Allegiant

by Veronica Roth

  “You can go in, but your knives stay here,” the man says. His voice is higher, lighter than I expected. He could be a gentle man, maybe, if this were a different kind of place. As it is, I see that he isn’t gentle, doesn’t even know what that means.

  Even though I myself have discarded any kind of softness as useless, I find myself thinking that something important is lost if this man has been forced to deny his own nature.

  “Not a chance,” Nita says.

  “Nita, is that you?” says a voice from inside. It is expressive, musical. The man to whom it belongs is short, with a wide smile. He comes to the doorway. “Didn’t I tell you to just let them in? Come in, come in.”

  “Hi, Rafi,” she says, her relief obvious. “Four, this is Rafi. He’s an important man in the fringe.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Rafi says, and he beckons for us to follow him.

  Inside is a large, open room lit by rows of candles and lanterns. There is wooden furniture strewn everywhere, all the tables empty but one.

  A woman sits in the back of the room, and Rafi slides into the chair beside her. Though they don’t look the same—she has red hair and a generous frame; his features are dark and his body, spare as wire—they have the same sort of look, like two stones hewn by the same chisel.

  “Weapons on the table,” Rafi says.

  This time, Nita obeys, putting her knife on the edge of the table right in front of her. She sits. I do the same. Across from us, the woman surrenders a gun.

  “Who’s this?” the woman says, jerking her head toward me.

  “This is my associate,” Nita says. “Four.”

  “What kind of a name is ‘Four’?” She doesn’t ask with a sneer, the way people have often asked me that question.

  “The kind you get inside the city experiment,” Nita says. “For having only four fears.”

  It occurs to me that she might have introduced me by that name just to have an opportunity to share where I’m from. Does it give her some kind of leverage? Does it make me more trustworthy to these people?

  “Interesting.” The woman taps the table with her index finger. “Well, Four, my name is Mary.”

  “Mary and Rafi lead the Midwest branch of a GD rebel group,” Nita says.

  “Calling it a ‘group’ makes us sound like old ladies playing cards,” Rafi says smoothly. “We’re more of an uprising. Our reach stretches across the country—there’s a group for every metropolitan area that exists, and regional overseers for the Midwest, South, and East.”

  “Is there a West?” I say.

  “Not anymore,” Nita says quietly. “The terrain was too difficult to navigate and the cities too spread out for it to be sensible to live there after the war. Now it’s wild country.”

  “So it’s true what they say,” Mary says, her eyes catching the light like slivers of glass as she looks at me. “The people in the city experiments really don’t know what’s outside.”

  “Of course it’s true, why would they?” Nita says.

  Fatigue, a weight behind my eyes, creeps up on me suddenly. I have been a part of too many uprisings in my short life. The factionless, and now this GD one, apparently.

  “Not to cut the pleasantries short,” Mary says, “but we shouldn’t spend much time here. We can’t keep people out for long before they come sniffing around.”

  “Right,” Nita says. She looks at me. “Four, can you make sure nothing’s happening outside? I need to talk to Mary and Rafi privately for a little while.”

  If we were alone, I would ask why I can’t be here when she talks to them, or why she bothered to bring me in when I could have stood guard outside the whole time. I guess I haven’t actually agreed to help her yet, and she must have wanted them to meet me for some reason. So I just get up, taking my knife with me, and walk to the door where Rafi’s guard watches the street.

  The fight across the street has died down. A lone figure lies on the pavement. For a moment I think it’s still moving, but then I realize that’s because someone is rifling through its pockets. It’s not a figure—it’s a body.

  “Dead?” I say, and the word is just an exhale.

  “Yep. If you can’t defend yourself here, you won’t last a night.”

  “Why do people come here, then?” I frown. “Why don’t they just go back to the cities?”

  He’s quiet for so long that I think he must not have heard my question. I watch the thief turn the dead person’s pockets inside out and abandon the body, slipping into one of the nearby buildings. Finally, Rafi’s guard speaks:

  “Here, there’s a chance that if you die, someone will care. Like Rafi, or one of the other leaders,” the guard says. “In the cities, if you get killed, definitely no one will give a damn, not if you’re a GD. The worst crime I’ve ever seen a GP get charged with for killing a GD was ‘manslaughter.’ Bullshit.”

  “Manslaughter?”

  “It means the crime is deemed an accident,” Rafi’s smooth, lilting voice says behind me. “Or at least not as severe as, say, first-degree murder. Officially, of course, we’re all to be treated the same, yes? But that is rarely put into practice.”

  He stands beside me, his arms folded. I see, when I look at him, a king surveying his own kingdom, which he believes is beautiful. I look out at the street, at the broken pavement and the limp body with its turned-out pockets and the windows flickering with firelight, and I know the beauty he sees is just freedom—freedom to be seen as a whole man instead of a damaged one.

  I saw that freedom, once, when Evelyn beckoned to me from among the factionless, called me out of my faction to become a more complete person. But it was a lie.

  “You’re from Chicago?” Rafi says to me.

  I nod, still looking at the dark street.

  “And now that you are out? How does the world seem to you?” he says.

  “Mostly the same,” I say. “People are just divided by different things, fighting different wars.”

