t we? Or else

we’re just walking around in a wasteland, possibly starving to death.”

Tobias releases my wrist and lowers his gun. I do the same. The others follow suit slowly, with Christina putting hers down last.

“Wherever we go, we have to be free to leave at any time,” Christina says. “Okay?”

Zoe places her hand on her chest, right over her heart. “You have my word.”

I hope, for all our sakes, that her word is worth having.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

TOBIAS

I STAND ON the edge of the truck bed, holding the structure that supports the cloth cover. I want this new reality to be a simulation that I could manipulate if I could only make sense of it. But it’s not, and I can’t make sense of it.

Amar is alive.

“Adapt!” was one of his favorite commands during my initiation.

Sometimes he yelled it so often that I would dream it; it woke me like an alarm clock, requiring more of me than I could provide. Adapt. Adapt faster, adapt better, adapt to things that no man should have to.

Like this: leaving a wholly formed world and discovering another one.

Or this: discovering that your dead friend is actually alive and driving the truck you’re riding in.

Tris sits behind me, on the bench that wraps around the truck bed, the creased photo in her hands. Her fingers hover over her mother’s face, almost touching it but not quite. Christina sits on one side of her, and Caleb is on the other. She must be letting him stay just to see the

photograph; her entire body recoils from him, pressing into Christina’s side.

“That’s your mom?” Christina says. Tris and Caleb both nod.

“She’s so young there. Pretty, too,” Christina adds.

“Yes she is. Was, I mean.”

I expect Tris to sound sad as she replies, like she’s aching at the memory of her mother’s fading beauty. Instead her voice is nervous, her lips pursed in anticipation. I hope that she isn’t brewing false hope.

“Let me see it,” Caleb says, stretching his hand out to his sister.

Silently, and without really looking at him, she passes him the photograph.

I turn back to the world we are driving away from—the end of the train tracks. The huge expanses of field. And in the distance, the Hub, barely visible in the haze that covers the city’s skyline. It’s a strange feeling, seeing it from this place, like I can still touch it if I stretch my hand far enough, though I have traveled so far away from it.

Peter moves toward the edge of the truck bed next to me, holding the canvas to steady himself. The train tracks curve away from us now, and I can’t see the fields anymore. The walls on either side of us gradually disappear as the land flattens out, and I see buildings everywhere, some small, like the

Abnegation houses, and some wide, like city buildings turned on their sides.

Trees, overgrown and huge, grow beyond the cement fixtures intended to keep them enclosed, their roots sprawling over the pavement. Perched on the edge of one rooftop is a row of black birds like the ones tattooed on Tris’s collarbone. As the truck passes, they squawk and scatter into the air.

This is a wild world.

Just like that, it is too much for me to bear, and I have to back up and sit on one of the benches. I cradle my head in my hands, keeping my eyes shut so I can’t take in any new information. I feel Tris’s strong arm across my back, pulling me sideways into her narrow

frame. My hands are numb.

“Just focus on what’s right here, right now,” Cara says from across the truck. “Like how the truck is moving. It’ll help.”

I try it. I think about how hard the bench is beneath me and how the truck always vibrates, even on flat ground, buzzing in my bones. I detect its tiny movements left and right, forward and back, and absorb each bounce as it rolls over the rails. I focus until everything goes dark around us, and I don’t feel the passage of time or the panic of discovery, I feel only our movement over the earth.

“You should probably look around

now,” Tris says, and she sounds weak. Christina and Uriah stand where I

stood, peering around the edge of the canvas wall. I look over their shoulders to see what we’re driving toward. There is a tall fence stretching wide across the landscape, which looks empty compared to the densely packed buildings I saw before I sat down. The fence has vertical black bars with pointed ends that bend outward, as if to skewer anyone who might try to climb over it.

A few feet past it is another fence, this one chain-link, like the one around the city, with barbed wire looped over the top. I hear a loud buzz coming from the second fence, an electric charge. People walk the space between them,

carrying guns that look a little like our paintball guns, but far more lethal, powerful pieces of machinery.

