His green eyes shift back and forth as he searches for the right place, his fingers nimble, built for turning pages. I think of how he disguised that part of himself, wedging books between his headboard and the wall in our Abnegation house, until he dropped his blood in the Erudite water on the day of our Choosing Ceremony. I should have known, then, that he was a liar, with loyalty only to himself.
I feel that sickening ache again. I can hardly stand to be in here with him, the door closing us in, nothing but the table between us.
“Ah, here.” He touches his finger to a page, then spins the book around to show me.
It looks like a copy of a contract, but it’s handwritten in ink:
I, Amanda Marie Ritter, of Peoria, Illinois, give my consent to the following procedures:
• The “genetic healing” procedure, as defined by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare: “a genetic engineering procedure designed to correct the genes specified as ‘damaged’ on page three of this form.”
• The “reset procedure,” as defined by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare: “a memory-erasing procedure designed to make an experiment participant more fit for the experiment.”
I declare that I have been thoroughly instructed as to the risks and benefits of these procedures by a member of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. I understand that this means I will be given a new background and a new identity by the Bureau and inserted into the experiment in Chicago, Illinois, where I will live out the remainder of my days.
I agree to reproduce at least twice to give my corrected genes the best possible chance of survival. I understand that I will be encouraged to do this when I am reeducated after the reset procedure.
I also give my consent for my children and my children’s children, etc., to continue in this experiment until such time as the Bureau of Genetic Welfare deems it to be complete. They will be instructed in the false history that I myself will be given after the reset procedure.
Signed,
Amanda Marie Ritter
Amanda Marie Ritter. She was the woman in the video, Edith Prior, my ancestor.
I look up at Caleb, whose eyes are alight with knowledge, like there’s a live wire running through each of them.
Our ancestor.
I pull out one of the chairs and sit. “She was Dad’s ancestor?”
He nods and sits down across from me. “Seven generations back, yes. An aunt. Her brother is the one who carried on the Prior name.”
“And this is . . .”
“It’s a consent form,” he says. “Her consent form for joining the experiment. The endnotes say that this was just a first draft—she was one of the original experiment designers. A member of the Bureau. There were only a few Bureau members in the original experiment; most of the people in the experiment weren’t working for the government.”
I read the words again, trying to make sense of them. When I saw her in the video, it seemed so logical that she would become a resident of our city, that she would immerse herself in our factions, that she would volunteer to leave behind everything she left behind. But that was before I knew what life was like outside the city, and it doesn’t seem as horrific as what Edith described in her message to us.
She delivered a skillful manipulation in that video, which was intended to keep us contained and dedicated to the vision of the Bureau—the world outside the city is badly broken, and the Divergent need to come out here and heal it. It’s not quite a lie, because the people in the Bureau do believe that healed genes will fix certain things, that if we integrate into the general population and pass our genes on, the world will be a better place. But they didn’t need the Divergent to march out of our city like an army to fight injustice and save everyone, as Edith suggested. I wonder if Edith Prior believed her own words, or if she just said them because she had to.
There’s a photograph of her on the next page, her mouth in a firm line, wisps of brown hair hanging around her face. She must have seen something terrible, to volunteer for her memory to be erased and her entire life remade.
“Do you know why she joined?” I say.
Caleb shakes his head. “The records suggest—though they’re fairly vague on this front—that people joined the experiment so their families could escape extreme poverty—the families of the subjects were offered a monthly stipend for the subject’s participation, for upward of ten years. But obviously that wasn’t Edith’s motivation, since she worked for the Bureau. I suspect something traumatic must have happened to her, something she was determined to forget.”
I frown at her photograph. I can’t imagine what kind of poverty would motivate a person to forget themselves and everyone they loved so their families could get a monthly stipend. I may have lived on Abnegation bread and vegetables for most of my life, with nothing to spare, but I was never that desperate. Their situation must have been much worse than anything I saw in the city.
I can’t imagine why Edith was that desperate either. Or maybe it’s just that she didn’t have anyone to keep her memory for.
“I was interested in the legal precedent for giving consent on behalf of one’s descendants,” Caleb says. “I think it’s an extrapolation of giving consent for one’s children under eighteen, but it seems a little odd.”
“I guess we all decide our children’s fates just by making our own life decisions,” I say vaguely. “Would we have chosen the same factions we did if Mom and Dad hadn’t chosen Abnegation?” I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe we wouldn’t have felt as stifled. Maybe we would have become different people.”
The thought creeps into my mind like a slithering creature—Maybe we would have become better people. People who don’t betray their own sisters.
I stare at the table in front of me. For the past few minutes it was easy to pretend that Caleb and I were just brother and sister again. But a person can only keep reality—and anger—at bay for so long before the truth comes back again. As I raise my eyes to his, I think of looking at him in just this way, when I was still a prisoner in Erudite headquarters. I think of being too tired to fight with him anymore, or to hear his excuses; too tired to care that my brother had abandoned me.
