Standing in four rows in front of us are a group of people, mostly dressed in black and white, spaced two feet apart, guns held up and ready. I blink and they become simulation-controlled Dauntless in the Abnegation sector, during the simulation attack. Get a grip! Get a grip get a grip get a grip. . . . I blink again and they are the Candor again—though some of them, dressed all in black, do look like Dauntless. If I’m not careful I’ll lose touch with where, and when, I am.
“Oh my God,” Christina says. “My sister, my parents . . . what if they . . .”
She looks at me, and I think I know her thoughts, because I have experienced them before. Where are my parents? I have to find them. But if her parents are like these Candor, simulation controlled and armed, there is nothing she can do for them.
I wonder if Lynn stands in one of these rows, somewhere else.
“What do we do?” Fernando asks.
I step toward the Candor. Maybe they aren’t programmed to shoot. I stare into the glazed eyes of a woman in a white blouse and black slacks. She looks like she just came from work. I take another step.
Bang. By instinct I drop to the ground, covering my head with my arms, and scramble backward, toward Fernando’s shoes. He helps me to my feet.
“How about let’s not do that?” he says.
I lean forward—not too far—and peer into the alley between the building next to us and Erudite headquarters. The Candor are in the alley too. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a dense layer of Candor surrounding the entire complex of Erudite buildings.
“Is there any other way to Erudite headquarters?” I say.
“Not that I know of,” says Cara. “Unless you want to jump from one roof to another.”
She laughs a little as she says it, like it’s a joke. I raise my eyebrows at her.
“Wait,” she says. “You aren’t considering—”
“The roof?” I say. “No. Windows.”
I walk to the left, careful not to advance even an inch toward the Candor. The building on my left overlaps with Erudite headquarters on its far left side. There have to be a few windows that face each other.
Cara mutters something about crazy Dauntless stunts, but runs after me, and Fernando, Marcus, and Christina follow. I try to open the back door of the building, but it’s locked.
Christina steps forward and says, “Stand back.” She points her gun at the lock. I shield my face with an arm as she fires. We hear a loud bang, and then a high ringing, the aftereffects of firing a gun in such a close space. The lock is broken.
I pull the door open and walk inside. A long hallway with a tile floor greets me, doors on either side, some open, some closed. When I look into the open rooms, I see rows of old desks, and chalkboards on the walls like the ones in Dauntless headquarters. The air smells musty, like the pages of a library book mixed with cleaning solution.
“This used to be a commercial building,” says Fernando, “but Erudite converted it into a school, for post-Choosing education. After the major renovations in Erudite headquarters about a decade ago—you know, when all the buildings across from Millennium were connected?—they stopped teaching there. Too old, hard to update.”
“Thanks for the history lesson,” says Christina.
When I reach the end of the hallway, I walk into one of the classrooms to see where I am. I see the back of Erudite headquarters, but there are no windows across the alley at street level.
Right outside the window, so close I could touch her if I stretched my hand through the window, is a Candor child, a girl, holding a gun that is as long as her forearm. She stands so still I wonder if she is even breathing.
I crane my neck to see the windows above street level. Over my head in the school building there are plenty of windows. At the back of Erudite headquarters, there is only one that lines up. And it’s on the third story.
“Good news,” I say. “I found a way across.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EVERYONE SPREADS THROUGHOUT the building in search of janitor’s closets, per my instruction to find a ladder. I hear sneakers squeaking on the tile and shouts of “I found one—no, wait, it’s just got buckets in it, never mind” and “How long does the ladder have to be? A stepladder won’t work, right?”
While they search, I find the third-floor classroom that looks into the Erudite window. It takes me three tries to open the right window.
I lean out, over the alley, and shout, “Hey!” Then I duck as fast as I can. But I don’t hear gunshots—Good, I think. They don’t respond to noise.
Christina marches into the classroom with a ladder under her arm, the others behind her. “Got one! I think it’ll be long enough once we stretch it out.”
She tries to turn too soon, and the ladder smacks into Fernando’s shoulder.
“Oh! Sorry, Nando.”
The jolt knocked his glasses askew. He smiles at Christina and takes the glasses off, shoving them into his pocket.
“Nando?” I say to him. “I thought the Erudite didn’t like nicknames?”
“When a pretty girl calls you by a nickname,” he says, “it is only logical to respond to it.”
Christina looks away, and at first I think she is bashful, but then I see her face contort like he slapped her instead of complimented her. It is too soon after Will’s death for her to be flirted with.
I help her guide the end of the ladder through the classroom window and across the gap between buildings. Marcus helps us steady it. Fernando whoops when the ladder hits the Erudite window across the alley.
“Time to break the glass,” I say.
Fernando takes the glass-breaking device from his pocket and offers it to me. “You probably have the best aim.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” I say. “My right arm is out of commission. I’d have to throw with my left.”
“I’ll do it,” says Christina.
She presses the button on the side of the device and tosses it across the alley, underhand. I clench my hands as I wait for it to land. It bounces onto the windowsill and rolls into the glass. An orange light flashes, and all at once the window—and the windows above, below, and next to it—shatters into hundreds of tiny pebbles that shower over the Candor below.
At the same time, the Candor twist and fire up into the sky. Everyone else drops to the ground, but I stay on my feet, part of me marveling at the perfect synchronicity of it, and the other part disgusted at how Jeanine Matthews has turned yet another faction from human beings into parts of a machine. None of the bullets even hit the classroom windows, let alone penetrate the room.