Insurgent (32 page)

“Tobias,” I wheeze.

He stops, and looks back at me. “Oh no,” he says, brushing my cheek with his fingers. “Come on. On my back.”

He bends, and I put my arms around his neck, burying my face between his shoulder blades. He lifts me without difficulty and holds on to my leg with his left hand. His right hand still holds the gun.

He runs, and even with my weight, he is fast. Idly I think,
How could he ever have been Abnegation?
He seems designed specifically for speed and deadly accuracy. But not strength, not particularly—he is smart, but not strong. Only strong enough to carry me.

The hallways are empty now, but not for long. Soon every Dauntless in the building will rush toward us from every angle, and we will be trapped in this pale maze. I wonder how Tobias plans to get past them.

I lift my head long enough to see that he just ran past an exit.

“Tobias, you missed it.”

“Missed … what?” he says between breaths.

“An exit.”

“Not trying to escape. We’d get shot if we did,” he says. “Trying to … find something.”

I would suspect that I’m dreaming if the pain in my head wasn’t so intense. Usually only my dreams make this little sense. Why, if he was not trying to escape, did he take me with him? And what is he doing, if not escaping?

He stops abruptly, almost dropping me, as he reaches a wide hallway with panes of glass on either side, revealing offices. The Erudite sit frozen at their desks, staring at us. Tobias pays no attention to them; his eyes, as far as I can tell, are fixed on the door at the end of the corridor. A sign outside the door says
CONTROL-A
.

Tobias searches every corner of the room, and then shoots at the camera attached to the ceiling on our right. The camera drops. He shoots at the camera attached to the ceiling on our left. Its lens shatters.

“Time to get down,” he says. “No more running, I promise.”

I slide off his back and take his hand instead. He walks toward a closed door that we passed already, and into a supply closet. He shuts the door and wedges a busted chair under the doorknob. I face him, a shelf stacked with paper at my back. Above us, the blue light flickers. His eyes roam over my face almost hungrily.

“I don’t have much time, so I’m going to be direct,” he says.

I nod.

“I didn’t come here on some suicide mission,” he says. “I came for two reasons. The first was to find Erudite’s two central control rooms so that when we invade, we’ll know what to destroy first to get rid of all the simulation data, so she can’t activate the Dauntless’s transmitters.”

That explains the running without escaping. And we found a control room, at the end of that hallway.

I stare at him, still dazed from the past few minutes.

“The second,” he says, clearing his throat, “is to make sure you hold on, because we have a plan.”

“What plan?”

“According to one of our insiders, your execution is tentatively scheduled for two weeks from today,” he says. “At least, that’s Jeanine’s target date for the new, Divergent-proof simulation. So fourteen days from now, the factionless, the loyal Dauntless, and the Abnegation who are willing to fight will storm the Erudite compound and take out their best weapon—their computer system. That means we’ll outnumber the traitor Dauntless, and therefore the Erudite.”

“But you told Jeanine where the factionless safe houses were.”

“Yeah.” He frowns a little. “That is problematic. But as you and I know, a lot of the factionless are Divergent, and many of them were already moving toward the Abnegation sector when I left, so only some of the safe houses will be affected. So they will still have a huge population to contribute to the invasion.”

Two weeks. Will I be able to make it through two weeks of this? I am already so tired I’m finding it difficult to stand on my own. Even the rescue that Tobias is proposing barely appeals to me. I don’t want freedom. I want sleep. I want this to end.

“I don’t …” I choke on the words and start to cry. “I can’t … make it … that long.”

“Tris,” he says sternly. He never coddles me. I wish that, just this once, he would coddle me. “You have to. You have to survive this.”

“Why?” The question forms in my stomach and launches from my throat like a moan. I feel like thumping my fists against his chest, like a child throwing a tantrum. Tears cover my cheeks, and I know I’m acting ridiculous but I can’t stop. “Why do I have to? Why can’t someone else do something for once? What if I don’t want to do this anymore?”

And what
this
is, I realize, is life. I don’t want it. I want my parents and I have for weeks. I’ve been trying to claw my way back to them, and now I am so close and he is telling me not to.

“I know.” I have never heard his voice sound so soft. “I know it’s hard. The hardest thing you’ve had to do.”

I shake my head.

“I can’t force you. I can’t make you want to survive this.” He pulls me against him and runs his hand over my hair, tucking it behind my ear. His fingers trail down my neck and over my shoulder, and he says, “But you will do it. It doesn’t matter if you believe you can or not. You will, because that’s who you are.”

I pull back and fit my mouth to his, not gently, not hesitantly. I kiss him like I used to, when I felt sure of us, and run my hands over his back, down his arms, like I used to.

I don’t want to tell him the truth: that he is wrong, and I do not want to survive this.

The door opens. Dauntless traitors crowd into the supply closet. Tobias steps back, turns the gun in his hand, and offers it, handle first, to the nearest Dauntless traitor.

“B
EATRICE.”

I jerk awake. The room I am in now—for whatever experiment they want to run on me—is large, with screens along the back wall and blue lights glowing just above the floor and rows of padded benches across the middle. I’m sitting on the farthest bench back with Peter at my left shoulder, my head leaning against the wall. I still can’t seem to get enough sleep.

Now I wish I hadn’t woken up. Caleb stands a few feet away, his weight on one foot, an uncertain posture.

“Did you
ever
leave Erudite?” I say.

“It’s not that simple,” he starts. “I—”

“It is that simple.” I want to yell, but instead my voice comes out flat. “At what point did you betray our family? Before our parents died, or after?”

