I stare over his left shoulder, at the skyline that gets clearer the closer we get to the city. I search for the two prongs at the top of the Hub, and when I find them, I feel better and worse at the same time—better, because the building is so familiar, and worse, because seeing the prongs means that we are getting closer.
“Yeah,” I say. “So have I.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
BY THE TIME we reach the city, all conversation has halted in the truck, replaced by pressed lips and pale faces. Marcus steers around potholes the size of a person and parts from broken-down buses. The ride is smoother when we get out of factionless territory and into the clean parts of the city.
Then I hear gunshots. From this distance they sound like popping.
For a moment I am disoriented, and all I can see are the leaders of Abnegation on their knees on the pavement and the slack-faced Dauntless with guns in hand; all I can see is my mother turning to embrace the bullets, and Will dropping to the ground. I bite my fist to keep from crying out, and the pain brings me back to the present.
My mother told me to be brave. But if she had known that her death would make me so afraid, would she have sacrificed herself so willingly?
Breaking away from the convoy of trucks, Marcus turns on Madison Avenue and, when we are just two blocks away from Michigan Avenue, where the fighting is, he pulls the truck into an alley and turns off the engine.
Fernando hops out of the truck bed and offers me his arm.
“Come on, Insurgent,” he says with a wink.
“What?” I say. I take his arm and slide down the side of the truck.
He opens the bag he was sitting with. It is full of blue clothes. He sorts through them, tossing garments to Christina and me. I get a bright blue T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans.
“Insurgent,” he says. “Noun. A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as a belligerent.”
“Do you need to give everything a name?” says Cara, running her hands over her dull blond hair to tuck the stray pieces back. “We’re just doing something and it happens to be in a group. No need for a new title.”
“I happen to enjoy categorization,” Fernando replies, arching a dark eyebrow.
I look at Fernando. The last time I broke into a faction’s headquarters, I did it with a gun in my hand, and I left bodies behind me. I want this time to be different. I need this time to be different. “I like it,” I say. “Insurgent. It’s perfect.”
“See?” Fernando says to Cara. “I’m not the only one.”
“Congratulations,” she says wryly.
I stare at my Erudite clothes while the others strip off their outer layers of clothing.
“No time for modesty, Stiff!” Christina says, giving me a pointed look.
I know she’s right, so I pull off the red shirt I was wearing and put on the blue one instead. I glance at Fernando and Marcus to make sure they aren’t watching, and change out of my pants too. I have to roll up the jeans four times, and when I belt them, they bunch at the top like the neck of a crushed paper bag.
“Did she just call you ‘Stiff’?” Fernando says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I transferred into Dauntless from Abnegation.”
“Huh.” He frowns. “That’s quite a shift. That kind of leap in personality between generations is almost genetically impossible these days.”
“Sometimes personality has nothing to do with a person’s choice of faction,” I say, thinking of my mother. She left Dauntless not because she was ill-suited for it but because it was safer to be Divergent in Abnegation. And then there’s Tobias, who switched to Dauntless to escape his father. “There are many factors to consider.”
To escape the man I have made my ally. I feel a twinge of guilt.
“Keep talking like that and they’ll never discover you’re not really Erudite,” Fernando says.
I run a comb through my hair to smooth it down and then tuck it behind my ears.
“Here,” says Cara. She lifts a piece of hair from my face and pins it back with a silver hair clip, the way Erudite girls do.
Christina takes out the guns we brought with us and looks at me.
“Do you want one?” she says. “Or would you rather carry the stunner?”
I stare at the gun in her hand. If I don’t take the stunner, I leave myself completely undefended against people who will gladly shoot me. If I do, I admit to weakness in front of Fernando, Cara, and Marcus.
“You know what Will would say?” says Christina.
“What?” I say, my voice breaking.
“He would tell you to get over it,” she says. “To stop being so irrational and take the stupid gun.”
Will had little patience for the irrational. Christina must be right; she knew him better than I did.
And she—who lost someone dear to her that day, just as I did—was able to forgive me, an act that must have been nearly impossible. It would have been impossible for me, if the situation were reversed. So why is it so difficult for me to forgive myself?
I close my hand around the gun Christina offered me. The metal is warm from where she touched it. I feel the memory of shooting him poking at the back of my mind, and try to stifle it. But it won’t be stifled. I let go of the gun.
“The stunner is a perfectly good option,” Cara says as she plucks a hair from her shirtsleeve. “If you ask me, the Dauntless are too gun-happy anyway.”
Fernando offers me the stunner. I wish I could communicate my gratitude to Cara, but she isn’t looking at me.
“How am I going to conceal this thing?” I say.
“Don’t bother,” Fernando says.
“Right.”
“We’d better go,” says Marcus, glancing at his watch.
My heart beats so hard it marks each second for me, but the rest of me is numb. I can barely feel the ground. I have never been this afraid before, and considering all that I have seen in simulations, and all that I did during the attack simulation, that doesn’t make any sense.
Or maybe it does. Whatever the Abnegation were about to show everyone before the attack, it was enough to make Jeanine take drastic and terrible measures to stop them. And now I am about to finish their work, the work my old faction died for. So much more than my life is at stake now.
Christina and I lead the way. We run down the clean, even sidewalks on Madison Avenue, passing State Street, toward Michigan Avenue.
Half a block from Erudite headquarters, I come to a sudden stop.