The Divergent Series Complete Collection

by Veronica Roth

  “We’re almost at the fringe,” George calls from the middle of the truck. “We’re going to stop here and advance on foot. Everyone take some equipment and set it up—except Amar, who should just look after Tris. Tris, you’re welcome to get out and have a look, but stay with Amar.”

  I feel like all my nerves are too close to the surface, and the slightest touch will make them fire. The fringe is where my mother retreated after witnessing a murder—it is where the Bureau found her and rescued her because they suspected her genetic code was sound. Now I will walk there, to the place where, in some ways, it all began.

  The truck stops, and Amar shoves the doors open. He holds his gun in one hand and beckons to me with the other. I jump out behind him.

  There are buildings here, but they are not nearly as prominent as the makeshift homes, made of scrap metal and plastic tarps, piled up right next to one another like they are holding one another upright. In the narrow aisles between them are people, mostly children, selling things from trays, or carrying buckets of water, or cooking over open fires.

  When the ones nearest to us see us, a young boy takes off running and screams, “Raid! Raid!”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Amar says to me. “They think we’re soldiers. Sometimes they raid to transport the kids to orphanages.”

  I barely acknowledge the comment. Instead I start walking down one of the aisles, as most people take off or shut themselves inside their lean-tos with cardboard or more tarp. I see them through the cracks between the walls, their houses not much more than a pile of food and supplies on one side and sleeping mats on the other. I wonder what they do in the winter. Or what they do for a toilet.

  I think of the flowers inside the compound, and the wood floors, and all the beds in the hotel that are unoccupied, and say, “Do you ever help them?”

  “We believe that the best way to help our world is to fix its genetic deficiencies,” Amar says, like he’s reciting it from memory. “Feeding people is just putting a tiny bandage on a gaping wound. It might stop the bleeding for a while, but ultimately the wound will still be there.”

  I can’t respond. All I do is shake my head a little and keep walking. I am beginning to understand why my mother joined Abnegation when she was supposed to join Erudite. If she had really craved safety from Erudite’s growing corruption, she could have gone to Amity or Candor. But she chose the faction where she could help the helpless, and dedicated most of her life to making sure the factionless were provided for.

  They must have reminded her of this place, of the fringe.

  I turn my head away from Amar so he won’t see the tears in my eyes. “Let’s go back to the truck.”

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  We both turn around to head back to the truck, but then we hear gunshots.

  And right after them, a shout. “Help!”

  Everyone around us scatters.

  “That’s George,” Amar says, and he takes off running down one of the aisles on our right. I chase him into the scrap-metal structures, but he’s too quick for me, and this place is a maze—I lose him in seconds, and then I am alone.

  As much automatic, Abnegation-bred sympathy as I have for the people living in this place, I am also afraid of them. If they are like the factionless, then they are surely desperate like the factionless, and I am wary of desperate people.

  A hand closes around my arm and drags me backward, into one of the aluminum lean-tos. Inside everything is tinted blue from the tarp that covers the walls, insulating the structure against the cold. The floor is covered with plywood, and standing in front of me is a small, thin woman with a grubby face.

  “You don’t want to be out there,” she says. “They’ll lash out at anyone, no matter how young she is.”

  “They?” I say.

  “Lots of angry people here in the fringe,” the woman says. “Some people’s anger makes them want to kill everyone they perceive as an enemy. Some people’s makes them more constructive.”

  “Well, thank you for the help,” I say. “My name is Tris.”

  “Amy. Sit.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “My friends are out there.”

  “Then you should wait until the hordes of people run to wherever your friends are, and then sneak up on them from behind.”

  That sounds smart.

  I sink to the floor, my gun digging into my leg. The bulletproof vest is so stiff it’s hard to get comfortable, but I do the best I can to seem relaxed. I hear people running outside and shouting. Amy flicks the corner of the tarp back to see outside.

  “So you and your friends aren’t soldiers,” Amy says, still looking outside. “Which means you must be Genetic Welfare types, right?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, they are, but I’m from the city. I mean, Chicago.”

  Amy’s eyebrows pop up high. “Damn. Has it been disbanded?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?” I frown at her. “That’s my home you’re talking about, you know.”

  “Well your home is perpetuating the belief that genetically damaged people need to be fixed—that they’re damaged, period, which they—we—are not. So yes, it’s unfortunate that the experiments still exist. I won’t apologize for saying so.”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way. To me Chicago has to keep existing because the people I have lost lived there, because the way of life I once loved continues there, though in a broken form. But I didn’t realize that Chicago’s very existence could be harmful to people outside who just want to be thought of as whole.

  “It’s time for you to go,” Amy says, dropping the corner of the tarp. “They’re probably in one of the meeting areas, northwest of here.”

  “Thank you again,” I say.

  She nods to me, and I duck out of her makeshift home, the boards creaking beneath my feet.

  I move through the aisles, fast, glad that all the people scattered when we arrived so there is no one to block my way. I jump over a puddle of—well, I don’t want to know what it is—and emerge into a kind of courtyard, where a tall, gangly boy has a gun pointed at George.

  A small crowd of people surrounds the boy with the gun. They have distributed among them the surveillance equipment George was carrying, and they’re destroying it, hitting it with shoes or rocks or hammers.

  George’s eyes shift to me, but I touch a finger to my lips, hastily. I am behind the crowd now; the one with the gun doesn’t know I’m there.

  “Put the gun down,” George says.

  “No!” the boy answers. His pale eyes keep shifting from George to the people around him and back. “Went to a lot of trouble to get this, not gonna give it to you now.”

  “Then just . . . let me go. You can keep it.”

  “Not until you tell us where you’ve been taking our people!” the boy says.

  “We haven’t taken any of your people,” George says. “We’re not soldiers. We’re just scientists.”

  “Yeah, right,” the boy says. “A bulletproof vest? If that’s not soldier shit, then I’m the richest kid in the States. Now tell me what I need to know!”

  I move back so I’m standing behind one of the lean-tos, then put my gun around the edge of the structure and say, “Hey!”

  Everyone in the crowd turns at once, but the boy with the gun doesn’t stop aiming at George, like I’d hoped.

  “I’ve got you in my sights,” I say. “Leave now and I’ll let you go.”

  “I’ll shoot him!” the boy says.

  “I’ll shoot you,” I say. “We’re with the government, but we aren’t soldiers. We don’t know where your people are. If you let him go, we’ll all leave quietly. If you kill him, I guarantee there will be soldiers here soon to arrest you, and they won’t be as forgiving as we are.”

  At that moment Amar emerges into the courtyard behind George, and someone in the crowd screeches, “There are more of them!” And everyone sca
tters. The boy with the gun dives into the nearest aisle, leaving George, Amar, and me alone. Still, I keep my gun up by my face, in case they decide to come back.

  Amar wraps his arms around George, and George thumps his back with a fist. Amar looks at me, his face over George’s shoulder. “Still don’t think genetic damage is to blame for any of these troubles?”

  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 Hu
b 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.