A sign on the first fence reads

BUREAU OF GENETIC WELFARE.

I hear Amar’s voice, speaking to the armed guards, but I don’t know what he’s saying. A gate in the first fence opens to admit us, and then a gate in the second. Beyond the two fences is...

order.

As far as I can see, there are low buildings separated by trimmed grass and fledgling trees. The roads that connect them are well maintained and well marked, with arrows pointing to various destinations: GREENHOUSES,

straight ahead; SECURITY OUTPOST, left;

OFFICERS’ RESIDENCES, right;

COMPOUND MAIN, straight ahead.

I get up and lean around the truck to see the compound, half my body hanging over the road. The Bureau of Genetic Welfare isn’t tall, but it’s still huge, wider than I can see, a mammoth of glass and steel and concrete. Behind the compound are a few tall towers with bulges at the top—I don’t know why, but I think of the control room when I see them, and wonder if that’s what they are.

Aside from the guards between the fences, there are few people outside. Those who are stop to watch us, but we drive away so quickly I don’t see their expressions.

The truck stops before a set of double doors, and Peter is the first to jump down. The rest of us spill out on the pavement behind him, and we are shoulder to shoulder, standing so close I can hear how fast everyone is breathing. In the city we were divided by faction, by age, by history, but here all those divisions fall away. We are all we have.

“Here we go,” mutters Tris, as Zoe and Amar approach.

Here we go, I say to myself.

“Welcome to the compound,” says Zoe. “This building used to be O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country. Now it’s the headquarters of the

Bureau of Genetic Welfare—or just the Bureau, as we call it around here. It’s an agency of the United States government.” I feel my face going slack. I know all the words she’s saying—except I’m not sure what an “airport” or “united states” is—but they don’t make sense to me all together. I’m not the only one who looks confused—Peter raises both eyebrows

as if asking a question.

“Sorry,” she says. “I keep forgetting how little you all know.”

“I believe it’s your fault if we don’t know anything, not ours,” Peter points out.

“I should rephrase.” Zoe smiles gently. “I keep forgetting how little information we provided you with. An

airport is a hub for air travel, and—” “ Air travel?” says Christina,

incredulous.

“One of the technological developments that wasn’t necessary for us to know about when we were inside the city was air travel,” says Amar. “It’s safe, fast, and amazing.”

“Wow,” says Tris.

She looks excited. I, however, think of speeding through the air, high above the compound, and feel like I might throw up.

“Anyway. When the experiments were first developed, the airport was converted into this compound so that we could monitor the experiments from a

distance,” Zoe says. “I’m going to walk you to the control room to meet David, the leader of the Bureau. You will see a lot of things you don’t understand, but it may be best to get some preliminary explanations before you start asking me about them. So take note of the things you want to learn more about, and feel free to ask me or Amar later.”

She starts toward the entrance, and the doors part for her, pulled open by two armed guards who smile in greeting as she passes them. The contrast between the friendly greeting and the weapons propped against their shoulders is almost humorous. The guns are huge, and I wonder how they feel to shoot, if you can feel the deadly power in them

just by curling your finger around the trigger.

Cool air rushes over my face as I walk into the compound. Windows arch high above my head, letting in pale light, but that is the most appealing part about the place—the tile floor is dull with dirt and age, and the walls are gray and blank. Ahead of us is a sea of people and machinery, with a sign over it that

s a ys SECURITY CHECKPOINT. I don’t

understand why they need so much security if they’re already protected by two layers of fence, one of which is electrified, and a few layers of guards, but this is not my world to question.

No, this is not my world at all.

Tris touches my shoulder and points down the long entryway. “Look at that.”

Standing at the far end of the room, outside the security checkpoint, is a huge block of stone with a glass apparatus suspended above it. It’s a clear example of the things we will see here that we don’t understand. I also don’t understand the hunger in Tris’s eyes, devouring everything around us as if it alone can sustain her. Sometimes I feel like we are the same, but sometimes, like right now, I feel the separation between our personalities like I’ve just run into a wall.

Christina says something to Tris, and they both grin. Everything I hear is

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