Insurgent (34 page)

Every part of my body chants it in unison.
Live, live, live.
I thought that in order to give my life in exchange for Will’s, in exchange for my parents’, that I needed to die, but I was wrong; I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

Jeanine holds my head steady with one hand and inserts the needle into my neck with the other.

I’m not done!
I shout in my head, and not at Jeanine.
I am not done here!

She presses the plunger down. Peter leans forward and looks into my eyes.

“The serum will go into effect in one minute,” he says. “Be brave, Tris.”

The words startle me, because that is exactly what Tobias said when he put me under my first simulation.

My heart begins to race.

Why would Peter tell me to be brave? Why would he offer any kind words at all?

All the muscles in my body relax at once. A heavy, liquid feeling fills my limbs. If this is death, it isn’t so bad. My eyes stay open, but my head drops to the side. I try to close my eyes, but I can’t—I can’t move.

Then the heart monitor stops beeping.

B
UT
I’
M STILL
breathing. Not deeply; not enough to satisfy, but
breathing
. Peter pushes my eyelids over my eyes. Does he know I’m not dead? Does Jeanine? Can she see me breathing?

“Take the body to the lab,” Jeanine says. “The autopsy is scheduled for this afternoon.”

“All right,” Peter replies.

Peter pushes the table forward. I hear mutters all around me as we pass the group of Erudite bystanders. My hand falls off the edge of the table as we turn a corner, and smacks into the wall. I feel a prickle of pain in my fingertips, but I can’t move my hand, as hard as I try.

This time, when we go down the hallway of Dauntless traitors, it is silent. Peter walks slowly at first, then turns another corner and picks up the pace. He almost sprints down the next corridor, and stops abruptly. Where am I? I can’t be in the lab already. Why did he stop?

Peter’s arms slide under my knees and shoulders, and he lifts me. My head falls against his shoulder.

“For someone so small, you’re
heavy
, Stiff,” he mutters.

He knows I’m awake. He
knows
.

I hear a series of beeps, and a slide—a locked door, opening.

“What do—” Tobias’s voice.
Tobias!
“Oh my God. Oh—”

“Spare me your blubbering, okay?” Peter says. “She’s not dead; she’s just paralyzed. It’ll only last for about a minute. Now get ready to run.”

I don’t understand.

How does Peter know?

“Let me carry her,” Tobias says.

“No. You’re a better shot than I am. Take my gun. I’ll carry her.”

I hear the gun slide out of its holster. Tobias brushes a hand over my forehead. They both start running.

At first all I hear is the pounding of their feet, and my head snaps back painfully. I feel tingling in my hands and feet. Peter shouts, “Left!” at Tobias.

Then a shout from down the hallway. “Hey, what—!”

A bang. And nothing.

More running. Peter shouts, “Right!” I hear another bang, and another. “Whoa,” he mumbles. “Wait, stop here!”

Tingling down my spine. I open my eyes as Peter opens another door. He charges through it, and just before I smack my head against the door frame, I stick my arm out and stop us.

“Careful!” I say, my voice strained. My throat still feels as tight as it did when he first injected me and I found it difficult to breathe. Peter turns sideways to bring me through the door, then nudges it shut with his heel and drops me on the floor.

The room is almost empty, except for a row of empty trash cans along one wall and a square metal door large enough for one of the cans to fit through it along the other wall.

“Tris,” Tobias says, crouching next to me. His face is pale, almost yellow.

There is too much I want to say. The first thing that comes out is, “Beatrice.”

He laughs weakly.

“Beatrice,” he amends, and touches his lips to mine. I curl my fingers into his shirt.

“Unless you want me to throw up all over you guys, you might want to save it for later.”

“Where are we?” I ask.

“This is the trash incinerator,” says Peter, slapping the square door. “I turned it off. It’ll take us to the alley. And then your aim had better be perfect, Four, if you want to get out of the Erudite sector alive.”

“Don’t concern yourself with my aim,” Tobias retorts. He, like me, is barefoot.

Peter opens the door to the incinerator. “Tris, you first.”

The trash chute is about three feet wide and four feet high. I slide one leg down the chute and, with Tobias’s help, swing the other leg in. My stomach drops as I slide down a short metal tube. Then a series of rollers pound against my back as I slip over them.

I smell fire and ash, but I am not burned. Then I drop, and my arm smacks into a metal wall, making me groan. I land on a cement floor, hard, and pain from the impact prickles up my shins.

“Ow.” I limp away from the opening and shout, “Go ahead!”

My legs have recovered by the time Peter lands, on his side instead of his feet. He groans, and drags himself away from the opening to recover.

I look around. We are inside the incinerator, which would be completely dark if not for the lines of light glowing in the shape of a small door on the other side. The floor is solid metal in some places and metal grating in others. Everything smells like rotting garbage and fire.

“Don’t say I never took you anywhere nice,” Peter says.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say.

Tobias drops to the floor, landing first on his feet and then tilting forward to his knees, wincing. I pull him to his feet and then draw close to his side. All the smells and sights and feelings of the world feel magnified. I was almost dead, but instead I am alive. Because of Peter.

Of all people.

Peter walks across the grate and opens the small door. Light streams into the incinerator. Tobias walks with me away from the fire smell, away from the metal furnace, into the cement-walled room that contains it.

“Got that gun?” Peter says to Tobias.

“No,” says Tobias, “I figured I would shoot the bullets out of my nostrils, so I left it upstairs.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Peter holds another gun in front of him and leaves the incinerator room. A dank hallway with exposed pipes in the ceiling greets us, but it’s only ten feet long. The sign next to the door at the end says
EXIT
. I am alive, and I am leaving.

