THERE ARE ONLY a dozen more entries in the file, and they don❹❹t tell me everything I want to know, though they do give me more questions. And instead of just containing her thoughts and impressions, they are all written to someone.
Dear David,
I thought you were more my friend than my supervisor, but I guess I was wrong.
What did you think would happen when I came in here, that I would live single and alone forever? That I wouldn’t get attached to anyone? That I wouldn’t make any of my own choices?
I left everything behind to come in here when no one else wanted to. You should be thanking me instead of accusing me of losing sight of my mission. Let’s get this straight: I’m not going to forget why I’m here just because I chose Abnegation and I’m going to get married. I deserve to have a life of my own. One that I choose, not one that you and the Bureau choose for me. You should know all about that—you should understand why this life would appeal to me after all I’ve seen and been through.
Honestly, I don’t really think you care that I didn’t choose Erudite like I was supposed to. It sounds like you’re actually just jealous. And if you want me to keep updating you, you’ll apologize for doubting me. But if you don’t, I won’t send you any more updates, and I certainly won’t leave the city to visit anymore. It’s up to you.
—Natalie
I wonder if she was right about David. The thought itches at my mind. Was he really jealous of my father? Did his jealousy fade over time? I can only see their relationship from her eyes, and I’m not sure she’s the most accurate source of information about it.
I can tell she’s getting older in the entries, her language becoming more refined as time separates her from the fringe where she once lived, her reactions becoming more moderate. She’s growing up.
I check the date on the next entry. It’s a few months later, but it’s not addressed to David the way some of the others have been. The tone is different too—not as familiar, more straightforward.
I tap the screen, flipping through the entries. It takes me ten taps to reach an entry that is addressed to David again. The date on the entry suggests that it came a full two years later.
Dear David,
I got your letter. I understand why you can’t be on the receiving end of these updates anymore, and I’ll respect your decision, but I’ll miss you.
I wish you every happiness.
—Natalie
I try to flip forward, but the journal entries are over. The last document in the file is a certificate of death. The cause of death says multiple gunshot wounds to the torso. I rock back and forth a little, to dispel the image of her collapsing in the street from my mind. I don’t want to think about her death. I want to know more about her and my father, and her and David. Anything to distract me from the way her life ended.
It’s a sign of how desperate I am for information—and action—that I go to the control room with Zoe later that morning. She talks to the manager of the control room about a meeting with David as I stare, determined, at my feet, not wanting to see what’s on the screens. I feel like if I allow myself to look at them, even for a moment, I will become addicted to them, lost in the old world because I don’t know how to navigate this new one.
As Zoe finishes her conversation, though, I can’t keep my curiosity in check. I look at the large screen hanging over the desks. Evelyn is sitting on her bed, running her hands over something on her bedside table. I move closer to see what it is, and the woman at the desk in front of me says, “This is the Evelyn cam. We track her 24-7.”
“Can you hear her?”
“Only if we turn the volume up,” the woman replies. “We mostly keep the sound off, though. Hard to listen to that much chatter all day.”
I nod. “What is that she’s touching?”
“Some kind of sculpture, I don’t know.” The woman shrugs. “She stares at it a lot, though.”
I recognize it from somewhere—from Tobias’s room, where I slept after my almost-execution in Erudite headquarters. It’s made of blue glass, an abstract shape that looks like falling water frozen in time.
I touch my fingertips to my chin as I search my memory. He told me that Evelyn gave it to him when he was young, and instructed him to hide it from his father, who wouldn’t approve of a useless-but-beautiful object, Abnegation that he was. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it must mean something to her, if she carried it all the way from the Abnegation sector to Erudite headquarters to keep on her bedside table. Maybe it was her way of rebelling against the faction system.
On the screen, Evelyn balances her chin on her hand and stares at the sculpture for a moment. Then she gets up and shakes out her hands and leaves the room.
No, I don’t think the sculpture is a sign of rebellion. I think it’s just a reminder of Tobias. Somehow I never realized that when Tobias charged out of the city with me, he wasn’t just a rebel defying his leader—he was a son abandoning his mother. And she is grieving over it.
Is he?
