“If you’re with Jeanine, then I hate you. Just like our father would have.”
“Our father.” Caleb snorts a little. “Our father was Erudite, Beatrice. Jeanine told me — he was in her year at school.”
“He wasn’t Erudite,” I say after a few seconds. “He chose to leave them. He chose a different identity, just like you, and became something else. Only you chose this … this evil.”
“Spoken like a true Dauntless,” says Caleb sharply. “It’s either one way or the other way. No nuances. The world doesn’t work like that, Beatrice. Evil depends on where you’re standing.”
“No matter where I stand, I’ll still think mind controlling an entire city of people is evil.” I feel my lip wobble. “I’ll still think delivering your sister to be prodded and executed is evil!”
He is my brother, but I want to tear him to pieces.
Instead of trying to, though, I find myself sitting down again. I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it hurts, in every part of my body. I press my fingers to my chest to massage some of the smarting tension away.
Jeanine and her army of Erudite scientists and Dauntless traitors walk in just as I wipe tears from my cheeks. I blink rapidly so she won’t see. She barely even gives me a glance.
“Let us view the results, shall we?” she announces. Caleb, now standing by the screens, presses something at the front of the room, and the screens turn on. Words and numbers I don’t understand fill them.
“We discovered something extremely interesting, Ms. Prior.” I have never seen her so cheerful before. She almost smiles — but not quite. “You have an abundance of a particular kind of neuron, called, quite simply, a mirror neuron. Would someone like to explain to Ms. Prior exactly what mirror neurons do?”
The Erudite scientists raise their hands in unison. She points to an older woman in the front.
“Mirror neurons fire both when one performs an action and when one sees another person performing that action. They allow us to imitate behavior.”
“What else are they responsible for?” Jeanine scans her “class” the same way my teachers did in Upper Levels. Another Erudite raises his hand.
“Learning language, understanding other people’s intentions based on their behavior, um …” He frowns. “And empathy.”
“More specifically,” Jeanine says, and this time she does smile at me, broadly, forcing creases into her cheeks, “someone with many, strong mirror neurons could have a flexible personality — capable of mimicking others as the situation calls for it rather than remaining constant.”
I understand why she smiles. I feel like my mind is cracked open, its secrets spilling over the floor for me to finally see.
“A flexible personality,” she says, “would probably have aptitude for more than one faction, don’t you agree, Ms. Prior?”
“Probably,” I say. “Now if only you could get a simulation to suppress that particular ability, we could be done with this.”
“One thing at a time.” She pauses. “I must admit, it confuses me that you are so eager for your own execution.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I close my eyes. “It doesn’t confuse you at all.” I sigh. “Can I go back to my cell now?”
I must seem nonchalant, but I’m not. I want to go back to my room so that I can cry in peace. But I don’t want her to know that.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” she chirps. “We’ll have a simulation serum to try out soon.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Whatever.”
Someone shakes my shoulder. I jerk awake, my eyes wide and searching, and I see Tobias kneeling over me. He wears a Dauntless traitor jacket, and one side of his head is coated with blood. The blood streams from a wound on his ear — the top of his ear is gone. I wince.
“What happened?” I say.
“Get up. We have to run.”
“It’s too soon. It hasn’t been two weeks.”
“I don’t have time to explain. Come on.”
“Oh God. Tobias.”
I sit up and wrap my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck. His arms tighten around me and squeeze. Warmth courses through me, and comfort. If he is here, that means I’m safe. My tears make his skin slippery.
He stands and pulls me to my feet, which makes my wounded shoulder throb.
“Reinforcements will be here soon. Come on.”
I let him lead me out of the room. We make it down the first hallway without difficulty, but in the second hallway, we encounter two Dauntless guards, one a young man and one a middle-aged woman. Tobias fires twice in a matter of seconds, both hits, one in the head and one in the chest. The woman, who was hit in the chest, slumps against the wall but doesn’t die.
We keep moving. One hallway, then another, all of them look the same. Tobias’s grip on my hand never falters. I know that if he can throw a knife so that it hits just the tip of my ear, he can fire accurately at the Dauntless soldiers who ambush us. We step over fallen bodies — the people Tobias killed on the way in, probably — and finally reach a fire exit.
Tobias lets go of my hand to open the door, and the fire alarm screeches in my ears, but we keep running. I am gasping for air but I don’t care, not when I’m finally escaping, not when this nightmare is finally over. My vision starts to go black at the edges, so I grab Tobias’s arm and hold on tight, trusting him to lead me safely to the bottom of the stairs.
I run out of steps to run down, and I open my eyes. Tobias is about to open the exit door, but I hold him back. “Got to … catch my breath….”
