Four: The Traitor: A Divergent Story
ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER Visiting Day.
Two years ago, when I was an initiate, I pretended my own Visiting Day didn’t exist, holed up in the training room with a punching bag. I was there for so long that I smelled the dust-sweat for days afterward. Last year, the first year I taught initiates, I did the same thing, though Zeke and Shauna both invited me to spend the day with their families instead.
This year I have more important things to do than punch a bag and mope about my family dysfunction. I’m going to the control room.
I walk through the Pit, dodging tearful reunions and shrieks of laughter. Families can always come together on Visiting Day, even if they’re from different factions, but over time, they usually stop coming. “Faction before blood,” after all. Most of the mixed clothing I see belongs to transfer families: Will’s Erudite sister is dressed in light blue, Peter’s Candor parents are in black and white. For a moment I watch his parents, and wonder if they made him into the person he is. But most of the time, people aren’t that easy to explain, I guess.
I’m supposed to be on a mission, but I pause next to the chasm, pressing into the railing. Bits of paper float in the water. Now that I know where the steps cut into the stone in the opposite wall are, I can see them right away, and the hidden doorway that leads to them. I smile a little, thinking of the nights I’ve spent on those rocks with Zeke or Shauna, sometimes talking and sometimes just sitting and listening to the water move.
I hear footsteps approaching, and look over my shoulder. Tris is walking toward me, tucked under the gray-clad arm of an Abnegation woman. Natalie Prior. I stiffen, suddenly desperate to escape—what if Natalie knows who I am, where I came from? What if she lets it slip, here, surrounded by all these people?
She can’t possibly recognize me. I don’t look anything like the boy she knew, lanky and slouched and buried in fabric.
When she’s close enough, she extends her hand. “Hello, my name is Natalie. I’m Beatrice’s mother.”
Beatrice. That name is so wrong for her.
I clasp Natalie’s hand and shake it. I’ve never been fond of Dauntless hand-shaking. It’s too unpredictable—you never know how tightly to squeeze, how many times to shake.
“Four,” I say. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Four,” Natalie says, and she smiles. “Is that a nickname?”
“Yes,” I say. I change the subject. “Your daughter is doing well here. I’ve been overseeing her training.”
“That’s good to hear,” she says. “I know a few things about Dauntless initiation, and I was worried about her.”
I glance at Tris. There’s color in her cheeks—she looks happy, like seeing her mother is doing her some good. For the first time I fully appreciate how much she’s changed since I first saw her, tumbling onto the wooden platform, fragile-looking, like the impact with the net should have shattered her. She doesn’t look fragile anymore, with the shadows of bruises on her face and a new stability in the way she stands, like she’s ready for anything.
“You shouldn’t worry,” I say to Natalie.
Tris looks away. I think she’s still angry with me for the way I nicked her ear with that knife. I guess I don’t really blame her.
“You look familiar for some reason, Four,” Natalie says. I would think her comment was lighthearted if not for the way she’s looking at me, like she’s pinning me down.
“I can’t imagine why,” I say, as coldly as I can manage. “I don’t make a habit of associating with the Abnegation.”
She doesn’t react the way I expect her to, with surprise or fear or anger. She just laughs. “Few people do, these days. I don’t take it personally.”
If she does recognize me, she doesn’t seem eager to say so. I try to relax.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your reunion,” I say.
On my screen, the security footage switches from the lobby of the Pire to the hole hemmed in by four buildings, the initiate entrance to Dauntless. A crowd is gathered around the hole, climbing in and out of it, I assume to test the net.
“Not into Visiting Day?” My supervisor, Gus, stands at my shoulder, sipping from a mug of coffee. He’s not that old, but there’s a bald spot at the crown of his head. He keeps the rest of his hair short, even shorter than mine. His earlobes are stretched around wide discs. “I didn’t think I’d see you again until initiation was over.”
“Figured I might as well do something productive.”
On my screen, everyone crawls out of the hole and stands aside, their backs against one of the buildings. A dark figure inches toward the edge of the roof high above the hole, runs a few steps, and jumps off. My stomach drops like I’m the one falling, and the figure disappears beneath the pavement. I’ll never get used to seeing that.
“They seem to be having a good time,” Gus says, sipping his coffee again. “Well, you’re always welcome to work when you’re not scheduled to, but it’s not a crime to go have some mindless fun, Four.”
He walks away, and I mumble, “So I’m told.”
I look over the control room. It’s almost empty—on Visiting Day, only a few people are required to work, and it’s usually the oldest ones. Gus is hunched over his screen. Two others flank him, scanning through footage with their headphones half on, half off. And then there’s me.
I type in a command, calling up the footage I saved last week. It shows Max in his office, sitting at his computer. He pokes at the keys with an index finger, hunting for the right ones for several seconds between jabs. Not many of the Dauntless know how to type properly, especially Max, who I’m told spent most of his Dauntless time patrolling the factionless sector with a gun at his side—he must not have anticipated that he would ever need to use a computer. I lean close to the screen to make sure that the numbers I took down earlier are accurate. If they are, I have Max’s account password written on a piece of paper in my pocket.
Ever since I realized that Max was working closely with Jeanine Matthews, and began to suspect that they had something to do with Amar’s death, I’ve been looking for a way to investigate further. When I saw him type in his password the other day, I found one.
