For the first time the Dauntless’s disregard for age does not seem like an opportunity. It seems like the thing that will condemn me. They will not say, But she’s young; she must have been confused. They will say, She is an adult, and she made her choice.
Of course, I agree with them. I did make my choice. I chose my mother and father, and what they fought for.
Walking down the stairs is easier than going up. We reach the fifth level before I realize that we’re going down to the lobby.
“Give me your gun, Uriah,” says Therese. “Someone needs to be able to shoot potential belligerents, and you can’t do it if you’re keeping her from falling down the stairs.”
Uriah surrenders his gun without question. I frown—Therese already has a gun, so why did it matter for him to give his? But I don’t ask. I am in enough trouble as it is.
We reach the bottom floor and walk past a large meeting room full of people dressed in black and white. I pause for a moment to watch them. Some of them are huddled in small groups, leaning on one another, tears streaking their faces. Others are alone, leaning against walls or sitting in corners, their eyes hollow or staring at something that is far away.
“We had to shoot so many,” Uriah mutters, squeezing my arm. “Just to get into the building, we had to.”
“I know,” I say.
I see Christina’s sister and mother clutched together on the right side of the room. And on the left side, a young man with dark hair that gleams in the fluorescent light—Peter. His hand is on the shoulder of a middle-aged woman I recognize as his mother.
“What is he doing here?” I say.
“Little coward came in the aftermath, after all the work was done,” Uriah says. “I heard his dad’s dead. Looks like his mother’s okay, though.”
Peter looks over his shoulder, and his gaze meets mine, just for a second. In that second I try to summon some pity for the person who saved my life. But while the hatred I once had for him is gone, I still feel nothing.
“What’s the holdup?” demands Therese. “Let’s get going.”
We walk past the meeting room to the main lobby, where I once embraced Caleb. The giant portrait of Jeanine is in pieces on the floor. The smoke that hovers in the air is condensed around the bookshelves, which are burned to cinders. All the computers are in pieces, strewn across the floor.
Sitting in rows in the center of the room are some of the Erudite who didn’t get away, and the Dauntless traitors who survived. I search the faces for anything familiar. I find Caleb near the back, looking dazed. I look away.
“Tris!” I hear. Christina sits near the front, next to Cara, her leg wrapped tightly with fabric. She beckons to me, and I sit down next to her.
“No success?” she says quietly.
I shake my head.
She sighs, and puts her arm around me. The gesture is so comforting I almost start to cry. But Christina and I are not people who cry together; we’re people who fight together. So I hold my tears in.
“I saw your mom and your sister in the next room,” I say.
“Yeah, me too,” she says. “My family is okay.”
“Good,” I say. “How’s your leg?”
“Fine. Cara said it’ll be fine; it’s not bleeding too much. One of the Erudite nurses stuffed some pain meds and antiseptic and gauze into her pockets before they took her down here, so it doesn’t hurt too bad either,” she says. Beside her, Cara is examining another Erudite’s arm. “Where’s Marcus?”
“Dunno,” I say. “We had to split up. He should be down here. Unless they killed him or something.”
“I wouldn’t be that surprised, honestly,” she says.
The room is chaotic for a while—people rushing in and rushing out again, our factionless guards trading places, new people in Erudite blue brought to sit among us—but gradually everything gets quieter, and then I see him: Tobias, walking through the stairwell door.
I bite my lip, hard, and try not to think, try not to dwell on the cold feeling that surrounds my chest and the weight that hangs over my head. He hates me. He does not believe me.
Christina clutches me tighter as he walks past us, without even looking at me. I watch him over my shoulder. He stops next to Caleb, grabs his arm, and wrenches him to his feet. Caleb wriggles for a second, but he is not half as strong as Tobias and can’t break away.
“What?” Caleb says, panicking. “What do you want?”
“I want you to disarm the security system for Jeanine’s laboratory,” says Tobias without looking back. “So that the factionless can access her computer.”
And destroy it, I think, and if possible, my heart becomes even heavier. Tobias and Caleb disappear into the stairwell again.
Christina slumps against me, and I slump against her, so we hold each other up.
“Jeanine activated all the Dauntless transmitters, you know,” Christina says. “One of the factionless groups got ambushed by simulation-controlled Dauntless, coming late from the Abnegation sector about ten minutes ago. I guess the factionless won, though I don’t know how you call shooting a bunch of brain-dead people winning.”
“Yeah.” There isn’t much more to say. She seems to realize that.
“What happened after I got shot?” she says.
I describe the blue hallway with two doors, and the simulation that followed, from the moment I recognized the Dauntless training room to the moment I shot myself. I do not tell her about hallucinating Will.
“Wait,” she says. “It was a simulation? Without a transmitter?”
I frown. I hadn’t bothered to wonder about that. Especially not at the time. “If the laboratory recognizes people, maybe it also knows data about everyone, and can present a corresponding simulated environment depending on your faction.”
It doesn’t matter, now, to figure out how Jeanine set up the security on her laboratory, of all things. But it feels good to put myself to some use, to think of a new problem to solve now that I have failed to solve the most important one.
Christina sits up straighter. Maybe she feels the same way.
“Or the poison somehow contains a transmitter.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“But how did Tori get past it? She’s not Divergent.”
I tilt my head. “I don’t know.”
Maybe she is, I think. Her brother was, and after what happened to him, she might never admit it, no matter how accepted it becomes.