The Honey In The Lion

Chapter 1: Gun Safety: Peter

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Peter

---

I’m not a liar, but I’ve never been a big fan of the truth. In Candor, truth meant exposure. The official statements of purpose had plenty to say about the importance of honesty, and the necessity of hunting down the worst lies and skewering them in the public sight, but we couldn’t see the biggest lie of all. In the end they weren’t any better informed – we weren’t – than anyone else. Not even the ones who sided with Erudite. We were being lied to on a level that most people could never have grasped. None of the factions ever put much of a premium on curiosity, not even Erudite despite their pretenses, and maybe that was why the whole structure held so long – everyone was too busy minding their own particular limited sector to look up, to look out and wonder what might really be out there in the wasteland. If I mind my own business, nothing can bother me, right? Why bother with what might or might not be out there? The walls stood as a constant reminder, a tacit threat – stay in your place, do what you’re told. Everything runs smoothly when the Factions know their place.

When it did fall apart, it didn’t need much help. I’m not ashamed of my part in it and what that meant; I don’t know how anyone could be. I will not be ashamed of what I’m going to do.

It did chafe to know that in Tris’ eyes, she was the leader of this little expedition – as if she could lead her way out of a wet paper bag. She might be Divergent, but that hobbled her, instead of helping her – she had to try to be brave and kind, and frank, and quick on the draw or whatever, all while her gut impulse remained still to roll over and play dead like the Stiff she is. If this scrawny little bitch is our best hope, consider me seriously unimpressed. The world outside the walls might be made for people like her, but it’s people like me who come out on top, every time. Jeanine might have made it too, if she were more like me – but she wasn’t ruthless, just selfish, and she’d forgotten what it really meant to take a life. I really do think she thought she was doing something good – but there’s no good choice, or even a better one. There’s just what works and what doesn’t.

Maybe Tris does have something vital inside her, something we’ll need on the outside to pay back our absent benefactors – and something she’ll need to be alive for, more importantly. I’d rather hang on to her now as my ticket out, than stay behind and wait patiently for the new factionless to wipe out anyone who won’t sweep up trash and scavenge scraps for the greater good. Or wait around for whatever’s left of Erudite to quit squirming around like a snake with its head cut off and start shooting people.

Edward’s dead. It’s just a shame it wasn’t me, but all things considered I’d like to be as far from his friends as possible. Maybe it’s one of those hilarious instances of Dauntless cowardice – that I’d rather take my chances plunging into the void than stay put waiting for the nasty stuff I do know is headed my way. Onward and outward it is. When it comes down to it, I’m a survivor type. Somehow I think I won’t have much trouble.

There’s smoke on the air already, all the way out here. Cara’s not far off, barking orders I don’t care nearly as much about as I should, trying to hash out the plan with our Amity hosts before we get going. No amount of yelling at any volume could wake Christina, who’s curled up in a sleepy heap in the back of Four’s truck. She could sleep through a bomb going off, and I’m struck with the whim to go take advantage of that by doing something puerile, though to my credit I restrain myself. Uriah sits shoulder to shoulder beside her, and glares at me sleepily when I peek in under the canvas.

We won’t be waiting around for long, and we’re traveling light, split into two groups. Harder to take out that way. When I think of the people Tris will actually want to travel with, it’s a pretty short list, and I’m not on it – she doesn’t have a knack for making friends. Four, of course, she’s got that meathead wrapped around her little finger. I wonder if they’ve fucked yet. She’d probably cry. Christina, too; I wonder if they’ve fucked yet. They used to cling to each other, before Tris traded up to someone bigger, I guess. And then there’s her brother, the enthusiastic defector I know so very well from playing Jeanine’s lackey; I’ll be keeping an eye on him as the lesser of two evils. I’m still wary of stirring Four’s displeasure if he thinks I’m trying to size him up. Caleb doesn’t look much like his little sister, which is a small mercy. I don’t think I could stand looking at two of them.

Caleb is leaning against the truck’s side, doing nothing in particular. I’ve been funneling away siphoned fuel into containers for what feels like hours, by electric lantern-light, and the fumes are starting to get to me. The trucks we’ve commandeered have been rigged with solar panels, scavenged from one of Erudite’s company cars – the liquid fuel is a backup in case there’s a system failure, but I’d forgotten how much it stinks, and how much the smell puts me on edge. There’s the smell of fresh paint, too – the hoods are inconspicuously painted over with the empty device the Allegiant use. Inter-factional cooperation in action.

Caleb’s jumpy, too, but he doesn’t know how to hide it. He barely even knows how to carry a gun. I wonder if that’s because of the Abnegation in hm or the Erudite – he keeps joggling his arm like a nervous tic and running his index finger through the trigger guard, instead of keeping it good and clear. No skin off my nose if he shoots himself in the foot thanks to poor trigger discipline, but if we’re going to be sharing a confined space he’d better learn fast. Somebody should have taught him. Who, though? Jeanine? Eric didn’t care much if we squeezed off a few extra shots on our way by, but he’s dead now and not the greatest authority on gun safety.

All I can think is how easy it would be for him to shoot me here – if the fidgeting is a warning, if he’s going to pull that trigger and whether he’ll be shooting to kill or just wound – the image takes over me, overpowering and complete, of sweet-faced Caleb Prior squeezing that trigger with total carelessness and blasting out my kneecap. It’s real to me, or real enough, the sound first and then the pain. It would hurt. I know exactly how much.

Maybe I’m losing my touch, but I don’t want to get shot again.

I reach over, as casually as possible when my heart’s practically in my throat, and in a flash I fold my hand over his – nothing friendly, as I wrench his fingers up and away to where they should be resting, somewhere they won’t contract on the trigger at the slightest surprise. I don’t even do it hard, or hurt him, though it would be so easy to give him at least a sprain – but he cries out in surprise and Tris is back in a flash, her arms full of bagged supplies pillaged from the greenhouses. I’m shocked she doesn’t drop them and launch herself at me directly.

She pulls her brother back by the sleeve. Back and away from me. (Despite his relative size, the way he startled does remind me of his sister the way she had been, back during initiation, and that’s an uneasy feeling. Not knowing how to categorize that, I’ll leave it be.)

“Caleb, what did he do?”

I answer before he can; his stupid face is still pink, his eyes still round with dull surprise. Must have woken him from a daydream about spreadsheets, or the exact color of Jeanine’s panties. “I was just showing your darling brother how to hold a gun without manslaughtering anyone. I’m surprised nobody ever taught him how.” Some traitor.

Tris tosses her bags into the vehicle and wheels on me. She doesn’t square for a fight – all the better to catch her off guard, I think, before the part of me that doesn’t like getting my head bashed in against a car door takes charge again – but her feet are solidly on the ground, her sharp chin raised.

“Leave him alone or we’re leaving you behind. Go bother Cara instead.” Her little eyes are so cold – the last time I saw her face like that, she’d been the one who shot me. To Caleb she says, “Give me that. When you’re holding a gun, keep your finger up here. Not on the trigger unless you’re ready to put a hole in whatever you’re pointing at. And treat every gun like it’s loaded.”

She sounds just like Four. How great-minded of her to teach her traitor brother a lesson or two. It’s no skin off my nose if he puts a few slugs in the back of Tris’ head, just as long as he waits until we’re actually on the road. Even better if it wasn’t an accident. Caleb’s sullen eyes are protesting that he does know this, it just slipped his mind, but he knows better than to protest out loud. He’s spent his entire life with this shrew; her version of the basics is a lot more boring. Mine would at least have been memorable.

And now it’s Four who’s giving me the eye from where he hangs off the back of the truck, all sinewy muscle and tattooed skin – Tris’ loyal lapdog. He’s bigger than I am, and heavier too – not as fast, maybe, and he’s injured. His body has more weak points than ever. But I still remember how it felt having his gun leveled on me and wouldn’t care to repeat it. He will kill me if I give him an excuse, any excuse.

Caleb’s thoroughly shaken out of his reverie now. “I know how to use a gun, you piece of shit. I’m not a kid.”

“I thought you guys weren’t supposed to swear. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Tris hisses my name. It’s as good as a warning.

“It’s just an expression, Stiff. Quit jostling me; I’d hate to spill anything.” The toe of my boot nudges against a gas can, just firmly enough to elicit an eerie metallic sloshing. I watch a crease appear briefly between Tris Prior’s eyebrows, just a little flicker like a punctuation mark. She’s angry – of course – but also afraid. Growing up in Candor had been an education in reading people’s faces. “Sorry, Caleb. Next time I’ll ask first.”

“Next time think before offering any of us your priceless input.” Four dismounts from the side of the vehicle, where he’d been busy strapping on the last of the baggage – mostly acquisitioned from Amity it looks like, though they won’t miss it. Spare clothes and ammunition and water, other bits and pieces. No medicine – that’s Four’s to dispense, so famous for his skill in mending things – and nothing superfluous. Who knows what Cara’s loaded up with? Her priorities are all over the place.

He pushes past me and heads straight to Tris’ side. She leans into him, obviously into it; in the low light it’s pretty sickening.

“Are we ready to go?”

“Ready as we’ll ever be.”

“I’ll be driver for the first stretch. Tris will be in the passenger’s seat.” How sweet. They can hold hands. “Caleb, you’re in the back with Christina. Try not to wake her up.”

Caleb stares, wary. But I’m not hearing any complaints.

“Fair enough,” I say, capping off the fuel tanks. “I’m riding with Cara. Try not to get lost; you’ll probably starve out there.” Four stows them away without a word, as if they don’t weigh a thing. If I don’t behave I’ll end up back there bouncing around with them. Probably hogtied.

“And we’ll be driving for how long?” Caleb asks.

“If we keep off the main roads, once we meet up with the other half of the team we should be able to make it by late afternoon. Maybe sooner.”

I saunter off to my own truck, where Cara’s still standing around looking peeved. She’s easier on the eyes than the competition, and at least she appreciates me – Tris can bitch and moan about my inclusion in the exploration party, but it feels good knowing that my particular gifts will have their place in this whole undertaking. Maybe there’s more people like me on the outside. More pragmatists. I’d like that.

“What are you waiting for? Hop in, then.” Our stalwart leader raps on the side of the armored vehicle with her knuckles. There’s no kind of restraints inside, nothing to hold us in place if the driver wraps this thing around a utility pole. I’m taking my chances and I know it. This place is going to explode; people are heading to the wall, not just the Allegiant but anyone with half a brain. Unarmed they’ll be easy pickings.

If Caleb’s lucky, he’ll sleep the whole way way, though I doubt that’ll change the glazed look in his eyes during waking or the way his hands shake. I don’t have the luxury – if I’m not ready to do my thing on command for Cara, I’m dead weight here and we all know it, despite my boyish charm. I half-expect to end up dead in a ditch long before we make it 30 miles out of Amity territory, let alone reach any sign of life outside the wall. But I’ll keep going until then. I just hope she doesn’t want to make small talk on the way over.

We set out before the sun’s up for a world that may not need us after all.

Chapter 2: Division Of Labor: Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Tris

---

Even the air smells different out here, whipping past my face as we gain some speed. The road before us emerges from the early morning darkness tracked with scars – the cracks and potholes I can at least recognize in the beams of our headlights. In Abnegation, the council members would have taken one look at this place and started organizing a volunteer road crew on the spot. In some places the paved roads give way entirely to rubble. Four drives around the worst patches of wreckage in the road, sometimes weaving from one side to the other to avoid a bad spot, and though we’re keeping a steady pace we’re going slow enough to have a good view of our surroundings – the blackened buildings half-leveled, the choppy wild grasses along the sides of the road, as the road itself emerges out of the waste.

We pass a pair of felled utility poles, like pillars. We drive alongside the train tracks, where a ruined train car still stands – scarred from some blast, its mirrored surface pocked and pitted with shrapnel. The signs here are no longer notices about the approaching border, but brightly-colored murals – all of them defaced. The only text I can make out is nonsense, but looking closely you can still make out a pair of bright blue eyes peeking out from a scorched blot, a fragment of a word or a human hand, a smiling mouth painted as scarlet as Christina’s.

Rubble isn’t new to me – I don’t think I can remember a single building in the city that wasn’t in some state of disrepair, except maybe Erudite headquarters. But on foot I’d have known exactly what to do about it, one way or another – the Dauntless would have climbed over, the Abnegation would have gotten to work moving the stones to clear the way, no matter how long it took. I don’t know what they’d have done in Candor, or in Amity – sit down on the nearest boulder and chatter, maybe.

Now, I didn’t know what to do. Our heavy wheels rolled over everything in our path and ground it into powder. I’d seen vehicles like this driving over people’s bodies – the dead and the wounded alike, crushing them. I’d seen –

No, I hadn’t seen that. I don’t know when I saw that, or where, but the recollection makes my heart surge. It could have been worse, the way we made our exit, but I can’t imagine how, and I still can’t believe we made it out this clean.

Nobody talks for the first few hours, except to confer over directions in low voices; we’re all either drowsy or edgy, and I cling to the handle beside the window and my stomach does an acrobatic flip at every new bump in the road. Four’s low, calm voice is the one thing my mind can anchor on, picked out from the electrical rumble of the engine; he’ll point out something new by the roadside, or where the old warehouses used to be. Everyone else is silent. Even Uriah, which really gives me chills. He and Christina are side by side, but they don’t even whisper. Uriah stares straight ahead, dark eyes chillingly focused.

“Do you have any of those really good pain pills left?” Christina asks once; her voice is friendly and jocular, as if to lighten the mood, but if she’s asking she’s likely in pain. Half the people in this truck are injured, and every teeth-cracking bump and jolt just makes it worse.

Four starts digging around in his jacket pockets, like another bottle of pills is just going to materialize. “There’s something in our first-aid kit. Give me a moment.”

The air in here is starting to reek like boy – which is unfair, and not just to Christina. I’m as sweaty and grim as either of them, but it puts my teeth on edge. I don’t mind being trapped in close quarters with Four, but I know it must be hard on him to be trapped at all – he’s rolled his window down and tied back the canvas flap behind his head, but the breeze only comes through in wet gusts. It didn’t take long before I was regretting the choice to sit up front when seating arrangements were made – it seemed better than sticking Caleb and Four in close proximity, or worse, Peter, but every jolt and bump is nauseating. I’m starting to feel too sick to read the map. The map itself does not extend too far beyond the city walls, making its original status as some kind of forbidden contraband worth killing over a little laughable – I can only try to make sense of where we’ve come from, not where we’re headed. Our trajectory is marked down in red pencil, but the only real rule is, don’t get lost. Don’t get separated.

I’m too jittery to sleep, but it physically hurts to keep my eyes open. I think of asking Caleb to read to us or to tell us some story he knows. I used to like his voice. But I hardly know if he’s willing to talk to me. I don’t know if I’m ready to talk to him. Thinking of him still stings.

His silence might be a sign of prayer. Folding your hands, shutting your eyes, while dad pronounces some blessing or you’re left alone with your thoughts for a little while. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do it anymore, or what form to take, except please. Please, let it be all right.

I’ve hardly closed my eyes when I have to open them again. The other commandeered van is nowhere to be seen. We’ve lost them.

“What is it?”

Christina’s awake, hanging over the partition. Her lipstick’s smeared out of the corner of her mouth, and her hair’s a mess, but at least she’s lively.

“Keep going. They’re probably waiting for us up ahead, over the hill.”

“There’s no hill, it’s just the way the road goes.”

“Great, that’s really what we need. If we lose them on a completely open road–”

Four swears, smacking the steering wheel with the palm of his broad hand.

“Just keep driving. How many other cars are going to be on the road? We’ve already got a head start, we can’t afford to lose it.”

If we did get lost out here, we’d be screwed. Dauntless’ idea of survival skills was all about running with the herd, firing guns and breaking bones – individual acts of daring that coincidentally added up to create a force incapable of marshalling itself for battle. Ripe for exploitation. Anyone who could have served as our general was either under Erudite’s thumb from the start, or too mad-dog crazy to pose any threat if they were to rebel. I knew the word mutiny, but it had hardly seemed like a possibility. Four might have been the exception; if we’d had a dozen more instructors like him, higher up the food chain, maybe the serum attack wouldn’t have happened. But all the challenges, all the games – they weren’t to tie us together but to force us apart, to compel us to vie for the attention of men like Eric. What else were soldiers supposed to do? Hold hands like a bunch of Amity?

That wasn’t quite true. Not everyone in Dauntless was cut out to be a soldier. Some of us were looking for something better, or trying to escape the homes and factions that had hurt them too much. Some Dauntless were looking to rise through the ranks, to prove themselves – that was a soldierly quality, wasn’t it? In our lessons we’d heard about professional warriors as well as simple volunteers – but those school days were a world away and who knew how much of that was true? Some Dauntless joined up from simple love of hurting people, without any strong feelings about domestic defense or prolonged survival apart from that. I think of Peter during the Abnegation massacre, how compliant he’d been and how ready to kill without even a drop of serum in his veins. I’m not murderous, he’d said, eyes big and liquid like the suggestion alone hurt. No wonder Candor didn’t want him.

*

The best thing I’d ever heard about the territory outside our boundaries had been a passing mention – maybe one day it’ll return to nature, whatever nature meant for land that was still uninhabitable, land that breathed and wept poison. Maybe it’d go back to the way it was meant to be. I can’t remember who it was that told me that. Maybe it was my mother.

I need to see what’s beyond the wall. I need to see more than anything.

As we approach, taking a curve around a heap of debris, the other van swims into sight – one moment there’s nothing and the next it’s there, framed square in our headlights. We didn’t even hear the engine going – it’s parked on the shoulder, or what there is of one when the ostensible path is just a smear of burned rubble.

“Maybe it’s stalled,” Christina says.

“Can you radio her?”

“We ditched the radios back at Amity. God, that was so stupid.”

There’s nobody visible in the driver’s seat. Has something happened? Has Peter already opted to mutiny? He can’t be that impatient, and Cara would see it coming, but my heart skips a beat at the suspicion anyway.

“Pull over, you’ve got to park –”

We come to a grinding halt in the gravel pathway. Christina gives a cry as the sudden halt throws her forward Cara emerges from the bed of the truck and runs to meet me – she runs, and it occurs to me that she’s still wearing high heels. No need to sacrifice style when we’re going to meet our makers.

“How is everybody? We thought we’d lost you there for a while.”

“We’re holding up alright. Christina’s leg’s acting up, but our fuel turnover’s good.” These trucks have been baking in the sun for who knows how long; it’d better be. “Why did you stop here?”

“Up ahead there’s a gated entrance. We’ll be coming in single-file.”

It doesn’t escape me that this is hardly a straight answer as to why here.

The strangeness of seeing a structure like this undefended almost overwhelms me; it’s as if they want us to just stroll on in, but they haven’t exactly put up confetti and streamers for us. My eyes dart from one thing to another, from the fences to the cut wires to the ominously open inner gate. We don’t need an ambush.

“Have you had the chance to look around?

“Not too much.”

I’ve never seen land so flat. No wonder it was so easy to buy this place as a wasteland – it’s eerily quiet, without the rush of trains passing or the murmur of human activity. Something else was missing, too – the thud and whir of the turbines. Even at a distance, they’d added something distinct, and their absence leaves me feeling exposed.

In the distance, though not too far, is a sprawling structure. It isn’t big in the same way the Merciless Mart is big – it’s low to the ground, with a few spiky structures atop it like lookout posts except improbably high off the ground – but the wicked fence that surrounds it is topped with tangles of bladed wire. The signs read: Bureau of Genetic Welfare.

Cara is making a mental note of this as we speak; her eyes get bright, and I half-expect her to make some clever comment at my expense. The desire to get in a fistfight with her still hasn’t entirely disappeared.

Uriah whistles. “That’s it.”

“Maybe we’d be better off going in on foot. Time to quit strategizing and get armed.”

Peter swings out the side of the other truck and balances himself on the edge of a low concrete wall. He wears Dauntless boots and blue jeans, and they make him look as leggy and light as one of the massive spiders that used to share rooms with us back in Abnegation. Spiders have never been among my fears; at absolute most my mother would scoop one up on a piece of paper and relocate it outdoors, even if this meant it tried to scale her arm or ended up perching on her hand.

“You wanted to explore, Stiff. Let’s go exploring.”

*

This is what we’re destined for, isn’t it? Not just the Divergent but all of us. This is where we meet our nearest neighbors; this is where we find out what we’ve been put here for, and who built the walls.

The structure itself sprawls bigger than any I’ve ever seen, bigger than the Merciless Mart; instead of going up by levels it’s spread out into various outbuildings. The signs announce greenhouses and barracks as well as offices, strong indicators that people should live here, but the first thing I notice once we get out is the silence. No engine sounds, no roar of wheels or treads. Is that good? Is that bad? No human sounds either, though, none of the low-level urban chatter that we’re used to or even the sounds of wildlife. Next, I notice the smell. The smoky ozone smell of an electrical storm is strong around the terminals of the inner gate – judging from the wire-topped posts, this fence was once electrified, but not any more. Someone made it here before we did and took out the compound’s primary defenses.

I go in first along with the other two women of the group, sweeping a path. Cara’s gun is drawn; mine is not, but hangs heavy at my side. Caleb and Peter go next, Uriah and Four follow up the rear. This isn’t a place of welcome. This isn’t a place that’s been here waiting for us with open arms. There’s something wrong with this place, big time.

Chapter 3: Waste Disposal: Tris / Peter

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Content notes for this chapter are in the endnote.

Tris

---

The smooth gray walls extend so far up I have to crane my head to look – a few birds flutter above our heads, they must be nesting in the skylights, but the only sound is the heavy beats of their wings. This facility is massive, but the sterile hallways and locked doors remind me with skin-crawling familiarity of Jeanine’s offices. There should be guards with guns at every door. There should be tripwires, laser beams, nozzles that spray poison gas in our faces. I should be reliving my worst fears right now instead of going over them one by one in my head with every carefully measured tread.

“This isn’t right,” Christina says, hugging my arm. “Something’s up. We need to leave.”

“We’re not leaving.”

“Not when they practically rolled out the red carpet for us,” Uriah says.

“What’s so special about a red carpet?”

“Hell if I know. It’s just a saying.”

Four moves to check for traps, but Cara waves him off. She’s the one to cheat the electronic lock with a few keystrokes and a hard hit from the butt of her gun. The door clicks open, and a wall of stench rolls out to meet us.

A sign hangs over our heads, but I can’t read it. A partition separates us from the rest of the hall. There was a workstation set up in here; it’s hard to tell if it’s as makeshift as it seems or if it’s just been ransacked in the violence. Somebody was boxing up papers. Somebody else was drinking coffee; the dried-up cup still stands there like a pitiful landmark.

I have never seen a dead body left to rot, but the smell is unmistakable. Four catches me when I stumble back, but even he can’t keep from recoiling, even before his eyes can fully process what he’s seeing. I’ve never seen death like this – I’ve seen bullets, I’ve seen blood, but this fills my eyes and nose and mouth. Even my ears – this place is swarming with flies, and they sing past like the graze of a bullet.

They were killed where they stood, or at their desks. One of them was seated at what I can barely recognize as a computer terminal, and lies with head slumped against the keyboard. From the clothes I can’t tell if it used to be a man or a woman, but a mat of dark hair falls loose over the face. A plastic tag sits on the desktop, not far away, but it is nearly submerged in a pool of liquid too foul to touch – not blood but decay.

Nothing is supposed to rot like this. In Abnegation we handled the unpleasant things; if something was growing mold or the flies had gotten to it, you slipped on a pair of gloves or you pared off the spoiled parts. Ruin was still useful to us. We took whatever was left and made sure there wasn’t any waste.

All of this is a waste, nothing but a waste.

Caleb steps forward and picks up the ID tag. He’s calmer than anybody should be, than anyone could be, inhumanly calm – but his face is so pale. Some of the liquid crust comes off on his ungloved hands.