“I did what I had to do. You think you understand this, Beatrice, but you don’t. This whole situation … it’s much bigger than you think it is.” His eyes plead with me to understand, but I recognize his tone—it’s the one he employed when we were younger, to scold me. It is condescending.

Arrogance is one of the flaws in the Erudite heart—I know. It is often in mine.

But greed is the other. And I do not have that. So I am halfway in and halfway out, as always.

I push myself to my feet. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

Caleb steps back.

“This isn’t about Erudite; it’s about everyone. All the factions,” he says, “and the city. And what’s outside the fence.”

“I don’t care,” I say, but that isn’t true. The phrase “outside the fence” prickles in my brain. Outside? How could any of this have to do with what’s outside?

Something itches at the back of my mind. Marcus said that information the Abnegation possessed motivated Jeanine’s attack on Abnegation. Does that information have to do with what’s outside, too?

I push the thought away for the time being.

“I thought you were all about facts. About freedom of information? Well, how about
this
fact, Caleb? When—” My voice quakes. “
When
did you betray our parents?”

“I have always been Erudite,” he says softly. “Even when I was supposed to be Abnegation.”

“If you’re with Jeanine, then I hate you. Just like our father would have.”

“Our father.” Caleb snorts a little. “Our father
was
Erudite, Beatrice. Jeanine told me—he was in her year at school.”

“He wasn’t Erudite,” I say after a few seconds. “He chose to leave them. He chose a different identity, just like you, and became something else. Only you chose this … this
evil
.”

“Spoken like a true Dauntless,” says Caleb sharply. “It’s either one way or the other way. No nuances. The world doesn’t
work
like that, Beatrice. Evil depends on where you’re standing.”

“No matter where I stand, I’ll still think mind controlling an entire city of people is evil.” I feel my lip wobble. “I’ll still think delivering your sister to be prodded and executed is evil!”

He is my brother, but I want to tear him to pieces.

Instead of trying to, though, I find myself sitting down again. I could never hurt him enough to make his betrayal stop hurting. And it
hurts
, in every part of my body. I press my fingers to my chest to massage some of the smarting tension away.

Jeanine and her army of Erudite scientists and Dauntless traitors walk in just as I wipe tears from my cheeks. I blink rapidly so she won’t see. She barely even gives me a glance.

“Let us view the results, shall we?” she announces. Caleb, now standing by the screens, presses something at the front of the room, and the screens turn on. Words and numbers I don’t understand fill them.

“We discovered something extremely interesting, Ms. Prior.” I have never seen her so cheerful before. She almost smiles—but not quite. “You have an abundance of a particular kind of neuron, called, quite simply, a mirror neuron. Would someone like to explain to Ms. Prior exactly what mirror neurons do?”

The Erudite scientists raise their hands in unison. She points to an older woman in the front.

“Mirror neurons fire both when one performs an action and when one sees another person performing that action. They allow us to imitate behavior.”

“What else are they responsible for?” Jeanine scans her “class” the same way my teachers did in Upper Levels. Another Erudite raises his hand.

“Learning language, understanding other people’s intentions based on their behavior, um …” He frowns. “And empathy.”

“More specifically,” Jeanine says, and this time she does smile at me, broadly, forcing creases into her cheeks, “someone with many, strong mirror neurons could have a flexible personality—capable of mimicking others as the situation calls for it rather than remaining constant.”

I understand why she smiles. I feel like my mind is cracked open, its secrets spilling over the floor for me to finally see.

“A flexible personality,” she says, “would probably have aptitude for more than one faction, don’t you agree, Ms. Prior?”

“Probably,” I say. “Now if only you could get a simulation to suppress that particular ability, we could be done with this.”

“One thing at a time.” She pauses. “I must admit, it confuses me that you are so eager for your own execution.”

“No, it doesn’t.” I close my eyes. “It doesn’t confuse you at all.” I sigh. “Can I go back to my cell now?”

I must seem nonchalant, but I’m not. I want to go back to my room so that I can cry in peace. But I don’t want her to know that.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” she chirps. “We’ll have a simulation serum to try out soon.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Whatever.”

Someone shakes my shoulder. I jerk awake, my eyes wide and searching, and I see Tobias kneeling over me. He wears a Dauntless traitor jacket, and one side of his head is coated with blood. The blood streams from a wound on his ear—the top of his ear is gone. I wince.

“What happened?” I say.

“Get up. We have to run.”

“It’s too soon. It hasn’t been two weeks.”

“I don’t have time to explain. Come on.”

“Oh God. Tobias.”

I sit up and wrap my arms around him, pressing my face into his neck. His arms tighten around me and squeeze. Warmth courses through me, and comfort. If he is here, that means I’m safe. My tears make his skin slippery.

He stands and pulls me to my feet, which makes my wounded shoulder throb.

“Reinforcements will be here soon. Come on.”

I let him lead me out of the room. We make it down the first hallway without difficulty, but in the second hallway, we encounter two Dauntless guards, one a young man and one a middle-aged woman. Tobias fires twice in a matter of seconds, both hits, one in the head and one in the chest. The woman, who was hit in the chest, slumps against the wall but doesn’t die.

We keep moving. One hallway, then another, all of them look the same. Tobias’s grip on my hand never falters. I know that if he can throw a knife so that it hits just the tip of my ear, he can fire accurately at the Dauntless soldiers who ambush us. We step over fallen bodies—the people Tobias killed on the way in, probably—and finally reach a fire exit.

Tobias lets go of my hand to open the door, and the fire alarm screeches in my ears, but we keep running. I am gasping for air but I don’t care, not when I’m finally escaping, not when this nightmare is finally over. My vision starts to go black at the edges, so I grab Tobias’s arm and hold on tight, trusting him to lead me safely to the bottom of the stairs.