He pauses, and I put my hands on my knees, leaning over. My shoulder still throbs. I frown, and look up at him.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he says insistently.
My stomach sinks. I stare into his eyes. They are dark blue, with a patch of light blue on his right iris.
I take his chin in hand and pull his lips down to mine, kissing him slowly, sighing as I pull back.
“We can’t get out of here,” I say. “Because this is a simulation.”
He pulled me to my feet with my right hand. The real Tobias would have remembered the wound in my shoulder.
“What?” He scowls at me. “Don’t you think I would know if I was under a simulation?”
“You aren’t under a simulation. You are the simulation.” I look up and say in a loud voice, “You’ll have to do better than that, Jeanine.”
All I have to do now is wake up, and I know how — I have done it before, in my fear landscape, when I broke a glass tank just by touching my palm to it, or when I made a gun appear in the grass to shoot descending birds. I take a knife from my pocket — a knife that wasn’t there a moment ago — and will my leg to be hard as diamond.
I thrust the knife toward my thigh, and the blade bends.
I wake with tears in my eyes. I wake to Jeanine’s scream of frustration.
“What is it?” She grabs Peter’s gun out of his hand and stalks across the room, pressing the barrel to my forehead. My body stiffens, goes cold. She won’t shoot me. I am a problem she can’t solve. She won’t shoot me.
“What is it that clues you in? Tell me. Tell me or I will kill you.”
I slowly push myself up from the chair, coming to my feet, pushing my skin harder into the cold barrel.
“You think I’m going to tell you?” I say. “You think I believe that you would kill me without figuring out the answer to this question?”
“You stupid girl,” she says. “You think this is about you, and your abnormal brain? This is not about you. It is not about me. It is about keeping this city safe from the people who intend to plunge it into hell!”
I summon the last of my strength and launch myself at her, clawing at whatever skin my fingernails find, digging in as hard as I can. She screams at the top of her lungs, a sound that turns my blood into fire. I punch her hard in the face.
A pair of arms wrap around me, pulling me off her, and a fist meets my side. I groan,
and lunge toward her, held at bay by Peter.
“Pain can’t make me tell you. Truth serum can’t make me tell you. Simulations can’t make me tell you. I’m immune to all three.”
Her nose is bleeding, and I see lines of fingernail scrapes in her cheeks, on the side of her throat, turning red with blossoming blood. She glares at me, pinching her nose closed, her hair disheveled, her free hand trembling.
“You have failed. You can’t control me!” I scream, so loud it hurts my throat. I stop struggling and sag against Peter’s chest. “You will never be able to control me.”
I laugh, mirthless, a mad laugh. I savor the scowl on her face, the hate in her eyes. She was like a machine; she was cold and emotionless, bound by logic alone. And I broke her.
I broke her.
Chapter 34
ONCE I’M IN the hallway, I stop struggling toward Jeanine. My side throbs from where Peter punched me, but it’s nothing compared to the pulse of triumph in my cheeks.
Peter walks me back to my cell without a word. I stand in the middle of the room for a long time, staring at the camera in the back-left corner. Who is watching me all the time? Is it Dauntless traitors, guarding me, or the Erudite, observing me?
Once the heat leaves my face and my side stops hurting, I lie down.
A picture of my parents floats into my head the moment I close my eyes. Once, when I was about eleven, I stopped at the doorway to my parents’ bedroom to watch them make the bed together. My father smiled at my mother as they pulled the sheets back and smoothed them down in perfect synchronicity. I knew by the way he looked at her that he held her in a higher regard than he held even himself.
No selfishness or insecurity kept him from seeing the full extent of her goodness, as it so often does with the rest of us. That kind of love may only be possible in Abnegation. I do not know.
My father: Erudite-born, Abnegation-grown. He often found it difficult to live up to the demands of his chosen faction, just as I did. But he tried, and he knew true selflessness when he saw it.
I clutch my pillow to my chest and bury my face in it. I don’t cry. I just ache.
Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.
“Stiff.”
I wake with a start, my hands still clutching the pillow. There is a wet patch on the mattress under my face. I sit up, wiping my eyes with my fingertips.
Peter’s eyebrows, which usually turn up in the middle, are furrowed.
“What happened?” Whatever it is, it can’t be good.
“Your execution has been scheduled for tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”
“My execution? But she … she hasn’t developed the right simulation yet; she couldn’t possibly …”
“She said that she will continue the experiments on Tobias instead of you,” he says.
All I can say is: “Oh.”
I clutch the mattress and rock forward and back, forward and back. Tomorrow my life will be over. Tobias may survive long enough to escape in the factionless invasion. The Dauntless will elect a new leader. All the loose ends I will leave will be easily tied up.
