I try to hide the shudder that goes through me at the word “execution,” my shoulder screaming with pain, and look up at Tobias. It’s hard to blink the tears back when I see the terror in Tobias’s wide, dark eyes.
“No,” says Tobias. His voice trembles, but his look is stern as he shakes his head. “I would rather die.”
“I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice in the matter,” replies Jeanine lightly.
Tobias takes my face in his hands roughly and kisses me, the pressure of his lips pushing mine apart. I forget my pain and the terror of approaching death and for a moment, I am grateful that the memory of that kiss will be fresh in my mind as I meet my end.
Then he releases me and I have to lean against the wall for support. With no more warning than the tightening of his muscles, Tobias lunges across the desk and wraps his hands around Jeanine’s throat. Dauntless guards by the door leap at him, their guns held ready, and I scream.
It takes two Dauntless soldiers to pull Tobias away from Jeanine and shove him to the ground. One of the soldiers pins him, his knees on Tobias’s shoulders and his hands on Tobias’s head, pressing his face to the carpet. I lunge toward them, but another guard slams his hands against my shoulders, forcing me against the wall. I am weak from blood loss and too small.
Jeanine braces herself against the desk, spluttering and gasping. She rubs her throat, which is bright red with Tobias’s fingerprints. No matter how mechanical she seems, she’s still human; there are tears in her eyes as she takes a box from her desk drawer and opens it, revealing a needle and syringe.
Still breathing heavily, she carries it toward Tobias. Tobias grits his teeth and elbows one of the guards in the face. The guard slams the heel of his gun into the side of Tobias’s head, and Jeanine sticks the needle into Tobias’s neck. He goes limp.
A sound escapes my mouth, not a sob or a scream, but a croaking, scraping moan that sounds detached, like it is coming from someone else.
“Let him up,” says Jeanine, her voice scratchy.
The guard gets up, and so does Tobias. He does not look like the sleepwalking Dauntless soldiers; his eyes are alert. He looks around for a few seconds as if confused by what he sees.
“Tobias,” I say. “Tobias!”
“He doesn’t know you,” says Jeanine.
Tobias looks over his shoulder. His eyes narrow and he starts toward me, fast. Before the guards can stop him, he closes a hand around my throat, squeezing my trachea with his fingertips. I choke, my face hot with blood.
“The simulation manipulates him,” says Jeanine. I can barely hear her over the pounding in my ears. “By altering what he sees — making him confuse enemy with friend.”
One of the guards pulls Tobias off me. I gasp, drawing a rattling breath into my lungs.
He is gone. Controlled by the simulation, he will now murder the people he called innocent not three minutes ago. Jeanine killing him would have hurt less than this.
“The advantage to this version of the simulation,” she says, her eyes alight, “is that he can act independently, and is therefore far more effective than a mindless soldier.” She looks at the guards who hold Tobias back. He struggles against them, his muscles taut, his eyes focused on me, but not seeing me, not seeing me the way they used to. “Send him to the control room. We’ll want a sentient being there to monitor things and, as I understand it, he used to work there.”
Jeanine presses her palms together in front of her. “And take her to room B13,” she says. She flaps her hand to dismiss me. That flapping hand commands my execution, but to her it is just crossing off an item from a list of tasks, the only logical progression of the particular path that she is on. She surveys me without feeling as two Dauntless soldiers pull me out of the room.
They drag me down the hallway. I feel numb inside, but outside I am a screaming, thrashing force of will. I bite a hand that belongs to the Dauntless man on my right and smile as I taste blood. Then he hits me, and there is nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I WAKE IN the dark, wedged in a hard corner. The floor beneath me is smooth and cold. I touch my throbbing head and liquid slips across my fingertips. Red — blood. When I bring my hand back down, my elbow hits a wall. Where am I?
A light flickers above me. The bulb is blue and dim when it’s lit. I see the walls of a tank around me, and my shadowed reflection across from me. The room is small, with concrete walls and no windows, and I am alone in it. Well, almost — a small video camera is attached to one of the concrete walls.
I see a small opening near my feet. Connected to it is a tube, and connected to the tube, in the corner of the room, is a huge tank.
The trembling starts in my fingertips and spreads up my arms, and soon my body is shuddering.
I’m not in a simulation this time.
My right arm is numb. When I push myself out of the corner, I see a pool of blood where I was sitting. I can’t panic now. I stand, leaning against a wall, and breathe. The worst thing that can happen to me now is that I drown in this tank. I press my forehead to the glass and laugh. That is the worst thing I can imagine. My laugh turns into a sob.
If I refuse to give up now, it will look brave to whoever watches me with that camera, but sometimes it isn’t fighting that’s brave, it’s facing the death you know is coming. I sob into the glass. I’m not afraid of dying, but I want to die a different way, any other way.
It is better to scream than cry, so I scream and slam my heel into the wall behind me. My foot bounces off, and I kick again, so hard my heel throbs. I kick again and again and again, then pull back and throw my left shoulder into the wall. The impact makes the wound in my right shoulder burn like it got stuck with a hot poker.