He reads off a name, a woman’s name. Whatever it is, I don’t even really hear it. The world grows fuzzy around me, the corners of my vision go gray.

Four pulls me by the hand through an upright glass passageway, and on to the other side. A massacre happened here. How can none of us say it?

In the next partitioned-off office there’s another dead body, and in the next, and the next. They must have brought them here to their workstations, to make them do something. I don’t know if what we’re looking at is a success or a failure on the part of whoever did this, but they covered their tracks.

Everyone we meet is dead.

Eventually the office blocks and wide-open hallways give way to a laboratory in white; papers are scattered everywhere, the chairs are overturned. This room is different than the others. Whoever came through here had to break down the door. Whoever came through here hasn’t been back in a long time.

In one corner are a row of squat beige boxes like refrigerators; one of them is ajar, and it exhales a musty odor strong enough to overpower the smell of death. Between the table and the shelving units is another dead body. A man, not very old, with skin a few shades darker than Four’s and with dark Dauntless braids. This one didn’t rot. This one withered. There’s a bullet wound in his temple as clear as if it were made yesterday.

Another gunshot wound to his shoulder was barely a graze; he took a third to the gut, a fourth to the leg, both dark blossoms against the cloth of his dark green uniform. He died fighting. Tobias kneels down next to the body and touches two fingers to the dead man’s chin, lifting to get a better look at his face.

“Shit,” he says, but his face is unreadable. Like he sees something I don’t. When I go to lean in closer, he sticks out an arm to keep me back, but I catch a glimpse anyway between the blackened streaks of dried blood.

A Dauntless tattoo marks the back of the dead man’s neck.

*

We reconvene in the hallway. Christina presses her sleeve to her mouth and nose, and I only wish I could follow suit. Only now do I realize I’m shaking.

“If we keep going from here, we’re going to need to scavenge.” Cara is gray with exhaustion; she braids back her hair without needing to look, exposing a thin shaved strip at her temple like a Dauntless. How can she be so calm? Animals scavenge. Thieves scavenge. I think of the Factionless – we can’t be that desperate, can we? Not desperate enough to justify taking the belongings of people who aren’t around to defend themselves any more.

I can’t restrain myself. “It already feels enough like we’re robbing the dead. We have enough to go on. We don’t need any more.”

Peter’s on Cara’s side now, crossing over to the opposite wall. “Who cares what it feels like, Tris?” Stiff. “It isn’t like your faction doesn’t rearrange things after somebody kicks the bucket, so nobody has to haggle over who keeps the second-best rock for a pillow or whatever.”

“That’s different. In Abnegation we consented to share resources.”

Four’s eyes on me cut in even before he speaks. “The adults do, maybe. Children don’t even know what they’re giving up until they see other people taking it for granted.”

My words have touched an old bruise and I know exactly what caused it. My throat goes tight and a prickle of humiliation runs down the back of my neck. “That isn’t what I meant,” I mutter lamely. “These people weren’t in any faction. They weren’t consenting to anything.”

“Think of it as data-gathering, then. We didn’t come here just to have a look around, and wherever their colleagues may be, they deserve to know what happened.”

Caleb’s eyes shine pale. It’s easy to imagine him with those flimsy make-believe glasses in front of them, like a shield for distance between himself and the subject of his observations. He is observing me. “It’s not logical to abandon resources like this. We need access to their files.”

Uriah sighs against his hand. “The least we can do is bury them before we start stealing their stuff.”

Pragmatically speaking, he’s right. Unburied bodies spread disease, but it’s more than that. I’m reminded of the incinerator, and the mere memory of that stink rushes over me to turn my stomach – what could only have been burned flesh. I couldn’t have known it at the time. Dauntless burned people there, and they would have burned my body there after I’d given them what they wanted from me.

They would have burned Tobias there too. Like garbage.

“What do you say, Tris? Is that compromise acceptable?”

Is this compromise acceptable?

I split, and I run. Past the checkpoint, past the gates and down the gravel road, kicking up chips of stone that clip my ankles and leave me bleeding.

Vision shudders out of focus. There’s no trees, no path, no sun in the sky; no one is chasing me but I can’t look back. The blood is singing in my ears.

The hoarse call of a crow rings out like a shot.

I come around again balled up in the passenger’s side seat of our truck, hugging my knees to my chest and breathing stale overheated air. My feet wouldn’t reach the pedals in the driver’s seat, and there’s no key in the ignition; it just seems like the smallest safest place. Four used to be afraid of small spaces. I seek them out. No place is safe, but here is the safest, with my gun in my lap. I don’t know when my gun went from the thing I hated most in the world and the thing that killed Will, to the instrument of my salvation and security. A gun like this one.

I try to breathe. I’ve got to breathe, or this is going to get real hard.

A sharp knock comes at the window. I startle at it like a gunshot. Staring down at me is Peter’s awful fucking face; he has to stoop to be on roughly my level, and his green eyes are unreadable.

“If you’re done having some kind of psychotic break, Cara wants to talk to you.”

“Tell her to wait.” I rub at my face with the back of my wrist, but there’s no good way to hide what I’ve been doing out here. It isn’t even real tears, real crying; I’m not wrenched by sobs, or tormented by the memory of what these people were like when they were alive. It comes and goes, like the shivering that accompanies a fever.

Peter pinches the bridge of his nose, exasperated. “You didn’t even know these people. There’s tons of dead bodies lying around out here. What do you care?”

“Four did. Four knew him, the one with the braids.”

“That’s impossible. If both of you are losing your shit out here, I’m hitching a ride back with the rest of the girls.”

“Good luck with that. Christina would eat you alive.”

“Can’t you just – turn it off? For now? We need you back in there, Tris, can’t you get it together this once?”

“Don’t you think I’d have done that already if I could? We’re not all like you.”

“Right, I forgot, I don’t feel things. I’m just an empty husk full of lies and bullshit.”

“Well, you sure do act like it. Get out of here before I break your neck.”

“Fine, princess, I’ll do it. Head back to the war room whenever you’ve got your shit together, we’re leaving as soon as they’re in the ground. There’s some things you need to see, Stiff.”

He straightens up and goes over to the bed of the truck, where Caleb sits swinging his legs. I don’t know how long he’s been there, or what he heard.

“You want to give me a hand, Caleb?” I hear him call out, sweetening the tone of his voice. Peter brushes past him and pulls out two of the gas cans, which clank against each other freely.

“Sure. With what?”

“I think we need to go clean up.”

***

Peter

---

I won’t rhapsodize about how much I love lugging around dead bodies or the smell of people burning. There’s no fun in that, and the suspicions of people like Tris Prior, that it might be a hell of a good time for people like me, are more than a little creepy. It says more about her and her type than it does about me. It’s a pain in the ass, but somebody has to take care of it.

We burn them in the asphalt lot where judging from the oil stains on the blacktop the people stationed at this place used to leave their cars. Somebody drove off with them. Other scavengers, or whoever did the shooting. Who knew; our noble progenitors are callous opportunists, just like us.

They lie there side by side, bloated bodies and blackened faces. Men and women alike. Lucky for me it’s only a handful of them or this would be a lot harder to tackle, but dead bodies are still fucking heavy, if you haven’t had the pleasure of dragging one around while it drips its juices down the back of your neck. Four checks their pockets for identifying papers or data cards. It’s oily, filthy, stinking work and I think I catch Four with tears in his eyes, though I’m in no position to comment on it. Caleb keeps his distance from the flames, circling as the fire starts to scour away at clothing and flesh. Even I can’t watch that part.

We leave the fire burning.

It’s a relief to go inside and get out of the smoke. The members of our team who aren’t busy crying their eyes out or sorting paperwork have gathered around a bank of computer monitors in the west wing of the facility; the screens surround us in a 360-degree ring, but they show nothing but dead black space.

I peel off my coat and toss it over my arm. It’s going to smell like dead people barbeque for the rest of the trip, I’m pretty sure.

“Somebody really fried these computers.” The fair-haired woman, Cara, only has to take one look to determine this – out of all the Allegiant, she’s one of the few equipped for handling tech thanks to her background, but even I can tell something’s up. “There’s a separate generator in the north complex that powers some incubators. Whoever did this was careful not to risk disturbing the samples. But they destroyed the hard drives accompanying all of these and cut the incoming cables.” The hard drive she’s transplanted is rigged up with an ugly beige cable that looks conspicuously less up-to-date than its surrounding gear.

“Why not wipe them all? Both the lab and the surveillance setup.” Caleb crowds up to her side before she can turn the screen around to face us. This place is big – big enough that we’ve barely even begun to explore it – but it’s not big enough to warrant this many screens. What were they watching in here?

“Don’t ask me. Maybe it was an accident that they missed the lab complex. But lucky for us, the computer network hooked up to all those computers before they got cut off. So there must be something of interest on here.”

A map webbed with green lines, carved off into sectors. The shape of the territory means nothing to me; why should it? More sectors than I can immediately count, so structure by faction seems unlikely.

“We’re here. And we were there.” Cara moves her finger less than an inch over to another dot ringed in red. “Chicago.”

The other red-ringed dots are labeled. Among others, there’s an Indianapolis crossed off in red, Minneapolis blinking between green and black, and way over in a little island of its own an Annapolis. A shitload of -polises. Impressive. Other names don’t seem to follow any discernible pattern by region, but they’re almost all marked with red x’es, whether blinking or steady.

“Outside every marked city, there’s a Bureau headquarters. Except here.” She stabs with a skinny finger somewhere to the west of us on the map. “I’d guess that one’s a standalone facility for a reason, and it’s your best shot for finding a staffed facility. The rest of the staff here may have retreated there for safety, or they might be planning a rendezvous there. In which case, we’d better make it over before whoever raided this place does.”

Four nods, though I can’t imagine he actually understands this more than I do. Tris will have to break it down for him in small words.

“How long’s the drive? From here to there?”

“It should be something like six days, depending on road conditions. We’ll try to rig you up a radio, but no promises.”

No promises. I lean back in my seat and suck in a deep breath of the sterile filtered air, but I can still taste the smoke.

Chapter 4: Tactics: Tris / Peter

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

This chapter is about twice as long as they normally should be – consider it a double feature, idk.

Tris

---

“So what do we have here?”

Cara tries to snatch the file from my hands before I can finish reading it, and I have to wave her off before I feel ready to pass it on. Back in the day, I’d have dropped it the moment somebody else needed it. She’ll get her turn.

“It’s a report on – radiation levels in crops harvested in the Upper Midwestern territories. Caleb?” I had heard the word, but not in conjunction with the few other words that I could recognize as my eyes skimmed over the pages – sampling, data, contamination, damage. The letterhead at the top reads Bureau of Genetic Welfare, Illinois Branch – and classified.

The stack of papers before us is up to my eyes – not an impressive measurement, sure, but it’s a lot to go through with a headache. All of it had been salvaged from desktops and file cabinets across the compound. Somebody had tried to burn it, the same way they’d tried to render the computer network unusable, but Cara’s hooked up the monitor salvaged from the lab and scrolls through a list of names. Something catches her eye, but she clicks through too fast to see.

“What we have here is an abandoned science lab with a bunch of samples of genetic material. They’re all labeled, some of them have bar codes for organizational purposes. This is clearly an organization with a plan and considerable means. A repeated phrase in all of these papers is genetic damage.”

Christina raises her eyebrows. “Genetic damage – does the phrase mean anything to anyone?”

“It’s what the people on the outside need our help to heal. The intention was to send for us and our insight as soon as we were ready. They’ve been waiting here for our input. We came too late.” Cara presses the heel of her hand against her eye and leans against the computer terminal.

“Great. Then what does genetic damage look like?”

The first words to nearly leave my lips are, it doesn’t look like anything. Thinking of Divergence, how none of the other Divergent I’ve encountered have looked alike – no more alike than me and Uriah. We both have two arms, two legs, and a head, but that’s about it. “It can’t be how you look, or they wouldn’t need samples. It’s got to be how you think, how you act–”

Caleb interrupts me, chiding as a schoolteacher. “The things that dictate your faction, perhaps. Don’t ignore the obvious possibility.”

One of the first things we all learned in faction history was that your faction had nothing to do with your basic appearance – the Candor dressed for business, and Dauntless had their piercings and plenty of scars, but it wasn’t about the color of your skin or how big you were. I wish I’d remembered that during Dauntless training, when I’d felt so puny and small just for being female. That can’t have been how it always was.

“What bearing does it have on how you’re born?” Christina asks.

Some factions had bigger families than others – I just figured it was a matter of their principles. Erudite families for the most part had only children, when they had any at all; there were always rumors about that, about how they kept their numbers up despite that, but it seemed more likely to me that their work kept any potential parents apart. Dauntless used protection, every time; any resulting children were raised by the group almost more than the individual parents. Candor usually had two children, and some Abnegation families had as many as three, though that was frowned upon. Too wasteful. Self-indulgent.

At the top of the stack sits a paper on fertility that I can’t make heads or tails of. I tear off the top six or seven pages, revealing the next section of text contained in this wad of paper. Early childhood development in children of the reintegrated. It looks just like a bunch of so-called case studies, experimental results typed in tight columns and jargon I can barely make out. I fold the report up in a thick square before I can get much further than that and jam it in my pocket. Nobody even notices.

“At the end of each report, they state the goal of their work has been to foster an understanding of genetic integrity. Was that what the killers came here for? To shut them up, or so the shooters could get their hands on whatever their conclusion was? How do we know the shooters won’t double back to clear us out?” Christina asks.

This is enough to make Uriah speak up. He’s been jumpy since we got here. “Whatever it was, we can’t stick around to find out. This is too much to go through in a day or two on-site.”

Cara swivels around the computer screen to show us an irregular outline: a map. “That’s the thing. There’s another outpost about a week’s drive from here. It’s marked on every map in the computer system, and with an active pass card you should be able to at least get close.”

I don’t know what sounds less inviting, using a dead woman’s keycard to raid her workplace under fraudulent pretenses, or showing up on the doorstep to find all her friends have regrouped and are waiting there for us. Or enemies.

Christina pushes back her chair and stands up, hands on the tabletop. “People in the city deserve to know what this was all about. We can’t help these people if we’re unprepared, and we don’t even know what we’re dealing with.”

“This is proof that there’s other people still out there, other cities, other settlements – are we just supposed to turn back now? We can’t do that.” Caleb’s voice is achingly fervent. I’d forgotten he could even sound that way. I want to know what our mother fought for. I want to know what we are.

“It’s not like it has to be one or the other. We’re not going to run out of gas if we double back, we can do both. We can come back here, take back the computers for a more detailed analysis, nobody would even need to know.”

“Sit down, Christina.” Cara’s voice rings out sharp. “I didn’t bring you all here for the purpose of splitting you into smaller groups.”

Christina barely comes up to Cara’s shoulder, but she rises up onto her toes to lock eyes with her and for a moment I think she’s going to pounce. “But you did bring us here to push us around? Aren’t you guys all about people having their own say?”

“Fine, then we’re going to take a vote. Anybody who wants to go back to the city can escort back these documents. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them, but people need to know. Anybody who wants to leave gets the rest of the supplies and our best wishes. Who’s ready to head back?”

Christina raises her hand, and I feel like I could cry. But what else am I supposed to hope for her? I can’t compel her to risk her life on account of my curiosity. “People deserve to know the truth. That’s my responsibility.”

Christina has a mother and a little sister back there. She’s proven herself. She’s proven what she’s ready to do to protect them.

Cara’s own hand is nowhere to be seen, but she practically vibrates with intensity. Her eyes drill into Uriah from across the tabletop. But Uriah isn’t looking at her; he’s staring at the papers in front of him.

There’s an awful pause. He swallows sharply, Adam’s apple dipping in his throat.

When Uriah speaks, his voice is practically breaking from the strain. “You know, I’m as excited to know what’s out there as anyone, but I’m less excited about the whole suicide mission thing than I used to be. Whoever’s out there is armed and dangerous. I’ll catch up later, but not without reinforcements.”

I’d never have thought of Uriah as a coward. If he abandons the party, the number of Divergent drops by one. Four and I are that much closer to being outnumbered. Overwhelmed. I can’t keep holding my tongue. “And who wants to keep going the way we are?”

My own arm is hoisted so high that my shoulder aches. Slowly – tentatively – my brother raises his hand. Four does not hesitate in raising his at all. They require no explanation.

If I have Four, then I have everything I need. I wouldn’t trade Four for a thousand soldiers. There’s no one I’d rather risk my life with.

Peter’s hand is raised. He must catch the kind of looks he’s getting, because he pushes his thick dark hair out of his eyes, like he’s annoyed. “If you guys don’t mind, I’m going to get the hell out of here. Have fun while the factions descend into cannibalism.”

“And you, Cara?”

Her hand is not raised, but her eyes are on me, hard as glass.

“Don’t think I won’t catch up with you, Tris. Are we agreed?”

*

Christina hugs me more tightly than ever before – her lipstick’s no longer smudged. She looks like a real warrior.

“It’s not – we’re not trying to ditch you out here. I’m sorry, Tris.”

“Take care of yourself, okay? That’s all I ask, I want to come back and have you all be alive. Keep an eye on Uriah.”

“You’re asking me to keep an eye on anyone, it must be pretty serious.”

“I mean it.”

“Now get over here.”

Christina presses her lips to my forehead, and scruffs the back of my neck.

“Don’t die out there. Come back to me.”

Uriah hugs us both tightly. Fortunately he doesn’t seem to take offense at earlier remarks. It doesn’t feel like we’re parting ways for good, that’s for sure – if we’re lucky we aren’t, but I don’t know what saying goodbye for good ought to feel like. Thinking that way will get both of us killed.

“Don’t drink too much, okay?” I admonish him, more jokingly than I really feel like at the moment. “That stuff will rot your insides.”

“All right, all right. Don’t pine away out there for love of me.” His hand presses against my side, lingering for one weird moment, and I feel something heavy drop into the pocket of my coat.

It isn’t until he’s already walking away that I realize it’s a flask. He’s given me his flask. My fingers twist on the metal cap, and the weight of it is hard as a bullet.

*

Cara comes last, after the others have cleared away for one last pass of the barracks and greenhouses. I don’t see her making any heartfelt goodbyes to the rest of the group; whatever she’d said to Four before he left, it just seemed to piss him off, though Peter seemed perfectly complacent. She corners me while I’m boxing up files, and thrusts a plastic sheath full of papers into my hand. It’s all very low-tech compared to where we came from.

Atop the folder sits a stiff fabric box. Unzipped, it comes open like a clamshell to reveal a dull gray rectangle.

“I copied you a map; it seemed like the least I could do. This is a copy of the hard drive – keep it safe, somebody might need it some day.” I don’t know if she means me, or somebody on the outside – this might be a bargaining chip. This slim rectangle might save my life one day.

She’ll have to forgive me if I don’t quite trust her motives, not with all the things that can too readily happen – but coming from Cara, this kind of offering is a windfall. No reason to be rude, just because somebody’s entire mode of operating is incredibly questionable.

“Thank you.” I slip both disc and folder away in my bag. Cara doesn’t need to know what else I’m taking with me.

“I’ve got something else for you, Tris. It was Tori’s; she wanted you to have this before you set out. It’s a location transmitter – don’t look at me like that, it’s not a simulation, not that that’d take. It’ll just show us where you are. And if things get out of hand, or you get too far off the beaten track, no matter where you go we’ll come find you. With reinforcements.”

There’s only one of them, a metallic bead smaller than a grain of rice. Cara gestures for me to sit down on the steel table and holds it out in the palm of her hand for me to look at it. It certainly looks like something Tori would have put together, or that she could easily have reverse-engineered from the examples of existing technology Erudite so generously peppered us all with. But I can’t imagine she’d have handed it over to Cara willingly; she had too strong a sense of ownership over the things she made. Like she was proud.

“Won’t you need a needle?” Or a dart. The thought of being stuck with anything resembling the simulation inducers is not inviting. I picture little wires slithering free of that thing and locking around an artery, or jamming into a major nerve.

“Actually, no,” Cara says, tipping the transmitter out of its plastic pouch. “Unfortunately for you. Roll up your sleeve.”

“Oh, no. No way.”

Smaller than a grain of rice. I can barely see what she’s doing, but before I know it, she’s made an incision with a silver pocketknife smaller than my thumb. Blood begins to well from the soft part of my upper arm – soft being a relative term on my small, wiry body, but it doesn’t hurt any less for it. I grit my teeth, and bite my tongue in the process.

Time to breathe. Her fingertips press the transmitter in between strands of muscle. The sensation is excruciating, moreso because I can make out what’s actually going on through the discomfort. Getting jabbed with anything sucks. Getting jabbed with an electronic transmitter of unknown provenance is not an experience to repeat.

“Can’t I just carry it in my pocket or something?” Another shudder of pain rips through me and I grip the table’s edge more tightly.

“Won’t work; it relies on nerve impulses. Now relax. If you don’t want it, carve it out.”

“Don’t think I won’t do it. If this thing does anything else other than what it’s supposed to–”

“It won’t. Tori knew what she was doing. I’m just sorry it had to be like this. Are you planning to tell Four, or should I?”

“I’ll tell him myself.” Cara’s head bobs low as she bends down to stick with a bandage. It’s one of those wrap-around bandages, like after you donate blood. My father donated blood often; who knew how many of the more reckless citizens of the city had his eminently sensible blood pumping through their veins even now. When I roll back down my sleeve, the shape of the bandage disappears, but not the pain.

Cara straightens up. For a moment I think she’s going to take me by the hand, or try to pat me on the back or something, and I’m pretty sure if she did I’d have to knock her to the ground. But she just looks me over, like she’s considering something.

“Be careful, Tris.” How dare she echo Tori at a time like this. How dare she turn coward at the first sign the outside world isn’t all peaches and cream and prepackaged answers.

I don’t rub at my shoulder to ease the mirror ache there; I can’t let her see I’m anything but fit to go. Instead, I lower my eyes. “Yeah, well.”

*

What are we hoping to find? I know what I want – I want answers. I want to know what I am. I want to know what I’m capable of.

Tobias’ answer is as straightforward as he is. He wants to know if there’s another way to live besides this. And I’d wager he wants to be as far from his father’s influence as possible.

Peter’s treating the trip like it’s inconsequential: like a day trip across town, like it’s some game he’s playing for fun. Not looking for anything in particular, just to see the sights and meet exciting people. Probably the same reason he gave Dauntless training a shot, besides the wanton cruelty.

Caleb’s not looking for anything. That way at least he’s likelier to get what he’s looking for.

The terminology of the papers we’d gone through is still rattling around in my head. I wish somebody could have explained it to us. Whole genes, intact genes. Was this Divergence, or its opposite? I didn’t feel like a whole person, a healed person, a better person. I felt worse than just a small part. Is Four an intact person? A complete person? What Marcus did to him runs deeper than I can ever know. Four has all the strengths that make Divergents threatening – he is versatile, he is perceptive, he is incredibly brave. He’s also proud, controlling, vengeful, miserable. Who can tell what he’d have been grown up to be in another household, with parents who weren’t monsters? The knowledge that Marcus’ influence has maimed him somehow even now is too much for me.

We’re setting out on a mission where we know we may die. That’s about all we know – even with a map in hand, we don’t know who or what exists between us and the next printed dot on our map. Gaping chasms, wild animals, insurmountable walls. There’s no way of knowing what happens if we keep driving, or when we’ll be too far to turn back. I need to know. I need to know where I came from.

Tobias is getting edgy too, though he’s better at hiding it than I am– he hasn’t shaved, and he’s barely eaten, even when the rest of us were passing rations around. He hasn’t slept, and the smell of burned flesh still sticks to the canvas. Looking out the window, you can still see the black smoke, rising behind us in a greasy pillar.

“It won’t be long until we’re clear of it,” Four remarks to me when he catches me looking, in a low voice that’s not yet a whisper. He sounds hoarse with exhaustion. “The total distance isn’t that far, objectively speaking. The roads are just worse.”