I nod. No family left, no loose ends, no great loss.
“I could have forgiven you, you know,” I say. “For trying to kill me during initiation. I probably could have.”
We are both quiet for a while. I don’t know why I told him that. Maybe just because it’s true, and tonight, of all nights, is the time for honesty. Tonight I will be honest, and selfless, and brave. Divergent.
“I never asked you to,” he says, and turns to leave. But then he stops at the door frame and says, “It’s 9:24.”
Telling me the time is a small act of betrayal — and therefore an ordinary act of bravery. It is maybe the first time I’ve seen Peter be truly Dauntless.
I’m going to die tomorrow. It has been a long time since I felt certainty about anything, so this feels like a gift. Tonight, nothing. Tomorrow, whatever comes after life. And Jeanine still doesn’t know how to control the Divergent.
When I start to cry, I clutch the pillow to my chest and let it happen. I cry hard, like a child cries, until my face is hot and I feel like I might be sick. I can pretend to be brave, but I’m not.
I suppose that now would be the time to ask for forgiveness for all the things I’ve done, but I’m sure my list would never be complete. I also don’t believe that whatever comes after life depends on my correctly reciting a list of my transgressions — that sounds too much like an Erudite afterlife to me, all accuracy and no feeling. I don’t believe that what comes after depends on anything I do at all.
I am better off doing as Abnegation taught me: turning away from myself, projecting always outward, and hoping that in whatever is next, I will be better than I am now.
I smile a little. I wish I could tell my parents that I will die like the Abnegation. They would be proud, I think.
Chapter 35
THIS MORNING I put on the clean clothes I am given: black pants — too loose, but who cares? — and a long-sleeved black shirt. No shoes.
It is not time yet. I find myself lacing my fingers together and bowing my head. Sometimes my father did this in the morning before sitting down at the breakfast table, but I never asked him what he was doing. Still, I would like to feel like I belong to my father again before I … well, before it’s over.
A few silent moments later, Peter tells me it’s time to go. He barely looks at me, scowls at the back wall instead. I suppose it would have been too much to ask, to see a friendly face this morning. I stand, and together we walk down the hallway.
My toes are cold. My feet stick to the tiles. We turn a corner, and I hear muffled shouts. At first I can’t tell what the voice is saying, but as we draw closer, it takes shape.
“I want to … her!” Tobias. “I … see her!”
I glance at Peter. “I can’t speak to him one last time, can I?”
Peter shakes his head. “There’s a window, though. Maybe if he sees you he’ll finally shut up.”
He takes me down a dead-end corridor that’s only six feet long. At the end is a door, and Peter is right, there’s a small window near the top, about a foot above my head.
“Tris!” Tobias’s voice is even clearer here. “I want to see her!”
I reach up and press my palm to the glass. The shouts stop, and his face appears behind the glass. His eyes are red; his face, blotchy. Handsome. He stares down at me for a few seconds and then presses his hand to the glass so it lines up with mine. I pretend I can feel the warmth of it through the window.
He leans his forehead against the door and squeezes his eyes shut.
I take my hand down and turn away before he can open his eyes. I feel pain in my chest, worse than when I got shot in the shoulder. I clutch the front of my shirt, blink away tears, and rejoin Peter in the main hallway.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. I meant to say it louder.
“Whatever.” Peter scowls again. “Let’s just go.”
I hear rumbling somewhere ahead of us — the sound of a crowd. The next hallway is packed with Dauntless traitors, tall and short, young and old, armed and unarmed. They all wear the blue armband of betrayal.
“Hey!” Peter shouts. “Clear a path!”
The Dauntless traitors closest to us hear him, and press against the walls to make way for us. The other Dauntless traitors follow suit soon after, and everyone is quiet. Peter steps back to let me go ahead of him. I know the way from here.
I don’t know where the pounding starts, but someone drums their fists against the wall, and someone else joins in, and I walk down the aisle between solemn-but-raucous Dauntless traitors, their hands in motion at their sides. The pounding is so fast my heart races to keep up with it.
Some of the Dauntless traitors incline their heads to me — I’m not sure why. It doesn’t matter.
I reach the end of the hallway and open the door to my execution chamber.
I open it.
D
auntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn’t look at me.
Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down.
The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they’re right, but maybe they’re not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway.
Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing.
And then rising from within me is a single thought:
I don’t want to die.
All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. But no. No, no.
Burning and boiling inside me is the desire to live.
I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I don’t want to!
Jeanine steps forward with a syringe full of purple serum. Her glasses reflect the fluorescent light above us, so I can barely see her eyes.
Every part of my body chants it in unison. Live, live, live. I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.
Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other.
Insurgent d-2 Page 24
