Allegiant (Divergent #3)(30)
Author: Veronica Roth

“Your sister did leave with us,” I say. “But we were attacked by the factionless, and she . . . didn’t make it.”

There is so much that phrase doesn’t say—how quick it was, and the sound of her body hitting the earth, and the chaos of everyone running into the night, stumbling over the grass. I didn’t go back for her. I should have—of all the people in our party, I knew Tori best, knew how tightly her hands squeezed the tattoo needle and how her laugh sounded rough, like it had been scraped with sandpaper.

George touches the wall behind him for stability. “What?”

“She gave her life defending us,” Tris says with surprising gentleness. “Without her, none of us would have made it out.”

“She’s . . . dead?” George says weakly. He leans his entire body into the wall, and his shoulders sag.

I see Amar in the hallway, a piece of toast in his hand and a smile quickly fading from his face. He sets the toast down on a table by the door.

“I tried to find you earlier to tell you,” Amar says.

Last night Amar said George’s name so casually, I didn’t think they really knew each other. Apparently they do.

George’s eyes turn glassy, and Amar pulls him into an embrace with one arm. George’s fingers are bent at harsh angles into Amar’s shirt, the knuckles white with tension. I don’t hear him cry, and maybe he doesn’t, maybe all he needs to do is hold on to something. I have only hazy memories of my own grief over my mother, when I thought she was dead—just the feeling that I was separate from everything around me, and this constant sensation of needing to swallow something. I don’t know what it’s like for other people.

Eventually, Amar leads George out of the room, and I watch them walk down the hallway side by side, talking in low voices.

I barely remember that I agreed to participate in a genetic test until someone else appears at the door to the dormitory—a boy, or not really a boy, since he looks about as old as I am. He waves to Tris.

“Oh, that’s Matthew,” she says. “I guess we should get going.”

She takes my hand and leads me toward the doorway. Somehow I missed her mentioning that “Matthew” wasn’t a crusty old scientist. Or maybe she didn’t mention it at all.

Don’t be stupid, I think.

Matthew sticks out his hand. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Matthew.”

“Tobias,” I say, because “Four” sounds strange here, where people would never identify themselves by how many fears they have. “You too.”

“So let’s go to the labs, I guess,” he says. “They’re this way.”

The compound is thick with people this morning, all dressed in green or dark blue uniforms that pool around the ankles or stop several inches above the shoe, depending on the height of the person. The compound is full of open areas that branch off the major hallways, like chambers of a heart, each marked with a letter and a number, and the people seem to be moving between them, some carrying glass devices like the one Tris brought back this morning, some empty-handed.

“What’s with the numbers?” says Tris. “Just a way of labeling each area?”

“They used to be gates,” says Matthew. “Meaning that each one has a door and a walkway that led to a particular airplane going to a particular destination. When they converted the airport into the compound, they ripped out all the chairs people used to wait for their flights in and replaced them with lab equipment, mostly taken from schools in the city. This area of the compound is basically a giant laboratory.”

“What are they working on? I thought you were just observing the experiments,” I say, watching a woman rush from one side of the hallway to the other with a screen balanced on both palms like an offering. Beams of light stretch across the polished tile, slanting through the ceiling windows. Through the windows everything looks peaceful, every blade of grass trimmed and the wild trees swaying in the distance, and it’s hard to imagine that people are destroying one another out there because of “damaged genes” or living under Evelyn’s strict rules in the city we left.

“Some of them are doing that. Everything that they notice in all the remaining experiments has to be recorded and analyzed, so that requires a lot of manpower. But some of them are also working on better ways to treat the genetic damage, or developing the serums for our own use instead of the experiments’ use—dozens of projects. All you have to do is come up with an idea, gather a team together, and propose it to the council that runs the compound under David. They usually approve anything that isn’t too risky.”

“Yeah,” says Tris. “Wouldn’t want to take any risks.”

She rolls her eyes a little.

“They have a good reason for their endeavors,” Matthew says. “Before the factions were introduced, and the serums with them, the experiments all used to be under near-constant assault from within. The serums help the people in the experiment to keep things under control, especially the memory serum. Well, I guess no one’s working on that right now—it’s in the Weapons Lab.”

“Weapons Lab.” He says the words like they’re fragile in his mouth. Sacred words.

“So the Bureau gave us the serums, in the beginning,” Tris says.

“Yes,” he says. “And then the Erudite continued to work on them, to perfect them. Including your brother. To be honest, we got some of our serum developments from them, by observing them in the control room. Only they didn’t do much with the memory serum—the Abnegation serum. We did a lot more with that, since it’s our greatest weapon.”

“A weapon,” Tris repeats.

“Well, it arms the cities against their own rebellions, for one thing—erase people’s memories and there’s no need to kill them; they just forget what they were fighting about. And we can also use it against rebels from the fringe, which is about an hour from here. Sometimes fringe dwellers try to raid, and the memory serum stops them without killing them.”

“That’s . . .” I start.

“Still kind of awful?” Matthew supplies. “Yes, it is. But the higher-ups here think of it as our life support, our breathing machine. Here we are.”

I raise my eyebrows. He just spoke out against his own leaders so casually I almost missed it. I wonder if that’s the kind of place this is—where dissent can be expressed in public, in the middle of a normal conversation, instead of in secret spaces, with hushed voices.