I ask tersely, “Edith joined Erudite, didn’t she? Even though she took an Abnegation name?”
“Yes!” He doesn’t seem to notice my tone. “In fact, most of our ancestors were in Erudite. There were a few Abnegation outliers, and one or two Candor, but the through line is fairly consistent.”
I feel cold, like I might shiver and then shatter.
“So I suppose you’ve used this as an excuse in your twisted mind for what you did,” I say steadily. “For joining Erudite, for being loyal to them. I mean, if you were supposed to be one of them all along, then ‘faction before blood’ is an acceptable thing to believe, right?”
“Tris . . .” he says, and his eyes plead with me for understanding, but I do not understand. I won’t.
I stand up. “So now I know about Edith and you know about our mother. Good. Let’s just leave it at that, then.”
Sometimes when I look at him I feel the ache of sympathy toward him, and sometimes I feel like I want to wrap my hands around his throat. But right now I just want to escape, and pretend this never happened. I walk out of the records room, and my shoes squeak on the tile floor as I run back to the hotel. I run until I smell sweet citrus, and then I stop.
Tobias is standing in the hallway outside the dormitory. I am breathless, and I can feel my heartbeat even in my fingertips; I am overwhelmed, teeming with loss and wonder and anger and longing.
“Tris,” Tobias says, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right?”
I shake my head, still struggling for air, and crush him against the wall with my body, my lips finding his. For a moment he tries to push me away, but then he must decide that he doesn’t care if I’m all right, doesn’t care if he’s all right, doesn’t care. We haven’t been alone together in days. Weeks. Months.
His fingers slide into my hair, a
nd I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep, for the rest of my life.
He leans down and kisses my throat, hard, and his hands smooth over me, securing themselves at my waist. I hook my fingers in his belt loops, my eyes closing. In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.
I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart. Someone—probably Uriah—whistles, but I barely hear it over the pulsing in my ears.
Tobias’s eyes meet mine, and it’s like the first time I really looked at him during my initiation, after my fear simulation; we stare too long, too intently. “Shut up,” I call out to Uriah, without looking away.
Uriah and Christina walk into the dormitory, and Tobias and I follow them, like nothing happened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TOBIAS
THAT NIGHT WHEN my head hits the pillow, heavy with thoughts, I hear something crinkle beneath my cheek. A note under my pillowcase.
T—
Meet me outside the hotel entrance at eleven. I need to talk to you.
—Nita
I look at Tris’s cot. She’s sprawled on her back, and there is a piece of hair covering her nose and mouth that shifts with each exhale. I don’t want to wake her, but I feel strange, going to meet a girl in the middle of the night without telling her about it. Especially now that we’re trying so hard to be honest with each other.
I check my watch. It’s ten to eleven.
Nita’s just a friend. You can tell Tris tomorrow. It might be urgent.
I push the blankets back and shove my feet into my shoes—I sleep in my clothes these days. I pass Peter’s cot, then Uriah’s. The top of a flask peeks out from beneath Uriah’s pillow. I pinch it between my fingers and carry it toward the door, where I slide it under the pillow on one of the empty cots. I haven’t been looking after him as well as I promised Zeke I would.
Once I’m in the hallway, I tie my shoes and smooth my hair down. I stopped cutting it like the Abnegation when I wanted the Dauntless to see me as a potential leader, but I miss the ritual of the old way, the buzz of the clippers and the careful movements of my hands, knowing more by touch than by sight. When I was young, my father used to do it, in the hallway on the top floor of our Abnegation house. He was always too careless with the blade, and scraped the back of my neck, or nicked my ear. But he never complained about having to cut my hair for me. That’s something, I guess.
Nita is tapping her foot. This time she wears a white short-sleeved shirt, her hair pulled back. She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“You look worried,” I say.
“That’s because I am,” she answers. “Come on, there’s a place I’ve been wanting to show you.”
She leads me down dim hallways, empty except for the occasional janitor. They all seem to know Nita—they wave at her, or smile. She puts her hands in her pockets, guiding her eyes carefully away from mine every time we happen to look at each other.
We go through a door without a security sensor to keep it locked. The room beyond it is a wide circle with a chandelier marking its center with dangling glass. The floors are polished wood, dark, and the walls, covered in sheets of bronze, gleam where the light touches them. There are names inscribed on the bronze panels, dozens of names.
Nita stands beneath the glass chandelier and holds her arms out, wide, to encompass the room in her gesture.
“These are the Chicago family trees,” she says. “Your family trees.”
I move closer to one of the walls and read through the names, searching for one that looks familiar. At the end, I find one: Uriah Pedrad and Ezekiel Pedrad. Next to each name is a small “DD,” and there is a dot next to Uriah’s name, and it looks freshly carved. Marking him as Divergent, probably.
