“Divergent?” one of them finally asks as the man behind the desk picks up the receiver of the building’s communication system.
If I close my hands into fists, I can stop them from shaking. I nod.
My eyes shift to the Dauntless coming out of the elevator on the left side of the room, and the muscles in my face go slack. Peter is coming toward us.
A thousand potential reactions, ranging from launching myself at Peter’s throat to crying to making some kind of joke, rush through my mind at once. I can’t decide on one. So I stand still and watch him. Jeanine must have known that I would come, she must have chosen Peter on purpose to collect me, she must have.
“We’ve been instructed to take you upstairs,” says Peter.
I mean to say something sharp, or nonchalant, but the only sound that escapes me is an assenting noise, squeezed tight by my swollen throat. Peter starts toward the elevators, and I follow him.
We walk down a series of sleek corridors. Despite the fact that we climb a few flights of stairs, I still feel like I am plunging into the earth.
I expect them to take me to Jeanine, but they don’t. They stop walking in a short hallway with a series of metal doors on each side. Peter types in a code to open one of the doors, and the traitor Dauntless surround me, shoulder to shoulder, forming a narrow tunnel for me to pass through on my way into the room.
The room is small, maybe six feet long by six feet wide. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling are all made of the same light panels, dim now, that glowed in the aptitude test room. In each corner is a tiny black camera.
I finally let myself panic.
I look from corner to corner, at the cameras, and fight the scream building in my stomach, chest, and throat, the scream that fills every part of me. Again I feel guilt and grief clawing inside me, warring with each other for dominance, but terror is stronger than both. I breathe in, and don’t breathe out. My father once told me it was a cure for hiccups. I asked him if I could die from holding my breath.
“No,” he said. “Your body’s instincts will take over, and force you to breathe.”
A shame, really. I could use a way out. The thought makes me want to laugh. And then scream.
I curl up so I can press my face to my knees. I have to make a plan. If I can make a plan, I won’t be so afraid.
But there is no plan. No escape from deep in Erudite headquarters, no escape from Jeanine, and no other escape from what I’ve done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I FORGOT MY watch.
Minutes or hours later, when the panic subsides, that is what I most regret. Not coming here in the first place—that seemed like an obvious choice—but my bare wrist, which makes it impossible for me to know how long I have been sitting in this room. My back aches, which is some indication, but it is not definite enough.
After a while I get up and pace, stretching my arms above my head. I hesitate to do anything while the cameras are there, but they can’t learn anything by watching me touch my toes.
The thought makes my hands tremble, but I don’t try to push it from my mind. Instead I tell myself that I am Dauntless and I am no stranger to fear. I will die in this place. Perhaps soon. Those are the facts.
But there are other ways to think of it. Soon I will honor my parents by dying as they died. And if all they believed about death was true, soon I will join them in whatever comes next.
I shake my hands as I pace. They’re still trembling. I want to know what time it is. I arrived a little after midnight. It must be early in the morning by now, maybe 4:00, or 5:00. Or maybe it hasn’t been that long, and only seems that way because I haven’t been doing anything.
The door opens, and at last I stand face-to-face with my enemy and her Dauntless guards.
“Hello, Beatrice,” Jeanine says. She wears Erudite blue and Erudite spectacles and an Erudite look of superiority that I was taught by my father to hate. “I thought you might be the one who came.”
But I don’t feel hate when I look at her. I don’t feel anything at all, even though I know she’s responsible for countless deaths, including Marlene’s. The deaths exist in my mind as a string of meaningless equations, and I stand frozen, unable to solve them.
“Hello, Jeanine,” I say, because it is the only thing that comes to mind.
I look from Jeanine’s watery gray eyes to the Dauntless who flank her. Peter stands at her right shoulder, and a woman with lines on either side of her mouth stands at her left. Behind her is a bald man with sharp planes in his skull. I frown.
How does Peter find himself in such a prestigious position, as Jeanine Matthews’s bodyguard? Where is the logic in that?
“I’d like to know what time it is,” I say.
“Would you,” she says. “That’s interesting.”
I should have known she wouldn’t tell me. Every piece of information she receives factors into her strategy, and she won’t tell me what time it is unless she decides that providing the information is more useful than withholding it.
“I’m sure my Dauntless companions are disappointed,” she says, “that you have not tried to claw my eyes out yet.”
“That would be stupid.”
“True. But in keeping with your ‘act first, think second’ behavioral trend.”
“I’m sixteen.” I purse my lips. “I change.”
“How refreshing.” She has a way of flattening even those phrases that should have inflection built into them. “Let’s go on a little tour, shall we?”
She steps back and gestures toward the doorway. The last thing I want to do is walk out of this room and toward an uncertain destination, but I don’t hesitate. I walk out, the severe-looking Dauntless woman in front of me. Peter follows me soon afterward.
The hallway is long and pale. We turn a corner and walk down a second one exactly like the first.
Two more hallways follow. I am so disoriented I could never find my way back. But then my surroundings change—the white tunnel opens to a large room where Erudite men and women in long blue jackets stand behind tables, some holding tools, some mixing multicolored liquids, some staring at computer screens. If I had to guess, I would say they are mixing simulation serum, but I hesitate to confine Erudite’s work to simulations alone.
Most of them stop to watch us as we walk down the center aisle. Or rather, they watch me. Some of them whisper, but most remain silent. It is so quiet here.
I follow the Dauntless traitor woman through a doorway, and stop so abruptly Peter runs into me.