Allegiant (Divergent #3)(11)
Author: Veronica Roth

He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight for a few seconds. His breaths tickle my ear, and I close my eyes, letting myself finally relax. He smells like wind and sweat and soap, like Tobias and like safety.

“Should we go in?” he says. “Whoever they are, they’re probably prompt.”

“Yes.” My legs are trembling from overexertion—I can’t imagine going down the stairs and running back to Erudite headquarters later. “Did you find out about Caleb?”

He winces. “Maybe we should talk about that later.”

That’s all the answer I need.

“They’re going to execute him, aren’t they,” I say softly.

He nods, and takes my hand. I don’t know how to feel. I try not to feel anything.

Together we walk into the room where Tobias and I were once interrogated under the influence of truth serum. The place where you made your confession.

A circle of lit candles is arranged on the floor over one of the Candor scales set into the tile. There is a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces in the room: Susan and Robert stand together, talking; Peter is alone on the side of the room, his arms crossed; Uriah and Zeke are with Tori and a few other Dauntless; Christina is with her mother and sister; and in a corner are two nervous-looking Erudite. New outfits can’t erase the divisions between us; they are ingrained.

Christina beckons to me. “This is my mom, Stephanie,” she says, indicating a woman with gray streaks in her dark curly hair. “And my sister, Rose. Mom, Rose, this is my friend Tris, and my initiation instructor, Four.”

“Obviously,” Stephanie says. “We saw their interrogations several weeks ago, Christina.”

“I know that, I was just being polite—”

“Politeness is deception in—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Christina rolls her eyes.

Her mother and sister, I notice, look at each other with something like wariness or anger or both. Then her sister turns to me and says, “So you killed Christina’s boyfriend.”

Her words create a cold feeling inside me, like a streak of ice divides one side of my body from the other. I want to answer, to defend myself, but I can’t find the words.

“Rose!” Christina says, scowling at her. At my side, Tobias straightens, his muscles tensing. Ready for a fight, as always.

“I just thought we would air everything out,” Rose says. “It wastes less time.”

“And you wonder why I left our faction,” Christina says. “Being honest doesn’t mean you say whatever you want, whenever you want. It means that what you choose to say is true.”

“A lie of omission is still a lie.”

“You want the truth? I’m uncomfortable and don’t want to be here right now. I’ll see you guys later.” She takes my arm and walks Tobias and me away from her family, shaking her head the whole time. “Sorry about that. They’re not really the forgiving type.”

“It’s fine,” I say, though it’s not.

I thought that when I received Christina’s forgiveness, the hard part of Will’s death would be over. But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you’ve done.

My watch reads twelve o’clock. A door across the room opens, and in walk two lean silhouettes. The first is Johanna Reyes, former spokesperson of Amity, identifiable by the scar that crosses her face and the hint of yellow peeking out from under her black jacket. The second is another woman, but I can’t see her face, just that she is wearing blue.

I feel a spike of terror. She looks almost like . . . Jeanine.

No, I saw her die. Jeanine is dead.

The woman comes closer. She is statuesque and blond, like Jeanine. A pair of glasses dangles from her front pocket, and her hair is in a braid. An Erudite from head to foot, but not Jeanine Matthews.

Cara.

Cara and Johanna are the leaders of the Allegiant?

“Hello,” Cara says, and all conversation stops. She smiles, but on her the expression looks compulsory, like she’s just adhering to a social convention. “We aren’t supposed to be here, so I’m going to keep this meeting short. Some of you—Zeke, Tori—have been helping us for the past few days.”

I stare at Zeke. Zeke has been helping Cara? I guess I forgot that he was once a Dauntless spy. Which is probably when he proved his loyalty to Cara—he had some kind of friendship with her before she left Erudite headquarters not long ago.

He looks at me, wiggles his eyebrows, and grins.

Johanna continues, “Some of you are here because we want to ask for your help. All of you are here because you don’t trust Evelyn Johnson to determine the fate of this city.”

Cara touches her palms together in front of her. “We believe in following the guidance of the city’s founders, which has been expressed in two ways: the formation of the factions, and the Divergent mission expressed by Edith Prior, to send people outside the fence to help whoever is out there once we have a large Divergent population. We believe that even if we have not reached that Divergent population size, the situation in our city has become dire enough to send people outside the fence anyway.

“In accordance with the intentions of our city’s founders, we have two goals: to overthrow Evelyn and the factionless so that we can reestablish the factions, and to send some of our number outside the city to see what’s out there. Johanna will be heading up the former effort, and I will be heading up the latter, which is what we will mostly be focusing on tonight.” She presses a loose strand of hair back into her braid. “Not many of us will be able to go, because a crowd that large would draw too much attention. Evelyn won’t let us leave without a fight, so I thought it would be best to recruit people who I know to be experienced with surviving danger.”

I glance at Tobias. We certainly are experienced with danger.

“Christina, Tris, Tobias, Tori, Zeke, and Peter are my selections,” Cara says. “You have all proven your skills to me in one way or another, and it’s for that reason that I’d like to ask you to come with me outside the city. You are under no obligation to agree, of course.”

“Peter?” I demand, without thinking. I can’t imagine what Peter could have done to “prove his skills” to Cara.

“He kept the Erudite from killing you,” Cara says mildly. “Who do you think provided him with the technology to fake your death?”