“Yeah right, you are!” says Christina.
“Well, I don’t want to go to battle with a bunch of factionless,” he says, his green eyes glinting. “So I’m going to stay here.”
“Like a coward,” says Christina, her lip curled in disgust. “Let everyone else clean up the mess for you.”
“Yep!” he says with a kind of malicious cheer. He claps his hands. “Have fun dying.”
He crosses the street, whistling, and walks in the other direction.
“Well, we distracted him,” she says. “He didn’t ask where we were going again.”
“Yeah. Good.” I clear my throat. “So, this plan. It’s kind of stupid, right?”
“It’s not . . . stupid.”
“Oh, come on. Trusting Marcus is stupid. Trying to get past the Dauntless at the fence is stupid. Going against the Dauntless and factionless is stupid. All three combined is . . . a different kind of stupid formerly unheard of by humankind.”
“Unfortunately it’s also the best plan we have,” she points out. “If we want everyone to know the truth.”
I trusted Christina to take up this mission when I thought I would die, so it seemed stupid not to trust her now. I was worried she wouldn’t want to come with me, but I forgot where Christina came from: Candor, where the pursuit of truth is more important than anything else. She may be Dauntless now, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s that we never leave our old factions behind.
“So this is where you grew up. Did you like it here?” She frowns. “I guess you couldn’t have, if you wanted to leave.”
The sun inches toward the horizon as we walk. I never used to like evening light because it made everything in the Abnegation sector look more monochromatic than it already is, but now I find the unchanging gray comforting.
“I liked some things and hated some things,” I say. “And there were some things I didn’t know I had until I lost them.”
We reach Abnegation headquarters, and its face is just a cement square like everything else in the Abnegation sector. I would love to walk into the meeting room and breathe the smell of old wood, but we don’t have time. We slip into the alley next to the building and walk to the back, where Marcus told me he would be waiting.
A powder-blue pickup truck waits there, its engine running. Marcus is behind the wheel. I let Christina walk ahead of me so that she can be the one to slide into the middle. I don’t want to sit close to him if I can help it. I feel like hating him while I work with him lessens my betrayal of Tobias somehow.
You have no other choice, I tell myself. There is no other way.
With that in mind, I pull the door shut and look for a seat belt to buckle. I find only the frayed end of a seat belt and a broken buckle.
“Where did you find this piece of junk?” says Christina.
“I stole it from the factionless. They fix them up. It wasn’t easy to get it to start. Better ditch those jackets, girls.”
I ball up our jackets and toss them out the half-open window. Marcus shifts the truck into drive, and it groans. I half expect it to stay still when he presses the gas pedal, but it moves.
From what I remember, it takes about an hour to drive from the Abnegation sector to Amity headquarters, and the trip requires a skilled driver. Marcus pulls onto one of the main thoroughfares and pushes his foot into the gas pedal. We lurch forward, narrowly avoiding a gaping hole in the road. I grab the dashboard to steady myself.
“Relax, Beatrice,” says Marcus. “I’ve driven a car before.”
“I’ve done a lot of things before, but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at them!”
Marcus smiles and jerks the truck to the left so that we don’t hit a fallen stoplight. Christina whoops as we bump over another piece of debris, like she’s having the time of her life.
“A different kind of stupid, right?” she says, her voice loud enough to be heard over the rush of wind through the cab.
I clutch the seat beneath me and try not to think of what I ate for dinner.
When we reach the fence, we see the Dauntless standing in our headlight beams, blocking the gate. Their blue armbands stand out against the rest of their clothing. I try to keep my expression pleasant. I will not be able to fool them into thinking I’m Amity with a scowl on my face.
A dark-skinned man with a gun in hand approaches Marcus’s window. He shines a flashlight at Marcus first, then Christina, then me. I squint into the beam, and force a smile at the man like I don’t mind bright lights in the eyes and guns pointed at my head in the slightest.
The Amity must be deranged if this is how they really think. Or they’ve been eating too much of that bread.
“So tell me,” the man says. “What’s an Abnegation member doing in a truck with two Amity?”
“These two girls volunteered to bring provisions to the city,” Marcus says, “and I volunteered to escort them so that they would be safe.”
“Also, we don’t know how to drive,” says Christina, grinning. “My dad tried to teach me years ago but I kept confusing the gas pedal for the brake pedal, and you can imagine what a disaster that was! Anyway, it was really nice of Joshua to volunteer to take us, because it would have taken us forever otherwise, and the boxes were so heavy—”
The Dauntless man holds up his hand. “Okay, I get it.”
“Oh, of course. Sorry.” Christina giggles. “I just thought I would explain, because you seemed so confused, and no wonder, because how many times do you encounter this—”
“Right,” the man says. “And do you intend to return to the city?”
“Not anytime soon,” Marcus says.
“All right. Go ahead, then.” He nods to the other Dauntless by the gate. One of them types a series of numbers on the keypad, and the gate slides open to admit us. Marcus nods to the guard who let us through and drives over the worn path to Amity headquarters. The truck’s headlights catch tire tracks and prairie grass and insects weaving back and forth. In the darkness to my right I see fireflies lighting up to a rhythm that is like a heartbeat.
After a few seconds, Marcus glances at Christina. “What on earth was that?”
“There’s nothing the Dauntless hate more than cheerful Amity babble,” says Christina, lifting a shoulder. “I figured if he got annoyed it would distract him and he would let us through.”