084628. Yes, the numbers look right. I call up the live security footage again, and cycle through the camera feeds until I find the ones that show Max’s office and the hallway beyond it. Then I type the command to take the footage of Max’s office out of the rotation, so Gus and the others won’t see it; it will only play on my screen. The footage from the whole city is always divided by however many people are in the control room, so we aren’t all looking at the same feeds. We’re only supposed to pull footage from the general rotation like that for a few seconds at a time, if we need a closer look at something, but hopefully this won’t take me long. I slip out of the room and walk toward the elevators.
This level of the Pire is almost empty—everyone is gone. That will make it easier for me to do what I have to do. I ride the elevator up to the tenth floor, and walk purposefully toward Max’s office. I’ve found that when you’re sneaking around, it’s best not to look like you’re sneaking around. I tap the flash drive in my pocket as I walk, and turn the corner toward Max’s office.
I nudge the door open with my shoe—earlier today, after I was sure he had gone to the Pit to start Visiting Day preparations, I’d crept up here and taped the lock. I close the door quietly behind me, not turning on the lights, and crouch next to his desk. I don’t want to move the chair to sit in it; I don’t want him to see that anything about this room has changed when he gets back.
The screen prompts me for a password. My mouth feels dry. I take the paper from my pocket and press it flat to the desk top while I type it in. 084628.
The screen shifts. I can’t believe it worked.
Hurry. If Gus discovers that I’m gone, that I’m in here, I don’t know what I’ll say, what excuse I could possibly give that would sound reasonable. I insert the flash drive and transfer the program I put there earlier. I asked Lauren, one of the Dauntless technical staff and my fellow initiation instructor, for a program that would make one computer mirror another, under the pretense that I wanted to prank Zeke when we’re at work. She was happy to help—another thing I’ve discovered is that the Dauntless are always up for a prank, and rarely looking for a lie.
With a few simple keystrokes, the program is installed and buried somewhere in Max’s computer that I’m sure he would never bother to access. I put the flash drive back in my pocket, along with the piece of paper with his password on it, and leave the office without getting my fingerprints on the glass part of the door.
That was easy, I think, as I walk toward the elevators again. According to my watch, it only took me five minutes. I can claim that I was on a bathroom break if anyone asks.
But when I get back to the control room, Gus is standing at my computer, staring at my screen.
I freeze. How long has he been there? Did he see me break into Max’s office?
“Four,” Gus says, sounding grave. “Why did you isolate this footage? You’re not supposed to take feeds out of rotation, you know that.”
“I . . .” Lie! Lie now! “I thought I saw something,” I finish lamely. “We’re allowed to isolate footage if we see something out of the ordinary.”
Gus moves toward me.
“So,” he says, “then why did I just see you on this screen coming out of that same hallway?”
He points to the hallway on my screen. My throat tightens.
“I thought I saw something, and I went upstairs to investigate it,” I say. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to move around.”
He stares at me, chewing the inside of his cheek. I don’t move. I don’t look away.
“If you ever see something out of the ordinary again, you follow the protocol. You report it to your supervisor, who is . . . who, again?”
“You,” I say, sighing a little. I don’t like to be patronized.
“Correct. I see you can keep up,” he says. “Honestly, Four, after over a year of working here there shouldn’t be so many irregularities in your job performance. We have very clear rules, and all you have to do is follow them. This is your last warning. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say. I’ve been chastised a few times for pulling feeds out of rotation to watch meetings with Jeanine Matthews and Max, or with Max and Eric. It never gave me any useful information, and I almost always got caught.
“Good.” His voice lightens up a little. “Good luck with the initiates. You got transfers again this year?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Lauren gets the Dauntless-borns.”
“Ah, too bad. I was hoping you would get to know my little sister,” Gus says. “If I were you, I’d go do something to wind down. We’re fine in here. Just let that footage loose before you go.”
He walks back to his computer, and I unclench my jaw. I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it. My face throbbing, I shut down my computer and leave the control room. I can’t believe I got away with it.
Now, with this program installed on Max’s computer, I can go through every single one of his files from the relative privacy of the control room. I can find out exactly what he and Jeanine Matthews are up to.
That night I dream that I’m walking through the hallways of the Pire, and I’m alone, but the corridors don’t end, and the view from the windows doesn’t change, lofted train tracks curving into tall buildings, the sun buried in clouds. I feel like I’m walking for hours, and when I wake with a start, it’s like I never slept at all.
Then I hear a knock, and a voice shouting, “Open up!”
This feels more like a nightmare than the tedium I just escaped—I’m sure it’s Dauntless soldiers coming to my door because they found out I’m Divergent, or that I’m spying on Max, or that I’ve been in touch with my factionless mother in the past year. All things that say “faction traitor.”
Dauntless soldiers coming to kill me—but as I walk to the door, I realize that if they were going to do that, they wouldn’t make so much noise in the hallway. And besides, that’s Zeke’s voice.
“Zeke,” I say when I open the door. “What’s your problem? It’s the middle of the night.”
There’s a line of sweat on his forehead, and he’s out of breath. He must have run here.
“I was working the night shift in the control room,” Zeke says. “Something happened in the transfer dorm.”
For some reason, my first thought is her, her wide eyes staring at me from the recesses of my memory.
“What?” I say. “To who?”
“Walk and talk,” Zeke says.
I put on my shoes and pull on my jacket and follow him down the hall.
“The Erudite guy. Blond,” Zeke says.