Fraught with difficulty as their relationship has been, those ties never really break. They can’t possibly.
Zoe touches my shoulder. “You wanted to ask me something?”
I nod and turn away from the screens. Zoe was young in the photograph where she stood next to my mother, but she was still there, so I figure she must know something. I would have asked David, but as the leader of the Bureau, he is difficult to find.
“I wanted to know about my parents,” I say. “I’m reading her journal, and I guess I’m having a hard time figuring out how they even met, or why they joined Abnegation together.”
Zoe nods slowly. “I’ll tell you what I know. Mind walking with me to the labs? I need to leave a message with Matthew.”
She holds her hands behind her back, resting them at the bottom of her spine. I am still holding the screen David gave me. It’s marked all over with my fingerprints, and warm from my constant touch. I
understand why Evelyn keeps touching that sculpture—it’s the last piece of her son she has, just like this is the last piece of my mother that I have. I feel closer to her when it’s with me.
I think that’s why I can’t give it to Caleb, even though he has a right to see it. I’m not sure I can let go of it yet.
“They met in a class,” Zoe says. “Your father, though a very smart man, never quite got the knack of psychology, and the teacher—an Erudite, unsurprisingly—was very hard on him for it. So your mother offered to help him after school, and he told his parents he was doing some kind of school project. They did this for several weeks, and then started to meet in secret—I think one of their favorite places was the fountain south of Millennium Park. Buckingham Fountain? Right by the marsh?”
I imagine my mother and father sitting beside a fountain, under the spray of water, their feet skimming the concrete bottom. I know the fountain Zoe is referring to hasn’t been operational for a long time, so the spraying water was never there, but the picture is prettier that way.
“The Choosing Ceremony was approaching, and your father was eager to leave Erudite because he saw something terrible—”
“What? What did he see?”
“Well, your father was a good friend of Jeanine Matthews,” says Zoe. “He saw her performing an experiment on a factionless man in exchange for something—food, or clothing, something like that. Anyway, she was testing the fear-inducing serum that was later incorporated into Dauntless initiation—long ago, the fear simulations weren’t generated by a person’s individual fears, you see, just general fears like heights or spiders or something—and Norton, then the representative of Erudite, was there, letting it go on for far longer than it should have. The factionless man was never quite right again. And that was the last straw for your father.”
She pauses in front of the door to the labs to open it with her ID badge. We walk into the dingy office where David gave me my mother’s journal. Matthew is sitting with his nose three inches from his computer screen, his eyes narrow. He barely registers our presence when we walk in.
I feel overwhelmed by the desire to smile and cry at the same time. I sit down in a chair next to the empty desk, my hands clasped between my knees. My father was a difficult man. But he was also a good one.
“Your father wanted out of Erudite, and your mother didn’t want in, no matter what her mission was—but she still wanted to be near Andrew, so they chose Abnegation together.” She pauses. “This caused a rift between your mother and David, as I’m sure you saw. He eventually apologized, but said he couldn’t receive updates from her anymore—I don’t know why, he wouldn’t say—and after that her reports were very short, very informational. Which is why they’re not in that journal.”
“But she was still able to carry out her mission in Abnegation.”
“Yes. And she was much happier there, I think, than she would have been among the Erudite,” Zoe says. “Of course, Abnegation turned out to be no better, in some ways. It seems there’s no escaping the reach of genetic damage. Even the Abnegation leadership was poisoned by it.”
I frown. “Are you talking about Marcus? Because he’s Divergent.
Genetic damage had nothing to do with it.”
“A man surrounded by genetic damage cannot help but mimic it with his own behavior,” Zoe says. “Matthew, David wants to set up a meeting with your supervisor to discuss one of the serum developments. Last time Alan completely forgot about it, so I was wondering if you could escort him.”
“Sure,” Matthew says without looking away from his computer. “I’ll get him to give me a time.”
“Lovely. Well, I have to go—I hope that answered your question, Tris.” She smiles at me and slips out the door.
I sit hunched, with my elbows on my knees. Marcus was Divergent— genetically pure, just like me. But I don’t accept that he was a bad person because he was surrounded by genetically damaged people. So was I. So was Uriah. So was my mother. But none of us lashed out at our loved ones.