Water trickles into the bottom of the tank.
The video camera means they’re watching me — no, studying me, as only the Erudite would. To see if my reaction in reality matches my reaction in the simulation. To prove that I’m a coward.
I uncurl my fists and drop my hands. I am not a coward. I lift my head and stare at the camera across from me. If I focus on breathing, I can forget that I’m about to die. I stare at the camera until my vision narrows and it is all I see. Water tickles my ankles, then my calves, then my thighs. It rises over my fingertips. I breathe in; I breathe out. The water is soft and feels like silk.
I breathe in. The water will wash my wounds clean. I breathe out. My mother submerged me in water when I was a baby, to give me to God. It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head.
My body rises with the water. Instead of kicking my feet to stay abreast of it, I push all the air from my lungs and sink to the bottom. The water muffles my ears. I feel its movement over my face. I think about snorting the water into my lungs so it kills me faster, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I blow bubbles from my mouth.
Relax. I close my eyes. My lungs burn.
I let my hands float up to the top of the tank. I let the water fold me in its silken arms.
When I was young, my father used to hold me over his head and run with me so I felt like I was flying. I remember how the air felt, gliding over my body, and I am not afraid. I open my eyes.
A dark figure stands in front of me. I must be close to death if I’m seeing things. Pain stabs my lungs. Suffocating is painful. A palm presses to the glass in front of my face, and for a moment as I stare through the water, I think I see my mother’s blurry face.
I hear a bang, and the glass cracks. Water sprays out a hole near the top of the tank, and the pane cracks in half. I turn away as the glass shatters, and the force of the water throws my body at the ground. I gasp, swallowing water as well as air, and cough, and gasp again, and hands close around my arms, and I hear her voice.
“Beatrice,” she says. “Beatrice, we have to run.”
She pulls my arm across her shoulders and hauls me to my feet. She
is dressed like my mother and she looks like my mother, but she is holding a gun, and the determined look in her eyes is unfamiliar to me. I stumble beside her over broken glass and through water and out an open doorway. Dauntless guards lie dead next to the door.
My feet slip and slide on the tile as we walk down the hallway, as fast as my weak legs can muster. When we turn the corner, she fires at the two guards standing by the door at the end. The bullets hit them both in the head, and they slump to the floor. She pushes me against the wall and takes off her gray jacket.
She wears a sleeveless shirt. When she lifts her arm, I see the corner of a tattoo under her armpit. No wonder she never changed clothes in front of me.
“Mom,” I say, my voice strained. “You were Dauntless.”
“Yes,” she says, smiling. She makes her jacket into a sling for my arm, tying the sleeves around my neck. “And it has served me well today. Your father and Caleb and some others are hiding in a basement at the intersection of North and Fairfield. We have to go get them.”
I stare at her. I sat next to her at the kitchen table, twice a day, for sixteen years, and never once did I consider the possibility that she could have been anything but Abnegation-born. How well did I actually know my mother?
“There will be time for questions,” she says. She lifts her shirt and slips a gun from under the waistband of her pants, offering it to me. Then she touches my cheek. “Now we must go.”
She runs to the end of the hallway, and I run after her.
We are in the basement of Abnegation headquarters. My mother has worked there for as long as I can remember, so I’m not surprised when she leads me down a few dark hallways, up a dank staircase, and into daylight again without interference. How many Dauntless guards did she shoot before she found me?
“How did you know to find me?” I say.
“I’ve been watching the trains since the attacks started,” she replies, glancing over her shoulder at me. “I didn’t know what I would do when I found you. But it was always my intention to save you.”
My throat feels tight. “But I betrayed you. I left you.”
“You’re my daughter. I don’t care about the factions.” She shakes her head. “Look where they got us. Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.”
She stops where the alley intersects with the road.
I know now isn’t the time for conversation. But there is something I need to know.
“Mom, how do you know about Divergence?” I ask. “What is it? Why…”
She pushes the bullet chamber open and peers inside. Seeing how many bullets she has left. Then takes a few out of her pocket and reloads. I recognize her expression as the one she wears when she threads a needle.
“I know about them because I am one,” she says as she shoves a bullet in place. “I was only safe because my mother was a Dauntless leader. On Choosing Day, she told me to leave my faction and find a safer one. I chose Abnegation.” She puts an extra bullet in her pocket and stands up straighter. “But I wanted you to make the choice on your own.”
“I don’t understand why we’re such a threat to the leaders.”
“Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way.” She touches my uninjured shoulder and smiles. “But our minds move in a dozen different directions. We can’t be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.”
I feel like someone breathed new air into my lungs. I am not Abnegation. I am not Dauntless.
I am Divergent.
And I can’t be controlled.
“Here they come,” she says, looking around the corner. I peek over her shoulder and see a few Dauntless with guns, moving to the same beat, heading toward us. My mother looks back. Far behind us, another group of Dauntless run down the alley, toward us, moving in time with one another.
She grabs my hands and looks me in the eyes. I watch her long eyelashes move as she blinks. I wish I had something of hers in my small, plain face. But at least I have something of hers in my brain.