I have to suppress a sigh of relief. It’s not her. Nothing happened to her. “Will?”
“No, the other one.”
“Edward.”
“Yeah, Edward. He was attacked. Stabbed.”
“Dead?”
“Alive. Got hit in the eye.”
I stop. “In the eye?”
Zeke nods.
“Who did you tell?”
“Night supervisor. He went to tell Eric, Eric said he would handle it.”
“Sure he will.” I veer to the right, away from the transfer dormitory.
“Where are you going?” Zeke says.
“Edward’s already in the infirmary?” I walk backward as I talk.
Zeke nods.
I say, “Then I’m going to see Max.”
The Dauntless compound isn’t so large that I don’t know where people live. Max’s apartment is buried deep in the underground corridors of the compound, near a back door that opens up right next to the train tracks outside. I march toward it, following the blue emergency lamps run by our solar generator.
I pound on the metal door with my fist, waking Max the same way Zeke woke me. He yanks the door open a few seconds later, his feet bare and his eyes wild.
“What happened?” he says.
“One of my initiates was stabbed in the eye,” I say.
“And you came here? Didn’t someone inform Eric?”
“Yeah. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Mind if I come in?”
I don’t wait for an answer—I brush past him and walk into his living room. He flips on the lights, displaying the messiest living space I’ve ever seen, used cups and plates strewn across the coffee table, all the couch cushions in disarray, the floor gray with dust.
“I want initiation to go back to what it was before Eric made it more competitive,” I say, “and I want him out of my training room.”
“You don’t really think it’s Eric’s fault that an initiate got hurt,” Max says, crossing his arms. “Or that you’re in any position to make demands.”
“Yes, it’s his fault, of course it’s his fault!” I say, louder than I mean to be. “If they weren’t all fighting for one of ten slots, they wouldn’t be so desperate they’re ready to attack each other! He has them wound up so tight, of course they’re bound to explode eventually!”
Max is quiet. He looks annoyed, but he isn’t calling me ridiculous, which is a start.
“You don’t think the initiate who did the attacking should be held responsible?” Max says. “You don’t think he or she is the one to blame, instead of Eric?”
“Of course he—she—whoever—should be held responsible,” I say. “But this never would have happened if Eric—”
“You can’t say that with any certainty,” Max says.
“I can say it with the certainty of a reasonable person.”
“I’m not reasonable?” His voice is low, dangerous, and suddenly I remember that Max is not just the Dauntless leader who likes me for some inexplicable reason—he’s the Dauntless leader who’s working closely with Jeanine Matthews, the one who appointed Eric, the one who probably had something to do with Amar’s death.
“That’s not what I meant,” I say, trying to stay calm.
“You should be careful to communicate exactly what you mean,” Max says, moving closer to me. “Or someone will start to think you’re insulting your superiors.”
I don’t respond. He moves still closer.
“Or questioning the values of your faction,” he says, and his bloodshot eyes drift to my shoulder, where the Dauntless flames of my tattoo stick out over the collar of my shirt. I have hidden the five faction symbols that cover my spine since I got them, but for some reason, at this moment, I am terrified that Max knows about them. Knows what they mean, which is that I am not a perfect Dauntless member; I am someone who believes that more than one virtue should be prized; I am Divergent.
“You had your shot to become a Dauntless leader,” Max says. “Maybe you could have avoided this incident had you not backed out like a coward. But you did. So now you have to deal with the consequences.”
His face is showing his age. It has lines it didn’t have last year, or the year before, and his skin is grayish brown, like it was dusted with ash.
“Eric is as involved in initiation as he is because you refused to follow orders last year—” Last year, in the training room, I stopped all the fights before the injuries became too severe, against Eric’s command that the fighting only stop when one person was unable to continue. I nearly lost my position as initiation instructor as a result; I would have, if Max hadn’t gotten involved.
“—and I wanted to give you another chance to make it right, with closer monitoring,” Max says. “You’re failing to do so. You’ve gone too far.”
The sweat I worked up on my way here has turned cold. He steps back and opens his door again.
“Get out of my apartment and deal with your initiates,” Max says. “Don’t let me see you step out of line again.”
“Yes, sir,” I say quietly, and I leave.
I go to see Edward in the infirmary early in the morning, when the sun is rising, shining through the glass ceiling of the Pit. His head is wrapped in white bandages, and he’s not moving, not speaking. I don’t say anything to him, just sit by his head and watch the minutes tick by on the wall clock.
I’ve been an idiot. I thought I was invincible, that Max’s desire to have me as a fellow leader would never waver, that on some level he trusted me. I should have known better. All Max ever wanted was a pawn—that’s what my mother said.
I can’t be a pawn. But I’m not sure what I should be instead.
The setting Tris Prior invents is eerie and almost beautiful, the sky yellow-green, yellow grass stretching for miles in every direction.
Watching someone else’s fear simulation is strange. Intimate. I don’t feel right about forcing other people to be vulnerable, even if I don’t like them. Every human being is entitled to her secrets. Watching my initiates’ fears, one after another, makes me feel like my skin has been scraped raw with sandpaper.
In Tris’s simulation, the yellow grass is perfectly still. If the air wasn’t stagnant, I would say this was a dream, not a nightmare—but still air means only one thing to me, and that is a coming storm.
