me? His heart pounds against my palm, and my own heart lifts. He is Divergent. He can fight this simulation. Any simulation.
“Tobias,” I say. “It’s me.”
I step forward and wrap my arms around him. His body is stiff. His heart beats faster. I can feel it against my cheek. A thud against my cheek. A thud as the gun hits the floor. He grabs my shoulders — too hard, his fingers digging into my skin where the bullet was. I cry out as he pulls me back. Maybe he means to kill me in some crueler way.
“Tris,” he says, and it’s him again. His mouth collides with mine.
His arm wraps around me and he lifts me up, holding me against him, his hands clutching at my back. His face and the back of his neck are slick with sweat, his body is shaking, and my shoulder blazes with pain, but I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.
He sets me down and stares at me, his fingers brushing over my forehead, my eyebrows, my cheeks, my lips.
Something like a sob and a sigh and a moan escapes him, and he kisses me again. His eyes are bright with tears. I never thought I would see Tobias cry. It makes me hurt.
I pull myself to his chest and cry into his shirt. All the throbbing in my head comes back, and the ache in my shoulder, and I feel like my body weight doubles. I lean against him, and he supports me.
“How did you do it?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just heard your voice.”
After a few seconds, I remember why I’m here. I pull back and wipe my cheeks with the heels of my hands and turn toward the screens again. I see one that overlooks the drinking fountain. Tobias was so paranoid when I was railing against Dauntless there. He kept looking at the wall above the fountain. Now I know why.
Tobias and I stand there for a while, and I think I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it too: How can something so small control so many people?
“Was
“I don’t know if you were running it so much as monitoring it,” I say. “It’s already complete. I have no idea how, but Jeanine made it so it could work on its own.”
He shakes his head. “It’s…incredible. Terrible, evil…but incredible.”
I see movement on one of the screens and see my brother, Marcus, and Peter standing on the first floor of the building. Surrounding them are Dauntless soldiers, all in black, all carrying weapons.
“Tobias,” I say tersely. “Now!”
He runs to the computer screen and taps it a few times with his finger. I can’t look at what he’s doing. All I can see is my brother. He holds the gun I gave him straight out from his body, like he’s ready to use it. I bite my lip.
I see a flash of light — a spark, from one of the guns — and gasp. My brother and Marcus and Peter crouch on the ground with their arms over their heads. After a moment they all stir, so I know they’re still alive, and the Dauntless soldiers advance. A cluster of black around my brother.
“Tobias,” I say.
He presses the screen again, and everyone on the first floor goes still.
Their arms drop to their sides.
And then the Dauntless move. Their heads turn from side to side, and they drop their guns, and their mouths move like they’re shouting, and they shove each other, and some of them sink to their knees, holding their heads and rocking back and forth, back and forth.
All the tension in my chest unravels, and I sit down, heaving a sigh.
Tobias crouches next to the computer and pulls the side of the case off.
“I have to get the data,” he says, “or they’ll just start the simulation again.”
I watch the frenzy on the screen. It is the same frenzy that must be happening on the streets. I scan the screens, one by one, looking for one that shows the Abnegation sector of the city. There is only one — it’s at the far end of the room, on the bottom. The Dauntless on that screen are firing at one another, shoving one another, screaming — chaos. Black-clothed men and women drop to the ground. People sprint in every direction.
“Got it,” says Tobias, holding up the computer’s hard drive. It is a piece of metal about the size of his palm. He offers it to me, and I shove it in my back pocket.
“We have to leave,” I say, getting to my feet. I point at the screen on the right.
“Yes, we do.” He wraps his arm across my shoulders. “Come on.”
We walk together down the hallway and around the corner. The elevator reminds me of my father. I can’t stop myself from looking for his body.
It is on the floor next to the elevator, surrounded by the bodies of several guards. A strangled scream escapes me. I turn away. Bile leaps into my throat and I throw up against the wall.
For a second I feel like everything inside me is breaking, and I crouch by a body, breathing through my mouth so I don’t smell the blood. I clamp my hand over my mouth to contain a sob. Five more seconds. Five seconds of weakness and then I get up. One, two. Three, four.
Five.
I am not really aware of my surroundings. There is an elevator and a glass room and a rush of cold air. There is a shouting crowd of Dauntless soldiers dressed in black. I search for Caleb’s face, but it is nowhere, nowhere until we leave the glass building and step out into sunlight.
Caleb runs to me when I walk through the doors, and I fall against him. He holds me tightly.
“Dad?” he says.
I just shake my head.
“Well,” he says, almost choking on the word, “he would have wanted it that way.”
Over Caleb’s shoulder, I see Tobias stop in the middle of a footstep. His entire body goes rigid as his eyes focus on Marcus. In the rush to destroy the simulation, I forgot to warn him.
Marcus walks up to Tobias and wraps his arms around his son. Tobias stays frozen, his arms at his sides and his face blank. I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down and his eyes lift to the ceiling.
“Son,” sighs Marcus.
Tobias winces.
“Hey,” I say, pulling away from Caleb. I remember the belt stinging on my wrist in Tobias’s fear landscape and slip into the space between them, pushing Marcus back. “Hey. Get away from him.”
I feel Tobias’s breaths against my neck; they come in sharp bursts.
“Stay away,” I hiss.
“Beatrice, what are you doing?” asks Caleb.
“Tris,” Tobias says.
Marcus gives me a scandalized look that seems false to me — his eyes are too wide and his mouth is too open. If I could find a way to smack that look off his face, I would.
“Not all those Erudite articles were full of lies,” I say, narrowing my eyes at Marcus.
“What are you talking about?” Marcus says quietly. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, Beatrice, but —”
“The only reason I haven’t shot you yet is because he’s the one who should get to do it,” I say. “Stay away from him or I’ll decide I no longer care.”
Tobias’s hands slip around my arms and squeeze. Marcus’s eyes stay on mine for a few seconds, and I can’t help but see them as black pits, like they were in Tobias’s fear landscape. Then he looks away.
“We have to go,” Tobias says unsteadily. “The train should be here any second.”
We walk over unyielding ground toward the train tracks. Tobias’s jaw is clenched and he stares straight ahead. I feel a twinge of regret. Maybe I should have let him deal with his father on his own.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he replies, taking my hand. His fingers are still shaking.
“If we take the train in the opposite direction, out of the city instead of in, we can get to Amity
