“Ah,” he says. “Can I see the picture?”
I take it out of my pocket and offer it to him. He smooths it down with his fingertips, and there is a strange smile on his face as he looks at it, like he’s caressing it with his eyes. I shift my weight from one foot to the other—I feel like I’m intruding on a private moment.
“She took a trip back to us once,” he says. “Before she settled into motherhood. That’s when we took this.”
“Back to you?” I say. “Was she one of you?”
“Yes,” David says simply, like it’s not a word that changes my entire world. “She came from this place. We sent her into the city when she was young to resolve a problem in the experiment.”
“So she knew,” I say, and my voice shakes, but I don’t know why. “She knew about this place, and what was outside the fence.”
David looks puzzled, his bushy eyebrows furrowed. “Well, of course.”
The shaking moves down my arms and into my hands, and soon my entire body is shuddering, as if rejecting some kind of poison that I’ve swallowed, and the poison is knowledge, the knowledge of this place and its screens and all the lies I built my life on. “She knew you were watching us at every moment . . . watching as she died and my father died and everyone started killing each other! And did you send in someone to help her, to help me? No! No, all you did was take notes.”
“Tris . . .”
He tries to reach for me, and I push his hand away. “Don’t call me that. You shouldn’t know that name. You shouldn’t know anything about us.”
Shivering, I walk back into the room.
Back inside, the others have picked their beds and put their things down. It’s just us in here, no intruders. I lean against the wall by the door and push my palms down the front of my pants to get the sweat off.
No one seems to be adjusting well. Peter lies facing the wall. Uriah and Christina sit side by side, having a conversation in low voices. Caleb is massaging his temples with his fingertips. Tobias is still pacing and gnawing on his fingernails. And Cara is on her own, dragging her hand over her face. For the first time since I met her, she looks upset, the Erudite armor gone.
I sit down across from her. “You don’t look so good.”
Her hair, usually smooth and perfect in its knot, is disheveled. She glowers at me. “That’s kind of you to say.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know.” She sighs. “I’m . . . I’m an Erudite, you know.”
I smile a little. “Yeah, I know.”
“No.” Cara shakes her head. “It’s the only thing I am. Erudite. And now they’ve told me that’s the result of some kind of flaw in my genetics . . . and that the factions themselves are just a mental prison to keep us under control. Just like Evelyn Johnson and the factionless said.” She pauses. “So why form the Allegiant? Why bother to come out here?”
I didn’t realize how much Cara had already cleaved to the idea of being an Allegiant, loyal to the faction system, loyal to our founders. For me it was just a temporary identity, powerful because it could get me out of the city. For her the attachment must have been much deeper.
“It’s still good that we came out here,” I say. “We found out the truth. That’s not valuable to you?”
“Of course it is,” Cara says softly. “But it means I need other words for what I am.”
Just after my mother died, I grabbed hold of my Divergence like it was a hand outstretched to save me. I needed that word to tell me who I was when everything else was coming apart around me. But now I’m wondering if I need it anymore, if we ever really need these words, “Dauntless,” “Erudite,” “Divergent,” “Allegiant,” or if we can just be friends or lovers or siblings, defined instead by the choices we make and the love and loyalty that binds us.
“Better check on him,” Cara says, nodding to Tobias.
“Yeah,” I say.
I cross the room and stand in front of the windows, staring at what we can see of the compound, which is just more of the same glass and steel, pavement and grass and fences. When he sees me, he stops pacing and stands next to me instead.
“You all right?” I say to him.
“Yeah.” He sits on the windowsill, facing me, so we’re at eye level. “I mean, no, not really. Right now I’m just thinking about how meaningless it all was. The faction system, I mean.”
He rubs the back of his neck, and I wonder if he’s thinking about the tattoos on his back.
“We put everything we had into it,” he says. “All of us. Even if we didn’t realize we were doing it.”
“That’s what you’re thinking about?” I raise my eyebrows. “Tobias, they were watching us. Everything that happened, everything we did. They didn’t intervene, they just invaded our privacy. Constantly.”
He rubs his temple with his fingertips. “I guess. That’s not what’s bothering me, though.”
I must give him an incredulous look without meaning to, because he shakes his head. “Tris, I worked in the Dauntless control room. There were cameras everywhere, all the time. I tried to warn you that people were watching you during your initiation, remember?”
I remember his eyes shifting to the ceiling, to the corner. His cryptic warnings, hissed between his teeth. I never realized he was warning me about cameras—it just never occurred to me before.
“It used to bother me,” he says. “But I got over it a long time ago. We always thought we were on our own, and now it turns out we were right—they left us on our own. That’s just the way it is.”
“I guess I don’t accept that,” I say. “If you see someone in trouble, you should help them. Experiment or not. And . . . God.” I cringe. “All the things they saw.”
He smiles at me, a little.
“What?” I demand.
“I was just thinking of some of the things they saw,” he says, putting his hand on my waist. I glare at him for a moment, but I can’t sustain it, not with him grinning at me like that. Not knowing that he’s trying to make me feel better. I smile a little.
I sit next to him on the windowsill, my hands wedged between my legs and the wood. “You know, the Bureau setting up the factions is not much different than what we thought happened: A long time ago, a group of people decided that the faction system would be the best way to live—or the way to get people to live the best lives they could.”