A shadow moves across the grass, and a large black bird lands on her shoulder, curling its talons into her shirt. My fingertips prickle, remembering how I touched her shoulder when she walked into the simulation room, how I brushed her hair away from her neck to inject her. Stupid. Careless.
She hits the black bird, hard, and then everything happens at once. Thunder rumbles; the sky darkens, not with storm clouds, but with birds, an impossibly huge swarm of them, moving in unison like many parts of the same mind.
The sound of her scream is the worst sound in the world, desperate—she’s desperate for help and I am desperate to help her, though I know what I’m seeing isn’t real, I know it. The crows keep coming, relentless, surrounding her, burying her alive in dark feathers. She screams for help and I can’t help her and I don’t want to watch this, I don’t want to watch another second.
But then, she starts to move, shifting so she’s lying in the grass, relenting, relaxing. If she’s in pain now she doesn’t show it; she just closes her eyes and surrenders, and that is worse than her screaming for help, somehow.
Then it’s over.
She lurches forward in the metal chair, smacking at her body to get the birds off, though they’re gone. Then she curls into a ball and hides her face.
I reach out to touch her shoulder, to reassure her, and she hits my arm, hard. “Don’t touch me!”
“It’s over,” I say, wincing—she punches harder than she realizes. I ignore the pain and run a hand over her hair, because I’m stupid, and inappropriate, and stupid . . .
“Tris.”
She just shifts back and forth, soothing herself.
“Tris, I’m going to take you back to the dorms, okay?”
“No! They can’t see me . . . not like this. . . .”
This is what Eric’s new system creates: A brave human being has just defeated one of her worst fears in less than five minutes, an ordeal that takes most people at least twice that time, but she’s terrified to go back into the hallway, to be seen as weak or vulnerable in any way. Tris is Dauntless, plain and simple, but this faction isn’t really Dauntless anymore.
“Oh, calm down,” I say, more irritable than I mean to be. “I’ll take you out the back door.”
“I don’t need you to . . .” I can see her hands trembling even as she shrugs off my offer.
“Nonsense,” I say. I take her arm and help her to her feet. She wipes her eyes as I move toward the back door. Amar once took me through this door, tried to walk me back to the dormitory even when I didn’t want him to, the way she probably doesn’t want me to now. How is it possible to live the same story twice, from different vantage points?
She yanks her arm from mine, and turns on me. “Why did you do that to me? What was the point of that, huh? I wasn’t aware that when I chose Dauntless, I was signing up for weeks of torture!”
If she was anyone else, any of the other initiates, I would have yelled at her for insubordination a dozen times by now. I would have felt threatened by her constant assaults against my character, and tried to squelch her uprisings with cruelty, the way I did to Christina on the first day of initiation. But Tris earned my respect when she jumped first, into the net; when she challenged me at her first meal; when she wasn’t deterred by my unpleasant responses to questions; when she spoke up for Al and stared me right in the eye as I threw knives at her. She’s not my subordinate, couldn’t possibly be.
“Did you think overcoming cowardice would be easy?” I say.
“That isn’t overcoming cowardice! Cowardice is how you decide to be in real life, and in real life, I am not getting pecked to death by crows, Four!”
She starts to cry, but I’m too struck by what she just said to feel uncomfortable with her tears. She’s not learning the lessons Eric wants her to learn. She’s learning different things, wiser ones.
“I want to go home,” she says.
I know where the cameras are in this hallway. I hope none of them have picked up on what she just said.
“Learning how to think in the midst of fear is a lesson that everyone, even your Stiff family, needs to learn,” I say. I doubt a lot of things about Dauntless initiation, but the fear simulations aren’t one of them; they are the most straightforward way for a person to engage their own fears and conquer them, far more straightforward than the knife throwing or the fighting. “That’s what we’re trying to teach you. If you can’t learn it, you’ll need to get the hell out of here, because we won’t want you.”
I’m hard on her because I know she can handle it. And also because I don’t know any other way to be.
“I’m trying. But I failed. I’m failing.”
I almost feel like laughing. “How long do you think you spent in that hallucination, Tris?”
“I don’t know. A half hour?”
“Three minutes,” I say. “You got out three times faster than any of the other initiates. Whatever you are, you’re not a failure.”
You might be Divergent, I think. But she didn’t do anything to change the simulation, so maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s just that brave.
I smile at her. “Tomorrow you’ll be better at this. You’ll see.”
“Tomorrow?”
She’s calmer now. I touch her back, right beneath her shoulders.
“What was your first hallucination?” she asks me.
“It wasn’t a ‘what’ so much as a ‘who.’” As I’m saying it, I think I should have just told her the first obstacle in my fear landscape, fear of heights, though it’s not exactly what she’s asking about. When I’m around her I can’t control what I say the way I do around other people. I say vague things because that’s as close as I can get to stopping myself from saying anything, my mind addled by the feeling of her body through her shirt. “It’s not important.”
“And are you over that fear now?”
“Not yet.” We’re at the dormitory door. The walk has never gone by so quickly. I put my hands in my pockets so I don’t do anything stupid with them again. “I may never be.”
“So they don’t go away?”
“Sometimes they do. And sometimes new fears replace them. But becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that’s the point.”
She nods. I don’t know what she came here for, but if I had to guess, it would be that she chose Dauntless for its freedom. Abnegation would have stifled the spark in her until it died out. Dauntless, for all its faults, has kindled the spark into a flame.
