Allegiant

by Veronica Roth

  I walk past one of the lean-tos and see a little girl crouching just inside the door, her arms wrapped around her knees. She sees me through the crack in the layered tarps and whimpers a little. I wonder who taught these people to be so terrified of soldiers. I wonder what made a young boy desperate enough to aim a gun at one of them.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t.”

  I have better people to blame.

  By the time we get back to the truck, Jack and Violet are setting up a surveillance camera that wasn’t stolen by people in the fringe. Violet has a screen in her hands with a long list of numbers on it, and she reads them to Jack, who programs them into his screen.

  “Where have you guys been?” he says.

  “We were attacked,” George says. “We have to leave, now.”

  “Luckily, that’s the last set of coordinates,” Violet says. “Let’s get going.”

  We pile into the truck again. Amar draws the doors shut behind us, and I set my gun on the floor with the safety on, glad to be rid of it. I didn’t think I would be aiming a dangerous weapon at someone today when I woke up. I didn’t think I would witness those kinds of living conditions, either.

  “It’s the Abnegation in you,” Amar says. “That makes you hate that place. I can tell.”

  “It’s a lot of things in me.”

  “It’s just something I noticed in Four, too. Abnegation produces deeply serious people. People who automatically see things like need,” he says. “I’ve noticed that when people switch to Dauntless, it creates some of the same types. Erudite who switch to Dauntless tend to turn cruel and brutal. Candor who switch to Dauntless tend to become boisterous, fight-picking adrenaline junkies. And Abnegation who switch to Dauntless become . . . I don’t know, soldiers, I guess. Revolutionaries.

  “That’s what he could be, if he trusted himself more,” he adds. “If Four wasn’t so plagued with self-doubt, he would be one hell of a leader, I think. I’ve always thought that.”

  “I think you’re right,” I say. “It’s when he’s a follower that he gets himself into trouble. Like with Nita. Or Evelyn.”

  What about you? I ask myself. You wanted to make him a follower too.

  No, I didn’t, I tell myself, but I’m not sure if I believe it.

  Amar nods.

  Images from the fringe keep rising up inside me like hiccups. I imagine the child my mother was, crouched in one of those lean-tos, scrambling for weapons because they meant an ounce of safety, choking on smoke to keep warm in the winter. I don’t know why she was so willing to abandon that place after she was rescued. She became absorbed into the compound, and then worked on its behalf for the rest of her life. Did she forget about where she came from?

  She couldn’t have. She spent her entire life trying to help the factionless. Maybe it wasn’t a fulfillment of her duty as an Abnegation—maybe it came from a desire to help people like the ones she had left.

  Suddenly I can’t stand to think of her, or that place, or the things I saw there. I grab on to the first thought that comes to my mind, to distract myself.

  “So you and Tobias were good friends?”

  “Is anyone good friends with him?” Amar shakes his head. “I gave him his nickname, though. I watched him face his fears and I saw how troubled he was, and I figured he could use a new life, so I started calling him ‘Four.’ But no, I wouldn’t say we were good friends. Not as good as I wanted to be.”

  Amar leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. A small smile curls his lips.

  “Oh,” I say. “Did you . . . like him?”

  “Now why would you ask that?”

  I shrug. “Just the way you talk about him.”

  “I don’t like him anymore, if that’s what you’re really asking. But yes, at one time I did, and it was clear that he did not return that particular sentiment, so I backed off,” Amar says. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything.”

  “To Tobias? Of course I won’t.”

  “No, I mean, don’t say anything to anyone. And I’m not talking about just the thing with Tobias.”

  He looks at the back of George’s head, now visible above the considerably diminished pile of equipment.

  I raise an eyebrow at him. I’m not surprised he and George were drawn to each other. They’re both Divergent who had to fake their own deaths to survive. Both outsiders in an unfamiliar world.

  “You have to understand,” Amar says. “The Bureau is obsessed with procreation—with passing on genes. And George and I are both GPs, so any entanglement that can’t produce a stronger genetic code . . . It’s not encouraged, that’s all.”

  “Ah.” I nod. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not obsessed with producing strong genes.” I smile wryly.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  For a few seconds we sit quietly, watching the ruins turn to a blur as the truck picks up speed.

  “I think you’re good for Four, you know,” he says.

  I stare at my hands, curled in my lap. I don’t feel like explaining to him that we’re on the verge of breaking up—I don’t know him, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to talk about it. All I can manage to say is, “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I can see what you bring out in him. You don’t know this because you’ve never experienced it, but Four without you is a much different person. He’s . . . obsessive, explosive, insecure . . .”

  “Obsessive?”

  “What else do you call someone who repeatedly goes through his own fear landscape?”

  “I don’t know . . . determined.” I pause. “Brave.”

  “Yeah, sure. But also a little bit crazy, right? I mean, most Dauntless would rather leap into the chasm than keep going through their fear landscapes. There’s bravery and then there’s masochism, and the line got a little hazy with him.”

  “I’m familiar with the line,” I say.

