I shake my head, still struggling for air, and crush him against the wall with my body, my lips finding his. For a moment he tries to push me away, but then he must decide that he doesn’t care if I’m all right, doesn’t care if he’s all right, doesn’t care. We haven’t been alone together in days. Weeks. Months.
His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep, for the rest of my life.
He leans down and kisses my throat, hard, and his hands smooth over me, securing themselves at my waist. I hook my fingers in his belt loops, my eyes closing. In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.
I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart. Someone—probably Uriah—whistles, but I barely hear it over the pulsing in my ears.
Tobias’s eyes meet mine, and it’s like the first time I really looked at him during my initiation, after my fear simulation; we stare too long, too intently. “Shut up,” I call out to Uriah, without looking away.
Uriah and Christina walk into the dormitory, and Tobias and I follow them, like nothing happened.
Chapter twenty-three
THAT NIGHT WHEN my head hits the pillow, heavy with thoughts, I hear something crinkle beneath my cheek. A note under my pillowcase.
T—
Meet me outside the hotel entrance at eleven. I need to talk to you.
—Nita
I look at Tris’s cot. She’s sprawled on her back, and there is a piece of hair covering her nose and mouth that shifts with each exhale. I don’t want to wake her, but I feel strange, going to meet a girl in the middle of the night without telling her about it. Especially now that we’re trying so hard to be honest with each other.
I check my watch. It’s ten to eleven.
Nita’s just a friend. You can tell Tris tomorrow. It might be urgent.
I push the blankets back and shove my feet into my shoes—I sleep in my clothes these days. I pass Peter’s cot, then Uriah’s. The top of a flask peeks out from beneath Uriah’s pillow. I pinch it between my fingers and carry it toward the door, where I slide it under the pillow on one of the empty cots. I haven’t been looking after him as well as I promised Zeke I would.
Once I’m in the hallway, I tie my shoes and smooth my hair down. I stopped cutting it like the Abnegation when I wanted the Dauntless to see me as a potential leader, but I miss the ritual of the old way, the buzz of the clippers and the careful movements of my hands, knowing more by touch than by sight. When I was young, my father used to do it, in the hallway on the top floor of our Abnegation house. He was always too careless with the blade, and scraped the back of my neck, or nicked my ear. But he never complained about having to cut my hair for me. That’s something, I guess.
Nita is tapping her foot. This time she wears a white short-sleeved shirt, her hair pulled back. She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
“You look worried,” I say.
“That’s because I am,” she answers. “Come on, there’s a place I’ve been wanting to show you.”
She leads me down dim hallways, empty except for the occasional janitor. They all seem to know Nita—they wave at her, or smile. She puts her hands in her pockets, guiding her eyes carefully away from mine every time we happen to look at each other.
We go through a door without a security sensor to keep it locked. The room beyond it is a wide circle with a chandelier marking its center with dangling glass. The floors are polished wood, dark, and the walls, covered in sheets of bronze, gleam where the light touches them. There are names inscribed on the bronze panels, dozens of names.
Nita stands beneath the glass chandelier and holds her arms out, wide, to encompass the room in her gesture.
“These are the Chicago family trees,” she says. “Your family trees.”
I move closer to one of the walls and read through the names, searching for one that looks familiar. At the end, I find one: Uriah Pedrad and Ezekiel Pedrad. Next to each name is a small “DD,” and there is a dot next to Uriah’s name, and it looks freshly carved. Marking him as Divergent, probably.
“Do you know where mine is?” I say.
She crosses the room and touches one of the panels. “The generations are matrilineal. That’s why Jeanine’s records said Tris was ‘second generation’—because her mother came from outside the city. I’m not sure how Jeanine knew that, but I guess we’ll never find out.”
I approach the panel that bears my name with trepidation, though I’m not sure what I have to fear from seeing my name and my parents’ names carved into bronze. I see a vertical line connecting Kristin Johnson to Evelyn Johnson, and a horizontal one connecting Evelyn Johnson to Marcus Eaton. Below the two names is just one: Tobias Eaton. The small letters beside my name are “AD,” and there’s a dot there too, though I now know I’m not actually Divergent.
“The first letter is your faction of origin,” she says, “and the second is your faction of choice. They thought that keeping track of the factions would help them trace the path of the genes.”
My mother’s letters: “EAF.” The “F” is for “factionless,” I assume.
My father’s letters: “AA,” with a dot.
I touch the line connecting me to them, and the line connecting Evelyn to her parents, and the line connecting them to their parents, all the way back through eight generations, counting my own. This is a map of what I’ve always known, that I am tied to them, bound forever to this empty inheritance no matter how far I run.
“While I appreciate you showing me this,” I say, and I feel sad, and tired, “I’m not sure why it had to happen in the middle of the night.”
“I thought you might want to see it. And I had something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“More reassurance that my limitations don’t define me?” I shake my head. “No thanks, I’ve had enough of that.”
“No,” she says. “But I’m glad you said that.”
She leans against the panel, covering Evelyn’s name with her shoulder. I step back, not wanting to be so close to her that I can see the ring of lighter brown around her pupils.
“That conversation I had with you last night, about genetic damage . . . it was actually a test. I wanted to see how you would react to what I said about damaged genes, so I would know whether I could trust you or not,” she says. “If you accepted what I said about your limitations, the answer would have been no.” She slides a little closer to me, so her shoulder covers Marcus’s name too. “See, I’m not really on board with being classified as ‘damaged.’”
I think of the way she spat out the explanation of the tattoo of broken glass on her back like it was poison.
My heart starts to beat harder, so I can feel my pulse in my throat. Bitterness has replaced the good humor in her voice, and her eyes have lost their warmth. I am afraid of her, afraid of what she says—and thrilled by it too, because it means I don’t have to accept that I am smaller than I once believed.
“I take it you aren’t on board with it either,” she says.
“No. I’m not.”
“There are a lot of secrets in this place,” she says. “One of them is that, to them, a GD is expendable. Another is that some of us are not just going to sit back and take it.”
“What do you mean, expendable?” I say.