“Do you know where mine is?” I say.
She crosses the room and touches one of the panels. “The generations are matrilineal. That’s why Jeanine’s records said Tris was ‘second generation’—because her mother came from outside the city. I’m not sure how Jeanine knew that, but I guess we’ll never find out.”
I approach the panel that bears my name with trepidation, though I’m not sure what I have to fear from seeing my name and my parents’ names carved into bronze. I see a vertical line connecting Kristin Johnson to Evelyn Johnson, and a horizontal one connecting Evelyn Johnson to Marcus Eaton. Below the two names is just one: Tobias Eaton. The small letters beside my name are “AD,” and there’s a dot there too, though I now know I’m not actually Divergent.
“The first letter is your faction of origin,” she says, “and the second is your faction of choice. They thought that keeping track of the factions would help them trace the path of the genes.”
My mother’s letters: “EAF.” The “F” is for “factionless,” I assume.
My father’s letters: “AA,” with a dot.
I touch the line connecting me to them, and the line connecting Evelyn to her parents, and the line connecting them to their parents, all the way back through eight generations, counting my own. This is a map of what I’ve always known, that I am tied to them, bound forever to this empty inheritance no matter how far I run.
“While I appreciate you showing me this,” I say, and I feel sad, and tired, “I’m not sure why it had to happen in the middle of the night.”
“I thought you might want to see it. And I had something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“More reassurance that my limitations don’t define me?” I shake my head. “No thanks, I’ve had enough of that.”
“No,” she says. “But I’m glad you said that.”
She leans against the panel, covering Evelyn’s name with her shoulder. I step back, not wanting to be so close to her that I can see the ring of lighter brown around her pupils.
“That conversation I had with you last night, about genetic damage . . . it was actually a test. I wanted to see how you would react to what I said about damaged genes, so I would know whether I could trust you or not,” she says. “If you accepted what I said about your limitations, the answer would have been no.” She slides a little closer to me, so her shoulder covers Marcus’s name too. “See, I’m not really on board with being classified as ‘damaged.’”
I think of the way she spat out the explanation of the tattoo of broken glass on her back like it was poison.
My heart starts to beat harder, so I can feel my pulse in my throat. Bitterness has replaced the good humor in her voice, and her eyes have lost their warmth. I am afraid of her, afraid of what she says—and thrilled by it too, because it means I don’t have to accept that I am smaller than I once believed.
“I take it you aren’t on board with it either,” she says.
“No. I’m not.”
“There are a lot of secrets in this place,” she says. “One of them is that, to them, a GD is expendable. Another is that some of us are not just going to sit back and take it.”
“What do you mean, expendable?” I say.
“The crimes they have committed against people like us are serious,” Nita says. “And hidden. I can show you evidence, but that will have to come later. For now, what I can tell you is that we’re working against the Bureau, for good reasons, and we want you with us.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why? What is it you want from me, exactly?”
“Right now I want to offer you an opportunity to see what the world is like outside the compound.”
“And what you get in return is . . . ?”
“Your protection,” she says. “I’m going to a dangerous place, and I can’t tell anyone else from the Bureau about it. You’re an outsider, which means it’s safer for me to trust you, and I know you know how to defend yourself. And if you c
ome with me, I’ll show you that evidence you want to see.”
She touches her heart, lightly, as if swearing on it. My skepticism is strong, but my curiosity is stronger. It’s not hard for me to believe that the Bureau would do bad things, because every government I’ve ever known has done bad things, even the Abnegation oligarchy, of which my father was the head. And even beyond that reasonable suspicion, I have brewing inside me the desperate hope that I am not damaged, that I am worth more than the corrected genes I pass on to any children I might have.
So I decide to go along with this. For now.
“Fine,” I say.
“First,” she says, “before I show you anything, you have to accept that you won’t be able to tell anyone—even Tris—about what you see. Are you all right with that?”
“She’s trustworthy, you know.” I promised Tris I wouldn’t keep secrets from her anymore. I shouldn’t get into situations where I’ll have to do it again. “Why can’t I tell her?”
“I’m not saying she isn’t trustworthy. It’s just that she doesn’t have the skill set we need, and we don’t want to put anyone at risk that we don’t have to. See, the Bureau doesn’t want us to organize. If we believe we’re not ‘damaged,’ then we’re saying that everything they’re doing—the experiments, the genetic alterations, all of it—is a waste of time. And no one wants to hear that their life’s work is a sham.”
I know all about that—it’s like finding out that the factions are an artificial system, designed by scientists to keep us under control for as long as possible.
She pulls away from the wall, and then she says the only thing she could possibly say to make me agree:
“If you tell her, you would be depriving her of the choice I’m giving you now. You would force her to become a coconspirator. By keeping this from her, you would be protecting her.”
The Divergent Series Complete Collection Page 80