“I’d feel a lot better about this if we wouldn’t be having to babysit Peter the whole way.”

Four’s brow furrows. “He still feels like he owes you, Tris; we might as well take advantage of that. And he knows things that are going to be useful.”

“How long until he doesn’t think he owes me any more?”

I want to get out, but I don’t know if I want to get out that badly. I focus my eyes on the horizon, and try to calm my roiling stomach. My fingers worry at the edges of the folded-up case study, working out the metal staple.

The truck veers, so sharply that the wheels grind on their axles. The body jolts hard in a series of shudders as we hit the road’s edge, and it sends me slamming into the edge of the window, lashing out for something to hang on to.

I cry out, calling Four by name before the vehicle grinds to a halt – his eyes flutter halfway between closed and open, irises ringed crazily in white, but he doesn’t look at me. Four doesn’t look at me.

Caleb scrambles around in the back, where the parcels of supplies have been jolted free of their webbing by the shock of our motion. “What happened? What’s happening?”

“Oncoming car–”

“What are you talking about? There’s no car –”

Another sharp jolt and we’re off the road entirely. Four’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles stand out white. Nostrils flared, breathing hard – for the first time I notice the sweat on his forehead, wet beads sticking down his dark hair. The complaints rising from the back are just noise; all I can hear is the sound of Four’s breathing as he sucks in desperate breaths.

He’s seeing things. He’s trapped in a tiny metal cockpit that smells like death, no wonder he’s seeing things.

“Four,” I say, as gently as I can. “Maybe I can drive.”

He’s been behind the wheel for practically two days straight. He needs rest, and I’ll just have to pick up the slack.

“Fine. Everybody out.”

*

I am adaptable. I can learn this. Press on the one pedal to go, press on the other to stop. Easy stuff. The whole vehicle gives a lurch every time I go to take it out of park, and the wheel is much more reluctant to turn for me than Four, but it’s not like we’ve really got other motorists to worry about. By the roadside, Four and Caleb stand watching me under the shade of a spreading tree – Four’s bearing radiates grim approval, despite the deep shadows of sleeplessness, but Caleb’s expression is unreadable, and the thin light through the leaves puts his face still mostly in shadow.

I’m learning this. I nearly have this. To come back and take another pass by my would-be passengers, I have to pull a U-turn; the tires scrape as I struggle to keep the turn itself narrow, and from the backseat I can hear Peter’s laughter. The brakes scream as I slam the pedal to the floor, and the lurch sends my only passenger flying.

“I thought you were asleep!” I have to shout over the awful sputtering of the engine, though it comes out as more of a scream.

“How the fuck was I supposed to sleep through that?” Peter hauls his bruised body up in the rear view mirror, hanging desperately from the canvas straps even now that we’re not moving. I’ve driven us into a ditch. Fantastic.

“Shut up, like you’re a better driver.” The wheel refuses to turn over any further.

“Put me behind the wheel and find out.”

“I’d rather drive this thing off a cliff!” The exhilaration has made me manic. My wounded arm throbs.

“Put it in reverse, for fuck’s sake, you’re only jamming it in deeper–”

“I know how to put it in reverse! I’m doing it!” Slamming it into reverse frees us from the rut, and I can ease the body of the truck back if I keep my foot on the brake in increments. This thing is massive, and even when I’m confident I’ve got it centered in the roadway again I can’t bear to see what Four’s expression must be. There’s a knot of sheer mortification sitting in my chest that’s as big as my fist.

Peter kicks down the tailgate and sticks his head out to mock me. “Great news, everybody! Tris Prior knows how to shift gears!”

***

---

Peter

The first sign of civilization’s not so promising. By the side of the road there’s a rust-eaten sign that reads, in boxy reflective letters, Keep Our Highways Beautiful. The metal of the sign had been sprayed full of bullets long ago, and now half of it hangs from the posts like a scrap of lace. Even Four had to laugh at that. Whoever lived here had zero self-awareness of what they’d go on to do and what would happen to all they’d made – it left me wondering if this had been a quick war, or a slow one, a lightning-strike that leveled anything taller than a few stories or a prolonged assault.

Four and Tris are sitting in the dust by the side of the road, passing back and forth rations and one water bottle between both of them. We’ve only got rations for all of three days, so I hope they like sharing.

I snag a quick look over my shoulder at the two of them, deeply absorbed on one another, before breaking out my best stage whisper. “How do we know he didn’t fuck up the car back there?” It seems wise to omit Tris’ hand in fucking up our one and only ride, given present company and the nauseating memory of her stunt driving routine still fresh in my mind.

Caleb’s already rolled up his sleeves. “I don’t know, that’s not the kind of thing they teach you to spot when you’re learning how to drive a tractor. Tris didn’t seem to have any problems, besides operator error.”

I take a stroll around the perimeter of the vehicle, counting my steps. The opportunity to stretch my legs should be relished, and after Tris’ shit parking job there’s plenty of room to maneuver on either side. Kick, kick, kick, kick. “Tires are fine.” And after a cursory look beneath, “Undercarriage too. It’s scraped up to shit from running off the road, but if we picked this thing for looks it’s news to me.”

“That’s promising. If there were any leaks or cracking under there, she’d need more extensive repairs. I know about engines, though,” Caleb says. “Engines are easy.”

It pains me a little that he knows something I don’t. “If they’re so easy, why don’t you show me? Just in case you, y’know, get shot in the face or something.”

“You sure know how to flatter a guy, don’t you.”

“I used to be Candor. We can’t help it. So tell it to me straight, how does this shitheap actually work? Or – not work.”

He pops open the hood. The inner workings of the car are a snarl of wire and tubing, the engine itself sitting somewhere beneath the driver; I can spot the places where the solar power line was rigged up to attach, but this is tech on a level that’s beyond me. Give me 20 minutes though, and I think I can pick it up. Electricity or no, the fumes are dizzying, and when Caleb bends over to check the connection plates a thick splatter flicks forth and lands squarely on his shirtfront. It looks so much like a bloodstain that I have to laugh, and his complaints are muffled around the roll of electrical tape between his teeth. His shirt wasn’t always the dirty gray that it is, I realize as I lean in closer – it used to be blue. That’s clever – it’s a surprise there haven’t been more people dyeing over their old clothes to make them new, trying to pass for one faction or another, declaring their new allegiances. It must be unimaginable.

Caleb’s straw-colored hair falls in his eyes. Concentration has made them beadier than ever. He passes off the roll of tape to me and straightens up to make a point. I try to follow where his line of sight points and where his gestures indicate as he walks me through the standard diagnostic checkup for a converted engine. These things connect here, and these turn over here, what performs what task. They’ve solved the overheating problems that used to be rife in old cars, but it’s still eyebrow-raising to see Caleb manhandling these parts directly.

He brings two wires together and a spark jumps – the flicker of a smile crosses his face, where anybody else would have grinned.

“Are we good?”

“We’re good.”

*

The truck’s back on the right side of the road with the help of a few good shoves, and the low-beam headlights surround it in a pool of dull yellow. In the dying light of day, the electric light’s already attracting insects. Tris sits on the hood, swinging her legs, and Four stands next to her like a good guard dog. Caleb sits on the ground.

“So how exactly are we going to divide the watch?”

Four has to withdraw his hand from his girlfriend’s so she can check her watch. “There’s four of us, aren’t there? Two per shift; two of us rest while the other two stay up and keep watch. Six hours at a time. Unless it’s daylight and we’re actually on the road, in which case two of us trade off driving and two of us keep an eye peeled for someone tailing us.”

“Tris and I will take first shift.” It’s Caleb who volunteers himself; he’s dopey-eyed again, not like before, compliant. The heels of his shoes leave scuff marks on the dusty road. “Four?”

“I’ll keep an eye on Peter.”

“Oh, nice.” Keep an eye on me, like I’m some kid.

“You’ve got to admit, you need it, Peter.” Caleb’s voice is infuriatingly calm, though it can’t make Tris’ stiffness any less conspicuous. “It was Cara who wanted you in the original search team. You’d better not try your luck out here.”

“This is bullshit.” I punctuate the exclamation by striking the canvas side wall, and Tris jumps where she sits.“Four, don’t you want to double up with your lady friend? You can cover for her.”

“I already am.”

“What if I’m not tired?”

“Then help keep watch. Twiddle your thumbs, count road signs, I don’t care. That’s your problem, not mine.”

This is the recipe for a fucking mutiny. Four can make me stow my gun, sure, but I’m keeping my knife sharp.

*

“Get some shut-eye.” Four’s already bedding down in the passenger’s seat, with the flimsy partition between him and me. His folding knife sits on his lap, within reach of his loosely curled hand. If he’s as exhausted as he looks, I could probably take it off of him, but I don’t think I want to try. “You’ll be out there patrolling in less than five hours. You’re going to wish you had.”

“Can’t fucking make me.”

I lean back with my head against the partition and my feet up on Caleb’s bookbag, digging black dirt from under my fingernails with the tip of my own knife. Just because we’re on a day trip across a blasted hellish wasteland doesn’t mean you’ve got an excuse to be gross. Using the same blade for personal hygiene, food preparation, and flaying the skin off anybody who messes with us isn’t gross – it’s just practical.

We burned a dozen people yesterday. We looted their personal belongings and stripped their corpses. I didn’t feel a thing, except disgust. A person should feel more than that, I think.

The blade slips. A red bead of blood begins to well up on the pad of my middle finger – on my tongue, a bright burst of copper. It tastes clean.

*

I don’t know when it is that I do fall asleep. Can’t say I like that; somebody in this convoy of dumbasses has to keep their eyes peeled for an ambush. But I do, and it ghosts over me like a different kind of waking, so fast that I don’t even notice.

In my dreams, I’m with mom again. We’re in the lab where I practiced dyeing serums purple; it was the morgue when I worked there, who knows what it is now. My father’s body is there on a rolling gurney, covered with a black tarp, but without lifting it I know that the body has been burned.

My mother is crying. My hand is on her shoulder, and I can feel her shake. I don’t feel anything else.

Chapter 5: Homesteading: Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Fair warning here: a good portion of this fic from here on out involves Tris having to interact with somebody who has hurt her badly in the past, namely Peter, and the fallout from that. The fic’s not about her coming to forgive him, and it’s only tangentially about him learning to treat her semi-decently – characters with very good reasons to hate each other having to work together is my narrative Kryptonite, but if that’s something you’d be uncomfortable reading, feel free to give this fic a pass! I’d love to write other fic about Tris that doesn’t put her in such a tough interpersonal situation.

Tris

We have driven a hundred-odd miles through battle-scarred terrain, past the places where the roads just stop entirely and through the breaks where the blacktop is split and rivulets of water snake through. Nature has cut a path, just like we will. The scenery that passes us by has included nothing big enough to be called a city – sometimes in the distance there will be possible signs of life, but when viewed from a smaller distance, they always prove as dead as ever. Just the reflection of our headlights, or the burnt stubble of a forest fire that’s reached its natural limit, smoking like a banked cooking fire. The world seems as empty as the fields, as empty as the sky. I’ve never seen a sky as blue as this, or as wide open on all sides. Maybe it’s a consequence of growing up behind walls; anything less feels exposed.

When I close my eyes, I can pretend we’re not alone – Tori is here, diagramming the inner workings of some new device with the meticulous precision of her tattoo designs, or Christina’s in the back with her arm hanging out the side like we’re out on a joyride and not an exploratory mission into absolute uncertainty. But the ache in my arm, and the joyless silence within the vehicle, both make it hard to keep pretending.

It’s sometimes easy to tell where there used to be settlements; the paths may have been worn away, but some of the fixtures still stand; tangles of broken pipes or fallen electrical poles mark where people used to live, like flags. Other times, only broken-down farm equipment. We pass an untilled field piled high with dirt, a single brown bone jutting from the top of it; whether animal or human, I couldn’t say.

“Do you ever wonder who they were?” I ask Four. He’s in the passenger’s seat, but resting pains him, and his eyes scan the horizon persistently. I long to reach out and touch him, to lay my small hand against his powerful dark arm, but I doubt he’d appreciate it right now.

“Of course. Whatever else they were like, we know they were brutal.”

“Whenever we get where we’re headed, we can see for ourselves.”

Whoever lived here is now dead.

*

Once we’ve crossed the river, it really feels as if we’re headed the right way – our truck halts halfway across and we pile out to take a look over the side and get our bearings. The raging dark water has swollen past its banks, and froths up white where it strikes against the rocks.

“Look, there.” Caleb clambers up to the edge, holding out an arm to gesture at something on the rocky shore. Even with a concrete ridge and a rusted guard rail in between us and the real edge, the drop feels too close for comfort. I’m reminded, irresistibly, of another dark chasm I’d known.

Peter had been there, too. That should serve as a reminder to take a step back from the edge. Instead, I step right up, feeling the unseasonably cool air whipping at my legs and the sting of dirty water. There’s a pale shape being buffeted against the shore on the other side, tangled in the reeds – like garbage.

“Do you see that?” Caleb calls again to Peter, who’s hoisted himself up on the guard rail for a better look.

“Sure do.” Then again, much less calmly – “Is that a person?” Peter startles from his perch, dislodging flakes of rust.

“It’s not a person,” Four grumbles. If it were, what good would it do to tell us the truth?

“Why don’t you go down there and find out?”

If it is a corpse, I don’t want to imagine how they died. Naked, dead, alone.

*

Another 200 miles. The green decaying smell of river water is far behind us, giving way to swelling hills and swarms of blue-green pines. It’s hard to imagine how people lived out here with this many trees in the way – I find myself wondering if this place used to be a timber farm. So many trees that it seems like the hills and exposed stone ridges should be buckling from the weight. Some places they cluster so thickly that the afternoon sun is practically blotted out – we pass through patches of shadow as dark as night, if not for the sound of bird calls.

“How’s this place look?” Four slows the vehicle to a crawl, and we creep past a spot like some of the other abandoned homes we’ve passed by – poured-concrete foundations where there’s no longer any building at all, tumbledown structures ringed in more expansive trees and the greenest grass I’ve ever seen threatening to overtake cinderblocks and rotten boards.

“Depends on what that is.” I gesture out to the top of the hill, where a metal contraption sticks up stubbornly. Its purpose is not immediately clear; the nearest neighboring structure is a fire-gutted shack with a tree growing straight out of the middle of it.

“A pump, maybe. We installed a few like that in Abnegation, a couple summers back. The mechanism itself is all analogue, so it’s pretty hard to screw up.”

“Will it even work, though?”

“Only one way to find out.” He shifts the truck into park, and the driver’s side door swings open; not a moment later, I pop mine open too, and our boots hit the ground at exactly the same moment.

“I’ll race you.”

My legs are stubbornly stiff from the long drive, and Four’s are too, from the way we both wobble on up the slope – the wet turf gives way under us a little, resulting in slipping and stumbling.

I beat him to the summit, but I tumble breathlessly to the ground once I get there, and he doesn’t take long before following me; a cloud of insects rises up from the long grass in agitation at our approach. One flies directly up my nose, and the indignity of it has me laughing despite everything even as I try in vain to snort it out. ‘Undignified’ is probably what I’d have called it back in the city, but here it’s hard to care about dignity, rolling around on sore muscles and stiff knees, rolling over every single rock and twig on the hilltop and laughing ourselves sick. We grapple together, half in play and half in earnest.

Somewhere in the whole mess, I kiss him, but that’s the least of our joys – we are free, we are here. I prop myself up on an elbow, inspecting the grass stains on my knuckles and forearms like the victorious party in a sparring match. “So,” I say, “about that pump.”

The lever part is barely more than a crooked metal bar. It groans with reluctance and I have to exert my full weight on it to press it down again; Four stands by, waiting in case I ask for help, but within a few tries the water’s going in unsteady, brownish jets. The whole apparatus is shaking under my grip, as if it’s reluctant to even give the water up, but in thirty seconds or so the water is running clear and I can’t restrain a shout of triumph.

Four grins like a little boy. “Looks like somebody left the water on. We’ll camp out here for tonight, if you want to sleep somewhere horizontal.”

“We can refill here too, but this should probably be boiled first. Unless you want to see what happens when Peter catches worms.”

It’s unbelievably tempting – to kick off my shoes and let the cool water run between my toes, to rinse the rust flakes from my hands and take a drink – but I’m not completely foolhardy. Even in the city, you couldn’t just go eating and drinking anything you found lying around, not least of all because of whose unofficial property it might be. Every year, some number of the Factionless would die from lack of the most basic necessities, even with Abnegation’s services. They’d die for lack of clean water, or cooked food that wasn’t rotten.

“I can’t believe people lived like this. It’s so open, everything’s so wide apart. There’s no real defenses.” Four scuffs with the toe of his boot in the now-muddy grass; a rivulet has started chasing down the hill.

“How did people get to know their neighbors?”

“They probably didn’t want to.”

*

We set up camp not that far from the roadside, uphill for better vantage. “In case we have guests,” Four says, pulling me close. “Go wake up your brother.”

(Peter is awake in the back, but motionless as a dead man. He stares out the back down the road behind us, but there’s nothing behind his eyes. He must be looking at something very far away.)

The immediate area is laid out like a triangle – a falling-down structure with a concrete floor at one point, the shack at the other, and a fenced enclosure as the third. There’s no animals left; I checked. No sign of life, no tire tracks, no other indicators of human activity. Behind the burned-out shack with the tree at the middle of it, there’s a rusted tractor, but it must be an antique – it’s more blocky and cumbersome than anything I saw during our stay in Amity, and I doubt it’ll be any good to anyone. It’s just an eerie reminder that people outside the city must have kept up with industry too. How did they do business? Or was it every family for itself?

I must have jogged up and down a square mile, all over this place and on uneven terrain too. Vaulting over fallen trees isn’t the same as flinging myself over rubble, but it’s good to get my blood pumping again; maybe this place is more suited to habitation than we’d think.

The woods are full of birds and deer and more kinds of animal than I can name. It’s tough to shake the feeling that I should know more about these things than I do – I can recognize the kind of animal that might be raised for milk and meat, or harnessed for their labor on an Amity farm, but there’s no purpose to anything that grows out here. No one planted these trees on purpose, or if they did, they did a lousy job of it. Squirrels scream out their distaste for one another from the treetops. Pine cones and debris shatter under my feet; a flock of fat turkeys scatter at my approach, breaking away in sudden flight that startles me as much as I’ve startled them. Just once I catch the golden gleam of some larger creature’s eyes – but when I flinch and turn my head, ready to shoot if I have to, it’s gone.

It isn’t frightening, as such, but I’m in a hurry to complete my circuit and get out of there. Reconnaissance work is exhausting, even when it’s not the soldierly kind. I’m just unstrapping my gun from its holster when Four calls me by name.

“Notice anything good?”

I brush off my sticky hands on the thighs of my pants. “There’s some apple trees to the west of here. No sign of anyone but us, though there’s probably some wild animals.” More animals than I can even name, and they’re all hungry. “If we keep a fire lit they might keep clear.”

“We can’t keep running the stoves; we’ll run out of juice eventually. But if we keep a cooking fire, we won’t need to.”

This place is already starting to look like a home; the guns are unpacked and lying in a heap, which spoils the effect a little, but there’s even a clothesline strung up between the pump and the trees. From the road it’d just look like a ragged sheet or two, blowing in the wind. Camouflage.

*

Our tent is really more of a tarp rigged up over a tree branch; it’ll sleep two at a time, or an extremely friendly group of three, but it’s not cold enough out here to necessitate getting that cozy with each other. My brother is snacking on dried fruit and rolling out his bedroll, and Peter is helping him pin the metallic cloth out flat. They’re chatting amongst themselves about God knows what, and Caleb is laughing, Peter is showing him where to put his hands. Completely unlike their interactions before we set out – I guess Caleb’s better at being forgiving than I am, though he only had to cope with bruised pride and a stiff finger.

I set my bag and bedroll down, but I don’t unstrap my holster.

“Hey, Caleb. Four’s starting a fire. If you can figure out how to boil water you can make tea, there’s a tin in Four’s pack. Peter – come with me.”

I take him as far from the encampment as I think I can get away with, all the way to where the apple trees are – he complains the whole way, in a half-hearted kind of way like he’s shooting the breeze with one of his little minions, but he’s not stupid enough to resist when I practically drag him.

“So what’s this supposed to be about?”

He twists one of the apples from the tree, weighing it in his hand like he’s wishing he had a slingshot. Compared to anything that grew in Amity, these apples are puny, and sour to boot – I took a bite from one earlier to test that they were at least edible, and my unlucky test subject lies where I left it. A couple fat black wasps have found it, and have attached themselves to the bitten place. They must want a taste for themselves.

I square off my stance, and look Peter in the eye. Even with a sidearm strapped to my body, I’m painfully aware of the advantage he has over me in terms of size – some part of me longs to frighten him badly, the way Ed did, and get him back, but that’s not what this is about. I’m not here to scare him, except maybe to scare him away from Caleb. The last thing we need with a team this small is – more faction. Peter must know he’ll never win Tobias over, any more than he’ll win me, even if Four’s more used to allying himself with strange bedfellows. (How old is that saying? Where had I heard it? Strange bedfellows.) But Caleb wasn’t there for Dauntless initiation. I don’t know what he’s seen, or what he’s heard, but Peter’s betting on him being an easy mark. He’s on the market for a new Molly or a new Drew.

“First things first, there’s going to be some rules around here. If you’re going to travel with us, you need to stay away from Caleb.”

“Why? Are you worried I’ll get my germs all over him?”

“I know you, Peter. I know how you operate. You must hate being outnumbered out here.”

“I hate to break it to you, Stiff, but your brother and I get along pretty well. We spent some time together back in Amity and at Erudite HQ, you really get to know a guy when you’re working for the evil empire. I like him, and I’m going to keep spending time with him.”

“That wasn’t him back there. Even if it was, I think I’d know him better than you.”

“Nobody made him defect. Nobody forced him. Even I managed to undermine Jeanine back there, in case you’d forgotten about that, but I didn’t see Caleb doing anything but kiss her ass. Your brother made a choice, or is that too difficult for a Stiff to understand?”

“He made a choice and what he chose was wrong. He was actively misled by somebody he trusted. You weren’t.”

I think of how Fernando had described my brother – that he didn’t have it in him to be naturally suspicious. Trusting. Guileless. In a better world those should have been my brother’s biggest virtues, instead of leading him to swallow what Jeanine was trying to feed him whole. He took that poison willingly – or else he thought he did, but he couldn’t possibly have known what it all implied. He’d just gotten in too deep. Peter chose this. Peter chose this before anyone else leapt in to capitalize on his cruelty.

The same boy who said the mere thought of being in debt to me made him sick to his stomach is the boy who’s trying to corrupt my brother.

“Now thank God his sister’s here to guide him back on the path of righteousness. Are you going to hold his hand, Tris?”

“Things have changed now. If we’re going to make it to where people are, we need to operate as a group, and you trying to gang up on the rest of us defeats the purpose.”

“Who says I’m ganging up with your brother? You just want him under your thumb like Four. How’d you win him over anyway? You’re not going to keep a handle on him for long with the whole damsel in distress act. Four’s just waiting until he gets to be the boss again.”

That’s what he sees when he looks at the two of us – me, a stupid girl struggling to restrain somebody bigger than me, and Four, either temporarily smitten or actively malicious. I can’t imagine smitten would be the word Peter would use; he’d accuse him of thinking with his dick, probably. He can’t imagine a motivation in life that isn’t sheer selfishness – greed, or lust, or self-aggrandizement. No one has ever loved Peter Hayes. Peter loves nothing and no one.

“Save your theorizing. He’s not the opportunist here, Peter. You are.”

“I’m just being honest about what I’m seeing here.”

Honest. Very funny. Peter slips out of his unlaced boots one at a time, sock-clad feet squirming in the grass.

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Why wouldn’t you just stay in Candor? Too busy beating up little girls to pass your law exams? Or weren’t you smart enough?”