“Her argument has a few holes in it, doesn’t it,” says Matthew. He’s watching me from behind his desk, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Some of the people here want to blame genetic damage for everything,” he says. “It’s easier for them to accept than the truth, which is that they can’t know everything about people and why they act the way they do.”
“Everyone has to blame something for the way the world is,” I say. “For my father it was the Erudite.”
“I probably shouldn’t tell you that the Erudite were always my favorite, then,” Matthew says, smiling a little.
“Really?” I straighten. “Why?”
“I don’t know, I guess I agree with them. That if everyone would just keep learning about the world around them, they would have far fewer problems.”
“I’ve been wary of them my whole life,” I say, resting my chin on my hand. “My father hated the Erudite, so I learned to hate them too, and everything they did with their time. Only now I’m thinking he was wrong. Or just . . . biased.”
“About the Erudite or about learning?”
I shrug. “Both. So many of the Erudite helped me when I didn’t ask them to.” Will, Fernando, Cara—all Erudite, all some of the best people I’ve known, however briefly. “They were so focused on making the world a better place.” I shake my head. “What Jeanine did has nothing to do with a thirst for knowledge leading to a thirst for power, like my father told me, and everything to do with her being terrified of how big the world is and how powerless that made her. Maybe it was the Dauntless who had it right.”
“There’s an old phrase,” Matthew says. “Knowledge is power. Power to do evil, like Jeanine . . . or power to do good, like what we’re doing. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.”
“I guess I grew up suspicious of both. Power and knowledge,” I say. “To the Abnegation, power should only be given to people who don’t want it.”
“There’s something to that,” Matthew says. “But maybe it’s time to grow out of that suspicion.”
He reaches under the desk and takes out a book. It is thick, with a worn cover and frayed edges. On it is printed HUMAN BIOLOGY.
“It’s a little rudimentary, but this book helped to teach me what it is to be human,” he says. “To be such a complicated, mysterious piece of biological machinery, and more amazing still, to have the capacity to analyze that machinery! That is a special thing, unprecedented in all of evolutionary history. Our ability to know about ourselves and the world is what makes us human.”
He hands me the book and turns back to the computer. I look down at the worn cover and run my fingers along the edge of the pages. He makes the acquisition of knowledge feel like a secret, beautiful thing,
and an ancient thing. I feel like, if I read this book, I can reach backward through all the generations of humanity to the very first one, whenever it was—that I can participate in something many times larger and older than myself.
“Thank you,” I say, and it’s not for the book. It’s for giving something back to me, something I lost before I was able to really have it.
The lobby of the hotel smells like candied lemon and bleach, an acrid combination that burns my nostrils when I breathe it in. I walk past a potted plant with a garish flower blossoming among its branches, and toward the dormitory that has become our temporary home here. As I walk I wipe the screen with the hem of my shirt, trying to get rid of some of my fingerprints.
Caleb is alone in the dormitory, his hair tousled and his eyes red from sleep. He blinks at me when I walk in and toss the biology book onto my bed. I feel a sickening ache in my stomach and press the screen with our mother’s file against my side. He’s her son. He has a right to read her journal, just like you.
“If you have something to say,” he says, “just say it.”
“Mom lived here.” I blurt it out like a long-held secret, too loud and too fast. “She came from the fringe, and they brought her here, and she lived here for a couple years, then went into the city to stop the Erudite from killing the Divergent.”
Caleb blinks at me. Before I lose my nerve, I hold out the screen for him to take. “Her file is here. It’s not very long, but you should read it.”
He gets up and closes his hand around the glass. He’s so much taller than he used to be, so much taller than I am. For a few years when we were children, I was the taller one, even though I was almost a year younger. Those were some of our best years, the ones where I didn’t feel like he was bigger or better or smarter or more selfless than I was.
“How long have you known this?” he says, narrowing his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter.” I step back. “I’m telling you now. You can keep that, by the way. I’m done with it.”
He wipes the screen with his sleeve and navigates with deft fingers to our mother’s first journal entry. I expect him to sit down and read it, thus ending the conversation, but instead he sighs.
“I have something to show you, too,” he says. “About Edith Prior.