  “I know.” Amar grins. “Anyway, all I’m saying is, any time you mash two different people against each other, you’ll get problems, but I can see that what you guys have is worthwhile, that’s all.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Mash people against each other, really?”

  Amar presses his palms together and twists them back and forth, to illustrate. I laugh, but I can’t ignore the achy feeling in my chest.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  TOBIAS

  I WALK TO the cluster of chairs closest to the windows in the control room and bring up the footage from different cameras throughout the city, one by one, searching for my parents. I find Evelyn first—she is in the lobby of Erudite headquarters, talking in a close huddle with Therese and a factionless man, her second and third in command now that I am gone. I turn up the volume on the microphone, but I still can’t hear anything but muttering.

  Through the windows along the back of the control room, I see the same empty night sky as the one above the city, interrupted only by small blue and red lights marking the runways for airplanes. It’s strange to think we have that in common when everything else is so different here.

  By now the people in the control room know that I was the one who disabled the security system the night before the attack, though I wasn’t the one who slipped one of their night shift workers peace serum so that I could do it—that was Nita. But for the most part, they ignore me, as long as I stay away from their desks.

  On another screen, I scroll through the footage again, looking for Marcus or Johanna, anything that can show me what’s happening with the Allegiant. Every part of the city shows up on the screen, the bridge near the Merciless Mart and the Pire and the main thoroughfare of the Abnegation sector, the Hub and the Ferris wheel and the Amity fields, now worked by all the factions. But none of the cameras shows me anything.

  “You’ve been coming here a lot,” Cara says as she approaches. “Are you afraid of the rest of the compound? Or of something else?”

  She’s right, I have been coming to the control room a lot. It’s just
something to pass the time as I wait for my sentence from Tris, as I wait for our plan to strike the Bureau to come together, as I wait for something, anything.

  “No,” I say. “I’m just keeping an eye on my parents.”

  “The parents you hate?” She stands next to me, her arms folded. “Yes, I can see why you would want to spend every waking hour staring at people you want nothing to do with. It makes perfect sense.”

  “They’re dangerous,” I say. “More dangerous because no one else knows how dangerous they are but me.”

  “And what are you going to do from here, if they do something terrible? Send a smoke signal?”

  I glare at her.

  “Fine, fine.” She puts up her hands in surrender. “I’m just trying to remind you that you aren’t in their world anymore, you’re in this one. That’s all.”

  “Point taken.”

  I never thought of the Erudite as being particularly perceptive about relationships, or emotions, but Cara’s discerning eyes see all kinds of things. My fear. My search for a distraction in my past. It’s almost alarming.

  I scroll past one of the camera angles and then pause, and scroll back. The scene is dark, because of the hour, but I see people alighting like a flock of birds around a building I don’t recognize, their movements synchronized.

  “They’re doing it,” Cara says, excited. “The Allegiant are actually attacking.”

  “Hey!” I shout to one of the women at the control room desks. The older one, who always gives me a nasty look when I show up, lifts her head. “Camera twenty-four! Hurry!”

  She taps her screen, and everyone milling around the surveillance area gathers around her. People passing by in the hallway stop to see what’s happening, and I turn to Cara.

  “Can you go get the others?” I say. “I think they should see this.”

  She nods, her eyes wild, and rushes away from the control room.

  The people around the unfamiliar building wear no uniform to distinguish them, but they don’t wear factionless armbands either, and they carry guns. I try to pick out a face, anything I recognize, but the footage is too blurry. I watch them arrange themselves, motioning to one another to communicate, dark arms waving in the darker night.

  I wedge my thumbnail between my teeth, impatient for something, anything to happen. A few minutes later Cara arrives with the others at her back. When they reach the crowd of people around the primary screens, Peter says, “Excuse me!” loud enough to make people turn around. When they see who he is, they part for him.

  “What’s up?” Peter says to me when he’s closer. “What’s going on?”

  “The Allegiant have formed an army,” I say, pointing at the screen on the left. “There are people from every faction in it, even Amity and Erudite. I’ve been watching a lot lately.”

  “Erudite?” Caleb says.

  “The Allegiant are the enemies of the new enemies, the factionless,” Cara replies. “Which gives the Erudite and the Allegiant a common goal: to usurp Evelyn.”

  “Did you say there were Amity in an army?” Christina asks me.

  “They’re not really participating in the violence,” I say. “But they are participating in the effort.”

  “The Allegiant raided their first weapons storehouse a few days ago,” the young woman sitting at the control room desk nearest to us says over her shoulder. “This is their second. That’s where they got those weapons. After the first raid, Evelyn had most of the weapons relocated, but this storehouse didn’t make it in time.”

  My father knows what Evelyn knew: that the power to make people fear you is the only power you need. Weapons will do that for him.

  “What’s their goal?” Caleb says.

  “The Allegiant are motivated by the desire to return to our original purpose in the city,” Cara says. “Whether that means sending a group of people outside of it, as instructed by Edith Prior—which we thought was important at the time, though I’ve since learned that her instructions didn’t really matter—or reinstating the factions by force. They’re building up to an attack on the factionless stronghold. That’s what Johanna and I discussed before I left. We did not discuss allying with your father, Tobias, but I suppose she’s capable of making her own decisions.”

