Insurgent (35 page)

Uriah reaches for me, but Tobias sets a hand on his shoulder to stop him. I feel a surge of gratitude. I don’t think I can handle Uriah’s embrace, or his questions, or his surprise, right now.

“She’s been through a lot,” Tobias says. “She just needs to sleep. She’ll be down the street—number thirty-seven. Come visit tomorrow.”

Uriah frowns at me. The Dauntless don’t usually understand restraint, and Uriah has only ever known the Dauntless. But he must respect Tobias’s assessment of me, because he nods and says, “Okay. Tomorrow.”

Christina reaches out as I pass her and squeezes my shoulder lightly. I try to stand up straighter, but my muscles feel like a cage, holding my shoulders hunched. The eyes follow me down the street, pinching the back of my neck. I am relieved when Tobias leads us up the front walk of the gray house that belonged to Marcus Eaton.

I don’t know by what strength Tobias marches through the doorway. For him this house must contain echoes of screaming parents and belt snaps and hours spent in small, dark closets, yet he doesn’t look troubled as he leads Peter and me into the kitchen. If anything he stands taller. But maybe that is Tobias—when he’s supposed to be weak, he’s strong.

Tori, Harrison, and Evelyn stand in the kitchen. The sight overwhelms me. I lean my shoulder into the wall and squeeze my eyes shut. The outline of the execution table is printed on my eyelids. I open my eyes. I try to breathe. They are talking but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Why is Evelyn here, in Marcus’s house? Where is Marcus?

Evelyn puts one arm around Tobias and touches his face with the other, pressing her cheek to his. She says something to him. He smiles at her when he pulls away. Mother and son, reconciled. I am not sure it’s wise.

Tobias turns me around and, keeping one hand on my arm and one on my waist, to avoid my shoulder wound, presses me toward the staircase. We climb the steps together.

Upstairs are his parents’ old bedroom and his old bedroom, with a bathroom between them, and that’s it. He takes me into his bedroom, and I stand for a moment, looking around at the room where he spent most of his life.

He keeps his hand on my arm. He has been touching me in some way since we left the stairwell of that building, like he thinks I might break apart if he doesn’t hold me together.

“Marcus didn’t go into this room after I left, I’m pretty sure,” says Tobias. “Because nothing was moved when I came back here.”

Members of Abnegation don’t own many decorations, since they are viewed as self-indulgent, but what few things we were allowed, he has. A stack of school papers. A small bookshelf. And, strangely, a sculpture made of blue glass on his dresser.

“My mother smuggled that to me when I was young. Told me to hide it,” he says. “The day of the ceremony, I put it on my dresser before I left. So he would see it. A small act of defiance.”

I nod. It is strange to be in a place that carries one single memory so completely. This room is sixteen-year-old Tobias, about to choose Dauntless to escape his father.

“Let’s take care of your feet,” he says. But he doesn’t move, just shifts his fingers to the inside of my elbow.

“Okay,” I say.

We walk into the adjoined bathroom, and I sit on the edge of the tub. He sits next to me, a hand on my knee as he turns on the faucet and plugs the drain. Water spills into the tub, covering my toenails. My blood turns the water pink.

He crouches in the tub and puts my foot in his lap, dabbing at the deeper cuts with a washcloth. I don’t feel it. Even when he smears soap lather over them, I don’t feel anything. The bathwater turns gray.

I pick up the bar of soap and turn it in my hands until my skin is coated with white lather. I reach for him and run my fingers over his hands, careful to get the lines in his palms and the spaces between his fingers. It feels good to do something, to clean something, and to have my hands on him again.

We get water all over the bathroom floor as we both splash it on ourselves to get the soap off. The water makes me cold, but I shiver and I don’t care. He gets a towel and starts to dry my hands.