  Nita’s footsteps creak on the floorboards inside, and when I turn she is standing right behind me, her hands buried in her pockets.

  “Thanks for arranging this,” Nita says, nodding to Rafi. “It’s time for us to go.”

  We make our way down the street again, and when I turn to look at Rafi, he has his hand up, waving good-bye.

  As we walk back to the truck, I hear screams again, but this time they are the screams of a child. I walk past snuffling, whimpering sounds and think of when I was younger, crouched in my bedroom, wiping my nose on one of my sleeves. My mother used to scrub the cuffs with a sponge before throwing them in the wash. She never said anything about it.

  When I get into the truck, I already feel numb to this place and its pain, and I am ready to get back to the dream of the compound, the warmth and the light and the feeling of safety.

  “I’m having trouble understanding why this place is preferable to city life,” I say.

  “I’ve only been to a city that wasn’t an experiment once,” Nita says. “There’s electricity, but it’s on a ration system—each family only gets so many hours a day. Same with water. And there’s a lot of crime, which is blamed on genetic damage. There are police, too, but they can only do so much.”

  “So the Bureau compound,” I say. “It’s easily the best place to live, then.”

  “In terms of resources, yes,” Nita says. “But the same social system that exists in the cities also exists in the compound; it’s just a little harder to see.”

  I watch the fringe disappear in the rearview mirror, distinct from the abandoned buildings around it only by that string of electric lights draped over the narrow street.

  We drive past dark houses with boarded-up windows, and I try to imagine them clean and polished, as they must have been at some point in the past. They have fenced-in yards that must have once been trim and green, windows that must once have glowed in the evenings. I imagine that the lives lived here were peaceful ones, quiet ones.

  “What did yo
u come out here to talk to them about, exactly?” I say.

  “I came out here to solidify our plans,” Nita says. I notice, in the glow of the dashboard light, that there are a few cuts on her lower lip, like she has spent too much time biting it. “And I wanted them to meet you, to put a face on the people inside the faction experiments. Mary used to be suspicious that people like you were actually colluding with the government, which of course isn’t true. Rafi, though . . . he was the first person to give me proof that the Bureau, the government, was lying to us about our history.”

  She pauses after she says it, like that will help me to feel the weight of it, but I don’t need time or silence or space to believe her. I have been lied to by my government for my entire life.

  “The Bureau talks about this golden age of humanity before the genetic manipulations in which everyone was genetically pure and everything was peaceful,” Nita says. “But Rafi showed me old photographs of war.”

  I wait a beat. “So?”

  “So?” Nita demands, incredulous. “If genetically pure people caused war and total devastation in the past at the same magnitude that genetically damaged people supposedly do now, then what’s the basis for thinking that we need to spend so many resources and so much time working to correct genetic damage? What’s the use of the experiments at all, except to convince the right people that the government is doing something to make all our lives better, even though it’s not?”

  The truth changes everything—isn’t that why Tris was so desperate to get the Edith Prior video shown that she allied herself with my father to do it? She knew that the truth, whatever it was, would change our struggle, would shift our priorities forever. And here, now, a lie has changed the struggle, a lie has shifted priorities forever. Instead of working against the poverty or crime that have run rampant over this country, these people have chosen to work against genetic damage.

  “Why? Why spend so much time and energy fighting something that isn’t really a problem?” I demand, suddenly frustrated.

  “Well, the people fighting it now probably fight it because they have been taught that it is a problem. That’s another thing that Rafi showed me—examples of the propaganda the government released about genetic damage,” Nita says. “But initially? I don’t know. It’s probably a dozen things. Prejudice against GDs? Control, maybe? Control the genetically damaged population by teaching them that there’s something wrong with them, and control the genetically pure population by teaching them that they’re healed and whole? These things don’t happen overnight, and they don’t happen for just one reason.”

  I lean the side of my head against the cold window and close my eyes. There is too much information buzzing in my brain to focus on any single part of it, so I give up trying and let myself drift off.

  By the time we make it back through the tunnel and I find my bed, the sun is about to rise, and Tris’s arm is hanging over the edge of her bed again, her fingertips brushing the floor.

  I sit down across from her, for a moment watching her sleeping face and thinking of what we agreed, that night in Millennium Park: no more lies. She promised me, and I promised her. And if I don’t tell her about what I heard and saw tonight, I will be going back on that promise. And for what? To protect her? For Nita, a girl I barely know?

  I brush her hair away from her face, gently, so I don’t wake her.

  She doesn’t need my protection. She’s strong enough on her own.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TRIS

  PETER IS ACROSS the room, gathering a stack of books into a pile and shoving them into a bag. He bites down on a red pen and carries the bag out of the room; I hear the books inside it smacking against his leg as he walks down the hallway. I wait until I can’t hear them anymore before I turn to Christina.

  “I’ve been trying not to ask you, but I’m giving up,” I say. “What’s going on with you and Uriah?”

  Christina, sprawled across her cot with one long leg dangling over the edge, gives me a look.

  “What? You’ve been spending a lot of time together,” I say. “Like a lot.”