The last one’s cheap – Peter doesn’t value his intelligence in terms of what people think of him, he doesn’t have anything in him that Erudite would value outside of low cunning. He thinks he’s smart because he knows how to fuck people over. Why couldn’t he have kept doing that in Candor, far away from me, or Four, or Edward? The only answer I can think of is so obvious that it hurts, like a physical object I keep jostling against – the very thing I’ve known all along, that he wants to hurt people. He’s not a pragmatist who’ll join up to whatever side looks like it’s winning, he’s a monster.

Peter watches me cagily. There’s no anger in his face, or any tension betrayed by his body language, but I won’t be fooled by that much – it just means he has a level head about what he’s going to do next.

“Did your parents ever tell you exactly what they thought of you? Exactly what you did wrong, how you’d fallen short, how you could have done better? It gets really old, really fast.”

No, they did not. They’d ask me instead. Listen to your guilt, Beatrice, and learn from it. What did you do wrong? (Beatrice sounds like a different person now. One of the dead. Beatrice died with her mother and father.)

“We’re not talking about my parents, Peter. I’m asking about you.”

He drops his arms to his sides, exasperated and clearly not about to produce the truth. Flustered, I’d almost say. “Then that’s why I left Candor. I got sick of lectures. In Dauntless either you pull your weight or they get rid of you. It sounded simpler to me.”

Poor Peter, struggling to live up to his parents’ lofty expectations. A tale of tragedy. I turn away, muscles of my shoulder and back locked against an anticipated blow – a blow that never comes.

“You’re so full of shit. Put your shoes back on, you’re going to want them on the way back.”

“I’m not a liar, Tris.”

“Then you’d better start pulling your weight out here. And telling the truth.”

**

Chapter 6: Field/Dressing: Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Content notes in endnote.

Tris

It’s a long hike back to our encampment, somehow longer for not having Peter griping in my ear. He jogs along in sullen silence, though I do get the satisfaction of hearing him get broadsided by the appearance of a fat brown bird. He startles and swears like he’s just crossed paths with a wild dog, and the bird warbles off none the worse for wear, leaving him scarlet-faced.

Caleb runs out to greet me once I’m past the treeline; his hair’s a mess, falling in his face, and there’s a large black smudge on one cheek. But he looks happy, almost.

“Hey, Tris.” (How weird it is to hear my Dauntless name coming out of my brother’s mouth. It hasn’t gotten any easier with time, and he rocks back on his heels when I look his way, like I’ve startled him by responding.) “Tris, we fixed up the fire. I figured out how to make it better – instead of just piling up the wood, I made a structure with openings so air can get through. It helps with the actual combustion – hi, Peter, did you find what you were looking for?”

Peter doesn’t greet him, or even acknowledge him. Caleb’s eyes are on him, too.

“That’s great, Caleb.” I must be visibly distracted still; the image of the two of them laughing is still in my head, and the wood smoke threatens to make my eyes water. My brother trots alongside me as I cut a track down the hill. “Have we got water boiling?”

“We do – it’s just hard to say how we’re going to get to it.”

Caleb’s fire is a pyramid of sticks built up to form a point; the smaller twigs at the heart of it are nearly ashes, and the wet wood steams and blackens. My eye had caught on the metal can parked in the coals, Factionless-style, and bubbling away – the material was sturdy enough to put up with the heat, but with nothing like a handle attached, it wouldn’t do anybody much good. I could ball up my coat for a potholder, or if we only had a towel – my mother used a towel, taking pans out of the oven. Hey, Peter, be a good sport – why don’t you grab that out of the fire for me?

“Well, we’ll just have to get inventive.” I fish out a cupful with the metal hinged cap of my water bottle; the fire crackles and spits up sparks at me, and the solid wall of heat threatens to singe me, but I don’t pull back until I’ve got what I came for.

When you’re sitting on a rock, it’s impossible to actually get comfortable, but at least I’m no longer getting roasted. Four hunkers down next to me, and his familiar powerful shape is another barrier against the radiant heat. He’s barefoot, and his socks are steaming themselves dry next to the fire; his gun lies next to him. I wonder if I’ll ever see him without a gun again. The reassurance that he’s there specifically because of me isn’t much reassurance at all. If not for me, he’d be safe – he’d be somewhere else, probably. He’d be safer if I wasn’t there.

“Tris? How are you holding up?”

I brush a hank of dirty hair back behind my ear. “I’m doing all right.”

The back of Four’s hand has fallen against my knee; I grasp his thumb, transferring a little of the heat from my fire-baked hand to his cooler, darker one.

“I think I need a haircut. Want to give me a hand?”

His other hand ghosts down the back of my neck; the sharp smell of gun oil fills my nose, and I lean into the caress, grimy as it feels having his touch disturb the greasy locks where they lie limp. It feels like only yesterday that I chopped it all off the first time; Four must be remembering it too, with a twinge of apprehension in the corners of his mouth.

“Well, looks like I’m back on guard duty, then,” Peter announces with some abruptness from a couple yards away. Half an energy bar sticks out of his mouth. He’s wasted no time breaking into our rations; they’ll go further split four ways than seven, but there’s still not a lot.

“You don’t have to do that. Caleb can cover; we won’t be that long.”

“Whatever, whatever. You two go do your thing. Take the night off.”

The thought of being unarmed, even asleep when Peter’s still up and around gives me the creeps. But I won’t be unarmed, not really, and more importantly I won’t be alone. Peter makes haste to the outer perimeter. He not only avoids my gaze on his way by – instead of catching me with a nasty look – but he avoids Four’s, too. Caleb sits by a lantern reading a book he must have smuggled out with him. If the two of them are planning a mutiny – well, they could have fooled me.

*

Up in the hills, up among the trees with nothing but thin plastic sheeting between us and the open air. We bathe as best we can with a few more capfuls of warm water, but between the two of us it’s less of a sensual indulgence and more a catalogue of scars and bruises. The pain in my arm has shrunk away to practically nothing, and the bandage peels away with my shirt, an unremarkable wad of nothing. There’s a bruise left behind, but no more blood.

Four dresses himself again, once he’s had some time to air-dry, but I remain stripped to the waist in my plain gray bra. My peeled-down thermal shirt is Amity-red, a pool of arresting color in the weird half-light of lantern and sunset.

I am seated across from him on the cool ground; his shaving kit sits between us, and a pair of scissors from the medical supplies, one surgical-looking piece. I take his electric razor in my hand, wondering at the unfamiliar weight of it. It is powered by one of the cells designed by Erudite, and even now the metal is shining and sharp. The last time we took a bath together, it was in the house where Tobias grew up – but there had been running water and soap.

Four can be my mirror.

I think of Tori and how ready she was to help us all become as fully who we were as possible. She must have been biding her time, but she’d taken long enough to keep me safe and to give me the tattoos that now peek out from under my folded collar. In her own small way, she made me who I am. I think of Lynn, and all the things she never got to say to the girl she loved. I think of all the people our age who have never known a life outside of this, who have never loved without thinking of their faction, who have never been free to do anything without an obligation to go with it.

The shears take away the bulk of it; what’s left is uneven and patchy, still long enough to pluck up into little spikes with my fingers. I almost stop there, at the sight of my own wet hair lying in peels on the dusty ground – and Four must sense it, as he sits opposite me cross-legged and sweeps away the little pieces as they fall. He hasn’t asked me, are you sure, or tried to talk me out of this for my own good.

The sharp thrum of the electric razor cuts through the air. For Tobias it must be abundantly familiar – I try to picture him shaving his face when just starting out, but this necessitates imagining him as a child. A scared little boy trying a grown-up thing for the first time. It gives me a pang.

“I can’t believe you have to use this thing every day.”

“Not every day. Definitely not out here. The girls in Erudite start shaving their legs when they’re thirteen.”

It isn’t wise to raise our voices – patrol or no – but I can’t restrain a laugh. “Isn’t that a little illogical? Even for Erudite standards. And how did you know that?”

“One of them asked to borrow a spare razor during our Initiation. It was a surprise finding out what she wanted it for, to say the least.”

“I wish I was just shaving my legs. At least I could get a better look.” And I’d end up with even more scabs on my knees, no doubt.

“You’re fine just like you are, Tris.”

I reach up to rub at my scalp – it feels stiff and prickly, and I can follow every line, from the soft parts of my temple down to the knobbly back of my skull.

“Here, check it out. Have I done all right?”

I can feel his soft eyes on me, tracing along from my bare neck to my bare arms, my bruises and my soft belly. It hurts, being so close to him and not being touched – like an ache in the pit of me, desperation cut with a low banked heat.

“Perfect. You did perfectly.”

I peel the coat from his shoulders, and his hands brace my narrow hips. My own hands find the warm broad planes of his chest, guiding up to where the tattoos span his neck, where I can feel the pulse beating in his throat. I cup his face in my hands and mark him out in little kisses – his cheeks, his chapped lower lip, his jaw and his throat.

“Is this–” he asks, the unformed words is this all right sweet in his mouth. I kiss them away into silence. His broad hand slips behind my back; the air is bitingly cold against my skin, but his fingertips are warm as they graze the flushed furrow of my spine, and the metal clasp of my bra springs apart. The sensation of yielding sends a shiver through me, pebbling my skin in goosebumps. My breasts fall loose against his chest.

He sinks back a little with his arms twined around me – the muscles of his belly tense underneath me as I press my mouth to his, and I trace the sleek damp skin with my fingers, the deep lines of his hips leading down beneath his waistband. A few of the glossy black buttons on his pants have already come undone, or they were never buttoned up to begin with. The rest slip free easily enough at a touch.

Four is wrapped around me inseparably close. He fits against me like a complementary piece,

Here, practically under the open sky, we are free.

*

I don’t dream this time; I sleep like a stone. Four dreams, judging by how he tosses and turns in the night, but there’s nothing I want to do less here than think.

When I wake to the light pouring over Four’s broad brown back, I see the tiniest blond prickles of my shaved hair still sticking to his skin. They’re in the folds of our clothing, scattered in the grass, prickling in the guard of the razor. They catch the light and shine gold.

“I probably look like a boy now, don’t I.” I tug down the hem of my shirt after a luxurious stretch; the cloth holds my breasts back even flatter than before. Last night’s activities hang over my body like a ghost, the memory of touching and being touched.

“You look like you,” Four says. His hands bracket my narrow hips, and he presses a kiss to my newly bared forehead.

*

Caleb spent the night in the rafters of the scorched-out farmhouse. His hair sticks up like a bird’s nest. But he can confirm there were no other vehicles on the road approaching – not a single gleam of headlights. “Just deer,” he says, though that in itself seems to disturb him a little.

All morning, Peter is conspicuously silent. I’d say he was sulking, but he seems to be pretty industrious instead of moping around poking things with sticks – there’s hot water for cooking and drinking, and he’s organized our supplies by perishability and strangely enough, color. Every color is in evidence in our scarce spread – from wild rice (black and brown) to to granola bars (pale gold) to dried fruit (red and purple). These supplies were stolen from Amity – this strikes me now in a way it hadn’t back in the city, now that I have visual proof that Peter’s been pawing over them and adding God-knows-what to the mix.

The neat little spread gives me the creeps. He’s the last person to devote himself to the service of the group. Who wants his service, anyway?

I settle down on my haunches next to him to swipe a bar, shucking back the paper wrapper without breaking eye contact. Peter cuts a ragged figure – his eyes are ringed with red, and there’s a powdering of gray ash in his hair dulling its regular shine.

“What’s this about? You leaving us alone, acting like you’re minding your own business. I know you, Peter. Whatever you’re planning, you won’t be able to keep a lid on it for long. Planning on making a break for it?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m minding my own business? It’s stupid to antagonize the people responsible for your continued survival, and you know I wouldn’t last a week out there. I might be evil, but I’m not an idiot.”

Peter’s latched on to that word, evil, as if it suits him – and thinking back to the laughing-faced boy who tried to kill me during initiation instead of the filthy wild thing standing in front of me, the label fit him like a glove.

“You seem pretty indiscriminate about other people’s business to me.” Thinking of his questions, always questions, the way he’d been astute enough to notice my shyness under my shapeless gray clothes those first days – within minutes, he must have. His instinct was to find whatever vulnerability was closest to the surface and to press on that as hard as he could. “The first time I cut my hair you wouldn’t shut up about it, now I shave my head and you don’t say a word about it. You must really be slipping. I can think of at least a dozen awful things to say.”

Color has risen to Peter’s cheeks, scarlet beneath dirt and sunburn alike. “I was trying to give you some privacy.”

‘Private’ is not a word one would use to describe a haircut. This encampment isn’t all that big, and this confirms what I’d already suspected – that our private meeting had not been that private after all. God knows what either of them had seen that night, or worse, had heard – the thought of either of them, the brother I’d once trusted or the ally I still hated, spying on me and Four while we did that is sickening to me. Not just the physical exposure but the joy of it, the unbridled joy of being with him and all the things we’d said to each other. The thought of anyone watching us –

“What did you see?”

“Nothing, nothing – what the fuck, why would I go looking? I just assumed– I figured if you guys were going to be fucking it should be as far away as possible.”

“That’s hard to picture, coming from the guy who liked to watch Stiffs get changed.”

“I never did that,” he says, voice choked and face pinker than ever. “I never would have done that if it weren’t–”

I gesture for him to keep his voice down. He flinches.

“Then what would you call what you did do?”

“Wrong. It was wrong, Tris, it was – a shitty thing to do.” The words tumble out of him in a chain, like they’re too painful to say one by one. A shitty thing, as if it wasn’t a whole campaign of things, of cruel stares and threats and touches and harm. His hands on my breasts, his eyes on my legs and arms and throat. His knife against my skin. “And it shouldn’t happen to anybody. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I wish you’d thought that a year ago.” I don’t know if it’s been a year, or six months, or eight months, or a decade. “If you want to be the kind of person that respects girls’ privacy, by all means start now, but you’ll be doing it for a while before you can expect any medals.”

I don’t know what he wants to achieve by halfway apologizing now. If he’s trying to throw me off by feigning decency, he’ll have to try harder. Is this his idea of good behavior? Or is he the same little boy he was in Candor, picking a fight and then bursting into tears like he’s the one that’s been hurt?

I try to think of what in the world he could do to make up for what he put me through – ‘die’ is at the top of the list, but I doubt he’d take that well no matter how sincere his remorse is. I want him to admit what he tried to do, even if the words will hardly fit in my mouth and can hardly be accommodated in his. I want him to never do it again. I don’t want him to touch me ever again, or to look at me like I’m something small he can grind under his heel.

He’ll never undo what he did to me and what he tried to do. I want nothing to do with him, and that much will never change. But if he wants to start being less shitty, I’d like to see him try. Starting with my brother and I.

**

Come late afternoon, Four has shot two deer. Peter is helping Caleb dress the meat. I’ve only seen these animals in pictures, and that hasn’t prepared me for how big they are – I catch sight of the bodies through the trees and it’s a moment before I even notice the boys are there, I’m too overtaken by the bulk of these animals where they lie. One has a heavy crown of horns, the weight of which leaves its neck twisted at an unnatural angle, and the other does not – a female, maybe, tawny and sleek. The bodies are laid out on a tarp for cutting, and Peter is offering to show my brother how; clearly he hasn’t noticed me watching them, or he’s pretending he hasn’t. Hunkered down on his heels next to the bodies, he wipes off his blade on the grass; Caleb kneels next to him, with the expression of curiosity more fitting a doctor with a patient.

The eyes on Peter’s deer are open. They could almost be human, glossy pools of darkness fringed with dark lashes. How Four could kill a creature like this is beyond me – had he looked it in the eye, or had it been over too quickly for that? He could never cut apart an animal that looked like that – I can hear him not far off, cutting firewood, and it’s no wonder that he chose to delegate the task. But to Peter –

Peter must be going by guesswork; he’s no more a hunter in the old way than any of us are. But there’s an easy confidence to the way he works in the knife and pulls, he’s slit the carcass from groin to chin. He’s bloody to the elbow already, and pretty soon he’s scooping out guts, chatting all the while. Is this his idea of keeping his distance?

Two against two. Caleb isn’t a fighter, that much is obvious, but he’s willing to follow orders. And more than that, Peter knows how I feel about him – he knows Caleb’s all I have left of the family I once had. Peter is a killer, before he’s anything else. My brother is not.

Chapter 7: Survivalism: Peter / Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Content notes for this chapter: oblique discussion of sexual harassment/assault, mentions of suicide.

Peter

Tris is taking care of more personal business somewhere, poking and prodding all the dials in the dashboard or burying more garbage out in the woods. It’s hard to give a fuck about what she does when I’m not around. It’s always been funny to me that the one luxury Stiffs really soak in is privacy – closed-off little houses, shapeless clothes, nobody asking them how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking. It was funny enough seeing one of them scramble to adjust to Dauntless’ oh-so-lovely wide open spaces. What happens to Abnegation who figure they’d really rather be Candor? There aren’t any.

There’s no point in sticking around here any longer if we’re not actually stocking up on resources or confirming anything about the lay of the land, but none of the others seem eager to pile back in our halfassed ride and keep on rolling toward impending doom. I’d welcome that, if it meant a change from all the busywork.

“Nice work back there,” Four says. I’m still wiping the blood and grease off my hands, and he’s watching the deer meat dry out over the fire, turning it over from time to time with the blade of his knife. The oil-smoke rising from the grease-splattered coals is a little more familiar than I’m comfortable with. This style of preparation can’t possibly work that well, but far be it from me to question his mighty survivor logic; maybe Abnegation know stuff about this kind of thing that we don’t. They didn’t get to eat the meat, but maybe they prepared it anyway.

This is the most approval he’s shown me this whole trip.

“Thanks,” I mutter. “Not like you were a shitload of help or anything.”

“Did you and Tris have a nice talk?” There’s a faint curve of amusement at the corner of his lip. Something twists in my guts at the sight of it.

“Yeah, she shook me down about contributing to the group. So this is me contributing.”

Tris is picking apples with her brother. They’d hear any screams, but there wouldn’t necessarily be any, and I don’t think either of them would come running. Four is bigger than I am, heavier. And there’s no one else around for a thousand miles. We’re all alone here, him and I. I know what I’d do, if I were him.

Fortunately for both of us, Four isn’t me. His big dark-ringed eyes dig in like the dull impact of a bullet. “There’s a grave site, in the woods. I don’t know how Tris missed it. Big enough for three or four people, I’d think. Somebody piled up stones to mark it.”

“So why are you telling me this? Want to go dig them up?”

He pauses heavily, and it couldn’t be clearer he’s unimpressed with me. “It’d be easy to lose track of a body out here.” Another turn of the knife. The blade catches the light, sending a warped reflection in dappled white scattering across the leaves. For a moment, it shines in my eyes. Shit, this has to be the most roundabout way possible of conveying menaces – so what do I care?

“Wow, you’re threatening me. You’re not a very subtle person.”

“I don’t need to be. As long as you ride with us, you will show the appropriate respect. Is that understood?”

The instructor in him is coming out again – like he’s just stating facts about where things stand in the chain of command. Clearly I’m at the bottom. But his eyes slip from me to a sideways glance at Caleb. If you thought he was disgusted by me, you should have seen the way he eyeballed his little girlfriend’s traitor brother. He hates him, and he resents having to take him with. Maybe even more than he hates having me in the party, though he seriously needs the manpower. I wonder if he’s supposed to be Divergent too – if that’s what his tattoos unsubtly stand in for, and if that’s why he guards Tris so closely, from the fear of being the only freak left if she dies. No matter what the founders’ intentions were, Divergents are still freaks. A beneficial mutation is still a mutation.

(On the far side of the clearing, Caleb sits in the shade with a notebook open in his lap, drawing the leaves on the trees. What an idiot. As if anybody cares what trees grow out here. He’s even more useless than I am. What an idiot. What an asshole.)

I already feel dirty under my own skin, I feel the itch to swipe back and say something perverse. But I think of how easy it’d be to hide a bunch of wrecked bones out in the countryside, and keep my eyes lowered.

“Yeah, understood.” He’d better not go telling his girlfriend about any tragic mass graves or she’ll freak.

There’s a lot of rebuilding to do – out here and back in the city alike. Tris might be perfectly content playing happy homemaker out here; the two of them could wrestle bears and raise a half-dozen light brown babies together, while the likes of me would wither and die. If we don’t keep going foward I might as well just off myself here. I’m not cut out for work.

*

The fire’s just a heap of ashes now, and after last night’s chill the noonday sun is like a slap in the face. Everything’s fucked up out here, even the weather – one second it’s clear skies, then it’s passing showers, or it’s cold, or it’s suddenly scorching even in the shade.

Tris has one of the maps on her lap. She’s working out the turns ahead of us in neat pencilled columns, and sometimes she’ll ask Four about some hypothetical, some washed-out bridge we might run into or an alternate route if there’s roadblocks or too much damage to just roll over.

Four is going through the process of carefully rearranging cut-up meat for storage. He sits at her knee, and you can smell the stink of blood from here. Every couple minutes she’ll put out a hand to rub his back, just in between his shoulder blades; he won’t turn his head or look up, but he must like it, because he hasn’t told her to stop.

This is private. I shouldn’t be seeing this. No one has ever touched me like that, and I don’t think they ever will.

Each stroke of my knife brings away a thick blond peel of bark; I sit back with a branch parked between my knees, slowly stripping it down and bringing it to a sharp point. I don’t even know what I’ll use these for – if we were really roughing it for long, I’d build a trap, and they might come in handy if we have to put together an extremely low-tech ambush of our own. But for now it’s just something for my hands to do, and I like seeing the sharp point emerge from the wood. Just a handle with an edge. A tool.

My hands are shaking, and I doubt it’s from hunger. Forcing them steady is the best I can do.

“Anybody else have a headache?” Caleb has his metal canteen pressed against his cheek and temple like an ice pack; it’s so cold that it’s sweating condensation.

“Must be all the fresh air and sunshine.” I can’t keep the smirk out of my voice, but I’m feeling it too – a little needle of pain behind each eye, digging in. Overall I’m not at the top of my game out here. There’s nothing to hide behind that’s familiar, and too much that’s still unrecognizable.

“Hey, it’s a serious question. The water tastes different out here, even after it’s boiled.”

“It did between the sectors in the city, too. Water in Erudite tastes the best, they actually filter out half the shit that gets recycled through. Then Candor, then Dauntless, then whatever you all drink in Abnegation, probably.”

“And Amity’s is probably all drugged to hell and back, like everything else there. It makes me queasy just thinking about that, people eating and not knowing.” Like him and his sweet sister, for one.

“What makes you think they didn’t know? For somebody with your big brain it’d be like a paid vacation. People don’t actually enjoy being responsible for their own actions.”

“If you say so.” His mouth turns down at the corners, like his sister’s, even positioned neutrally at rest – I can’t remember their parents’ faces, so it’s hard to weigh in on whether it’s an inherited characteristic.

Tris makes a face. Her shorn scalp bristles as she raises her head. “Peter, enough. Caleb, if you need a painkiller, I’ve got some in my bag – it’s probably just pressure changes. We’re higher up here than when we started out.”

She flicks a sachet of pills to her brother without even getting up, and her aim must be excellent, because she gets him right in the center of his chest. Not much stopping power in a couple of headache pills, but it stops him in the middle of his train of thought. Caleb won’t push it.

**

Tris

“Ready to break camp?” Four asks it more like a declaration, not that late in the second day there. He and Caleb have set to the task of reloading everything back in the truck, leaving me with Peter to pack up and obliterate our traces – Peter’s acting tame as a housecat, but I catch Tobias looking our way, keeping an eye on him and on me. I haven’t told him about our conversation earlier, out of concern not to escalate things; as grudging as I am to take Peter at his word that he’s doing all this out of compliance, Four is even less likely to buy it. I wonder if he ever taught him firsthand back in Dauntless, or if Eric handled the entirety of that. His caring tutelage would explain a lot, though Peter lacks his analytical nature.