“Anyway,” I say. “Your fears are rarely what they appear to be in the simulation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, are you really afraid of crows?” I grin. “When you see one, do you run away screaming?”
“No, I guess not.”
She moves closer to me. I felt safer when there was more space between us. Even closer, and I think about touching her, and my mouth goes dry. I almost never think about people that way, about girls that way.
“So what am I really afraid of?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Only you can know.”
“I didn’t know Dauntless would be this difficult.”
I’m glad to have something else to think about, other than how easy it would be to fit my hand to the arch of her back.
“It wasn’t always like this, I’m told. Being Dauntless, I mean.”
“What changed?”
“The leadership. The person who controls training sets the standard of Dauntless behavior. Six years ago Max and the other leaders changed the training methods to make them more competitive and more brutal.” Six years ago, the combat portion of training was brief and didn’t include bare-knuckled sparring. Initiates wore padding. The emphasis was on being strong and capable, and on developing camaraderie with the other initiates. And even when I was an initiate, it was better than this—an unlimited potential for initiates to become members, fights that stopped when one person conceded. “Said it was to test people’s strength. And that changed the priorities of Dauntless as a whole. Bet you can’t guess who the leaders’ new protégé is.”
Of course, she does immediately. “So if you were ranked first in your initiate class, what was Eric’s rank?”
“Second.”
“So he was their second choice for leadership. And you were their first.”
Perceptive. I don’t know that I was the first choice, but I was certainly a better option than Eric. “What makes you say that?”
“The way Eric was acting at dinner the first night. Jealous, even though he has what he wants.”
I’ve never thought of Eric that way. Jealous? Of what? I’ve never taken anything from him, never posed a real threat to him. He’s the one who came after Amar, who came after me. But maybe she’s right—maybe I never saw how frustrated he was to be second to a transfer from Abnegation, after all his hard work, or that I was favored by Max for leadership even when he was positioned here specifically to take the leadership role.
She wipes her face.
“Do I look like I’ve been crying?”
The question seems almost funny to me. Her tears vanished almost as quickly as they came, and now her face is fair again, her eyes dry, her hair smooth. Like nothing ever happened—like she didn’t just spend three minutes overwhelmed by terror. She’s stronger than I was.
“Hmm.” I lean in closer, making a joke of examining her, but then it’s not a joke, and I’m just close, and we’re sharing a breath.
“No, Tris,” I say. “You look . . .” I try a Dauntless expression. “Tough as nails.”
She smiles a little. So do I.
“Hey,” Zeke says sleepily, leaning his head into his fist. “Want to take over for me? I practically need to tape my eyes open.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I just need to use a computer. You do know it’s only nine o’clock, right?”
He yawns. “I get tired when I’m bored out of my mind. Shift’s almost over, though.”
I love the control room at night. There are only three people monitoring the footage, so the room is silent except for the hum of computers. Through the windows I see only a sliver of the moon; everything else is dark. It’s hard to find peace in the Dauntless compound, and this is the place where I find it most often.
Zeke turns back to his screen. I sit at a computer a few seats over from him, and angle the screen away from the room. Then I log in, using the fake account name I set up several months ago, so no one would be able to track this back to me.
Once I’m logged in, I open the mirroring program that lets me use Max’s computer remotely. It takes a second to kick in, but when it does, it’s like I’m sitting in Max’s office, using the same machine he uses.
I work quickly, systematically. He labels his folders with numbers, so I don’t know what each one will contain. Most are benign, lists of Dauntless members or schedules of events. I open them and close them in seconds.
I go deeper into the files, folder after folder, and then I find something strange. A list of supplies, but the supplies don’t involve food or fabric or anything else I would expect for mundane Dauntless life—the list is for weapons. Syringes. And something marked Serum D2.
I can imagine only one thing that would require the Dauntless to have so many weapons: an attack. But on who?
I check the control room again, my heartbeat pounding in my head. Zeke is playing a computer game that he wrote himself. The second control-room operator is slumped to one side, her eyes half-closed. The third is stirring his glass of water idly with his straw, staring out the windows. No one is paying attention to me.
I open more files. After a few wasted efforts, I find a map. It’s marked mostly with letters and numbers, so at first I don’t know what it’s showing.
Then I open a map of the city on the Dauntless database to compare them, and sit back in my chair as I realize what streets Max’s map is focusing on.
The Abnegation sector.
The attack will be against Abnegation.
It should have been obvious, of course. Who else would Max and Jeanine bother to attack? Max and Jeanine’s vendetta is against Abnegation, and it always has been. I should have realized that when the Erudite released that story about my father, the monstrous husband and father. The only true thing they’ve written, as far as I can tell.
Zeke nudges my leg with his foot. “Shift’s over. Bedtime?”
“No,” I say. “I need a drink.”
He perks up noticeably. It’s not every night I decide I want to abandon my sterile, withdrawn existence for an evening of Dauntless indulgence.
“I’m your man,” he says.
I close down the program, my account, everything. I try to leave the information about the Abnegation attack behind, too, until I can figure out what to do about it, but it chases me all the way into the elevator, through the lobby, and down the paths to the bottom of the Pit.
I surface from the simulation with a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I detach from the wires and get up. She’s still recovering from the sensation of almost drowning, shaking her hands and taking deep breaths. I watch her for a moment, not sure how to say what I need to say.
“What?” she says.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Crack the glass.”
“I don’t know.”