“I don’t …” I sound like I am being strangled. “My family is all
dead
, or traitors; how can I …”

I am not making any sense. The sobs take over my body, my mind, everything. He gathers me to him, and bathwater soaks my legs. His hold is tight. I listen to his heartbeat and, after a while, find a way to let the rhythm calm me.

“I’ll be your family now,” he says.

“I love you,” I say.

I said that once, before I went to Erudite headquarters, but he was asleep then. I don’t know why I didn’t say it when he could hear it. Maybe I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion. Or afraid that I did not know what it was to love someone. But now I think the scary thing was not saying it before it was almost too late. Not saying it before it was almost too late for me.

I am his, and he is mine, and it has been that way all along.

He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response.

He frowns at me. “Say it again.”

“Tobias,” I say, “I love you.”

His skin is slippery with water and he smells like sweat and my shirt sticks to his arms when he slides them around me. He presses his face to my neck and kisses me right above the collarbone, kisses my cheek, kisses my lips.

“I love you, too,” he says.

H
E LIES NEXT
to me as I fall sleep. I expect to have nightmares, but I must be too tired, because my mind stays empty. When I open my eyes next, he’s gone, but there’s a stack of clothes on the bed beside me.

I get up and walk into the bathroom and I feel raw, like my skin was scraped clean and every breath of air stings it a little, but stable. I don’t turn on the lights in the bathroom because I know they will be pale and bright, just like the lights in the Erudite compound. I shower in the dark, barely able to tell soap from conditioner, and tell myself that I will emerge new and strong, that the water will heal me.

Before I leave the bathroom, I pinch my cheeks hard to bring blood to the surface of my skin. It’s stupid, but I don’t want to look weak and exhausted in front of everyone.

When I walk back into Tobias’s room, Uriah is sprawled across the bed facedown; Christina is holding the blue sculpture above Tobias’s desk, examining it; and Lynn is poised above Uriah with a pillow, a wicked grin creeping across her face.

Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a
pillow
hurt, Lynn?”

“My exceptional strength,” she says. “Did you get smacked, Tris? One of your cheeks is bright red.”

I must not have pinched the other one hard enough. “No, it’s just … my morning glow.”

I try the joke out on my tongue like it’s a new language. Christina laughs, maybe a little harder than my comment warrants, but I appreciate the effort. Uriah bounces on the bed a few times when he moves to the edge.

“So, the thing we’re all not talking about,” he says. He gestures to me. “You almost died, a sadistic pansycake saved you, and now we’re all waging some serious war with the factionless as allies.”

“Pansycake?” says Christina.

“Dauntless slang.” Lynn smirks. “Supposed to be a huge insult, only no one uses it anymore.”

“Because it’s so offensive,” says Uriah, nodding.

“No. Because it’s so stupid no Dauntless with any sense would speak it, let alone think it. Pansycake. What are you, twelve?”

“And a half,” he says.

I get the feeling their banter is for my benefit, so that I don’t have to say anything; I can just laugh. And I do, enough to warm the stone that has formed in my stomach.

“There’s food downstairs,” says Christina. “Tobias made scrambled eggs, which, as it turns out, is a disgusting food.”

“Hey,” I say. “I
like
scrambled eggs.”

“Must be a Stiff breakfast, then.” She grabs my arm. “C’mon.”

Together we go down the stairs, our footsteps thundering as they never would have been allowed to in my parents’ house. My father used to scold me for running down the stairs. “Do not call attention to yourself,” he said. “It is not courteous to the people around you.”

I hear voices in the living room—a chorus of them, in fact, joined by occasional bursts of laughter and a faint melody plucked on an instrument, a banjo or a guitar. It is not what I expect in an Abnegation house, where everything is always quiet, no matter how many people are gathered within. The voices and the laughter and the music breathe life into the sullen walls. I feel even warmer.

