“How do you know she’s telling you the truth?” I say.
“I don’t,” he says. “She promised to show me evidence. Tonight.” He takes my hand. “I’d like you to come.”
“And Nita will be okay with that?”
“I don’t really care.” His fingers slide between mine. “If she really needs my help, she’ll have to figure out how to be okay with it.”
I look at our joined fingers, at the fraying cuff of his gray shirt and the worn knee of his jeans. I don’t want to spend time with Nita and Tobias together, knowing that her supposed genetic damage gives her something in common with him that I will never have. But this is important to him, and I want to know if there’s evidence of the Bureau’s wrongdoing as much as he does.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go. But don’t for a second think that I actually believe she’s not interested in you for more than your genetic code.”
“Well,” he says. “Don’t for a second think I’m interested in anyone but you.”
He puts his hand on the back of my neck and draws my mouth toward his.
The kiss and his words both comfort me, but my unease doesn’t completely disappear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TOBIAS
TRIS AND I meet Nita in the hotel lobby after midnight, among the potted plants with their unfurling flowers, a tame wilderness. When Nita sees Tris at my side, her face tightens like she just tasted something bitter.
“You promised you wouldn’t tell her,” she says, pointing at me. “What happened to protecting her?”
“I changed my mind,” I say.
Tris laughs, harshly. “That’s what you told him, that he would be protecting me? That’s a pretty skillful manipulation. Well done.”
I raise my eyebrows at her. I never thought of it as a manipulation, and that scares me a little. I can usually rely on myself to see a person’s ulterior motives, or to invent them in my mind, but I was so used to my desire to protect Tris, especially after almost losing her, that I didn’t even think twice.
Or I was so used to lying instead of telling difficult truths that I welcomed the chance to deceive her.
“It wasn’t a manipulation, it was the truth.” Nita doesn’t look angry anymore, just tired, her hand sliding over her face and then smoothing back her hair. She isn’t defensive, which means she might be telling the truth. “You could be arrested just for knowing what you know and not reporting it. I thought it would be better to avoid that.”
“Well, too late,” I say. “Tris is coming. Is that a problem?”
“I would rather have both of you than neither of you, and I’m sure that’s the implied ultimatum,” Nita says, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Tris, Nita, and I walk back through the silent, still compound to the laboratories where Nita works. None of us speaks, and I am conscious of every squeak of my shoes, every voice in the distance, every snap of every closing door. I feel like we’re doing something forbidden, though technically we aren’t. Not yet, anyway.
Nita stops by the door to the laboratories and scans her card. We follow her past the gene therapy room where I saw a map of my genetic code, farther into the heart of the compound than I have been yet. It’s dark and grim back here, and clumps of dust dance over the floor when we walk past.
Nita pushes another door open with her shoulder, and we walk into a storage room. Dull metal drawers cover the walls, labeled with paper numbers, the ink worn off with time. In the center of the room is a lab table with a computer and a microscope, and a young man with slicked-back blond hair.
“Tobias, Tris, this is my friend Reggie,” Nita says. “He’s also a GD.”
“Nice to meet you,” Reggie says with a smile. He shakes Tris’s hand, then mine, his grip firm.
“Let’s show them the slides first,” Nita says.
Reggie taps the computer screen and beckons us closer. “Not gonna bite.”
Tris and I exchange a glance, then stand behind Reggie at the table to see the screen. Pictures start flashing on it, one after another. They’re in grayscale and look grainy and distorted—they must be very old. It takes me only a few seconds to realize that they are photographs of suffering: narrow, pinched children with huge eyes, ditches full of bodies, huge mounds of burning papers.
The photographs move so fast, like book pages fluttering in the breeze, that I get only impressions of horrors. Then I turn my face away, unable to look any longer. I feel a deep silence grow inside me.
At first, when I look at Tris, her expression is like still water—like the images we just saw caused no ripples. But then her mouth quivers, and she presses her lips together to disguise it.
“Look at these weapons.” Reggie brings up a photograph with a man in uniform holding a gun and points. “That kind of gun is incredibly old. The guns used in the Purity War were much more advanced. Even the Bureau would agree with that. It’s gotta be from a really old conflict. Which must have been waged by genetically pure people, since genetic manipulation didn’t exist back then.”
“How do you hide a war?” I say.
“People are isolated, starving,” Nita says quietly. “They know only what they’re taught, they see only the information that’s made available to them. And who controls all that? The government.”
“Okay.” Tris’s head bobs, and she’s talking too fast, nervous. “So they’re lying about your—our history. That doesn’t mean they’re the enemy, it just means they’re a group of grossly misinformed people trying to . . . better the world. In an ill-advised way.”
Nita and Reggie glance at each other.
“That’s the thing,” Nita says. “They’re hurting people.”
She puts her hand on the counter and leans into it, leans toward us, and again I see the revolutionary building strength inside her, taking over the parts of her that are young woman and GD and laboratory worker.
“When the Abnegation wanted to reveal the great truth of their world sooner than they were supposed to,” she says slowly, “and Jeanine wanted to stifle them . . . the Bureau was all too happy to provide her with an incredibly advanced simulation serum—the attack simulation that enslaved the minds of the Dauntless, that resulted in the destruction of Abnegation.”
I take a moment to let that sink in.
“That can’t be true,” I say. “Jeanine told me that the highest proportion of Divergent—the genetically pure—in any faction was in Abnegation. You just said the Bureau values the genetically pure enough to send someone in to save them; why would they help Jeanine kill them?”