The stretch of land between Dauntless headquarters and Erudite headquarters does not look the same in reverse. I suppose everything is bound to look different when you aren’t on your way to die.

When we reach the end of the alley, Tobias presses his shoulder to one wall and leans forward just enough to see around the corner. His face blank, he puts one arm around the corner, steadying it with the building wall, and fires twice. I shove my fingers in my ears and try not to pay attention to the gunshots and what they make me remember.

“Hurry,” Tobias says.

We sprint, Peter first, me second, and Tobias last, down Wabash Avenue. I look over my shoulder to see what Tobias shot at, and see two men on the ground behind Erudite headquarters. One isn’t moving, and the other is clutching his arm and running toward the door. They will send others after us.

My head feels muddled, probably from exhaustion, but the adrenaline keeps me running.

“Take the least logical route!” shouts Tobias.

“What?” Peter says.

“The least logical route,” Tobias says. “So they won’t find us!”

Peter swerves to the left, down another alley, this one full of cardboard boxes that contain frayed blankets and stained pillows—old factionless dwellings, I assume. He jumps over a box that I go crashing through, kicking it behind me.

At the end of the alley he turns left, toward the marsh. We are back on Michigan Avenue. In plain sight of Erudite headquarters, if anyone cares to glance down the street.

“Bad idea!” I shout.

Peter takes the next right. At least all the streets here are clear—no fallen street signs to dodge or holes to jump over. My lungs burn like I inhaled poison. My legs, which ached at first, are now numb, which is better. Somewhere far away, I hear shouts.

Then it occurs to me: The least logical thing to do is stop running.

I grab Peter’s sleeve and drag him toward the nearest building. It is six stories high, with wide windows arranged into a grid, divided by pillars of brick. The first door I try is locked, but Tobias fires at the window next to it until it breaks, and unlocks the door from the inside.

The building is completely empty. Not a single chair or table. And there are too many windows. We walk toward the emergency stairwell, and I crawl beneath the first flight so that we are hidden by the staircase. Tobias sits next to me, and Peter across from us both, his knees drawn to his chest.

I try to catch my breath and calm myself down, but it isn’t easy. I was dead. I was
dead
, and then I wasn’t, and why? Because of Peter?
Peter?

I stare at him. He still looks so innocent, despite all that he has done to prove that he is not. His hair lies smooth against his head, shiny and dark, like we didn’t just run for a mile at full speed. His round eyes scan the stairwell and then rest on my face.

“What?” he says. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“How did you do it?” I say.

“It wasn’t that hard,” he says. “I dyed a paralytic serum purple and switched it out with the death serum. Replaced the wire that was supposed to read your heartbeat with a dead one. The bit with the heart monitor was harder; I had to get some Erudite help with a remote and stuff—you wouldn’t understand it if I explained it to you.”

“
Why
did you do it?” I say. “You
want
me dead. You were willing to do it yourself! What changed?”

He presses his lips together and doesn’t look away, not for a long time. Then he opens his mouth, hesitates, and finally says, “I can’t be in anyone’s debt. Okay? The idea that I owed you something made me sick. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit. Indebted to a Stiff? It’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And I couldn’t have it.”

“What are you talking about? You owed me something?”

He rolls his eyes. “The Amity compound. Someone shot me—the bullet was at head level; it would have hit me right between the eyes. And you shoved me out of the way. We were even before that—I almost killed you during initiation, you almost killed me during the attack simulation; we’re square, right? But after that …”

“You’re insane,” says Tobias. “That’s not the way the world works … with everyone keeping score.”

“It’s not?” Peter raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what world
you
live in, but in mine, people only do things for you for one of two reasons. The first is if they want something in return. And the second is if they feel like they owe you something.”

“Those aren’t the only reasons people do things for you,” I say. “Sometimes they do them because they love you. Well, maybe not
you
, but …”

Peter snorts. “That’s exactly the kind of garbage I expect a delusional Stiff to say.”

“I guess we just have to make sure you owe us,” says Tobias. “Or you’ll go running to whoever offers you the best deal.”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “That’s pretty much how it is.”

I shake my head. I can’t imagine living the way he does—always keeping track of who gave me what and what I should give them in return, incapable of love or loyalty or forgiveness, a one-eyed man with a knife in hand, looking for someone else’s eye to poke out. That isn’t life. It’s some paler version of life. I wonder where he learned it from.

“So when can we get out of here, you think?” Peter says.

“Couple hours,” says Tobias. “We should go to the Abnegation sector. That’s where the factionless and the Dauntless who aren’t wired for simulations will be by now.”

“Fantastic,” says Peter.

Tobias puts his arm around me. I press my cheek into his shoulder, and close my eyes so I don’t have to look at Peter. I know there is a lot to say, though I’m not sure exactly what it is, but we can’t say it here, or now.

As we walk the streets I once called home, conversations sputter and die, and eyes cling to my face and body. As far as they knew—and I’m sure they knew, because Jeanine knows how to spread news—I died less than six hours ago. I notice that some of the factionless I pass are marked with patches of blue dye. They are simulation-ready.

Now that we’re here, and safe, I realize that there are cuts all over the bottoms of my feet from running over rough pavement and bits of glass from broken windows. Every step stings. I focus on that instead of all the stares.

“Tris?” someone calls out ahead of us. I lift my head, and see Uriah and Christina on the sidewalk, comparing revolvers. Uriah drops his gun in the grass and sprints toward me. Christina follows him, but at a slower pace.