Come on.”
It’s her name, not my lingering attachment to him, that draws me after him when he starts to walk away.
He leads me out of the dormitory and down the hallway and around corners to a room far away from any that I have seen in the Bureau compound. It is long and narrow, the walls covered with shelves that bear identical blue-gray books, thick and heavy as dictionaries. Between the first two rows is a long wooden table with chairs tucked beneath it. Caleb flips the light switch, and pale light fills the room, reminding me of Erudite headquarters.
“I’ve been spending a lot of time here,” he says. “It’s the record room.
They keep some of the Chicago experiment data in here.”
He walks along the shelves on the right side of the room, running his fingers over the book spines. He pulls out one of the volumes and lays it flat on the table, so it spills open, its pages covered in text and pictures.
“Why don’t they keep all this on computers?”
“I assume they kept these records before they developed a sophisticated security system on their network,” he says without looking up. “Data never fully disappears, but paper can be destroyed forever, so you can actually get rid of it if you don’t want the wrong people to get their hands on it. It’s safer, sometimes, to have everything printed out.”
His green eyes shift back and forth as he searches for the right place, his fingers nimble, built for turning pages. I think of how he disguised that part of himself, wedging books between his headboard and the wall in our Abnegation house, until he dropped his blood in the Erudite water on the day of our Choosing Ceremony. I should have known, then, that he was a liar, with loyalty only to himself.
I feel that sickening ache again. I can hardly stand to be in here with him, the door closing us in, nothing but the table between us.
“Ah, here.” He touches his finger to a page, then spins the book around to show me.
It looks like a copy of a contract, but it’s handwritten in ink:
I, Amanda Marie Ritter, of Peoria, Illinois, give my consent to the following procedures:
- The “genetic healing” procedure, as defined by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare: “a genetic engineering procedure designed to correct the genes specified as ‘damaged’ on page three of this form.”
- The “reset procedure,” as defined by the Bureau of Genetic Welfare: “a memory-erasing procedure designed to make an experiment participant more fit for the experiment.”
I declare that I have been thoroughly instructed as to the risks and benefits of these procedures by a member of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. I understand that this means I will be given a new background and a new identity by the Bureau and inserted into the experiment in Chicago, Illinois, where I will live out the remainder of my days.
I agree to reproduce at least twice to give my corrected genes the best possible chance of survival. I understand that I will be encouraged to do this when I am reeducated after the reset procedure.
I also give my consent for my children and my children’s children, etc., to continue in this experiment until such time as the Bureau of Genetic Welfare deems it to be complete. They will be instructed in the false history that I myself will be given after the reset procedure.
Signed,
Amanda Marie Ritter
Amanda Marie Ritter. She was the woman in the video, Edith Prior, my ancestor.
I look up at Caleb, whose eyes are alight with knowledge, like there’s a live wire running through each of them.
Our ancestor.
I pull out one of the chairs and sit. “She was Dad’s ancestor?”
He nods and sits down across from me. “Seven generations back, yes.
An aunt. Her brother is the one who carried on the Prior name.” “And this is . . .”
“It’s a consent form,” he says. “Her consent form for joining the experiment. The endnotes say that this was just a first draft—she was one of the original experiment designers. A member of the Bureau. There were only a few Bureau members in the original experiment; most of the people in the experiment weren’t working for the government.”
I read the words again, trying to make sense of them. When I saw her in the video, it seemed so logical that she would become a resident of our city, that she would immerse herself in our factions, that she would volunteer to leave behind everything she left behind. But that was before
I knew what life was like outside the city, and it doesn’t seem as horrific as what Edith described in her message to us.
She delivered a skillful manipulation in that video, which was intended to keep us contained and dedicated to the vision of the Bureau
—the world outside the city is badly broken, and the Divergent need to come out here and heal it. It’s not quite a lie, because the people in the Bureau do believe that healed genes will fix certain things, that if we integrate into the general population and pass our genes on, the world will be a better place. But they didn’t need the Divergent to march out of our city like an army to fight injustice and save everyone, as Edith suggested. I wonder if Edith Prior believed her own words, or if she just said them because she had to.
