He nods again.
My next breath shakes on the way out of my mouth. “This is really bad, Tobias.”
In the hallway outside the interrogation room, he stops, leaning against the wall.
“So you attacked Eric,” he says. “Was that during the invasion? Or when you were by the elevators?”
“By the elevators,” I say.
“One thing I don’t understand,” he says. “You were downstairs. You could have just run away. But instead, you decided to dive into a crowd of armed Dauntless all by yourself. And I’m willing to bet you weren’t carrying a gun.”
I press my lips together.
“Is that true?” he demands.
“What makes you think I didn’t have a gun?” I scowl.
“You haven’t been able to touch a gun since the attack,” he says. “I understand why, with the whole Will thing, but—”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“No?” He lifts his eyebrows.
“I did what I had to do.”
“Yeah. But now you should be done,” he says, pulling away from the wall to face me. Candor hallways are wide, wide enough for all the space I want to keep between us. “You should have stayed with the Amity. You should have stayed far away from all of this.”
“No, I shouldn’t have,” I say. “You think you know what’s best for me? You have no idea. I was going crazy with the Amity. Here I finally feel . . . sane again.”
“Which is odd, considering you are acting like a psychopath,” he says. “It’s not brave, choosing the position you were in yesterday. It’s beyond stupid—it’s suicidal. Don’t you have any regard for your own life?”
“Of course I do!” I retort. “I was trying to do something useful!”
For a few seconds he just stares at me.
“You’re more than Dauntless,” he says in a low voice. “But if you want to be just like them, hurling yourself into ridiculous situations for no reason and retaliating against your enemies without any regard for what’s ethical, go right ahead. I thought you were better than that, but maybe I was wrong!”
I clench my hands, my jaw.
“You shouldn’t insult the Dauntless,” I say. “They took you in when you had nowhere else to go. Trusted you with a good job. Gave you all your friends.”
I lean against the wall, my eyes on the floor. The tiles in the Merciless Mart are always black and white, and here they are in a checkered pattern. If I unfocus my eyes, I see exactly what the Candor don’t believe in—gray. Maybe Tobias and I don’t believe in it either. Not really.
I weigh too much, more than my frame can support, so much I should fall right through the floor.
“Tris.”
I keep staring.
“Tris.”
I finally look at him.
“I just don’t want to lose you.”
We stand there for a few minutes. I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that he might be right. There is a part of me that wants to be lost, that struggles to join my parents and Will so that I don’t have to ache for them anymore. A part of me that wants to see whatever comes next.
“So you’re her brother?” says Lynn. “I guess we know who got the good genes.”
I laugh at the expression on Caleb’s face, his mouth drawn into a slight pucker and his eyes wide.
“When do you have to get back?” I say, nudging him with my elbow.
I bite into the sandwich Caleb got me from the cafeteria line. I am nervous to have him here, mixing the sad remains of my family life with the sad remains of my Dauntless life. What will he think of my friends, my faction? What will my faction think of him?
“Soon,” he says. “I don’t want anyone to worry.”
“I didn’t realize Susan had changed her name to ‘Anyone,’” I say, raising an eyebrow.
“Ha-ha,” he says, making a face at me.
Teasing between siblings should feel familiar, but it doesn’t for us. Abnegation discouraged anything that might make someone feel uncomfortable, and teasing was included.
I can feel how cautious we are with each other, now that we’re discovering a different way to relate in light of our new factions and our parents’ deaths. Every time I look at him, I realize that he’s the only family I have left and I feel desperate, desperate to keep him around, desperate to narrow the gap between us.
“Is Susan another Erudite defector?” says Lynn, stabbing a string bean with her fork. Uriah and Tobias are still in the lunch line, waiting behind two dozen Candor who are too busy bickering to get their food.
“No, she was our neighbor when we were kids. She’s Abnegation,” I say.
“And you’re involved with her?” she asks Caleb. “Don’t you think that’s kind of a stupid move? I mean, when all this is over, you’ll be in different factions, living in completely different places. . . .”
“Lynn,” Marlene says, touching her shoulder, “shut up, will you?”
Across the room, something blue catches my attention. Cara just walked in. I put down my sandwich, my appetite gone, and look up at her with my head lowered. She walks to the far corner of the cafeteria, where a few tables of Erudite refugees sit. Most of them have abandoned their blue clothes in favor of black-and-white ones, but they still wear their glasses. I try to focus on Caleb instead—but Caleb is watching the Erudite, too.
“I can’t go back to Erudite any more than they can,” says Caleb. “When this is over, I won’t have a faction.”
For the first time I notice how sad he looks when he talks about the Erudite. I didn’t realize how difficult the decision to leave them must have been for him.
“You could go sit with them,” I say, nodding toward the Erudite refugees.
“I don’t know them.” He shrugs. “I was only there for a month, remember?”
Uriah drops his tray on the table, scowling. “I overheard someone talking about Eric’s interrogation in the lunch line. Apparently he knew almost nothing about Jeanine’s plan.”
“What?” Lynn slaps her fork on the table. “How is that even possible?”
Uriah shrugs, and sits.
“I’m not surprised,” Caleb says.
Everyone stares at him.
“What?” He flushes. “It would be stupid to confide your entire plan to one person. It’s infinitely smarter to give little pieces of it to each person working with you. That way, if someone betrays you, the loss isn’t too great.”