I stand in the doorway to the living room. Five people are crowded onto the three-person couch, playing a card game I recognize from Candor headquarters. A man sits in the armchair with a woman balanced on his lap, and someone else perches on the arm, a can of soup in hand. Tobias sits on the floor, his back against the coffee table. Every part of his posture suggests ease—one leg bent, the other straight, an arm slung across his knee, his head tilted to listen. I have never seen him look so comfortable without a gun. I didn’t think it was possible.

I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach that I always get when I know I’ve been lied to, but I don’t know who it was that lied to me this time, or about what, exactly. But this is not what I was taught to expect of factionlessness. I was taught that it was worse than death.

I stand there for just a few seconds before people realize that I’m there. Their conversation peters out. I wipe my palms off on the hem of my shirt. Too many eyes, and too much silence.

Evelyn clears her throat. “Everyone, this is Tris Prior. I believe you may have heard a lot about her yesterday.”

“And Christina, Uriah, and Lynn,” supplies Tobias. I’m grateful for his attempt to divert everyone’s attention from me, but it doesn’t work.

I stand glued to the door frame for a few seconds, and then one of the factionless men—older, his wrinkled skin patterned with tattoos—speaks up.

“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

Some of the others laugh, and I try a smile. It emerges crooked and small.

“Supposed to be,” I say.

“We don’t like to give Jeanine Matthews what she wants, though,” Tobias says. He gets up and hands me a can of peas—but it isn’t full of peas; it’s full of scrambled eggs. The aluminum warms my fingers.

He sits, so I sit next to him, and scoop some of the eggs into my mouth. I am not hungry, but I know I need to eat, so I chew and swallow anyway. I am familiar with the way the factionless eat, so I pass the eggs to Christina, and take a can of peaches from Tobias.

“Why is everyone camped out in Marcus’s house?” I ask him.

“Evelyn kicked him out. Said it was her house, too, and he’d gotten to use it for years, and it was her turn.” Tobias grins. “It caused a huge blowup on the front lawn, but eventually Evelyn won.”

I glance at Tobias’s mother. She is in the far corner of the room, talking to Peter and eating more eggs from another can. My stomach churns. Tobias talks about her almost reverently. But I still remember what she said to me about my transience in Tobias’s life.

“There’s bread somewhere.” He picks up a basket from the coffee table and hands it to me. “Take two pieces. You need it.”

As I chew on the bread crust, I look at Peter and Evelyn again.

“I think she’s trying to recruit him,” Tobias says. “She has a way of making the factionless life sound extraordinarily appealing.”

“Anything to get him out of Dauntless. I don’t care if he saved my life, I still don’t like him.”

“Hopefully we won’t have to worry about faction distinctions anymore by the time this is over. It’ll be nice, I think.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t feel like picking a fight with him here. Or reminding him that it won’t be so easy to persuade Dauntless and Candor to join the factionless in their crusade against the faction system. It may take another war.

The front door opens, and Edward enters. Today he wears a patch with a blue eye painted on it, complete with a half-lowered eyelid. The effect of the overlarge eye against his otherwise handsome face is both grotesque and amusing.

“Eddie!” someone calls out in greeting. But Edward’s good eye has already fallen on Peter. He starts across the room, nearly kicking a can of food out of someone’s hand. Peter presses into the shadow of the door frame like he is trying to disappear into it.

Edward stops inches from Peter’s feet, and then jerks toward him like he is about to throw a punch. Peter jolts back so hard he slams his head into the wall. Edward grins, and all around us, the factionless laugh.

“Not so brave in broad daylight,” Edward says. And then, to Evelyn, “Make sure you don’t give him any utensils. Never know what he might do with them.”

As he speaks, he plucks the fork from Peter’s hand.

“Give that back,” says Peter.

Edward slams his free hand into Peter’s throat, and presses the tines of the fork between his fingers, right against Peter’s Adam’s apple. Peter stiffens, blood rushing into his face.

“Keep your mouth shut around me,” he says, his voice low, “or I will do this again, only next time, I’ll shove it right through your esophagus.”