I nod, and offer her my hand. She gets up without any trouble, but she avoids my eyes. I check the corners of the room for cameras. There is one, just where I thought it would be, right across from us. I take her elbow and lead her out of the room, to a place where I know we won’t be observed, in the blind spot between two surveillance points.
“What?” she says irritably.
“You’re Divergent,” I say. I haven’t been very nice to her today. Last night I saw her and her friends by the chasm, and a lapse in judgment—or sobriety—led me to lean in too close, to tell her she looked good. I’m worried that I went too far. Now I’m even more worried, but for different reasons.
She cracked the glass. She’s Divergent. She’s in danger.
She stares.
Then she sinks against the wall, adopting an almost-convincing aura of casualness. “What’s Divergent?”
“Don’t play stupid,” I say. “I suspected it last time, but this time it’s obvious. You manipulated the simulation; you’re Divergent. I’ll delete the footage, but unless you want to wind up dead at the bottom of the chasm, you’ll figure out how to hide it during the simulations! Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
I walk back to the simulation room, pulling the door closed behind me. It’s easy to delete the footage—just a few keystrokes and it’s done, the record clean. I double-check her file, making sure the only thing that’s in there is the data from the first simulation. I’ll have to come up with a way to explain where the data from this session went. A good lie, one that Eric and Max will actually believe.
In a hurry, I take out my pocketknife and wedge it between the panels covering the motherboard of the computer, prying them apart. Then I go into the hallway, to the drinking fountain, and fill my mouth with water.
When I return to the simulation room, I spit some of the water into the gap between the panels. I put my knife away and wait.
A minute or so later, the screen goes dark. Dauntless headquarters is basically a leaky cave—water damage happens all the time.
I was desperate.
I sent a message through the same factionless man I used as a messenger last time I wanted to get in touch with my mother. I arranged to meet her inside the last car of the ten-fifteen train from Dauntless headquarters. I assume she’ll know how to find me.
I sit with my back against the wall, an arm curled around one of my knees, and watch the city pass. Night trains don’t move as fast as day trains between stops. It’s easier to observe how the buildings change as the train draws closer to the center of the city, how they grow taller but narrower, how pillars of glass stand next to smaller, older stone structures. Like one city layered on top of another on top of another.
Someone runs alongside the train when it reaches the north side of the city. I stand up, holding one of the railings along the wall, and Evelyn stumbles into the car wearing Amity boots, an Erudite dress, and a Dauntless jacket. Her hair is pulled back, making her already-severe face even harsher.
“Hello,” she says.
“Hi,” I say.
“Every time I see you, you’re bigger,” she says. “I guess there’s no point in worrying that you’re eating well.”
“Could say the same to you,” I say, “but for different reasons.”
I know she’s not eating well. She’s factionless, and the Abnegation haven’t been providing as much aid as they usually do, with the Erudite bearing down on them the way they are.
I reach behind me and grab the backpack I brought with cans from the Dauntless storeroom.
“It’s just bland soup and vegetables, but it’s better than nothing,” I say when I offer it to her.
“Who says I need your help?” Evelyn says carefully. “I’m doing just fine, you know.”
“Yeah, that’s not for you,” I say. “It’s for all your skinny friends. If I were you, I wouldn’t turn down food.”
“I’m not,” she says, taking the backpack. “I’m just not used to you caring. It’s a little disarming.”
“I’m familiar with the feeling,” I say coldly. “How long was it before you checked in on my life? Seven years?”
Evelyn sighs. “If you asked me to come here just to start this argument again, I’m afraid I can’t stay long.”
“No,” I say. “No, that’s not why I asked you to come here.”
I didn’t want to contact her at all, but I knew I couldn’t tell any of the Dauntless what I had learned about the Abnegation attack—I don’t know how loyal to the faction and its policies they are—and I had to tell someone. The last time I spoke to Evelyn, she seemed to know things about the city that I didn’t. I assumed she might know how to help me with this, before it’s too late.
It’s a risk, but I’m not sure where else to turn.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on Max,” I say. “You said the Erudite were involved with the Dauntless, and you were right. They’re planning something together, Max and Jeanine and who knows who else.”
I tell her what I saw on Max’s computer, the supply lists and the maps. I tell her what I’ve observed about the Erudite’s attitude toward Abnegation, the reports, how they’re poisoning even Dauntless minds against our former faction.
When I finish, Evelyn doesn’t look surprised, or even grave. In fact, I have no idea how to read her expression. She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then she says, “Did you see any indication of when this might happen?”
“No,” I say.
“How about numbers? How large a force do Dauntless and Erudite intend to use? Where do they intend to summon it from?”
“I don’t know,” I say, frustrated. “I don’t really care, either. No matter how many recruits they get, they’ll mow down the Abnegation in seconds. It’s not like they’re trained to defend themselves—not like they would even if they knew how, either.”
“I knew something was going on,” Evelyn says, furrowing her brow. “The lights are on at Erudite headquarters all the time now. Which means that they’re not afraid of getting in trouble with the council leaders anymore, which . . . suggests something about their growing dissent.”
“Okay,” I say. “How do we warn them?”
“Warn who?”
“The Abnegation!” I say hotly. “How do we warn the Abnegation that they’re going to be killed, how do we warn the Dauntless that their leaders are conspiring against the council, how—”
I pause. Evelyn is standing with her hands loose at her sides, her face relaxed and passive. Our city is changing, Tobias. That’s what she said to me when we first saw each other again. Sometime soon, everyone will have to choose a side, and I know which one you would rather be on.