On the fringes of our camp I spot a couple of wild dogs. Stray dogs in the city didn’t stick around for long – the few animals that escaped destruction ended up as working animals – but there’s something familiar in these animals and their restless loitering. They nose around at the heap of guts Caleb had interred in the bushes after the boys’ foray into becoming amateur butchers. Woe to them if this little pack should scratch up the haphazardly-dug latrine pit; they’re likely to find that a lot less appetizing.

I approach one of the strays with hands raised. She raises her yellowish-brown head, fixing me with her enormous brown eyes; her lips flare to bare teeth as a growl escapes her. A little shiver of recognition runs through me – this scene has played out somewhere before, in a simulation or in a dream, the feral animal about to show its teeth and me, foolishly trying to negotiate – something. Am I supposed to shoo them away? They haven’t touched any of the meat we’ve tried to keep, and the presence of smaller scavengers might keep bigger ones at bay.

“Fine,” I say, feeling profoundly stupid. “You can have them.”

Her ragged ears prick up, like she’s not sure what to make of me, but she’s not about to spring. I almost wish I could take her with us – scarred, battle-worn, but free. Free is the only way she’ll survive out here. No one else is about to take her in.

*

We’ve discussed what we all missed most about the city – real beds, or running water, the way the sun shines on glass. I find myself missing real vegetables, of all things – we’re surrounded by greenery but I don’t even know what I’d pick without making myself ill. Four misses his apartment, with its Fear God Alone inscription. Peter is pining away for a change of clothes and an actual shower. The list of who we miss most is conspicuously absent, but it’d just be a list of the dead anyway. Our radio hasn’t sounded besides the occasional empty chirp, and the metallic pellet crusted into my upper arm does precisely nothing to relay back to me what’s happened to Cara and company, or who’s doing the monitoring now.

We’ve discussed the names of cities we’ll pass along our way. Most of them are given a wide berth, just in case, but the names sound like a litany of impossible things – it’s almost beyond imagining that there were once so many people in the world to warrant this many towns. And not even a fence to be seen. No heavily-armed ramparts, no electrified wire, nothing. No one protected them.

I’m behind the wheel for the late-afternoon shift; in the passenger seat beside me, Caleb’s fast asleep. Tobias is supposed to be the one on watch in the backseat, but the rear view mirror shows his eyes are closed. His eyelashes cast funny shadows across his cheeks, except I’m not laughing. Like this, he could still be a child – tattoos or no tattoos. Yellow light from the diminished sun cutting through the windows – we could be in the car going anywhere and instead we’re going nowhere.

Peter is awake. I can’t say I’ve ever longed for his company, let alone his idea of conversation, but part of me is terrified I’ll fall asleep at the wheel or imagine things that aren’t there – and another part on a deeper level has come to hate the silence, with the expectation that whatever breaks it next will be trying to kill us. Or at least seriously inconvenience us.

“Did he ever talk about me?”

“Not like you were his sister, no. He was selling you out.”

More than anything else, this is what I fear when it comes to my brother – that he knew what he was doing. He’d always been the one who did it right, the one who succeeded at completely extinguishing any selfishness or any pride – and then when the chance came to make something of himself, and to rise in the ranks instead of stagnating forever in a position of service, he took it. Caleb knowingly supported the regime that killed our mother and father – he’d have killed to uphold it. Maybe he already had.

“Don’t hold it against him. He regrets it.”

“Not enough.”

“Four scares the shit out of him.”

“You say that like Four doesn’t scare the shit out of you.”

“I’m not scared. I’m reasonably cautious.”

“What are you afraid of? In the fear simulations, you got the one for public humiliation, didn’t you?”

“I did. Not– not because it was one of my fears to start with, but because it was the instructor’s. You remember her. Lauren, or whoever.”

How bizarre it is, to sit around and chatter like an Amity with my own would-be rapist. Everything that’s happened since then only compounds the strangeness of our first acquaintance – enemy, then ally, then enemy again, then ally. Never friend; I think we’re both fine with that. But I can’t help but press him about some things; my curiosity gets the better of me.

“What was it like? I’d figure having people tell you how lousy you are in public places must be commonplace to you.” I thought of my interrogation, standing there in the middle of everyone struggling to keep my mouth from moving even when the serum did its best to burn the truth out of me. Nobody had to tell me how bad I was for what I’d done. I was more than ready to tell them all myself. Peter doesn’t laugh, but in the rear-view mirror I can see his eyes crease.

“It was a lot like that, yeah. Being in the middle of everybody and not being able to lie any more, standing around naked while people said stuff to you, and did stuff, and asked you how you liked it, and if you said no they’d say you were lying anyway.”

“Sounds involved.”

“No shit. I threw up afterward. I found some quiet little place and I threw up. I hope it wasn’t some Erudite transfer’s secret reading nook – or maybe I hope it was, I don’t know.” He cracks a smile but it isn’t very lively; even the memory has left him bloodless pale, like a ghost in the narrow strip of rear-facing mirror.

My own mouth twitches into a tighter line. “Oh, I can only imagine.”

It doesn’t make me feel better, knowing he got a taste of his own medicine, even if it was only in a simulation. If I’d been more heartless, maybe, it would have – if I’d been more capable, or more cruel, I could have made sure he got paid back in kind at the hands of someone at least as much bigger than him as he was than me. But I hadn’t even wanted to.

I can’t judge with simulations. For me they’d never really seemed real to begin with – I only know what they’re supposed to feel like from secondhand accounts, not even Four can tell me that – but that didn’t mean they didn’t terrify me. Like a hallucination, the fear of what they signified, on top of it all. Just like what it’d signify if I relished the thought of another sixteen-year-old kid getting manhandled and scared to death, even in what was hardly more than a dream. Peter’s worst fear is that other people will treat him like he treated me; why am I not surprised?

Peter keeps his eyes fixed on the seat in front of him. “Yeah. Yeah. Next question, please.”

“Did you ever get burned alive in yours?”

“Oh, yeah. Burning alive’s easy – you just have to let yourself melt into a puddle.”

“What kind of problem solving is that?”

“The sneaky kind.”

*

Chapter 8: Situational Awareness: Peter

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Peter

Caleb lies back, watching the sun move across the sky through the peeled-back canvas roof. His head is pillowed on my wadded-up coat. If he’d been anyone else I’d have pulled it out from under him and let his floppy head rattle against the metal bench.

Another hundred-some miles on the odometer and the landscape’s changed so sharply as to be no longer recognizable. We’ve gone from dead-flat plains behind us and overgrown jungle fields to stripped rock and sparse scattered trees, facing down the edge of a sharp drop-off. There’s a river at the bottom of it, and an intact bridge coming up before us – thank fuck for that, compared to the alternative, but who knows how structurally sound that thing is.

This forest burned. Here and there, tree trunks still stand like spars of rebar in the dark ground, and the few clusters of living trees hug the edges of the river. Either the water saved them, or they just weren’t important enough to burn.

“Do your hands shake too?” Caleb asks me, sounding almost drowsy in the middle of the day. “From stress, I guess.”

My reflex is to lie.

*

Dark clouds are gathering overhead. The group’s stopped here to survey the land, but we probably shouldn’t stick around much longer . In the middle of the path somebody has spray-painted the word “STOP”, in white, and a broad bar spanning the right lane.

This place is some kind of bottleneck, where all the other scrap and refuse has been swept to – old furniture, scorched barrels. The drifts of abandoned vehicles along the sides of the road suggest other people have made it this far and still bailed, or at least fucked up bad enough that ditching their rides seemed like the preferable option. Exposure has eaten some of the frames up so badly there’s nothing else left but rusted skeletons. They’ve caved in on themselves.

I head for the most intact of them and fish around in the back through an open window. The tailgate’s rusted shut. There’s a duffel bag full of old clothes – intact outside, rotten inside, just fragments of soggy cloth. That I can toss. A picture, in a frame. Nobody’s kept a painting in a frame since our textbooks were put together, I’m pretty sure. It’s all just junk.

Tris and Four have been talking amongst themselves for ages, rudely enough – mostly about the various merits of turning back. Versus… having the ancient ruined bridge crumble under us and kill us all, I guess. It’s all in the phrasing. Maybe that’s not even what “stop” is supposed to signify. Also up for discussion is whether they should split up the load by weight, who should carry what, whether there’d be any appreciable difference at all one way or another. But we’d better get a move on now before the storm breaks.

If it were up to me, we’d be turning the fuck around. These other drivers should have. But nobody listens to me anyway; I don’t think they even glance my way.

Half the shit in this car I don’t even recognize. This can’t have been here that long; somebody busted out the windows a while ago, I’m just giving the glass a little push. The broken glass comes away in crumbling cubes that shower into my clothing. This represents no inconsiderable pain in the ass, but it suggests – that somebody was here, obviously. If it had been a hundred years, the leather seats would be rotted away entirely. But no.

Something’s been living in here; very definitely a something and not a someone. It’s ripped out the stuffing to make a nest, and the smell of piss and shit is eye-watering. There’s a couple boxes of shells sitting in the passenger’s seat; who knows if they’re compatible with our own weapons, I don’t know this shit on sight. Those I set aside to stow. Four can go over them at his leisure; he keeps a closer eye on the guns these days, what a surprise.

On the dashboard, somebody’s written in permanent pen, I’m Sorry. And I bet that really helped, too. In the plastic slot below the dashboard sits a woman’s gold ring. I pocket it. I don’t know why. The dashboard sags open like a busted jaw; inside the shallow cavity on the passenger’s side is a wad of faded yellow paper, a gun – from its heaviness, obviously loaded – and a folded leather identification wallet. The gun’s so rusted-up as to be useless. I toss it out the window, half-expecting to hear the crack of a misfire’s report anyway – but there’s only a dull thud as it goes skidding down the rocky slope.

The sound of old-married-couple bickering reaches my ears – though my parents didn’t bitch like that at each other, just at me. They’re really going at it over there. Tris has started to raise her voice, but Four’s stays frustratingly level. I mean, I’d find it frustrating, Tris doesn’t give a fuck.

Caleb’s footsteps come from somewhere behind me. I turn my head.

“If they keep at it like this, we’re going to die out here of old age. Is your sister usually so long-winded?”

“She’s just trying to do what’s safest.”

“By the time she’s actually decided this bridge is going to be at the bottom of the river.”

“Granted. What do you say we make a break for it?”

Caleb’s hand rests against my back. The bark of laughter that escapes me is more from surprise than anything.

“You mean on our own? Yeah, that’d definitely work.”

For a moment before I twist away from him, his face is inclined to me, and he is smiling. The corners of his eyes fold a little when he smiles. I unfold from the cramped car interior and brush past him, grumbling, but my skin’s on fire where he touched me. What the fuck was that about?

He’s every bit as steeped in Abnegation’s stupidly strait-laced sexual mores as his sister. He might as well have just jammed his tongue down my throat. But that’s the kind of thing a pervert like me would think, right? In Candor if somebody was interested in you they’d tell you so, and there wasn’t a lot of ambiguity about what they wanted you for. I’ve never had to seek anyone out, looking like I do. With Tris I’d only wanted to hurt her. And that had worked out so well.

I don’t actually want to hurt Caleb yet. That’s the most surprising thing, and it knocks the breath out of me to realize it. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t know what I want, and it’s the last thing I want to think about.

(Of course we end up crossing the bridge anyway. I don’t even know which one of them’s bright idea that was; they’re mild as milk about reaching an accord between the two of them. By the time the storm’s broken overhead and the rain starts pissing down, the two of them are practically holding hands in the front seat – and somehow the bridge manages not to buckle and send us plunging into the river, which is a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t explain the graveyard of old cars, or what they were all running from. ‘Running toward’ is a possibility, obviously, but an unlikely one.)

*

If it were up to Four I think we wouldn’t even stop to eat. But the car doors swing open along a patch of muddy road and the redistribution of resources begins. Tris eats like it’s going to be taken away from her at any moment; Four waits until she’s finished to even start. Zero appetite means Caleb gets my share – another thing not to think about – and I get another half-canteen’s worth of rusty water.

Legs crossed, perched on the tailgate, I lay out the contents of my pockets for a more thorough investigation, now that the visibility is better than occasional flashes of lightning. It all looks that much junkier laid out in a grid. When I unfold the scrap of leather, it’s full of hard plastic identity cards and more garbage – just weathered gray-brown paper soaking in its own ink. I peel apart the wad into individual strips and watch them flutter down. Probably too wet to burn.

“What do you have there?” Four asks, tearing into a sealed package.

“ID.” I hold up the three or four cards, before tossing them in his lap. “Car keys, too. I loaded up back at the bridge.”

Pieces of other people’s lives. Somebody thought all this shit was worthwhile enough to take with them. When you’re running away from a massive war, who takes clothes? Who takes paper? No wonder they all fucking died.

Four passes off the cards to Tris. She turns them over in her hands, furrowing her brow a little, in alarm or disgust or whatever.

“Were they dead?” Tris asks, fanning the ID cards out to compare mildewed photographs. They’re all different designs – checkpoint cards, license cards, curfew passes. The bars on the back of them for scanning purposes have probably lost their magnetism years ago.

“No, they left this stuff behind as a surprise,” I say as sweetly as possible. “Of course they died. They probably ran out of gas and jumped off the bridge.”

Tris is unamused. “So you just stole their stuff.”

“They weren’t using it.”

The ring just about fits on my pinky finger, as long as I don’t bother trying to take it off. Or maybe I should hand it over to Tris as a peace offering. The thought of somebody coming this far with a piece of their property, only to leave it behind for anybody else to pick up, is almost funny to me. They should’ve taken it with them.

Chapter 9: Reconnaissance: Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Tris

“We’re stopping? Again? Shit, either you have the short-term memory of a flea or a bladder the size of a kidney bean.” Somehow Peter manages to voice these complaints every time, when it’s not him requesting a chance to scout the place out. Which mysteriously involves climbing up in trees and doing anything not to sit around in a bone-jostling vehicle any longer. He’s embarrassed to admit he needs to pee like anybody else in the world, which must be very difficult for him psychologically, I’m sure.

We’ve found a junction in the road, just long enough to check maps and for anybody to stretch their legs who’s determined to do so – that’s the kind of luxury you’d never get on Faction-specific transportation no matter where you were, but even then you weren’t riding for days at a time. You could probably have kept train-hopping for days if you needed to – plenty of Factionless did it to escape detection or to keep warm in the winter. There were stories about people losing it, people too scared to jump off again during initiation who just rode around and around on the rails forever. It’s different on the road, the familiar infrastructure is gone, but not so different the urge to just keep going mindlessly doesn’t kick in. Whoever built the trains must have built these roads; it’s an endless series of long broad loops, straight shots and sharp curves.

Pain throbs behind my eyes; the pressure there is palpable, like a thumb pressing deep in the socket. The clarity of the sky is overwhelming, from here to the rocky horizon is nothing but sterile blue – broken by stands of burnt trees. By the sides of the road are intermittent patches of brambles, some reaching as tall as a person – Caleb slides out the back with journal in hand as if he intends to document them somehow. Maybe he’ll note down how long their thorns are, who knows.

I excuse myself to Four and hop down. The road disappears behind me as I steal away for a little cover – it’s not like I’ve had the luxury of being a really private individual, but there’s no need to take care of business by the roadside like an animal if I can avoid it. As long as I’m quick.

Stalking back afterward is an exercise in cautiousness; this area still has some new growth springing up underfoot, which had been convenient for my purposes but didn’t make keeping my footing so easy afterward, picking a path through charred wood and stones. The incision in my upper arm has healed to a crusty red welt, but it has broken out in a dull irregular throb that I can feel beneath my clothing. Not like an angry red bolt of infection, but like an alarm going off, a siren only I can hear. A signal: be aware.

I haven’t told Four about it yet. Cara’s reassurances sound less and less convincing the further from home we are, and the possibility that I’m leading him into a trap – that I am the trap, that there’s something in my body that shouldn’t be there – is shameful. I find myself palming at my knife, itching to cut it out.

It would be easy to think humans never came to this place, looking up from an angle where the road wasn’t visible. Somewhere there’s a riff of birdsong – an eerie sawing repetition of notes, but issued from where, I can’t tell. My eyes scan the underbrush for anything bigger than a rabbit. Something I could catch, maybe, but I don’t know what I’d do with it. I’m halfway between civilized and wild, at this point, and I don’t know what to do about either one.

Everything is dark green and a fertile brown so dark it’s nearly black. These limited colors are so ubiquitous here, like a carpet, and the one pop of color set against the heavy green backdrop immediately catches my eye. Just a random smear of color like a tattoo: little pink flowers have taken over the bloom of a burned crater. The fire came and left; now there’s these. The truck’s engine isn’t thrumming in my ears; there’s no sound of voices echoing down from the break in the trees. I might as well be the only person left out here. I could be alone in the world.

Even the sound of my own breathing is muffled here, the thick undergrowth closing around me like a hand. The woods are like an organism, and I’m in the belly of it.

For a moment, the thought seizes me that they’ve left me here. Four wouldn’t, unless he had a persuasive reason, but what if he found one? I’d climb up past the trees and find nothing there but black tracks of burnt rubber from where my valiant companions did a U-turn and took off. There’s nothing in the world to suggest this, beyond the heavy pall of dread that drops onto me like a physical force – but there’s nothing to disprove it, and the certainty settles in my stomach like a lead weight. They should have left me here, and they’d be right.

Cara’s resistance must be dead already. The only proof of Edith Prior’s mission is a video file, one that could be deleted in a heartbeat. What if the reason we haven’t been followed up by another truck full of rebels is that they’ve all been killed? We should have turned back. We should never have come this far.

Maybe I was never supposed to survive this. The pull toward death feels inescapable, some vortex opened up beneath my feet long ago.There’s no way this scenario plays out where I survive. I’m going to die and there’s nothing I can do about it. Better to do it now, better to do it here than let somebody else–

The man I love is here; I’m not alone. My brother is here, the world’s worst pain in the ass is here, I am very much not alone. But what if I’m cracking up? My intact genes are finally breaking up, I’m losing whatever I once had, I’m falling apart. I’m not Tris Prior, heroic rebel, I’m Tris Prior the girl who ran away, the girl who fled her faction and her mother’s house because she was afraid of what she might be hiding.

All this is nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I shut my eyes as tightly as I can, and listen for birdsong.

Scaling the thorny slope to the road, the truck is exactly where I left it – dusty, ugly, and completely real. (Still full of quarreling boys, who have now switched off from sullen silence to arguing about sedatives and poisons, and Four behind the wheel like their reluctant babysitter.) Somehow that’s not as hugely reassuring as it might be.

*

Six hours later, we’re deep in the hills. There’s nowhere to set up camp, no convenient clearing, and no reason to bother. We’re all too tired, and when Four proposes we just pull over there’s no complaints. He locks the doors and takes the key from the ignition; even I don’t know where he keeps it when he stashes it away, which is a good sign and a bad one.

In short order, the sound of my brother’s soft snoring issues from the back seats. He’s huddled up on one of the benchlike seats, while Peter’s curled up in the truck bed wrapped around his gun like it’s a stuffed toy. His face is pressed to the floor.

Tobias must catch my backward glances and he correctly interprets their meaning. He’s settled back in his seat, leaning against the frame of the window with his wadded up coat for a pillow. We’re drowsy enough that neither of us wants to drive any further, but not so far gone we can’t pick up on each other’ signals. We need to talk.

“They won’t be up for a while.”

“Are you sure they’re out for good?”

Not for good, I hope. “Say something inflammatory and find out.” The words come out nastier than I meant them – who knows what I’d even say. Caleb Prior is a filthy traitor. Peter Hayes is scared of girls.

Four’s hand has settled against my leg; somehow it’s more companionable than sexual, more the act of a friend than a boyfriend. Dauntless boys are often physical with each other, handsier than even the girls – usually they don’t mean anything by it, it’s just a way of situating themselves in their bodies, not being afraid. I wish I weren’t afraid to be touched.

“You can talk if you need to, Tris.” Tobias says it gently, but firmly.

“We can have a big heart-to-heart once we’re somewhere with running water. I promise. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been jumpier than usual, and I know you’ve seen some shit lately. Coming back to the truck, you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

“You know I can’t trust myself out here. Somebody could be following us. Somebody could be coming for us right now, and I wouldn’t know it. I hate that.”

“If anybody’s coming after us, it won’t be because of anything you did, Tris. You need to drink water, sleep, and rest yourself. Or you’re no good to anybody.”

“I can’t– you know I can’t. How am I supposed to sleep when he’s always there?”

“Peter? Tris, did he do anything–”

“Not yet. I’m starting to think he only came along to make life harder for me.”

“Or because he knew Evelyn would have him taken out and shot. He’s not someone who’s really endeared himself to the new regime.”

“I wish she had.”

“Is it Caleb?”

“It’s not Caleb. When I’m not thinking I can almost pretend things are normal again with us, like we’re just on some kind of family trip.” I’m nearly babbling. The words sound stupid as soon as they’ve left my mouth. Four kicked off this little family trip by abducting my brother from prison and making him believe he was about to be shot in front of me. The only kind of trip I’ve ever been on with my brother has been to the slums, to perform some service. What’s the service here?

“He stood by and let them torture you, Tris. It’s never going to be normal for you two again. He can’t undo that, and trying to pretend this is the same person as when you were kids is going to destroy you. I know what it’s like living with someone you hate. Seeing them every morning, going to bed knowing they’re still there. You can’t pretend any of it didn’t happen.”

Something’s in my throat to choke me; Four’s hand falls away, and I have to turn into my collar to hide my face. “This isn’t the same.”

Seeing Caleb isn’t like seeing him – this isn’t the same magnitude. Nothing he did to me can parallel what happened to Four.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you, and I’m not going to let you run yourself into the ground. Once we make it to our objective, we’ll find out what happened with the founders. We’ll find who killed Amar and why. That’s all we have to do, and it won’t be long.”

“Are you even sure–”

“I knew him, Tris, I’m sure. I’d recognize those tattoos anywhere. It’s just – weird, the difference between thinking he was dead back there and seeing it for certain out here.”

“The question being how he got out here.”

“And who shot him in the head. He died protecting something. I’d just feel better if we knew what it was.”

“How are you sure it was even him? Why would a Dauntless leader be outside the city?” Who would have brought him there – or had he snuck out past the wall? Somehow the fact that a dead man did all this is the least difficult part to reconcile. We made it past the wall, and we’re alive. Or at least we’re supposed to be.

“Amar wasn’t like the usual Dauntless brass. He was smarter, more versatile. He guided me during initiation when no one else would. If anybody could have made it outside, it would have been him.” His voice is full of tightly-wound admiration; I try to picture Four as an initiate, fresh out of his birth faction, and fail. “He looked at me and knew more about me than I knew back then; he knew about my test results. About my fear landscapes. Why they weren’t the same as everyone else’s.” Four kneads his other hand hand against the gray paneled dashboard. “Looking back now – it’s obvious he was like you and me, Tris. Divergent. And if I could see that, somebody else could too. If he ended up at some Bureau checkpoint, somebody was scouting for people with Divergences. Somebody took him and kept him alive for years.”

Laced in Four’s fingers is the black plastic strap of a pair of handcuffs; they’re the kind of quick ties used by security forces to lock together a prisoner’s wrists. In his bag there’s got to be a pair of two more. What had he been preparing for? More than a week-long jaunt with the reconnaissance team.

“Worst case scenario, we’re turning back around and heading home.”

“If you want to fight it out with Evelyn or anything else, she’ll still be around when we get there.” Unless she’s broken away too, but suggesting to Four that his mother may have skipped out a second time seems needlessly cruel. “And if these guys give us any trouble–”

He crushes the plastic tie in the palm of his hand. “We’ll cuff them and chuck them in the back.”

There’s the ghost of a laugh in his voice, and I’m delirious enough to find it pretty funny too. The mental image of Peter indignantly hogtied is pretty enjoyable, but rationally the prospect is none too nice.