“Go to your father and brother. The alley on the right, down to the basement. Knock twice, then three times, then six times.” She cups my cheeks. Her hands are cold; her palms are rough. “I’m going to distract them. You have to run as fast as you can.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
She smiles. “Be brave, Beatrice. I love you.”
I feel her lips on my forehead and then she runs into the middle of the street. She holds her gun above her head and fires three times into the air. The Dauntless start running.
I sprint across the street and into the alley. As I run, I look over my shoulder to see if any Dauntless follow me. But my mother fires into the crowd of guards, and they are too focused on her to notice me.
I whip my head over my shoulder when I hear them fire back. My feet falter and stop.
My mother stiffens, her back arching. Blood surges from a wound in her abdomen, dyeing her shirt crimson. A patch of blood spreads over her shoulder. I blink, and the violent red stains the inside of my eyelids. I blink again, and I see her smile as she sweeps my hair trimmings into a pile.
She falls, first to her knees, her hands limp at her sides, and then to the pavement, slumped to the side like a rag doll. She is motionless and without breath.
I clamp my hand over my mouth and scream into my palm. My cheeks are hot and wet with tears I didn’t feel beginning. My blood cries out that it belongs to her, and struggles to return to her, and I hear her words in my mind as I run, telling me to be brave.
Pain stabs through me as everything I am made of collapses, my entire world dismantled in a moment. The pavement scrapes my knees. If I lie down now, this can all be done. Maybe Eric was right, and choosing death is like exploring an unknown, uncertain place.
I feel Tobias brushing my hair back before the first simulation. I hear him telling me to be brave. I hear my mother telling me to be brave.
The Dauntless soldiers turn as if moved by the same mind. Somehow I get up and start running.
I am brave.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THREE DAUNTLESS SOLDIERS pursue me. They run in unison, their footsteps echoing in the alley. One of them fires, and I dive, scraping my palms on the ground. The bullet hits the brick wall to my right, and pieces of brick spray everywhere. I throw myself around the corner and click a bullet into the chamber of my gun.
They killed my mother. I point the gun into the alley and fire blindly. It wasn’t really them, but it doesn’t matter — can’t matter, and just like death itself, can’t be real right now.
Just one set of footsteps now. I hold the gun out with both hands and stand at the end of the alley, pointing at the Dauntless soldier. My finger squeezes the trigger, but not hard enough to fire. The man running toward me is not a man, he is a boy. A shaggy-haired boy with a crease between his eyebrows.
Will. Dull-eyed and mindless, but still Will. He stops running and mirrors me, his feet planted and his gun up. In an instant, I see his finger poised over the trigger and hear the bullet slide into the chamber, and I fire. My eyes squeezed shut. Can’t breathe.
The bullet hit him in the head. I know because that’s where I aimed it.
I turn around without opening my eyes and stumble away from the alley. North and Fairfield. I have to look at the street sign to see where I am, but I can’t read it; my vision is blurred. I blink a few times. I stand just yards away from the building that contains what’s left of my family.
I kneel next to the door. Tobias would call me unwise to make any noise. Noise might attract Dauntless soldiers.
I press my forehead to the wall and scream. After a few seconds I clamp my hand over my mou
th to muffle the sound and scream again, a scream that turns into a sob. The gun clatters to the ground. I still see Will.
He smiles in my memory. A curled lip. Straight teeth. Light in his eyes. Laughing, teasing, more alive in memory than I am in reality. It was him or me. I chose me. But I feel dead too.
I pound on the door — twice, then three times, then six times, as my mother told me to.
I wipe the tears from my face. This is the first time I will see my father since I left him, and I don’t want him to see me half-collapsed and sobbing.
The door opens, and Caleb stands in the doorway. The sight of him stuns me. He stares at me for a few seconds and then throws his arms around me, his hand pressing to the wound in my shoulder. I bite my lip to keep from crying out, but a groan escapes me anyway, and Caleb yanks back.
“Beatrice. Oh God, are you shot?”
“Let’s go inside,” I say weakly.
He drags his thumb under his eyes, catching the moisture. The door falls shut behind us.
The room is dimly lit, but I see familiar faces, former neighbors and classmates and my father’s coworkers. My father, who stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. Marcus. The sight of him makes me ache — Tobias…
No. I will not do that; I will not think of him.
“How did you know about this place?” Caleb says. “Did Mom find you?”
I nod. I don’t want to think about Mom, either.
“My shoulder,” I say.
Now that I am safe, the adrenaline that propelled me here is fading, and the pain is getting worse. I sink to my knees. Water drips from my clothes onto the cement floor. A sob rises within me, desperate for release, and I choke it back.
A woman named Tessa who lived down the street from us rolls out a pallet. She was married to a council member, but I don’t see him here. He is probably dead.
Someone else carries a lamp from one corner to the other so we have light. Caleb produces a first-aid kit, and Susan brings me a bottle of water. There is no better place to need help than a room full of members of Abnegation. I glance at Caleb. He’s wearing gray again. Seeing him in the Erudite compound feels like a dream now.
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