“You already knew,” I say slowly, struggling to process the truth. “You knew they were planning something like this, and have been for a while. You’re waiting for it. Counting on it.”
“I have no lingering affection for my former faction. I don’t want them, or any faction, to continue to control this city and the people in it,” Evelyn says. “If someone wants to take out my enemies for me, I’m going to let them.”
“I can’t believe you,” I say. “They’re not all Marcus, Evelyn. They’re defenseless.”
“You think they’re so innocent,” she says. “You don’t know them. I know them, I’ve seen them for who they really are.”
Her voice is low, throaty.
“How do you think your father managed to lie to you about me all those years? You think the other Abnegation leaders didn’t help him, didn’t perpetuate the lie? They knew I wasn’t pregnant, that no one had called a doctor, that there was no body. But they still told you I was dead, didn’t they?”
It hadn’t occurred to me before. There was no body. No body, but still all the men and women sitting in my father’s house on that awful morning and at the funeral the following evening played the game of pretend for me, and for the rest of the Abnegation community, saying even in their silence, No one would ever leave us. Who would want to?
I shouldn’t be so surprised to find that a faction is full of liars, but I guess there are parts of me that are still naive, still like a child.
Not anymore.
“Think about it,” Evelyn said. “Are those people—the kind of people who would tell a child that his mother was dead just to save face—are they the ones you want to help? Or do you want to help remove them from power?”
I thought I knew. Those innocent Abnegation, with their constant acts of service and their deferent head-bobbing, they needed to be saved.
But those liars, who forced me into grief, who left me alone with the man who caused me pain—should they be saved?
I can’t look at her, can’t answer her. I wait for the train to pass a platform, and then jump off without looking back.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look awful.”
Shauna sinks into the chair next to mine, setting her tray down. I feel like yesterday’s conversation with my mother was a sudden, earsplitting noise, and now every other sound is muffled. I’ve always known that my father was cruel. But I always thought the other Abnegation were innocent; deep down, I’ve always thought of myself as weak for leaving them, as a kind of traitor to my own values.
Now it seems like no matter what I decide, I’ll be betraying someone. If I warn the Abnegation about the attack plans I found on Max’s computer, I’ll be betraying Dauntless. If I don’t warn them, I betray my former faction again, in a much greater way than I did before. I have no choice but to decide, and the thought of deciding makes me feel sick.
I went through today the only way I knew how: I got up and went to work. I posted the rankings—which were a source of some contention, with me advocating for giving heavier weight to improvement, and Eric advocating for consistency. I went to eat. I put myself through the motions as if by muscle memory alone.
“You going to eat any of that?” Shauna says, nodding to my plate full of food.
I shrug. “Maybe.”
I can tell she’s about to ask what’s wrong, so I introduce a new topic. “How’s Lynn doing?”
“You would know better than I do,” she says. “Getting to see her fears and all that.”
I cut a piece from my hunk of meat and chew it.
“What’s that like?” she asks cautiously, raising an eyebrow at me. “Seeing all their fears, I mean.”
“Can’t talk to you about her fears,” I say. “You know that.”
“Is that your rule, or Dauntless’s rule?”
“Does it matter?”
Shauna sighs. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know her, that’s all.”
We eat the rest of our meals without speaking. That’s what I like most about Shauna: she doesn’t feel the need to fill the empty spaces. When we’re done, we leave the dining hall together, and Zeke calls out to us from across the Pit.
“Hey!” he says. He’s spinning a roll of tape around his finger. “Want to go punch something?”
“Yes,” Shauna and I say in unison.
We walk toward the training room, Shauna updating Zeke on her week at the fence—“Two days ago the idiot I was on patrol with started freaking out, swearing he saw something out there. . . . Turns out it was a plastic bag”— and Zeke sliding his arm across her shoulders. I run my fingers over my knuckles and try not to get in their way.
When we get closer to the training room, I think I hear voices inside. Frowning, I push the door open with my foot. Standing inside are Lynn, Uriah, Marlene, and . . . Tris. The collision of worlds startles me a little.
“I thought I heard something in here,” I say.
Uriah is firing at a target with one of the plastic pellet guns the Dauntless keep around for fun—I know for a fact that he doesn’t own it, so this one must be Zeke’s—and Marlene is chewing on something. She grins at me and waves when I walk in.
“Turns out it’s my idiot brother,” says Zeke. “You’re not supposed to be here after hours. Careful, or Four will tell Eric, and then you’ll be as good as scalped.”
Uriah tucks the gun under his waistband, against the small of his back, without turning on the safety. He’ll probably end up with a welt on his butt later from the gun firing into his pants. I don’t mention it to him.
I hold the door open to usher them through it. As she passes me, Lynn says, “You wouldn’t tell Eric.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” I say. When Tris passes me I put out a hand, and it fits automatically in the space between her shoulder blades. I don’t even know if that was intentional or not. And I don’t really care.
The others start down the hallway, our original plan of spending time in the training room forgotten once Uriah and Zeke start bickering and Shauna and Marlene share the rest of a muffin.
“Wait a second,” I say to Tris. She turns to me, looking worried, so I try to smile, but it’s hard to feel like smiling right now.