I spread my knees apart, trying to lean back in my seat, and something sharp gouges into my leg. It’s the folded-up wad of papers I lifted from the Bureau base – I unfold it in a hurry and scan the words again. Like they’ll have changed since the last time I looked them over.

Five sectors. Five factions. References to the Illinois experiment, our designation on the map. Children, young children, referred to by initials and anonymized as far as possible into a list of milestones: first use of sentences, first use of questions, household mistakes, relationship with siblings (cordial or diffident or only child), height, weight. I can recognize something of myself in these pages, these sterile descriptions of family life across faction lines, the listing of parental concerns and life lessons imparted. Is this supposed to be me? Or is this Uriah? Is this Four?

I hold up the folded paper. “I saved you this. It’s the first few pages of a report on kids…” They kept using the words ‘genetically reintegrated’, over and over. Until it sounded like nonsense. “Divergent kids.”

“Give me that. You couldn’t have shown me sooner?”

Taking the paper from my hands, he reads it over almost hungrily. His deep blue eyes pour over it with remarkable speed, and I’m reminded suddenly that he used to do as much intelligence work as he did guidance for initiates. Maybe more. Back then I hadn’t known what that had entailed. Even now I can hardly imagine.

I continue anyway, despite feeling irritatingly redundant. “These reports were taken in our city. They’re ten years out of date, but they’re about us Somebody was watching us.”

His mouth presses into a thin line. “Somebody was watching you, Tris. There was nobody I interacted with as a child except Marcus, and I can’t see him volunteering information about my development.”

“True.”

Four folds the paper into quarters, pressing it into the pocket of his jeans. “We don’t know what they were doing with that data in the first place. Don’t get your hopes up.”

Like I’m hoping for a warm welcome whenever we get there? I don’t even care if they’re armed and dangerous out there, I just want to know that whoever these reports was compiled for is alive.

“I just want to be alone with you for once. I don’t want to be responsible for the fate of mankind, I want to be a girl who’s alone with her boyfriend.”

Without a chaperone. Beatrice Prior, how daring.

“I know, and you’re not wrong. We’ll be alone again. Somewhere safe.”

Tobias leans over to kiss me, the pads of his fingertips skimming my cheek and making my cropped hair prickle. I could drink him in out here, I could let go and dissolve into nothing. His touch is electrifying, and it almost sweeps away the pressing need for sleep – cascading like a chain reaction from my lips to my throat to my breasts, the ache of a sensation that cuts through the fatigue and grime.

Leaning into him almost sends me toppling from my seat. He grips me by my arm, guiding me into place. I slip across the division between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s side, clambering into his lap in a jumble of bruises and sharp bones. It makes the already tight space even smaller, but there’s no sign it distresses him. His breathing doesn’t quicken, his muscles don’t square off instinctively against a struggle to escape. He lets me in against his lap, arms around me like a metal band – and I’m held tight.

My pulse is pounding still, but if I focus hard enough – like willing down a simulation, I can bring it to match his, I can bring it to a gentler baseline. His nose and lips against my neck says, Four is here and still alive. The way his tattooed body settles against mine to accommodate the steady rise and fall of my breathing says, both of us are here and we are fine. If I can’t sleep, I can at least shut my eyes. That’s better than nothing. I can shut my eyes and know he’s there, that he hasn’t left, that he’d never leave. Sleep never happens for me, but I almost prefer it that way – fading into gray half-sleep while still cradled in his arms, certain we’re both alive.

Chapter 10: Ballistics: Peter

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

Additional warning for suicidal and homicidal ideation in this chapter. Peter is definitely a piece of work. I’m worried this is still really half baked but I’ve been agonizing over this chapter for literal weeks now, it needs to be out in the world at last.

Peter

I can’t tell you how many days it’s been, how long we’ve been driving for, how long since we left behind anyone who didn’t have a latent death wish. If I had to name three people in the world I wanted to talk faction politics with any less… I’m drawing a blank. Other than maybe my father, who’s not present to offload about how the faction of the week are a bunch of irresponsible cowards who need an old-fashioned civics lesson, on account of him being dead. Talking world history in a moving vehicle that’s slowly filling up with flies; sounds appealing, doesn’t it?

“When do we get a turn to steer?” Caleb is pressed flush against the division between driver’s seat and passengers, looking like a sweetheart and sounding like a passive-aggressive prick. (His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, awfully free and easy for a buttoned-up prude, and the sun slants through to highlight the blond hairs on the backs of his arms and the complete absence of any tattoos. I don’t know why I expect them. It’s like he’s blank.) “It’s only logical that the labor should be divided four ways, not two.”

“In the absolute worst case scenario,” Four says, slow but blunt like he’s talking to a civilian, because in a way he still is. Caleb has his own training to draw on, but it has nothing to do with driving, or shooting. “Labor gets divided according to skills. You can pull your weight some other way.”

Or because they still don’t trust us, and they know they can’t say so without making it real. I chime in from my place on the floor, where I am currently pretending to be dead. It smells like death back here anyway. “Shouldn’t we at least be taking a vote? Four, I thought you were all about communal action.”

“It’s the chain of command. Maybe you’ve heard of the concept. You’re welcome to get out and walk, if the two of you think you can do any better on your own.”

It’d be way better for our continued survival than trusting the control of a ton and a half of metal to a massive headcase. It’s impossible to tell if Caleb is concerned out of the goodness of his heart or if he’s got something he’s looking to pull: “No one’s questioning your obvious qualification for squad leadership. Just let her take it easy for once.”

Tris hasn’t spoken up yet in this conversation but the hair must be prickling on the back of her neck. I hope she can see me grinning. “Yeah, seriously. Take a break, put her feet up. Let a big strong man do the thinking.”

Tris refuses to be goaded, and good for her for growing something like a spine, but in the rear-view mirror you can see her biting down on her lower lip. She looks thinner than ever, jumpy and even more attached at the hip to her co-pilot. But we’re all too tired and too distracted by thoughts of what we’re coming up on for real complaints. It isn’t a real argument, just the shadow of one, some weird routine where the front seat and the back seats bitch at each other aimlessly to ignore everything else. The meat’s starting to turn rancid, even double-bagged in plastic, and it’s hot enough that the protection hypothetically afforded by piling into the back of a truck waiting for someone to put a couple bullet holes in the gas tank isn’t enough to overcome the disincentives. It’s been bone-dry for days, since we crossed the bridge, and that can’t last forever. Better to pull over now than fuck up and do it too late.

*

Everybody’s too tired and riddled with muscle cramps to fucking bother establishing real boundaries and the whole shift system breaks down easily when you’re only bedding down for maybe six or seven hours at a time, sleeping with one eye open trying not to get mobbed by wild animals or accidentally surprise-knifed by your bedmates. Tris is still plenty cagey about how our campsite gets set up, which has the secondary purpose of making sure nobody wanders off in the night and falls down a ravine to their death, but if you’ve ever tried sleeping on a plastic tarp it doesn’t really accommodate stealthy comings and goings. It manages to accommodate every sharp rock within ten miles but it’s still so much better than a cat-nap in the back of a van — stretching out on the grass feeling your legs uncramp is basically better than a thousand orgasms and the long grass is softer than anything Erudite could come up with to sleep on. Wet, yeah, rocky, yeah, filthy, yeah, but not the backseat of a stolen van. Not that any of us will be getting a lot of uninterrupted sleep, and knowing that adds an element of spite that makes the division more bearable. Four shifts, 90 minutes — Tris, Four, me, Caleb. There’s nobody I wouldn’t kill just for the privilege of waking up and being alone. I want to be entirely alone.

Getting to sleep is easy. Waking up is the only part that’s hard. Sweating in the dark, I dream about Caleb. It starts out like a nightmare, but it doesn’t end like one, and that’s what kicks me awake like an unexpected drop. It would be bad enough dreaming about him in amazingly dirty ways — like my brain’s trying to punish me for treating him with perfect civility so far — without having to wake up to him being right there breathing in the dark. Fortunately we’re positioned back to back or I don’t think either of us would be able to recover. So I lie there for a while with that to think about, and no real way of doing anything about it.

Four shoves me into full wakefulness and I roll over to rub the sleep-grime out of my eyes and do my turn keeping watch. In the dark, by extra-dim lantern light. Once Four’s resumed his place wrapped in a stranglehold around passed-out Tris — and wow, fuck him for that, nobody needs to see that — I’m up in the dark with a flashlight and a real headache. Nothing to write home about. Dear mom, having a great time, we gutted a deer and Tris shaved her head like a crazy person, I made a friend… I’m just going nuts out here with nothing to do, that’s all this is. Lying here under the open sky makes me want to eat a bullet. If that meant I’d never have to leave here, never have to fuck it up, I’d do it.

Tris whimpers in her sleep. Four hangs over her like a dog with a bone, protecting her with his body. Protecting her from me, probably. Caleb, on the other hand, sleeps like a stone. Why should he look so peaceful? There’s nothing I’ve done that he wouldn’t do, and what’s his excuse?

It’s a peaceful face but not an innocent one. You can get a lot done with a pretty face, and even drooling into his rolled-up jacket his is as wholesome as it gets, with a dimple flickering in his soft cheek. There are freckles across his hooked nose and everything that makes his sister look like a twelve-year-old boy or a stray dog has been broadened, strengthened, amplified. I know this in the dark now, and I wish I didn’t. If he were to open his eyes and propose we cut the other two’s throats in their sleep, it wouldn’t surprise me exactly. But traitor or not, he sleeps like a baby.

Caleb Prior’s got a pretty face, but he’d sell his sister for a pretty uniform and high-tier access privileges. He would, and he has, and he’d do it again. If he was my brother I’d have cut his pretty throat for that before he could see a tribunal and he’d be grateful I hadn’t done it sooner. He wouldn’t have made it out of the cradle.

Out in the dark there’s nothing. No animals, no ambushes, nothing. I don’t know what they think they’re going to find out here — some magical hidden city that’s going to welcome them with open arms. There’s no answers. There’s no satisfaction of knowing you’ve been on the right track this whole time. Outside the wall there’s two kinds of people, people who are dead and people who are waiting to get killed. There’s absolutely nothing out here to suggest anybody who wants to meet us. If they didn’t kill each other, then they were killed by cabin fever or a serum leak or somebody else’s little raiding party — if we got past the walls, so could they, a bunch of Factionless on a power trip. That’s about a million times more likely than a massive conspiracy leading us to safety and salvation on the other side of the river. They’re leading us out here to die.

Finish it now and get it over with. Get rid of the temptation. It wouldn’t even be hard to eat a bullet out here. It would be easy. Could take the rest of them with me, even. One, two, three, four, two shots each and one for me. That’s what’s wrong with me. Nobody else thinks like this.

When it’s Caleb’s turn I don’t bother waking him. Instead I watch the sun rise, and pretend I’m alone.

*

The sun finally comes in thin and bluish through the clouds. Caleb sits up and starts peeling off his faded navy-blue shirt. That’s just about my cue to avert my eyes. Four shoots me a look, but before he can say anything about my not waking Caleb he’s getting cornered; Tris shoves his boots into his hands (like he couldn’t walk the extra two feet to get them himself?) and barks a few short words about the day’s itinerary. Whatever she’s saying doesn’t leave a lot of room for negotiation — secretly she must love getting to play the petty tyrant with him, it must be gratifying to push him around. But Four has a leaf sticking out of his hair and Tris reaches up to pluck it out like she’s preening him — just like that, she goes soft on him, and he’s rubbing her skinny shoulders. Everybody’s just going to pretend like they haven’t been all over each other this whole time. Isn’t this embarrassing for them? Aren’t they ashamed? It’s disgusting. Even half-starved and filthy, Four looks at her like she’s the moon and stars. We’re all pretty hungry, and we don’t talk about it much; it’s hard to bitch about my own empty stomach knowing if we don’t get where we’re headed in record time it might kill me.

(Why shouldn’t I have what they have? Don’t I get an ally out here? That’s just fair. I don’t even want what they have.)

There’s a fucking snake hanging out sunning itself on the tarp by the time we’re collectively clean, dressed, and ready to pack up. Tris must not see me watching her from the backseat; she nudges the snake lightly into the grass with the toe of her shoe, and it slinks off unbothered. The city used to be crawling with snakes every summer, harmless ones even — I remember cutting the head off one to see if the body still wiggled.

I was a kid then. Anyone else could say they were different then, that they’d grown up.

*

The view coming down is — I shouldn’t be the person to describe it. Light pours through a gash in the sky, illuminating a massive stripe across the rocks below and silhouetting where there’s still dead pine trees sticking out at unnatural angles. But the storm clouds are a black-and-blue mass overhead like a deep bruise.

The weather turns fast as we come down out of the hills. By the time there are buildings on the horizon, the sky is black. The rain is pelting down in sheets, flooding out the already shit pavement — and you can feel the queasy strain filling the truck like water flooding into a tank, all that built up unease and doubt. The vehicle is sagging on its frame already, like it’s just as disheartened as we are — at irregular intervals there’s a sound like metal going on metal and the car frame shudders, jolting all of us forward where we sit. The bolted panels rattle on top of us like they’re about to peel off.

The tension finally ends up splintering. Tris smacks the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “We can’t drive in this.”

(“Agreed,” says the backseats. Even Four agrees, through some freak coincidence, but I guess he’d have to if it’s his close personal friend making the call.)

Tris drives us right off the road, pulling over sharply underneath a cluster of trees whose branches hang so low you can hear them snap and scrape along the roof of the truck. From the looks of the broken-up pavement this place used to be a neighborhood of its own, can you imagine? Now it’s as wild as anywhere else. A neighborhood in the middle of a marsh, with a street of its own and everything. The houses are arranged in a ring like a cluster of broken teeth. Four tosses his gun across the passenger side seat and dismounts first.

This place is a wasteland of petrified fences and broken windows. It looks like a bomb hit it. Maybe a bomb did hit it. The grass and the bushes are covered in reddish gray ash, caking like sand on fat white flowers, and wild turkeys rummage brazenly through the undergrowth. They don’t even scatter at our approach, and they’ve shit everywhere. Turkey shit and wild roses. There’s a smell in the air, and it’s not just the wildlife – a chemical stink that leaves me with my face pressed into the crook of my arm, trying not to gag.

“This place must be just like old times for you guys. Hey, Tris did you have any genius plans for dealing with chemical fallout, or are we just going to wade on in?”

Prior’s mouth is a flat line. Hey, at least she doesn’t look like she’s about to cry, and at any rate it’s true. Abnegation had the shittiest living compound even before Jeanine swept the place clean. Tris passes her eyes over me in a disinterested flicker. “Try holding your breath, Peter.”

Was that a joke? A joke out of Beatrice Prior? She slithers out of the car, boots hitting the ashy ground, and the two of us follow.

More fat ugly birds graze aimlessly in the center median, like they don’t even see us through the drizzling rain, which is finally starting for real right around now. Caleb’s turning up his coat collar against the weather, and then he raises his arm in a nonspecific gesture.

“Hey, look. Lunch.” His expression is unreadable and I can’t tell if he’s actually made a semi-funny joke or if he’s in deadly earnest. First Tris and now her brother, today is full of surprises.

I’m tempted to take one down just to teach him a lesson. (What lesson? Just for the fuck of it, more accurately. It’d be easy.) “Don’t even talk to me about food right now. Now look what you did, they’re splitting.” My elbow collides with the soft place just underneath his ribs. Caleb’s bookbag slithers to the ground off his shoulder and the ugly things bolt — they can barely fly but they’re streaking off into the stand of trees that used to be somebody’s yard. Caleb yelps and scoops up his worldly possessions before they can get soaked.

No one’s lived here for years. Maybe longer. Even the Factionless wouldn’t stoop to living here; staring through the dark you can make out the busted windows overgrown with dead gray weeds, the paint on the houses bleached out to pastels. Some of the doors are hung with rusty padlocks, but they dangle uselessly, flaking away in chips of plastic. Four lifts one lock up with a rattle, and it just about breaks off in his hands. He and Tris exchange a look. Who knows what passes between them in that look.

“We need the gear to patch a tire with. It should hold out a while, but not for long, and not if we lose more than one at a time.”

“So are we supposed to start knocking on doors, or what? This used to be somebody’s front yard. You think they’ll let us borrow a cup of sugar?”

(Bad choice of reference. Stiffs don’t cook with sugar, they’re afraid they might like it.) I might be a liar, but I’m not a thief. I wouldn’t dream of appropriating anything for our use that wasn’t mine.

Four states the obvious. “Nobody lives here, and they look like they left in a hurry. We might as well scavenge for supplies and make a few repairs until the roads clear up.”

Tris puffs up into the shoulders of her coat, huddled like a bird but looking sharp. If she weren’t bald her wet hair would be plastered down to her head like a helmet. “We’re looking for anything like a garage, a toolshed, anything. Anybody who needs to take a moment of privacy, this is as good a time as you’re going to get.”

Glad we’re all of like mind. There’s some stuff nobody wants to do by the side of the road. Getting rained on isn’t so bad, but the sudden humid dark anywhere outside of our headlights’ spill is something else. It’s smothering. The tree branches provide a little cover, but everything is weird shadows, weird half-light. Posted around the circle are big bar street lamps, broken now, but they look just like the ones that marked out neighborhoods in Candor — buildings where people like my dad often worked late. Other neighborhoods got the real dark. Anything else was wasteful, whatever petty little woman was in charge of how energy got parceled out decided some blocks got round-the-clock light and others didn’t. I was never really afraid of the dark until I left Candor.

Caleb stretches, linking his long arms above his head, damp coat sticking to the muscles in his back. Being this close to him is going to drive me insane. Just put a bullet in my head already.

Tris and Four set off through the snarls of long grass to the still fenced backyard of one of the houses — the gate rattles a couple times but Tris is already tramping through the thick snarl of overgrown rose bushes and vaulting over the wall. We’ll meet them back there, I guess. The front door’s swollen shut, but a few good kicks loosen it up. The humidity inside is like a slap in the face — if you thought it was bad outside, it’s got to be a couple degrees warmer in here, like walking into an armpit. There’s carpet on the floor, but it’s rotted flat and squishes wetly underfoot.

They can have the yard, I’ll take the cover — or at least I would if the ceiling in here wasn’t leaking worse than the clouds outside. The plaster’s rotted away entirely and sags down like something from the floor above made a strong enough impact to bow it like a net.

Squinting in the dark, but there’s not a lot to see. There’s nothing in here. The plastic frame of a flat computer screen lies on the floor in the main room, in pieces. Somebody put their foot through it. I pull open desk drawers just in case, but there’s nothing good in here. Broken glass. Overturned picture frames. An overturned table with its back to the wall. Behind the table there’s a pile of sports equipment and two packed bags, but dumped out on the blackened carpet they’re just clothes. I rummage for anything that looks like it might fit.

The walls are plastered in patterned paper and caked in yellow mold — there’s pictures on the walls, or hanging on the floor, but nobody looks at that stuff anyway. Over top of the mold and stains somebody has spray-painted two letters in red, a couple of block capitals: a G and a D. GD.

Next room over is the kitchen. The windows are boarded up and plastered over. I lean around the doorframe to shout, and the tile echoes, tile walls and floor and everything. “Tris? Hey, Tris, you’re going to want to take a look at this.”

It’s Caleb who comes instead after me, stepping in the doorway and casting the beam of a pen light over the warped plaster and paint.

The rain’s stopped. Why would the rain stop? Caleb takes a step back, surveying the spray-painted letters. “Somebody’s initials?”

The sharp crack of a gunshot rings out, rippling with echo, and then another. Another makes contact — that hard wet sound you can’t really forget, and suddenly I can feel my heart pounding at the back of my mouth, I can feel the hurt of it like it’s me it hit and for a moment it feels so real I think it did. Bone splintering like rotten wood. And then the pain. Not me. Not me. I’m fine.

A male voice snags in a short, cut-off gasp. From the back yard Tris calls to Four by name — his real name, it must be, no wonder he prefers a number if he’s been slapped with a classic Stiff name like that one — but it’s almost a scream.

Somebody nailed boards over the kitchen windows, but even those have been busted through. A stray bullet shatters through in a hail of splinters, making me jump back, hauling Caleb by his sleeve.

“Who’s shooting at us?” He knows well enough not to raise his voice. Now, I don’t carry a huge fucking high-powered murder rifle everywhere like Four does, but I don’t leave my gun in the truck either. It’s up and out in a second flat and Caleb puts his bare hand out to force the barrel down, exactly like he wouldn’t if he knew what one of these could do.

“Who gives a shit? We need to shoot back—”

“This is the first sign of recent habitation since the Bureau building. We shouldn’t be shooting them, we don’t even know who they are. At least we shouldn’t shoot to kill.” His eyes aren’t looking at me, but they’re more — exhilarated, than anything. “Want to make a break for it?”

Caleb Prior’s got a pretty face, but he’s a real piece of work.

“Like fuck we’re not. You’re sticking with your sister or I’ll snap your fucking neck, now cover me.”

We’re going to die out here. If they take the truck we’re going to die out here anyway no matter what. We’ll just starve in the garbage instead of bleeding out. How many guys? Four? Five? The gate Tris vaulted so nimbly over is flung open wide and the truck is right there, getting raided. One of them has torn back the canvas and you can hear them shoveling out webbed bags of dry goods like they’re trash — looking for a gun, maybe, or something to trick the ignition with. They’re dressed like Factionless, all in mixed-up black and blue and dirty brown, and the way they scatter without regrouping is a sure sign that they’re not trained for this. It’s not a battle; it’s not even a fight. None of us are ready to fight. This is going to be a shitshow.

Through the window everything is just half-silhouettes, half in the dark. I can see skinny shoulders, the shapeless outlines of a coat. Tris is frozen. Her gun hangs at her side from its strap. She is frozen. She’s useless.

Two men. Skinny guys but big. Filthy, ragged. They’re not even dressed for the weather, let alone armored — you could drop them with a bullet each. But at this distance? Tris takes a step backward with the heels of her boots scuffing, and they circle up on her, front and back, like stray dogs sniffing. It’s impossible to tell if she’s that stiff because she’s scared, or if it’s something else.

It’s something else.

One of them reaches out without the slightest shred of self-preservation instinct to touch her gun. He fingers at the plastic casing like he desperately desperately wants some broken fingers. “You two boys lost?”

“We’re not looking for trouble,” Tris says, raising her voice enough for the rest of us to hear — clearly and calmly like she’s being broadcast on a screen somewhere. “We were just leaving. If you need food or help, we’ll help.”

Like we’re not dead anyway?

“That’s real sweet of you, but we’re gonna need to take a look at what you’ve got first.” You can see the exact moment when it dawns on the first guy that Tris is a girl and not a really ugly boy. His scraggly beard is caked with blood, too thick for the rain to wash away, and even from this distance you can see his lips part to show a grin full of broken teeth. “Keys,” he barks. “You’ve got keys? Hand ’em on over.”

His friend has a bat, and his grip on it shifts. Both of them look impatient. Both of them look hungry. Tris’ finger is far off the trigger, and she digs in her coat pockets for something she can’t find. It’s taking too long. This guy is going to knock that gun out of her arms and bust her fucking teeth in.

Wood and tile clatter as Caleb scrambles, trying to bust loose the door past a rotten-out lock; she can’t turn, but from the motion of her head it’s obvious Tris hears the noise. She reaches back, like she’s going for her back pocket. Behind her back she holds up a hand sign: stop. Don’t advance. Stay put.

Four must see it too. Even Caleb must know what it means.

It’s taking too long. She’s got a gun, and she’s quick, she’s quicker on the draw than both these guys, so why’s she hesitating? There’s no clear line of sight and every nerve in my body is screaming drop him, drop him, drop him, not because I can but just because I really want to, so much I’d even let her do it. He thinks he’s a big man. She better make him bleed.