  It’s sunny today, the light glowing through the white curtains. I don’t know how, but the dormitory smells like sleep—like laundry and shoes and night sweats and morning coffee. Some of the beds are made, and some still have rumpled sheets bunched up at the bottom or the side. Most of us came from Dauntless, but I’m struck by how different we are anyway. Different habits, different temperaments, different ways of seeing the world.

  “You may not believe me, but it’s not like that.” Christina props herself up on her elbows. “He’s grieving. We’re both bored. Also, he’s Uriah.”

  “So? He’s good-looking.”

  “Good-looking, but he can’t have a serious conversation to save his life.” Christina shakes her head. “Don’t get me wrong, I like to laugh, but I also want a relationship to mean something, you know?”

  I nod. I do know—better than most people, maybe, because Tobias and I aren’t really the joking type.

  “Besides,” she says, “not every friendship turns into a romance. I haven’t tried to kiss you yet.”

  I laugh. “True.”

  “Where have you been lately?” Christina says. She wiggles her eyebrows. “With Four? Doing a little . . . addition? Multiplication?”

  I cover my face with my hands. “That was the worst joke I’ve ever heard.”

  “Don’t dodge the question.”

  “No ‘addition’ for us,” I say. “Not yet, anyway. He’s been a little preoccupied with the whole ‘genetic damage’ thing.”

  “Ah. That thing.” She sits up.

  “What do you think about it?” I say.

  “I don’t know. I guess it makes me angry.” She frowns. “No one likes to be told there’s something wrong with them, especially something like their genes, which they can’t change.”

  “You think there’s really something wrong with you?”

  “I guess so. It’s like a disease, right? They can see it in our genes. That’s not really up for debate, is it?”

  “I’m not saying your genes aren’t different,” I say. “I’m just saying that doesn’t mean one set is damaged and one set isn’t. The genes for blue eyes and brown eyes are different too, but are blue eyes ‘damaged’? It’s like they just arbitrarily decided that one kind of DNA was bad and the other was good.”

  “Based on the evidence that GD behavior was worse,” Christina points out.

  “Which could be caused by a lot of things,” I retort.

  “I don’t know why I’m arguing with you when I’d really like for you to be right,” Christina says, laughing. “But don’t you think a bunch of smart people like these Bureau scientists could figure out the cause of bad behavior?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But I think that no matter how smart, people usually see what they’re already looking for, that’s all.”

  “Maybe you’re biased too,” she says. “Because you have friends—and a boyfriend—with this genetic issue.”

  “Maybe.” I know I’m fumbling for an explanation, one I may not really believe, but I say it anyway: “I guess I don’t see a reason to believe in genetic damage. Will it make me treat other people better? No. The opposite, maybe.”

  And besides, I see what it’s doing to Tobias, how it’s making him doubt himself, and I don’t understand how anything good can possibly come from it.

  “You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true,” she points out.

  “But”—I speak slowly as I mull that over—“isn’t looking at the result of a belief a good way of evaluating if it’s true?”

  “Sounds like a Stiff way of thinking.” She pauses. “I guess my way is very Candor, though. God, we really can’t escape factions no matter where we go, can we?”

  I shrug. “Maybe it’s not so important to escape them.”

  Tobias walks into the dormitory,
looking pale and exhausted, like he always does these days. His hair is pushed up on one side from lying on his pillow, and he’s still wearing what he wore yesterday. He’s been sleeping in his clothes since we came to the Bureau.

  Christina gets up. “Okay, I’m going to go. And leave you two . . . to all this space. Alone.” She gestures at all the empty beds, and then winks conspicuously at me as she walks out of the dormitory.

  Tobias smiles a little, but not enough to make me think he’s actually happy. And instead of sitting next to me, he lingers at the foot of my bed, his fingers fumbling over the hem of his shirt.

  “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say, and I feel a spike of fear in my chest, like a jump on a heart monitor.

  “I want to ask you to promise not to get mad,” he says, “but . . .”

  “But you know I don’t make stupid promises,” I say, my throat tight.

  “Right.” He does sit, then, in the curve of blankets left unmade on his bed. He avoids my eyes. “Nita left a note under my pillow, telling me to meet her last night. And I did.”

  I straighten, and I can feel an angry heat spreading through me as I picture Nita’s pretty face, Nita’s graceful feet, walking toward my boyfriend.

  “A pretty girl asks you to meet her late at night, and you go?” I demand. “And then you want me not to get mad about it?”

  “It’s not about that with Nita and me. At all,” he says hastily, finally looking at me. “She just wanted to show me something. She doesn’t believe in genetic damage, like she led me to believe. She has a plan to take away some of the Bureau’s power, to make GDs more equal. We went to the fringe.”

  He tells me about the underground tunnel that leads outside, and the ramshackle town in the fringe, and the conversation with Rafi and Mary. He explains the war that the government kept hidden so that no one would know that “genetically pure” people are capable of incredible violence, and the way GDs live in the metropolitan areas where the government still has real power.

  As he speaks, I feel suspicion toward Nita building inside me, but I don’t know where it comes from—the gut instinct I usually trust, or my jealousy. When he finishes, he looks at me expectantly, and I purse my lips, trying to decide.