He opens his mouth to interject, but I hold up a hand to stop him.
“If we stay together, I’ll have to forgive you over and over again, and if you’re still in this, you’ll have to forgive me over and over again too,” I say. “So forgiveness isn’t the point. What I really should have been trying to figure out is whether we were still good for each other or not.”
All the way home I thought about what Amar said, about every relationship having its problems. I thought about my parents, who argued more often than any other Abnegation parents I knew, who nonetheless went through each day together until they died.
Then I thought of how strong I have become, how secure I feel with the person I now am, and how all along the way he has told me that I am brave, I am respected, I am loved and worth loving.
“And?” he says, his voice and his eyes and his hands a little unsteady.
“And,” I say, “I think you’re still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me.”
“I am,” he says roughly.
And I kiss him.
His arms slip around me and hold me tight, lifting me onto the tips of my toes. I bury my face in his shoulder and close my eyes, just breathing in the clean smell of him, the smell of wind.
I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that’s true of beginnings, but it’s not true of this, now.
I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
TRIS
I ARRIVE AT David’s office for my first council meeting just as my watch shifts to ten, and he pushes himself into the hallway soon afterward. He looks even paler than he did the last time I saw him, and the dark circles under his eyes are pronounced, like bruises.
“Hello, Tris,” he says. “Eager, are you? You’re right on time.”
I still feel a little weight in my limbs from the truth serum Cara, Caleb, and Matthew tested on me earlier, as part of our plan. They’re trying to develop a powerful truth serum, one that even GPs as serum-resistant as I am are not immune to. I ignore the heavy feeling and say, “Of course I’m eager. It’s my first meeting. Want help? You look tired.”
“Fine, fine.”
I move behind him and press into the handles of the wheelchair to get it moving.
He sighs. “I suppose I am tired. I was up all night dealing with our most recent crisis. Take a left here.”
“What crisis is that?”
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough, let’s not rush it.”
We maneuver through the dim hallways of Terminal 5, as it is labeled—“an old name,” David says—which have no windows, no hint of the world outside. I can almost feel the paranoia emanating from the walls, like the terminal itself is terrified of unfamiliar eyes. If only they knew what my eyes were searching for.
As I walk, I get a glimpse of David’s hands, pressed to the armrests. The skin around his fingernails is raw and red, like he chewed it away overnight. The fingernails themselves are jagged. I remember when my own hands looked that way, when the memories of fear simulations crept into every dream and every idle thought. Maybe it’s David’s memories of the attack that are doing this to him.
I don’t care, I think. Remember what he did. What he would do again.
“Here we are,” David says. I push him through a set of double doors, propped open with doorstops. Most of the council members seem to be there, stirring tiny sticks in tiny cups of coffee, the majority of them men and women David’s age. There are some younger members—Zoe is there, and she gives me a strained, but polite, smile when I walk in.
“Let’s come to order!” David says as he wheels himself to the head of the conference table. I sit in one of the chairs along the edge of the room, next to Zoe. It’s clear we’re not supposed to be at the table with all the important people, and I’m okay with that—it’ll be easier to doze off if things get boring, though if this new crisis is serious enough to keep David awake at night, I doubt it will.
“Last night I received a frantic call from the people in our control room,” David says. “Evidently Chicago is about to erupt into violence again. Faction loyalists calling themselves the Allegiant have rebelled against factionless control, attacking weapons safe houses. What they don’t know is that Evelyn Johnson has discovered a new weapon—stores of death serum kept hidden in Erudite headquarters. As we know, no one is capable of resisting death serum, not even the Divergent. If the Allegiant attack the factionless government, and Evelyn Johnson retaliates, the casualties will obviously be catastrophic.”
I stare at the floor in front of my feet as the room bursts into conversation.
“Quiet,” says David. “The experiments are already in danger of being shut down if we cannot prove to our superiors that we are capable of controlling them. Another revolution in Chicago would only cement their belief that this endeavor has outlived its usefulness—something we cannot allow to happen if we want to continue to fight genetic damage.”
Somewhere behind David’s exhausted, haggard expression is something harder, stronger. I believe him. I believe that he will not allow it to happen.
“It’s time to use the memory serum virus for a mass reset,” he says. “And I think we should use it against all four experiments.”
“Reset them?” I say, because I can’t help myself. Everyone in the room looks at me at once. They seem to have forgotten that I, a former member of the experiments they’re referring to, am in the room.
“‘Resetting’ is our word for widespread memory erasure,” David says. “It is what we do when the experiments that incorporate behavioral modification are in danger of falling apart. We did it when we first created each experiment that had a behavioral modification component, and the last one in Chicago was done a few generations before yours.” He gives me an odd smile. “Why did you think there was so much physical devastation in the factionless sector? There was an uprising, and we had to quell it as cleanly as possible.”
I sit stunned in my chair, picturing the broken roads and shattered windows and toppled streetlights in the factionless sector of the city, the destruction that is evident nowhere else—not even north of the bridge, where the buildings are empty but seem to have been vacated peacefully. I always just took the broken-down sectors of Chicago in stride, as evidence of what happens when people are without community. I never dreamed that they were the result of an uprising—and a subsequent resetting.