“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” I say, “that you may have said you just wanted us to be honest with each other, but I think you really wanted me to always agree with you.”
“I can’t believe you would say that! You were wrong—”
“Yeah, I was wrong!” I’m shouting now, and I don’t know where the anger came from, except that I can feel it swirling around inside me, violent and vicious and the strongest I have felt in days. “I was wrong, I made a huge mistake! My best friend’s brother is as good as dead! And now you’re acting like a parent, punishing me for it because I didn’t do as I was told. Well, you are not my parent, Tris, and you don’t get to tell me what to do, what to choose—!”
“Stop yelling at me,” she says quietly, and she finally looks at me. I used to see all kinds of things in her eyes, love and longing and curiosity, but now all I see is anger. “Just stop.”
Her quiet voice stalls the anger inside me, and I relax into the wall behind me, shoving my hands into my pockets. I didn’t mean to yell at her. I didn’t mean to get angry at all.
I stare, shocked, as tears touch her cheeks. I haven’t seen her cry in a long time. She sniffs, and gulps, and tries to sound normal, but she doesn’t.
“I just need some time,” she says, choking on each word. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
She wipes her cheeks with her palms and walks down the hallway. I watch her blond head until it disappears around the bend, and I feel bare, like there’s nothing left to protect me against pain. Her absence stings worst of all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TRIS
“THERE SHE IS,” Amar says as I approach the group. “Here, I’ll get you your vest, Tris.”
“My . . . vest?” As promised by David yesterday, I’m going to the fringe this afternoon. I don’t know what to expect, which usually makes me nervous, but I’m too worn-out from the past few days to feel much of anything.
“Bulletproof vest. The fringe is not all that safe,” he says, and he reaches into a crate near the doors, sorting through a stack of thick black vests to find the right size. He emerges with one that still looks far too big for me. “Sorry, not much variety here. This will work just fine. Arms up.”
He guides me into the vest and tightens the straps at my sides.
“I didn’t know you would be here,” I say.
“Well, what did you think I did at the Bureau? Just wandered around cracking jokes?” He smiles. “They found a good use for my Dauntless expertise. I’m part of the security team. So is George. We usually just handle compound security, but any time anyone wants to go to the fringe, I volunteer.”
“Talking about me?” George, who was standing in the group by the doors. “Hi, Tris. I hope he’s not saying anything bad.”
George puts his arm across Amar’s shoulders, and they grin at each other. George looks better than the last time I saw him, but grief leaves its mark on his expression, taking the crinkles out of the corners of his eyes when he smiles, taking the dimple from his cheek.
“I was thinking we should give her a gun,” Amar says. He glances at me. “We don’t normally give potential future council members weapons, because they have no clue how to use them, but it’s pretty clear that you do.”
“It’s really all right,” I say. “I don’t need—”
“No, you’re probably a better shot than most of them,” George says. “We could use another Dauntless on board with us. Let me go get one.”
A few minutes later I am armed and walking with Amar to the truck. He and I get in the far back, George and a woman named Ann get in the middle, and two older security officers named Jack and Violet get in the front. The back of the truck is covered with a hard black material. The back doors look opaque and black from the outside, but from the inside they’re transparent, so we can see where we’re going. I am nestled between Amar and stacks of equipment that block our view of the front of the truck. George peers over the equipment and grins when the truck starts, but other than that, it’s just Amar and me.
I watch the compound disappear behind us. We drive through the gardens and outbuildings that surround it, and peeking out from behind the edge of the compound are the airplanes, white and stationary. We reach the fence, and the gates open for us. I hear Jack speaking to the soldier at the outer fence, telling him our plans and the contents of the vehicle—a series of words I don’t understand—before we can be released into the wild.
I ask, “What’s the purpose of this patrol? Beyond showing me how things work, I mean.”
“We’ve always kept an eye on the fringe, which is the nearest genetically damaged area outside the compound. Mostly just research, studying how the genetically damaged behave,” Amar says. “But after the attack, David and the council decided we needed more extensive surveillance set up there so we can prevent an attack from happening again.”
We drive past the same kind of ruins I saw when we left the city—the buildings collapsing under their own weight, and the plants roaming wild over the land, breaking through concrete.
I don’t know Amar, and I don’t exactly trust him, but I have to ask:
“So you believe it all? All the stuff about genetic damage being the cause of . . . this?”
All his old friends in the experiment were GDs. Can he possibly believe that they’re damaged, that there’s something wrong with them?
“You don’t?” Amar says. “The way I see it, the earth has been around for a long, long time. Longer than we can imagine. And before the Purity War, no one had ever done this, right?” He waves his hand to indicate the world outside.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I find it hard to believe that they didn’t.”
“Such a grim view of human nature you have,” he says.
I don’t respond.
He continues, “Anyway, if something like that had happened in our history, the Bureau would know about it.”
That strikes me as naive, for someone who once lived in my city and saw, at least on the screens, how many secrets we kept from one another. Evelyn tried to control people by controlling weapons, but Jeanine was more ambitious—she knew that when you control information, or manipulate it, you don’t need force to keep people under your thumb. They stay there willingly.
That is what the Bureau—and the entire government, probably—is doing: conditioning people to be happy under its thumb.
We ride in silence for a while, with just the sound of jiggling equipment and the engine to accompany us. At first I look at every building we pass, wondering what it once housed, and then they start to blend together for me. How many different kinds of ruin do you have to see before you resign yourself to calling it all “ruin”?
“We’re almost at the fringe,” George calls from the middle of the truck. “We’re going to stop here and advance on foot. Everyone take some equipment and set it up—except Amar, who should just look after Tris. Tris, you’re welcome to get out and have a look, but stay with Amar.”
I feel like all my nerves are too close to the surface, and the slightest touch will make them fire. The fringe is where my mother retreated after witnessing a murder—it is where the Bureau found her and rescued her because they suspected her genetic code was sound. Now I will walk there, to the place where, in some ways, it all began.