Pressed hard against the boards, gun pressing into my shoulder, waiting for the next bullet to come through and pulp my brain. Peter Hayes, coward.

“You got keys?” the guy with the beard repeats again in a questioning tone. “Or are you going to take all day?”

Tris says something too quiet to hear. Her head is down. She looks so small like this.

The guy with the bat is swinging it for fun, sliding it back behind his head like he’s scratching his neck. He thinks he’s being reasonable. He thinks she’s just a kid. “Come on, sweetheart, don’t make this hard. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

That hand comes out from behind her back. Tris makes a motion like she’s going to toss the keyring to him, but her hand must be empty — because the back of her balled-up fist slams into the middle of the bat guy’s face, right in the nose. Metal pings on bricks. He drops the bat. What kind of dumbfuck move is that? But Tris is on him hard and fast.

From the window you can’t quite see it, but you can hear it, and you’d know if you heard it. Fist to the face, elbow to the throat, twice each. Tris drops the two of them without firing a shot. I wouldn’t have thought she had it in her.

Tris strikes the second one, the bearded one, for a final third time — he takes a swing and the butt of her gun comes down like a club on the fallen man’s face and the guy’s arms spasm in the mud. Tris is bent double from the effort, and when she turns around she’s wheezing like an animal. Wood splinters and Caleb is out the door, running to his sister’s side.

Four calls to Tris, and she calls back, her voice is sharp and almost choked but his doesn’t sound too breezy either. His dark gray shirt is dark with blood dripping from the side of his face, but he must have repulsed one of the adults successfully — I don’t envy any guy who tries to jump Four, even with a gun in his hand. He’s still struggling with another combatant. You can see it in his face the moment Four notices that the skinny arm he holds is that of a boy no older than twelve. He’s lost his weapon, but hasn’t stopped struggling — Four restrains him in what amounts to a bear hug, but the kid’s spitting and kicking like an animal. There’s the shooter. A barefoot kid.

Tris gets the other adult by her hair, dragging her back through the gate away from the truck and all but throwing her on the ground. She drops her with a strike to the shoulder, but the woman doesn’t even whimper. Tris isn’t even trying to hurt her, she’s trying to listen.

For a while there there’s only breathing, the thin reedy sound of hard breath and the animal moan of the other two guys in the mud. The woman’s voice comes out from somewhere in her chest, rusty like she rarely uses it.

“Fuck the Bureau.” The woman spits a glob of blood right in Tris’ face; to her credit she doesn’t even flinch. “Fuck your Bureau men.”

“How many of you are there? How many more are here?” Tris is stunned white; the rain makes it look like she has no eyebrows and no eyelashes, pale as an egg. Somebody tries to shoot her boyfriend in the face and she still wants to take a sociological study of their group behaviors, very helpful. “Where did you come from?”

I need a shot. My arms are steady now and my heart’s still beating hard; let the rest of them run around like idiots if they want to. I’m staying put. I’m not a coward for staying covered if it’s tactics.

The sun’s coming out. It shines on Caleb, crouched useless in the dirt and concrete between the two prone men, fumbling with ammo; it shines on Four, ashy pale and rigid and marked in blood like an already-dead man. It illuminates Tris from behind, bent low and gripping tight; her little remaining hair is plastered to her skull, and she looks like she could burn the whole world. The sun’s coming out, and it glints on the blade of a knife, pressed into the ragged woman’s palm.

“Tris—” Caleb must see it too, he wheels, ready to launch himself. Why would he do that? He doesn’t even like her. Four lets the boy drop and lunges for the woman hard, forcing them apart but not soon enough.

The first swing slices at Tris’ arm, and misses. The second time around the blade bites into Tris’ side, and her whole body jerks back; Tris loses her soaking-wet hold on her opponent, there’s no scream but a nasty sound of surprise. Tris staggers. The blade rips up and in.

The ragged woman lets Tris drop and bolts, running like a half-downed animal with her busted arm hanging limp. She’s old, and not too quick, but her unsteady gait is a real pain in the ass. I aim for the back of her head and squeeze the trigger. My whole world narrows to just that one spot, the base of her skull. There’s no rain, no trees, no Tris, no Four, no her, no me. There’s just that one spot.

The old woman drops like a stone, easy as pie. When I come back to the world, the shot’s still buzzing in my ears.

Chapter 11: Toxicology: Tris

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

(Additional content notes in this chapter’s endnote, though it’s nothing massive.)

Chapter Eleven: Tris

I dream of the crows again. Frozen in place again – there are no restraints holding my arms and legs in place, but I’m petrified just the same beneath the flurry of dark feathers. Alone, in a little dark place. One of the black birds pecks testingly at my cheek; when I can’t flinch away, he tries again; encouraged. And another joins in, then another. I can feel talons scratching at my scalp and making it prickle, and every separate strike of their sharp black beaks falls like a hammer.

Think. Try to move a finger, or flex your toes, try to bend your knee and test the boundaries of this specific scenario. Make the scenario bend for you, and change the scene.

My lungs burn and my ribs heave but the sound won’t come out – as if there’s a solid blockage in my throat. I want to call for Four, but I can’t even do that – the sensation of tiny claws tugging through the strands of my hair is unsettlingly precise. Not so prickly any more; my hair is long again in this dream, which makes another vivid cue to remove myself from this scenario and look at it analytically. That’s not me any more. That part of my life belongs somewhere else, the yellow-haired girl with a nose too big for her face and collarbones standing out on her skinny shoulders.

What would Four do? Endure. The blood runs freely down my cheek, as the scene shifts a little – now it’s not me on the ground but somebody else, my perspective shifts to a higher angle on some other girl. It can only be Four’s mom – a rangy girl with Four’s olive skin but none of his good health or strength. Immobile on a narrow gray bed with her hands laced over her pregnant belly, her gray dress showing the bruises on her biceps. It’s hard to see the real Evelyn in her, the grown woman who’d let herself get tough, the woman who’d survived this and abandoned her son to it just the same. Evelyn the girl, not Evelyn the woman. Evelyn the girl wants to die.

She needs to move – I need her to move. I need her not to be dead. If she can get up and put her feet on the floor, she’ll be all right – if she can lift her head, if she can sit up and braid her dark hair, if she can move her arm and focus on something else other than the feeble heartbeat of whatever is growing inside her. My mind focuses in on that – her thinly muscled arm with freckles on the back of it, crooked against her side, folded across her waist. It hurts, but she needs to move it. If I can make her lift up her arm–

I wake up to Tobias’ hands on me. He knows better than to shake me awake, but I’m rigid in a second anyway, ready to defend myself.

His hands are on my shoulders, warm and strong. Securing me not to keep me in place but to keep me from hurting myself.

Somebody is calling my name, probably him. My own voice is sharp in my throat, hoarse from disuse, and before I can even get the word out he’s lifting a canteen to wet my lips.

“Four?”

Not Four. Not here. In such claustrophobic close quarters the old way of thinking of him kept hanging around on me like the smell of rot; the ghost of who he used to be. It isn’t Four who saved me; it’s Tobias. My Tobias.

My arms are around him in an instant, tighter than a vise around his sturdy waist despite the sudden gouge of pain in my own side – he’s solid muscle despite his leanness and it’s strange to feel him relax into my touch.

Has he been shaking? Not from exhaustion, but from something else. Worry, maybe. There’s still blood on his shirt, but not a lot of it, and it’s faded to copper-brown in place of angry red. A bullet graze nicked the side of his head, and now there’s a tiny seam there under his hair – I can find it with my fingers, sitting up to cup his face and search his soft dark hair for more wounds, and for that moment he closes his eyes. The relief on his face is clear.

He’s so warm. Who gave him permission to be this pleasant?

“You’re going to be all right. The blade didn’t hit anything important, and there’s no sign of serious infection. All things considered, you’re pretty lucky. If she’d have gotten you in the kidney, you’d be having a much harder time.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve got a lot of blood, what can I say.”

Modesty goes out the window in the face of stab wounds. Tobias peels back the blankets while I make my best effort to sit up, lifting my arm so he can get a better look. From my ribs down is a thick swathe of bandages; between the two of us we get them unrolled enough for a good look at the crusty red welt that marks my side.

I don’t feel very rested. My tongue feels like it’s wearing a foul-tasting sweater and sitting up starts to seem like a terrible idea once the shivers start. Who knows what that woman’s knife was made of, or whether she’d ever cleaned it – the open gash in my side has begun to fill in pink, but the edges of the wound are still blanched white, ready to tear further and gape. It doesn’t look good.

Tobias tips some of the contents of Uriah’s flask onto a cloth pad and begins to swab at the site of my wound. His hands are gentle, but the damp pad is devilishly cold, and the sharp sting of alcohol makes my teeth chatter.

Looking down, my bare legs are all covered in scratches. I can’t remember how they got there.

“What happened to the little boy?”

“Caleb checked him out for injuries and he ran off. His friends didn’t even wait that long.”

Tobias hands me the flask and I suck down a burning mouthful. It’s a near thing but I manage not to spit it out. Whatever this stuff was, it tastes like it was fermented in an old shoe; Uriah must have been tougher than any of us knew.

The burn chases down my throat and fills my mouth, threatening to clear out my sinuses too with its sharp fumes – it’s not for the pain, it’s for courage. There was always someone passing a bottle around in the Dauntless compound, and the clear sharp smell always drags up the memory of Al’s funeral – it hadn’t made any of us brave then. It made us loud and sentimental, making stupid speeches about heroics. That was the only way we could be tender with each other, and that was all we had… stupid, now. We were all just kids.

“What happened to the woman?”

Tobias’ mouth twists. “We buried her as soon as the rain stopped. Then we got moving.”

*

Peter sits a few yards clear of the truck, balanced on a crumbling concrete embankment. He’s cleaning his gun. I can barely walk a straight line, and the insistent pain in my side cutting through the medicated buzz is a persuasive reason not to try to jog anywhere or vault over anything. But I can still sneak up on him, judging from the way his shoulders jump before he twists around to fix me in an accusing stare.

It’s difficult to keep my cool, looking him in the face after that. All I can hear is the sound of the bullet connecting with that woman, the woman who had been doing her best to hurt me if not kill me. My face is fixed in emotionless neutrality, even with the blood roaring in my ears. “That was a good shot back there.”

“Don’t thank me. I’d have shot her anyway.”

“Oh, undoubtedly.” It’s such little-boy posturing that I could almost laugh, if just breathing alone didn’t hurt. Is it kill or be killed out here? Is that the kind of world we’re passing into? Or it’s the kind of world we’ve been in for a while now. I want to change that. But Peter brushes his hair back behind his ears, sullenly and without meeting my eyes. He can’t look at me.

“I could have shot you too. I thought about it.” (How macho is that, if he can’t even bear the possibility that one of his actions might be mistaken for altruism. But I don’t resent him for it – somehow it all seems serene. Peter is a snake. This is what snakes do; they lash out and bite people.)

“Believe me, Peter, I don’t care. I already knew that about you.”

“Then you’ve got the right idea.” Peter rubs at his mouth, leaving a streak of gun oil on his smooth cheek. (If Peter shaves, I’ve never seen him do it; his face is still soft as a girl’s.) “Don’t get in the way of my shot again.”

He hunches his shoulders, rubbing at his muddy face with muddy hands.

Peter doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t know either. Maybe some people are just like that; they’re mean to the bone, and they enjoy it.

*

Caleb wants to talk. And no offense to him, but I’m not in the mood for navigating thorny familial relationships when I’m trying to drive. Peter and Four are in the back, miraculously not strangling each other, but their silence sounds obtrusively like they’re pretending not to be listening – which if I know Four at all, in all his hypervigilant glory, is absolutely true. No one could care about Peter. Heavily armed and in defensive positions, eyes on the horizon. Four is looking out, so I don’t have to.

Uriah’s canteen is in my lap. My mouth still tingles, and everything’s just a little more indistinct thanks to the taste of alcohol, just a little more blurred.

“At least let me present my case!”

“You have five minutes to convince me.” Every bump in the road and every steep turn makes my side ache; Four’s jacket is wadded up behind me for padding, but it only serves to make the driver’s seat more claustrophobic. “Without the use of a diagram, unless you want me to wrap this thing around a tree.” Or a signpost. A really big rock. A wild mountain deer. Whatever.

“Serums are a part of the architecture of society. They’ve existed for at least three generations, when we were studying there were data points that weren’t accounted for by the time frame of the Chicago experiment – which means they must have come from outside. You remember Amity, how everyone living there got dosed with a particular mood-altering strain whether they liked it or not–”

“Including guests of the faction. Believe me, I remember.” It made you blissed-out and dopey, and had nearly wiped me out entirely – it was better than pain, but nowhere near as liberating as anger, and a standard-sized dose had had me ready to braid Four a flower crown.

“Then how’d they learn to do that? Where’d they get the idea from?”

“It seems pretty intuitive to me, no offense. Somebody in Amity pulled some strings and got the treatment from Erudite, maybe for covert crowd control, and it got out of hand.” Thinking about it now was cringeworthy – no doubt there were plenty of people in Amity who were naturally hard-working and naturally giving at the same time, but everybody knew kids from that faction mostly stuck around. They didn’t last long anywhere else. Because they were so happy there, right?

“Then what’s to say Amity were the only people getting treated without knowing it? Ever since we got past the wall we’ve been boiling our water and refilling from sources in the water table nobody’s touched for a hundred years. Maybe we’re only now getting clean.”

Clean. Illegal drugs one of the things we learned about in schools before sixteen, one of the undifferentiated horrors of the old world that the faction system was put in place as a bulwark against. Drugs were illegal because they were poison, and furthermore because they were addictive – the kind of thrill you were only supposed to get from a job well done, or a hard day’s work, or an adrenaline high jumping off a train headfirst. And because you were never allowed to quit.

Headaches, stress, muscle aches and tremors, bad dreams – but there was nobody alive who could have lived through the last few months without bad dreams.

Like when someone from Amity changed factions – the reason it almost never happened was because the come-down from stopping taking Amity serums was so bad. If you’d never been unhappy before in your life, and then your first taste of misery was Erudite’s 12-hour-long standardized tests, or Candor moot courts with you on trial, or Dauntless simulations putting you through the paces of the worst stuff you could imagine – you’d kill yourself, or drop out. Best case scenario had you scavenging for Evelyn, hoping for a little taste of what you used to have. But this wasn’t just Amity; this was everyone. A sort of low-level fog dissipating, a patina of something being cleared away. No wonder it messed with Four’s head.

If you’d never known freedom before, being plunged into some wide-open spaces with only a outdated map to guide you…

It didn’t have to be true. I didn’t want it to be true. But what difference would it make to lie?

Caleb’s eyes are fixed on me when I glance to his side; they are cool and clear. It would be easy to believe they were wise eyes, and not just indifferent ones. What had he seen, buried in the heart of Erudite’s crumbling power structure?

“Caleb, you can’t be serious.”

“I don’t expect you to believe me without proof. Once we get to someplace with the right equipment, I can try and illustrate my theory, but I can’t make anyone believe it. Do you remember when it used to start raining on the way back from our work detail? You used to run around with your tongue out, trying to catch water drops?”

Caleb shouldn’t have remembered that – I was only a kid then, younger than the kid Peter nearly shot back there, and with someone who cared about me to pull me inside and tell me no. My mother. Caleb was always the slower one, he was always better-behaved and never tried that kind of thing. There was probably a dossier somewhere saying as much. But the water had been so cold, and so sweet. Not cold like a cold shower – cold like a cold morning, before anyone else was awake.

“I do. What’s your point?”

“It tasted different, didn’t it? You wanted more of it. That’s what freedom tastes like.”

Cold, empty, and plain. Sounds about right.

*

The hills loom over everything, dark with densely-packed trees and gouged through with high walls of exposed rock. The roads are fewer here, twisting through the terrain like snakes; there’s more wash-outs here, some of them probably no older than the cut in my side.

When we first set out, the game plan had been two days there, max, and two days back. It’s been a lot longer than that, and even with water and deer meat, we’re running low. Caleb and I avoid the meat where we can, some vestige of our upbringing still echoes even out here – the memory of the blood. This stop will be our last before we get to that unidentified mark on the map. Before we all pile into the unknown.

“We need to stop for fresh food, but it can’t be for long. I don’t see any place better around here; the river’s right there. We can even fish, probably, if we’ve got anything to use for a hook.”

(Which of us is supposed to know how to catch a fish? All the fish we’ve ever eaten came out of a tank somewhere.)

“There’s still plenty of meat and rice, isn’t there?” Caleb asks.

“Food other than meat and rice. Some of the deer meat’s spoiled.” And even Four is sick of dead deer, but I can’t tell them that, not Caleb the mighty hunter.

“There’s mushrooms all over the place,” Peter says. “They’re popping up out of the ground and everything. If you don’t like meat and rice, knock yourself out.”

Caleb looks at him like he just suggested we butcher and eat Four.

“Poisonous mushrooms, you mean. The ones growing wild out here are poisonous.”

“Bullshit! There’s no such thing as a poisonous mushroom. Snakes are poisonous.”

“Why don’t you try one and find out? It’s your funeral.”

“They’re not poisonous, they’re brown.”

“Are you saying brown things can’t be poisonous?”

“Trust me, they’re harmless. Just because your mother raised you to be scared of your own shadow – whatever, fine. More for me.”

Four has too much self-control to roll his eyes, but from his face you can tell he’s at least thinking about it. “Guys, not that this isn’t interesting, but may Tris and I have a moment? You two won’t implode if we leave you alone for five seconds?”

More likely they’d burn the forest down. Caleb to see what happened next, and Peter for the hell of it.

We leave the boys to their breakfast; Caleb’s still trying to get the fire started, and Peter is squirreling around in the trees looking for birds’ eggs. I hope the birds maul him. There’s no city birds all the way out here, and surprisingly few of the big black birds from my nightmares, but the predominant varieties seem to be more of the fat, brown skittish birds that the forests out here are crowded with, and innumerable birds of prey. When the two collide, it can’t be pretty. The birds of prey are too smart to come near us, but they’re watching us anyway, circling against the gray sky looking for lunch.

We split off in the opposite direction, past the parked van. It’s closer to the road than the last time we stopped, in case we needed to make a quick getaway, but Tobias had back to cover it in broken tree boughs – it’s hardly enough to camouflage the boxy shape, but the metal no longer catches the eye as we pass. It still gives me a sick prickling feeling to pass it by – someone else might know we’re here. Someone else might put us in the ground. We need to be more careful.

Tobias waits until we’re in the deepest part of the trees to step in closer behind me, as if he’s assured himself that we’re not being followed or en route to another ambush.

“Up there, look.” There’s one of those unbelievably fat brown birds nesting in a tree branch, watching us. “If I had a sling I’d kill it and we’d have breakfast..”

“Birds are mostly bones, from my experience.” Tobias reaches for my hand, as I alight on the trunk of a fallen tree and crane my head back for a better look.

“Not this one. Look, it’s not even scared of us.”

The tree bark is rough against my back. Tobias’ hands steer good and clear of my bandaged side and he is so gentle. I don’t want gentle right now.

But I still want him. It doesn’t seem right that, injured, bandaged, a million miles from home and burning up with borrowed liquor, I should still want him. There’s something dangerous in that kind of wanting, something that makes it perfectly clear why everything about our faction’s courtship rituals was designed to squelch it before it could occur – and likewise perfectly clear how that desire refused to be beaten down. I’m hungry for him.

Four’s hands find their way north to my upper arm through my sleeve, and the pit of my stomach just drops.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your arm?”

“I thought you’d notice when we had sex.” A prickle of blood still rises to my cheeks. “I wanted you to ask.”

“Of course I noticed. I just didn’t want to kill the mood.”

I put up a hand, laying two fingers over the second bullet graze in his upper arm.

“Tori made me a tracking device. Before she died. Cara helped me put it in – it goes under the skin, like the serum transmitters but in reverse. It should help them locate where we are from back in the city.”

His laugh is quietly incredulous. “Wow. And you couldn’t put it in your pocket? You really think they’re still sending a follow-up team? Tris, we would have seen them already. We’d have heard from them.”

“It seemed important at the time. I made a judgment call.”

“Yeah, well, it’s the least of my worries right now. Did you stop to think who might have access to the other side of that thing? That it might not be what Tori said it was? Did Cara do this to you? Did she?”

“I did think about it. If anybody nasty’s coming our way, we already know the terrain better than they do. If anything happens, I’ll take responsibility for that.”

“That’ll be really reassuring the next time we get ambushed out here. What if it were a suicide transmitter? How would you even know the difference? You should have come to me, Tris.”

The anger is a dull knot in my throat, as sudden and as jolting as the physical attraction I’d felt only a minute or two before. Because he always asked me first, right? He’d never just do something because he was pissed off and wanted to take it out on somebody, or–

He might have done that to someone else, but never to me.

It’s exhausting, being scared, and cautious, and thinking about everyone else before myself. That’s what it was for – for someone else, always thinking about someone else, taking precautions for somebody else –

My cheeks are warm, and the wound in my side is steadily throbbing away with pain. But I can’t look away from Four.

“You didn’t ask me first before pretending to kill my brother. I didn’t come all the way out here to be your second-in-command. Whether I live or die is my business.”

“You don’t believe that for a second. If you seriously thought Tori would ever do anything to harm you, you wouldn’t have taken it. I’m not second-guessing your judgment, I just wish you’d told me about it. That’s all.”

Both of us know what Tori is capable of. There’s no need to play dumb about what kind of person she was – brilliant, yes, humane for sure, but ruthless, absolutely. The sense of relief is palpable, but so is the embarrassment.

“Good. It was my decision, and I’m holding to it, unless you feel like doing more road surgery.”

It wouldn’t just be me, if I’d made the bad choice back there. If I died out here I’d be leaving everyone else at a disadvantage – I’d be leaving Four behind, with these guys. I’d be leaving Four behind. Tobias didn’t come out here with me because he was curious about who our predecessors were, or because he wanted to go on a nature hike. He came here to be with me.

“I’m not going to hold you down,” Four finally says, exhaustedly, with such sweetness in his eyes that my heart wrenches in my chest. “I love you, Tris. I worry about you. That’s all.”

“If we did get separated, what would you do?”

“I’d find you. I wouldn’t need any help to do that.”

My body is pressed flush against his, I can feel all my bones and all my scars and all his scars too. The topography of his body is familiar now after all our different kinds of intimacy, but there’s still so much left to know – new freckles or muscles or dimples. In the middle of a blasted wasteland I want to read my boyfriend’s body like a map, how’s that for priorities?

“If I – if we died out here, I want someone back home to know. I want someone to know we made it all this way. I don’t just want to disappear.” There must be a hundred, a thousand ways to die in the woods. Infection, starvation, heatstroke, wild animals, broken bones, dehydration, a bullet to the back of the head. All of them shuffle through my mind like playing cards. “I don’t want to die lost. Does that make sense?”

Four thumbs at my temples, brushing back the soft short prickling hairs along my hairline. “I’d find you even then, Tris. I’d find you anywhere.”

We could live here – alone. Even if it wasn’t pretty – there’s metal and wood, stuff to start fires with, I’d learn to wind fibers out of the tall grass or figure out how they used to tan leather here. Four could be peaceful here, millions of miles away from anyone he could hurt, from anyone who ever hurt him.

I reach for Four’s hand, fumbling to grasp his first two fingers in my palm.

“We should go back.”

“Right.”

*

The first thing I notice is the acid smell of bile. Somebody’s been sick here, and it makes my gorge rise in sympathy with the sudden bitterness. My brother’s book bag is here on the ground, and his canteen sits on top of a stack of printed maps. Either it’s starting to rain again, or the leaves have begun to drip a little; a few stray water drops have bled into the paper, making the crisp annotations in pen – my brother’s handwriting – start to run. Caleb’s coat is here, neatly folded; on top of it rests a trio of mottled brown eggs.