There’s a photograph of her on the next page, her mouth in a firm line, wisps of brown hair hanging around her face. She must have seen something terrible, to volunteer for her memory to be erased and her entire life remade.
“Do you know why she joined?” I say.
Caleb shakes his head. “The records suggest—though they’re fairly vague on this front—that people joined the experiment so their families could escape extreme poverty—the families of the subjects were offered a monthly stipend for the subject’s participation, for upward of ten years. But obviously that wasn’t Edith’s motivation, since she worked for the Bureau. I suspect something traumatic must have happened to her, something she was determined to forget.”
I frown at her photograph. I can’t imagine what kind of poverty would motivate a person to forget themselves and everyone they loved so their families could get a monthly stipend. I may have lived on Abnegation bread and vegetables for most of my life, with nothing to spare, but I was never that desperate. Their situation must have been much worse than anything I saw in the city.
I can’t imagine why Edith was that desperate either. Or maybe it’s just that she didn’t have anyone to keep her memory for.
“I was interested in the legal precedent for giving consent on behalf of one’s descendants,” Caleb says. “I think it’s an extrapolation of giving consent for one’s children under eighteen, but it seems a little odd.”
“I guess we all decide our children’s fates just by making our own life decisions,” I say vaguely. “Would we have chosen the same factions we did if Mom and Dad hadn’t chosen Abnegation?” I shrug. “I don’t know.
Maybe we wouldn’t have felt as stifled. Maybe we would have become different people.”
The thought creeps into my mind like a slithering creature—Maybe we would have become better people. People who don’t betray their own sisters.
I stare at the table in front of me. For the past few minutes it was easy to pretend that Caleb and I were just brother and sister again. But a person can only keep reality—and anger—at bay for so long before the truth comes back again. As I raise my eyes to his, I think of looking at him in just this way, when I was still a prisoner in Erudite headquarters. I think of being too tired to fight with him anymore, or to hear his excuses; too tired to care that my brother had abandoned me.
I ask tersely, “Edith joined Erudite, didn’t she? Even though she took an Abnegation name?”
“Yes!” He doesn’t seem to notice my tone. “In fact, most of our ancestors were in Erudite. There were a few Abnegation outliers, and one or two Candor, but the through line is fairly consistent.”
I feel cold, like I might shiver and then shatter.
“So I suppose you’ve used this as an excuse in your twisted mind for what you did,” I say steadily. “For joining Erudite, for being loyal to them. I mean, if you were supposed to be one of them all along, then ‘faction before blood’ is an acceptable thing to believe, right?”
“Tris . . .” he says, and his eyes plead with me for understanding, but I do not understand. I won’t.
I stand up. “So now I know about Edith and you know about our mother. Good. Let’s just leave it at that, then.”
Sometimes when I look at him I feel the ache of sympathy toward him, and sometimes I feel like I want to wrap my hands around his throat. But right now I just want to escape, and pretend this never happened. I walk out of the records room, and my shoes squeak on the tile floor as I run back to the hotel. I run until I smell sweet citrus, and then I stop.
Tobias is standing in the hallway outside the dormitory. I am breathless, and I can feel my heartbeat even in my fingertips; I am overwhelmed, teeming with loss and wonder and anger and longing.
“Tris,” Tobias says, his brow furrowed with concern. “Are you all right?”
I shake my head, still struggling for air, and crush him against the wall with my body, my lips finding his. For a moment he tries to push me away, but then he must decide that he doesn’t care if I’m all right, doesn’t care if he’s all right, doesn’t care. We haven’t been alone together in days. Weeks. Months.
His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep, for the rest of my life.
He leans down and kisses my throat, hard, and his hands smooth over me, securing themselves at my waist. I hook my fingers in his belt loops, my eyes closing. In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.
I hear footsteps and laughter at the end of the hallway, and we break apart. Someone—probably Uriah—whistles, but I barely hear it over the pulsing in my ears.
Tobias’s eyes meet mine, and it’s like the first time I really looked at him during my initiation, after my fear simulation; we stare too long, too intently. “Shut up,” I call out to Uriah, without looking away.
Uriah and Christina walk into the dormitory, and Tobias and I follow them, like nothing happened.
