I smile a little. I shouldn’t, but it’s harder to suppress gestures and expressions than words, with this weight in my veins. She believes that Tobias belongs to her now. She doesn’t know the truth, that he belongs to himself.
Evelyn straightens, folding her arms.
“The truth serum has revealed that while you may be a fool, you are no traitor. This interrogation is over. You may leave.”
“What about my friends?” I say sluggishly. “Christina, Cara. They didn’t do anything wrong either.”
“We will deal with them soon,” Evelyn says.
I stand, though I’m weak and dizzy from the serum. The room is packed with people, shoulder to shoulder, and I can’t find the exit for a few long seconds, until someone takes my arm, a boy with warm brown skin and a wide smile—Uriah. He guides me to the door. Everyone starts talking.
Uriah leads me down the hallway to the elevator bank. The elevator doors spring open when he touches the button, and I follow him in, still not steady on my feet. When the doors close, I say, “You don’t think the part about the mess and the throne was too much?”
“No. She expects you to be hotheaded. She might have been suspicious if you hadn’t been.”
I feel like everything inside me is vibrating with energy, in anticipation of what is to come. I am free. We’re going to find a way out of the city. No more waiting, pacing a cell, demanding answers that I won’t get from the guards.
The guards did tell me a few things about the new factionless order this morning. Former faction members are required to move closer to Erudite headquarters and mix, no more than four members of a particular faction in each dwelling. We have to mix our clothing, too. I was given a yellow Amity shirt and black Candor pants earlier as a result of that particular edict.
“All right, we’re this way. . . .” Uriah leads me out of the elevator. This floor of Erudite headquarters is all glass, even the walls. Sunlight refracts through it and casts slivers of rainbows across the floor. I shield my eyes with one hand and follow Uriah to a long, narrow room with beds on either side. Next to each bed is a glass cabinet for clothes and books, and a small table.
“It used to be the Erudite initiate dormitory,” Uriah says. “I reserved beds for Christina and Cara already.”
Sitting on a bed near the door are three girls in red shirts—Amity girls, I would guess—and on the left side of the room, an older woman lies on one of the beds, her spectacles dangling from one ear—possibly one of the Erudite. I know I should try to stop putting people in factions when I see them, but it’s an old habit, hard to break.
Uriah falls on one of the beds in the back corner. I sit on the one next to his, glad to be free and at rest, finally.
“Zeke says it sometimes takes a little while for the factionless to process exonerations, so they should be out later,” Uriah says.
For a moment I feel relieved that everyone I care about will be out of prison by tonight. But then I remember that Caleb is still there, because he was a well-known lackey of Jeanine Matthews, and the factionless will never exonerate him. But just how far they will go to destroy the mark Jeanine Matthews left on this city, I don’t know.
I don’t care, I think. But even as I think it, I know it’s a lie. He’s still my brother.
“Good,” I say. “Thanks, Uriah.”
He nods, and leans his head against the wall to prop it up.
“How are you?” I say. “I mean . . . Lynn . . .”
Uriah had been friends with Lynn and Marlene as long as I’d known them, and now both of them are dead. I feel like I might be able to understand—after all, I’ve lost two friends too, Al to the pressures of initiation and Will to the attack simulation and my own hasty actions. But I don’t want to pretend that our suffering is the same. For one thing, Uriah knew his friends better than I did.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Uriah shakes his head. “Or think about it. I just want to keep moving.”
“Okay. I understand. Just . . . let me know if you need . . .”
“Yeah.” He smiles at me and gets up. “You’re okay here, right? I told my mom I’d visit tonight, so I have to go soon. Oh—almost forgot to tell you—Four said he wants to meet you later.”
I pull up straighter. “Really? When? Where?”
“A little after ten, at Millennium Park. On the lawn.” He smirks. “Don’t get too excited, your head will explode.”
Chapter four
MY MOTHER ALWAYS sits on the edges of things—chairs, ledges, tables—as if she suspects she will have to flee in an instant. This time it’s Jeanine’s old desk in Erudite headquarters that she sits on the edge of, her toes balanced on the floor and the cloudy light of the city glowing behind her. She is a woman of muscle twisted around bone.
“I think we have to talk about your loyalty,” she says, but she doesn’t sound like she’s accusing me of something, she just sounds tired. For a moment she seems so worn that I feel like I can see right through her, but then she straightens, and the feeling is gone.
“Ultimately, it was you who helped Tris and got that video released,” she says. “No one else knows that, but I know it.”
“Listen.” I lean forward to prop my elbows on my knees. “I didn’t know what was in that file. I trusted Tris’s judgment more than my own. That’s all that happened.”
I thought telling Evelyn that I broke up with Tris would make it easier for my mother to trust me, and I was right—she has been warmer, more open, ever since I told that lie.
“And now that you’ve seen the footage?” Evelyn says. “What do you think now? Do you think we should leave the city?”
I know what she wants me to say—that I see no reason to join the outside world—but I’m not a good liar, so instead I select a part of the truth.
“I’m afraid of it,” I say. “I’m not sure it’s smart to leave the city knowing the dangers that might be out there.”
She considers me for a moment, biting the inside of her cheek. I learned that habit from her—I used to chew my skin raw as I waited for my father to come home, unsure which version of him I would encounter, the one the Abnegation trusted and revered, or the one whose hands struck me.
I run my tongue along the bite scars and swallow the memory like it’s bile.
She slides off the desk and moves to the window. “I’ve been receiving disturbing reports of a rebel organization among us.” She looks up, raising an eyebrow. “People always organize into groups. That’s a fact of our existence. I just didn’t expect it to happen this quickly.”
“What kind of organization?”
“The kind that wants to leave the city,” she says. “They released some kind of manifesto this morning. They call themselves the Allegiant.” When she sees my confused look, she adds, “Because they’re allied with the original purpose of our city, see?”
“The original purpose—you mean, what was in the Edith Prior video? That we should send people outside when the city has a large Divergent population?”
“That, yes. But also living in factions. The Allegiant claim that we’re meant to be in factions because we’ve been in them since the beginning.” She shakes her head. “Some people will always fear change. But we can’t indulge them.”
With the factions dismantled, part of me has felt like a man released from a long imprisonment. I don’t have to evaluate whether every thought I have or choice I make fits into a narrow ideology. I don’t want the factions back.