The fire pit is a charred ruin. Caleb was here; I spot his genius fire design in the rubble, a heap of charred wood like a tent, and somebody’s stuck a stone in the ashes to cook on that’s now blackened with animal fat and flecks of white flesh. I nudge it with the toe of my boot, dislodging a piece of sooty scorched bark.

Tobias is rigid, silent, on alert.

“Looks like they’re done with dinner.”

He holds up a hand sign: listen. My gun is out already, and my finger itches on the trigger – there’s a rustling in the foliage, and my brain is screaming – get out of here, get out of here, get in the car and fucking drive.

Bootprints in the dirt, the smudge of an impact. Somebody hit the ground here. Somebody got dragged. They’re back – the stragglers who ambushed us are back. They’re back with reinforcements.

“Caleb?” I call my brother’s name a few more times, until it starts to sound stupid in my throat.

Down the slope, there’s a shallow depression like a slash in the ground – a creek used to run here that’s now just a series of muddy pits criss-crossed with fallen trees. Four balances on the edge of the drop-off, balancing on a rotten tree trunk that now lies horizontal.

He sees something I don’t.

“Tris, get back.”

But I’m down the ridge in a second, boots pounding through mud and rainwater. Peter lies in the dirt and leaves, curled up on his side. He isn’t moving; every line in his body’s posture announces suffering. His shirtfront is soaked dark red.

My hands dig through his jacket, looking for a wound like all of the bodies back at the Bureau. Somewhere there has to be something.

One of his hands has begun to tremble. Dead men can’t do that, at least. It’s not just blood that’s spilled on him. The bitter watery smell of vomit is heavy on him, and I can’t even be disgusted – none of this fits together, none of this makes sense. Something bad happened here, sure, but not an attack. More like a mistake. Something really, really… stupid.

One of those twitching hands seizes me by the wrist.

“I’m fine,” Peter says, staring at me with unfocused eyes. It’s like “Don’t touch me–”

I recoil a couple feet, scrambling in the rotten leaves back up the slope.

He drags himself up onto his knees, but can’t even get a foot under himself before collapsing bonelessly in a sick heap.

“Where’s Caleb?”

His face is fixed, gone waxy white apart from the muddy smear down his chin, and his eyes stare out at me like I just asked a really stupid question. “Gone– gone looking for you. I mean, obviously–”

Peter throws up again on his hands, and with even less dignity he faints.

*

Tobias tries to ease a little water into Peter’s mouth, with the same kind of doctorly care he’d used on me, but most of it spills down his chin. His grip on Peter’s shoulder is firm, but gentler than a doctor’s – he must have been trained for something like these kinds of occurrences if they let him look out for the next crop of Dauntless’ best recruits. Couldn’t have us killing ourselves with spoiled food or alcohol poisoning before we got deployed, after all.

A branch snaps at the edge of the clearing; two sets of eyes swivel around to fix on it, and I’d be willing to bet Four and I flinch for our weapons at the exact same time. There stands Caleb, hands raised in surrender.

“Look who’s late to the party.” There’s an edge of tension in Tobias’ voice that betrays his apparent calm.

“I’ve been looking for you guys everywhere.” He doesn’t just walk to Peter’s side, he runs, skidding in the dirt and very nearly landing on his rear. Peter has been laid out on one of the fire-resistant blankets, with Tobias’ coat balled up under his head so he can’t aspirate any of his own vomit. What a way to go. “It was the mushrooms. He was fine for a while, but we were working on the maps together, and–”

“You should have let me die there,” Peter interrupts, speaking to him or to me or to anyone who will listen. His eyes are still shut, freckled with burst blood vessels, but his eyelids strain like they’re on the verge of rolling back into his head.

He may not be dead yet, but it’s easy to believe he’s dying.

Caleb catches me by the elbow, like he means to move me aside, and I don’t appreciate the gesture. “He needs activated charcoal. It’ll soak up some of the poison, at least for now.”

“This is where you tell me you packed for exactly this kind of contingency, isn’t it.” I can see the satisfaction on his face even beneath the sharply-drawn lines of anxiety. The part of him that’s still Erudite is a real asshole, but I love him right now despite myself. He dips into the medical kit and pulls out a sealed plastic sachet.

“Sedating him might help with the convulsions.”

“Yeah, he’ll love that.” Instant visions of him doped to the eyes on Amity complacency. Maybe it’d be good for him, planting potatoes and weaving baskets.

“Not like he’s in any shape to complain.”

*

The fire’s still out. Relighting it might attract wild animals, or worse, so we scatter ashes on any conspicuous spots of throw-up and sit around like a bunch of jerks while Caleb packs up. Sleep seems unlikely, but I doze against Tobias’ shoulder – he’s reluctant to hold me too tightly in my current condition, but the warmth and solidity of him gives me a little comfort in the damp. Before long, Caleb is resting with his head propped up on his bag, and even Four is starting to unwind beneath me.

“Somebody should go check on him. No, don’t – don’t get up, I’ll go.”

He can barely keep his eyes open. I won’t be going far, anyway. My kiss feels cool against his temple, and his hand locks in mine for a sleepy moment before he lets me go.

Pulling away, I heft my bag’s strap up higher on my shoulders, wary of the pain in my left side as it diffuses into a dull ache. That might never go away, for all I know. Caleb took the liberty of filling Peter’s canteen for him – an unwarranted small kindness, an act of mercy – and it weighs heavy at the bottom of my bag.

Peter’s makeshift bed is in the darkest shadows, a heap of balled outer garments and dryish leaves and damp bark.

“Hey, Peter – you still alive? You haven’t thrown up in a while.” I mean it honestly, but it comes out sounding like something he’d say, and I could kick myself for it. I try to keep my distance, just in case. The flashlight beam rakes the ground, and a flash of white sends me rocking back on my heels.

Peter’s hand gouges into the dirt, scratching deep lines.

“No such thing as poison mushrooms,” he mutters hoarsely in the dark, “god, fucking idiot. There’s no such thing as poison mushrooms, Peter, sure.”

“Are you going to be all right, or what?”

“Oh yeah, your boyfriend’s taking great care of me.” There’s a dreamy slackness to his voice – Caleb must have sedated him after all. I can’t imagine Peter will be pleased with him once his head’s cleared again.

As he sits up to take the canteen, the light catches on the knot of scar tissue in his shoulder – I did that. My bullet left that mark. Peter must have the fewest tattoos of any Dauntless I’ve known. There’s a thick band of ink marking his skinny forearm – and underneath it I can hardly recognize the wiry muscles I once went up against in the ring. And that took me down, hard. Other Dauntless got tattoos to commemorate loved ones, friends they’d lost or family members they’d left behind – the canvas of Peter’s body is practically blank. He’s gotten thinner, harder-looking; sickness has left his skin with a yellow cast beneath the bruises and scrapes. We must both look like shit.

I dig around in my pack and toss him a clean tee shirt. It’ll fit him better than it fit me. Peter tries to sit up, but it’s more of a body-wide flinch.

“Don’t say I never got you anything nice.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He can barely keep his eyes open, and they keep slipping out of focus behind his eyelashes. It’s very hard to look threatening all doped up to the teeth, and it’s impossible not to laugh at him here.

“Feel better. That’s an order.”

“You should have let me die, Stiff. I mean it.”

*

We can’t delay any longer, not when we’re so close. Peter gets bundled into the back of the truck with the last of the water and a little whiskey – he’s not throwing up any more, but his condition is not improving, and neither is mine. With every moment we’ve gone further away from certainty. Further away from everything we’ve known.

The signs for Rapid City are behind us now – another dead city full of dead residents – and the road winds deeper into the mountains. We are in a ruin. Maybe it was once a sacred place, before whoever lived here surrendered it to the woods, but it’s a ruin just the same. I’ve never lived anywhere that wasn’t half falling down, half rotting away, and now I have a better sense of why – there used to be a people here that loved to build, men and women who loved to pave roads and cut paths through the mountainside, and now they’re gone.

I know next-to-nothing about wilderness. I’ve never seen this many trees in one place in my life, except out a car window, and they all look alike – I keep turning my head, expecting to see a path or a gap I can turn to my advantage, but there’s nothing.

This time there’s no fence – the road coming in is a deep bend, the view of more sprawling lots partially obstructed by trees, but we can pass straight by them unobstructed. No stragglers showing up in the middle of the road, just flooded cracked blacktop and the naked posts for signs at regular intervals.

We reach a gate where the signs are still in place, not roughly chopped down; there’s a booth by the side of the entryway, like there’s supposed to be an attendant there, probably an armed one. But the booth is empty, and the sign hangs from two bolted hooks, creaking a little to and fro from the vibrations of our vehicle. The printing on this one matches the legend on our maps, and above the stencilled text is the same brazen symbol in the same garish green. The symbol for a facility in use, a facility that hasn’t been overtaken or worse.

Camp Lysenko. And then beneath that, in smaller rusting letters, Rushmore Vault #: 0016. There are at least fifteen more facilities like this. Maybe more.

“Lysenko. Person, place, or thing?”

“Let’s hope it’s not a person,” Four says grimly. And we roll on through.

We’re here, right where we’re supposed to be on the map – sandwiched between a low tangle of buildings and a long broken colonnade. In the middle of it all, clearly meant to be the center of things, is a cleared-out stone amphitheater. It could be the big sister of the one at the Hub where we all had our choosing ceremony – built to hold a crowd, but judging from the shattered concrete seats and the plants sprouting up between the fragments of stone, no one has fully occupied this space in decades. I’ve never seen anything more massive, or more desolate. The bowl of the impression is shallow, and there’s a square screen in front, the perfect spot for a podium.

Then, front and center above the treeline, they are there – outcroppings like enormous stone faces. At first they look like any of the other features we’ve seen, weather-worn into irregularity, but somebody made these things. They’re too ugly not to be likenesses, I decide; erosion has rubbed out their distinct features but they’re unmistakably man-made.

What was this place?

A dull repetitive sound wraps around my head like a coil of smoke, coming from every direction and none. The thudding sound of turbine blades – echoing off the far hills. Just like before, we’re not alone.

Chapter 12: Botany: Peter

Chapter Summary

(The beginning.)

Chapter Notes

Chapter Twelve: Peter

“Feeling better?” Tris must be completely winded, but the sound of pity in her voice still makes me want to hurl.

“My piss is brown, Stiff, you do the math.”

“More than I needed to know,” Four shouts back over his shoulder – and screw him for being a peak physical specimen right now. Among other discoveries, my back aches like somebody’s been kicking me in the kidneys all night. My head still hurts like somebody’s jamming a railroad spike through it. What a treat.

Guess I owe both of them now for the dubious pleasure of surviving all this, Tris and Four alike. Oh, and Caleb too in the offing, but nothing about him counts. Overhead in the canopy of leaves there’s a heavy chopping sound, like a repetitive dull thud – it reverberates off the mountains and the echo diffuses as if it comes from everywhere and nowhere.

The wind picks up in the trees. It makes all the sweaty hairs on the back of my neck go up.

“I’m going back to the car,” Caleb says, with none of his sister’s cheer, hanging back by a few feet. “I don’t feel good about this.”

What I want to say is, me too, let’s tell these guys to take a hike and split. Instead I tell him, like Tris would if she had any sense: “And get shanked? You’re not going to feel any better about it if shit goes wrong and you’re alone.”

“This was a mistake. I’m leaving.” Not even sticking around for his sister – ice cold. Maybe he’s not out of my league after all.

“You’re not. Turn back and I’ll shoot you. " I wouldn’t really do it. It’s motivational.

His sister is in bad shape; even I can tell that. Four practically has to carry her down some of the steps. Her spine is stiff and her face is a rigid point of pain, but she limps on ahead of me undaunted, hugging her arm to her side. She’s got her gun hanging from her non-dominant arm, which won’t be a whole lot of good – in Dauntless we’re supposed to train for both, but with the way things were there toward the end, hardly any of us really got the training we were supposed to. We weren’t training to be soldiers, after all, they just needed us to point and shoot. She doesn’t like having me at her back, and I can’t blame her. But I’ll cover her like I’d cover Caleb – like I’d want her covering me.

I follow her down into the hole. The eerie half-dark spills over us, and I hang on to my gun a little tighter – but there’s no sound but our own footsteps and not far away, running water. Maybe the thrum of a coolant system. It could be a headquarters of some kind, easily. I wouldn’t want to live here, but it’s easy to imagine some nut holing up underground like this.

A metal fence has been drawn in front of the path, running floor to ceiling; Tris rattles at it furiously, as if it’s the fence’s fault we can’t scale it and jump over. I give it a useless couple of shakes for good measure while Tris unfolds her knife and gouges at the lock sunk deep in the wall – it’s lit up in green, which in one way is a good sign and in another way might mean we’re in deep shit.

Four pushes me aside and gives the fence one good hard strike with the butt of his rifle. The metal screams just like a person screams, as the joints wrench apart, and a gash opens up – big enough for Tris to wriggle through if she didn’t mind tetanus. It’s harder for Four to shimmy in after her, and harder still for me, when just bending at the waist hurts like I’m getting fucked in the spine with a knife. I can feel my organs dying off, and it scares me. I don’t enjoy it.

Another door, this one massive – easily twenty feet tall. But old. Its battered surface has dents in it like bullet holes, and there’s no visible means of defense – no camera trained on it or nozzles to disperse gas. There wouldn’t be, would there – they’d hide them.

“You go first.” It’s not an admission of cowardice; from Tris it is an order. I am expendable; she is not. That might chafe, but I keep walking. I keep breathing.

Waiting.

When I pictured how I’d die, I expected it wouldn’t make any sense, but I still didn’t expect this part – the waiting, trying to keep track of my breaths and scrutinize the sensation of my throat lining for any burning or scratching. There were serums full of tiny rigid particles that’d rip you up from the inside out. There were ones that’d knock you out cold, permanently, or toxins that’d have you clawing your own eyes out. I suck in as big a breath as possible, thinking of all the places I thought I’d die – all the places I kind of figured it would be, bleeding out alone with my face shot off or broken at the bottom of a long drop.

The whole point of life was making sure that happened to somebody else and not you.

“You’re clear. Barring some kind of freak thing.” Like a bioscanner coded to only the most extra-special genetic profile – a very real possibility – or a slow-acting gas that’s odorless and tasteless, or a laser that cuts the heads off anybody shorter than six feet tall, I don’t fucking know. I beckon with both arms, letting my gun hang slack at my side, then gesture a little more vigorously and a little less politely. “Hurry the fuck up, do I look dead to you?”

“Now that you mention it.”

In with the debris there’s a metal bar – solid metal, not broken pipe, and heavy in my hand. “Hey, Stiff. Catch.”

I turn to toss it, but her flashing eyes present a persuasive argument to just hand it over instead. Even with a tool, this won’t be easy. Tris’ hands are already bleeding.

The temperature drops palpably the moment the doors wheel open. I expect to see my breath. Lighting is dim but definitely present. This place is one big morgue – who’s keeping the power on?

The walls are stone slabs, lined with metal racks, floor to ceiling – the original fixtures have been removed to make way for them, and the whole place is built like a bunker, clean-swept and well lit from corner to corner. Every rack is piled floor-to-ceiling with plastic bins, the locking-handled kind, except there are no actual locks, only looping paper tags.

Tris lugs one down (from one of the lower shelves, naturally) and whatever its contents are rattle around like a tin can – Four goes to ransack a file cabinet, impatient; there’s the hiss of a seal being broken, and the computer monitor beside us flares into life.

I flip through a rack of paper envelopes. Each one is marked with a pair of numbers – two different serial numbers, maybe – and a pair of letters. ND, SD, KY, CO, IL. Each one is matched to a plastic tab on a paper binder as thick as my fist.

Tris tears the top off of the paper packet and tips its contents into her hand. Ten or fifteen little, round, brownish things. Cherry pits.

“Prunus avium,” Tris reads. “O, R.”

GD.

“Seeds. They’re just seeds.” She says it loud enough for Four to hear, loud enough to stop him in his tracks.

Just seeds. We came all the way out here for the same stuff they grow in Amity territory by the bushel. I open up another, a little too roughly maybe, sending its contents scattering. Little white ovals, like a baby’s fingernail. “Great, exactly what we need. We found the secret to being Divergent, Stiff, you’re part-melon.”

“Shut up, weren’t you paying any attention at all in school?” Tris’ lessons must seem far away to her now. “People first worked out the existence of genes by cross-breeding plants. Somebody was growing beans, and – get that out of your mouth, Peter, you don’t even know what it is yet.”

I crack one between my teeth. “It’s a pumpkin seed, genius.”

“You of all people shouldn’t be eating stuff you find lying around. This place is a library for seeds. They were studying them here. Trying to keep them safe.”

Tris’ voice is raspy from thirst. I hand her my canteen before she can ask. (But she’d have never asked. Good old Tris.)

“We had seeds back home,” Four says darkly.

Caleb has slid the book loose from the back of the drawer and opened it to the first tab. There’s diagrams and columns of text, even photographs. He talks like someone in a daze. “They were designed for the Faction system. They were genetically modified too, and they were sterile. But these are from the old world. Anyone can farm these seeds.”

Four is already tugging open another metallic drawer. The rattle of glass against glass makes itself noisily known. He swears, and slams the drawer shut.

“Tobias, you don’t understand what this means. They left these for us. We can use these to start over.”

“That’s it? That’s what we came here for, a storage facility?” Four sounds as unimpressed as I am.

“I never promised you the key to everything,” Tris starts to say, defensive. “We’re not being shot at, are we? Look, if we can just figure it out–”

This isn’t a welcoming committee with open arms, this isn’t a plain blank screen and an explanation video from some even earlier founder telling us what this is all about. It was never about anything. This place was never more than a circle drawn on a map.

But the power’s on. There’s lights and central air, and somebody has been mopping these floors. This isn’t what an abandoned building looks like, which means any minute now we might have company.

“Hey, Tris.” Leaning forward on my haunches hurts like fuck. “You still have that hard drive, right?”

“What?”

“Yeah, about that. I went through your bag. Take it out and see if it’ll hook up to that computer.”

It takes her a few tries to get the plugs in right; her hands are shaking and the three of us guys crowding around her probably doesn’t help. Tris pulls up a database file – a password-locked database file.

“I’ll handle it,” Four and Caleb both say at once, and it hurts to laugh. Caleb will try anything – between the four of us we’ve weaseled our way into enough high-security areas and locked-down computer networks that a password encoding is the least of our concerns. Four did “security” before they demoted him to hands-on training a bunch of sixteen-year-olds; everybody knew what that entailed.

“We could probably cross-reference with the scanner, but we need a staff login to see any results.”

“Staff only. Who the hell would work here?”

It’s one of the verification scanners they use in Erudite – or it’s like one, but not quite. The text is the wrong size, and the colors are wrong. I wave a hand in front of it, half-expecting to hear the same tinny voice spit back at me, Peter Hayes, Dauntless, level three clearance – but there’s nothing. It can tell me nothing. I need to log in. I need credentials for this and I don’t have them, my head’s swimming through red pain and I can’t think clearly enough to fake having them. I can’t even bullshit right.

I’ve made shit like this work before. I’ve implemented daring escapes and stolen shit that didn’t belong to me and broken in where I shouldn’t be – and that was before Dauntless, before this fucking war. I can’t do it now.

Tris notices my hesitation. Her eyebrows go together a little, and I grimace.

“You have to put your finger on the pad,” she says,

“That’s stupid.” Still, I lay the pad of my finger against the plastic panel; nothing. I press down again, this time for longer, and a red light starts to flash on the console.

“Try the other panel. It could be the override.”

Tris lifts the black plastic hood; inside is a clear plastic screw-top canister and a pack of sterile swabs.

Block letters flash in the viewing window.

“Insert cheek swab. Material override. You go first, Stiff.”

Tris rolls the cotton-topped stick around in her mouth for a while. It’s no delight handling her spit; when she passes it to me I bin it in the plastic cup.

“Secure sample container and lower hood. Secure it to what? There’s no lid, there’s nothing in here to secure it to.”

Tris sighs like she’s one step away from elbowing me over and fooling around with this thing herself. “You’re supposed to screw it in at the top, genius.”

The hood slides down with a click. There’s a flash of light from the little window, and – nothing. I can hear the blood in my ears. Four can probably hear my blood, and my body’s gone completely rigid from the anticipation of him shoving me out of the way. The click and the flash sound again. Nothing. An electronic chime goes off, hammering away in a series of sharp beeps, and it’s being drilled on the inside of my skull, against my eyelids –

Nothing. Nothing. We don’t have what we need.

“If we made the trip, then they can, too. There’s infrastructure here,” Tris says, growing frantic. “There’s a generator that’s still running. There’s a computer network that’s still online, and if there’s seeds there’s probably a greenhouse. This isn’t a safe house. This is a compound.”

What the fuck is a safe house?

“She’s right,” Caleb concurs.

“Get fucked,” I say.

The sound of footfalls rings out clear – click, click, click, down the metal steps with sharp deliberation. A woman’s footsteps. Somebody else’s footsteps, too? Or are we hearing things? Tris goes stiff, and I can see Caleb begin to unfold himself to stand; my fingernails dig into his wrist when I yank him down.

“Is someone there?” A woman’s voice rings out, and all of us duck down behind the rows of cabinets – they’re steel, and ought to provide some decent cover. She sounds frightened, strained. Then again, more sharply and more firmly, like an echo of Tris’ own tough-girl cadences – “You won’t have any luck with that. Come out unarmed and we can talk.”

Four makes a grim gesture at me. I’m the best at surrendering, so out I go, hands where this lady can see them.

There’s a lady all right – a woman there who isn’t ragged like the strays who ambushed us but dressed for business, orange-haired and rangy. She wears a polished brown leather jacket over an armored vest and everything else is practical dark green. I really need to stop sizing people up by faction as soon as I meet them, but that’s all I can think at first, stupid as it is – what faction wears green?

(I find my feet queasily, trying to look intimidating. Under my breath, not even turning my head: “You’re going to want to see this, Stiff.”)

I’ve never seen this woman before. I don’t know what to say to her that will possibly keep us all from getting murdered right here. We’re filthy and bloody and we look like shit, and right now I’m so tired and so sore I’m about ready to lie down and die completely independently of trespassing.

She’s flanked by a dark-haired woman and a dark-haired man. The girl is pretty, in a queasy long-legged kind of way that makes me think of Candor girls; he’s handsome, angular and skinny with a long face. (I could take him. I’m confident of it.) Both of them are wearing the colors of no particular faction. Both of them are armed.

But neither of them are looking at me.

“Holy shit,” the guy blurts, “Tris, you made it,” like he’s known her all his life. That’s the thing – the guy looks just like that girl from the tattoo shop, the stone-cold bitch with a green thumb for electronic mayhem. Just like Tori Wu.

And I wish I could see the look on Tris’ face. I can practically feel her stiffen at the sound of her name from a total stranger – Four is covering her with his body, no doubt, and in the corner of my eye Caleb is on his knees, raising his hands with puppy-like obedience. The red-haired woman is raking us over with her eyes – the blood on Tris’ shirt, the notebook in Caleb’s hands, the paper packets and scattered specimens. We must look like a couple of scavengers. Animals. Raccoons or stray cats, the kind you’d take a potshot at when you saw them rifling through the garbage. But they know our names, and they’ve been waiting for us.

First contact with outside life that isn’t trying to kill us, right? There ought to be something to say fitting the gravity of the situation, right? If it were Beatrice Prior out here with her hands where Red and her sexy goons can see them, she’d have something heartbreaking and tearful to say, and if it were Four he could channel his stone-cold bitch mother and lay down the law. But I’m first, so it’s just me: “What the fuck?”

The girl with black hair shifts the gun from her shoulder. Her face unfolds from a hard mask into a hundred-watt smile. I can’t believe it – she’s happy to see us. “We’re from the Bureau. You’re safe here.”

Isn’t that what everybody wants to hear? And like a king-size pussy with no endurance, I faint.