I noticed tension in the training room when I posted the rankings earlier this evening—I never thought, when I was tallying up the points for the rankings, that maybe I should mark her down for her protection. It would have been an insult to her skill in the simulations to put her any lower on the list, but maybe she would have preferred the insult to the growing rift between her and her fellow transfers.
Even though she’s pale and exhausted, and there are little cuts around each of her nail beds, and a wavering look in her eyes, I know that’s not the case. This girl would never want to be tucked safely in the middle of the pack, never.
“You belong here, you know that?” I say. “You belong with us. It’ll be over soon, so . . . just hold on, okay?”
The back of my neck suddenly feels hot, and I scratch at it with one hand, unable to meet her eyes, though I can feel them on me as the silence stretches.
Then she slips her fingers between mine, and I stare at her, startled. I squeeze her hand, lightly, and it registers through my turmoil and my exhaustion that though I’ve touched her half a dozen times—each one a lapse in judgment—this is the first time she’s ever done it back.
Then she turns and runs to catch up with her friends.
And I stand in the hallway, alone, grinning like an idiot.
I try to sleep for the better part of an hour, twisting under the covers to find a comfortable position. But it seems like someone has replaced my mattress with a bag of rocks. Or maybe it’s just that my mind is too busy for sleep.
Eventually I give up, putting on my shoes and jacket and walking to the Pire, the way I do every time I can’t sleep. I think about running the fear landscape program again, but I didn’t think to replenish my supply of simulation serum this afternoon, and it would be a hassle to get some now. Instead I walk to the control room, where Gus greets me with a grunt and the other two on staff don’t even notice me come in.
I don’t try to go through Max’s files again—I feel like I know everything I need to know, which is that something bad is coming and I have no idea whether I’ll try to stop it.
I need to tell someone, I need someone to share in this with me, to tell me what to do. But there’s no one that I would trust with something like this. Even my friends here were born and raised in Dauntless; how can I know that they wouldn’t trust their leaders implicitly? I can’t know.
For some reason, Tris’s face comes to mind, open but stern as she clasps my hand in the hallway.
I scroll through the footage, looking over the city streets and then returning to the Dauntless compound. Most of the hallways are so dark, I couldn’t see anything even if it was there. In my headphones, I hear only the rush of water in the chasm or the whistle of wind through the alleys. I sigh, leaning my head into my hand, and watch the changing images, one after another, and let them lull me into something like sleep.
“Go to bed, Four,” Gus says from across the room.
I jerk awake, and nod. If I’m not actually looking at the footage it’s not a good idea for me to be in the control room. I log out of my account and walk down the hallway to the elevator, blinking myself awake.
As I walk across the lobby, I hear a scream coming from below, coming from the Pit. It’s not a good-natured Dauntless shout, or the shriek of someone who is scared but delighted, or anything but the particular tone, the particular pitch of terror.
Small rocks scatter behind me as I run down to the bottom of the Pit, my breathing fast and heavy, but even.
Three tall, dark-clothed people stand near the railing below. They are crowded around a fourth, smaller target, and even though I can’t see much about them, I know a fight when I see one. Or, I would call it a fight, if it wasn’t three against one.
One of the attackers wheels around, sees me, and sprints in the other direction. When I get closer I see one of the remaining attackers holding the target up, over the chasm, and I shout, “Hey!”
I see her hair, blond, and I can hardly see anything else. I collide with one of the attackers—Drew, I can tell by the color of his hair, orange-red—and slam him into the chasm barrier. I hit him once, twice, three times in the face, and he collapses to the ground, and then I’m kicking him and I can’t think, can’t think at all.
“Four.” Her voice is quiet, ragged, and it’s the only thing that could possibly reach me in this place. She’s hanging from the railing, dangling over the chasm like a piece of bait from a fishing hook. The other one, the last attacker, is gone.
I run toward her, grabbing her under her shoulders, and pull her over the edge of the railing. I hold her against me. She presses her face to my shoulder, twisting her fingers into my shirt.
Drew is on the ground, collapsed. I hear him groan as I carry her away—not to the infirmary, where the others who went after her would think to look for her, but to my apartment, in its lonely, removed corridor. I shove my way through the apartment door and lay her down on my bed. I run my fingers over her nose and cheekbones to check for breaks, then I feel for her pulse, and lean in close to listen to her breathing. Everything seems normal, steady. Even the bump on the back of her head, though swollen and scraped, doesn’t seem serious. She isn’t badly injured, but she could have been.
My hands shake when I pull away from her. She isn’t badly injured, but Drew might be. I don’t even know how many times I hit him before she finally said my name and woke me up. The rest of my body starts to shake, too, and I make sure there’s a pillow supporting her head, then leave the apartment to go back to the railing next to the Pit. On the way, I try to replay the last few minutes in my mind, try to recall what I punched and when and how hard, but the whole thing is lost to a dizzy fit of anger.
I wonder if this is what it was like for him, I think, remembering the wild, frantic look in Marcus’s eyes every time he got angry.
When I reach the railing, Drew is still there, lying in a strange, crumpled position on the ground. I pull his arm across my shoulders and half lift, half drag him to the infirmary.
When I make it back to my apartment, I immediately walk to the bathroom to wash the blood from my hands—a few of my knuckles are split, cut from the impact with Drew’s face. If Drew was there, the other attacker had to be Peter, but who was the third? Not Molly—the shape was too tall, too big. In fact, there’s only one initiate that size.
Al.