  I almost forgot that Cara was the leader of the Allegiant, before we left. Now I’m not sure she cares whether the factions survive or not, but she still cares about the people. I can tell by the way she watches the screens, eager but afraid.

  Even over the chatter of the people around us, I hear the gunfire when it starts, just snaps and claps in the microphones. I tap the glass in front of me a few times, and the camera angle switches to one inside the building the invaders have just forced their way into. On a table within is a pile of small boxes—ammunition—and a few pistols. It’s nothing compared to the guns the people here have, in all their abundance, but in the city, I know it’s valuable.

  Several men and women with factionless armbands guard the table, but they are falling fast, outnumbered by the Allegiant. I recognize a familiar face among them—Zeke, slamming the butt of his gun into a factionless man’s jaw. The factionless are overcome within two minutes, falling to bullets I see only when they’re already buried in flesh. The Allegiant spread through the room, stepping over bodies like they are just more debris, and gather everything they can. Zeke piles stray guns on the table, a hard look on his face that I’ve only seen a few times.

  He doesn’t even know what happened to Uriah.

  The woman at the desk taps the screen in a few places. On one of the smaller screens above her is an image—a piece of the surveillance footage we just watched, frozen at a particular moment in time. She taps again, and the image moves closer to its targets, a man with close-cropped hair and a woman with long, dark hair covering one side of her face.

  Marcus, of course. And Johanna—carrying a gun.

  “Between them, they have managed to rally most of the loyal faction members to their cause. Surprisingly, though, the Allegiant still don’t outnumber the factionless.” The woman leans back in her chair and shakes her head. “There were far more factionless than we ever anticipated. It’s difficult to get an accurate population count on a scattered population, after all.”

  “Johanna? Leading a rebellion? With a weapon? That makes no sense,” Caleb says.

  Johanna told me once that if the decisions had been up to her, she would have supported action against Erudite instead of the passivity the rest of her faction advocated. But she was at the mercy of her faction and their fear. Now, with the factions disbanded, it seems she has become something other than the mouthpiece of Amity or even the leader of the Allegiant. She has become a soldier.

  “Makes more sense than you’d think,” I say, and Cara nods along with my words.

  I watch them empty the room of weapons and ammunition and move on, fast, scattering like seeds on the wind. I feel heavier, like I am bearing a new burden. I wonder if the people around me—Cara, Christina, Peter, even Caleb—feel the same way. The city, our city, is even closer to total destruction than it was before.

  We can pretend that we don’t belong there anymore, while we’re living in relative safety in this place, but we do. We always will.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  TRIS

  IT’S DARK AND snowing when we drive up to the entrance of the compound. The flakes blow across the road, as light as powdered sugar. It’s just an early autumn snow; it will be gone in the morning. I take off my bulletproof vest as soon as I get out, and offer it to Amar along with my gun. I’m uncomfortable holding it now, and I used to think that my discomfort would go away with time, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe it never will, and maybe that’s all right.

  Warm air surrounds me as I pass through the doors. The compound looks cleaner than ever before, now that I’ve seen the fringe. The comparison is unsettling. How can I walk these squeaky floors and wear these starchy clothes when I know that those people
are out there, wrapping their houses in tarp to stay warm?

  But by the time I reach the hotel dormitory, the unsettled feeling is gone.

  I scan the room for Christina, or for Tobias, but neither of them is there. Only Peter and Caleb are, Peter with a large book on his lap, scribbling notes on a nearby notepad, and Caleb reading our mother’s journal on the screen, his eyes glassy. I try to ignore that.

  “Have either of you seen . . .” But who do I want to talk to, Christina or Tobias?

  “Four?” Caleb says, deciding for me. “I saw him in the genealogy room earlier.”

  “The . . . what room?”

  “They have our ancestors’ names on display in a room. Can I get a piece of paper?” he asks Peter.

  Peter tears a sheet from the back of his notepad and hands it to Caleb, who scribbles something on it—directions. Caleb says, “I found our parents’ names there earlier. On the right side of the room, second panel from the door.”

  He hands me the directions without looking at me. I look at his neat, even letters. Before I punched him, Caleb would have insisted on walking me himself, desperate for time to explain himself to me. But recently he has kept his distance, either because he’s afraid of me or because he has finally given up.

  Neither option makes me feel good.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Um . . . how’s your nose?”

  “It’s fine,” he says. “I think the bruise really brings out my eyes, don’t you?”

  He smiles a little, and so do I. But it’s clear that neither of us knows what to do from here, because we’ve both run out of words.

  “Wait, you were gone today, right?” he says after a second. “Something’s happening in the city. The Allegiant rose up against Evelyn, attacked one of her weapons storehouses.”

  I stare at him. I haven’t wondered about what was happening in the city for a few days now; I’ve been too wrapped up in what’s happening here.

  “The Allegiant?” I say. “The people currently led by Johanna Reyes . . . attacked a storehouse?”

  Before we left, I was sure the city was about to explode into another conflict. I guess now it has. But I feel detached from it—almost everyone I care about is here.