Allegiant (Divergent #3)(60)
Author: Veronica Roth

“What does the serum do?”

His smile turns into a grimace. “Let’s just say it’s bad enough that Nita would rather be in prison for the rest of her life than come into contact with it.”

He’s right. He doesn’t have to say anything more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

TOBIAS

“LOOK WHO IT is,” Peter says as I walk into the dormitory. “The traitor.”

There are maps spread across his cot and the one next to his. They are white and pale blue and dull green, and they draw me to them by some strange magnetism. On each one Peter has drawn a wobbly circle—around our city, around Chicago. He’s marking the limits of where he’s been.

I watch that circle shrink into each map, until it’s just a bright red dot, like a drop of blood.

And then I back away, afraid of what it means that I am so small.

“If you think you’re standing on some kind of moral high ground, you’re wrong,” I say to Peter. “Why all the maps?”

“I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it, the size of the world,” he says. “Some of the Bureau people have been helping me learn more about it. Planets and stars and bodies of water, things like that.”

He says it casually, but I know from the frantic scribbling on maps that his interest isn’t casual—it’s obsessive. I was obsessive about my fears, once, in the same way, always trying to make sense of them, over and over again.

“Is it helping?” I say. I realize that I’ve never had a conversation with Peter that didn’t involve yelling at him. Not that he didn’t deserve it, but I don’t know anything about him. I barely remember his last name from the initiate roster. Hayes. Peter Hayes.

“Sort of.” He picks up one of the bigger maps. It shows the entire globe, pressed flat like kneaded dough. I stare at it long enough to make sense of the shapes on it, the blue stretches of water and the multicolored pieces of land. On one of the pieces is a red dot. He points at it. “That dot covers all the places we’ve ever been. You could cut that piece of land out of the ground and sink it into this ocean and no one would even notice.”

I feel that fear again, the fear of my own size. “Right. So?”

“So? So everything I’ve ever worried about or said or done, how can it possibly matter?” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t.”

“Of course it does,” I say. “All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter.”

He shakes his head again, and I wonder, suddenly, if this is how he comforts himself: by convincing himself that the bad things he’s done don’t matter. I see how the mammoth planet that terrifies me seems like a haven to him, a place where he can disappear into its great space, never distinguishing himself, and never being held responsible for his actions.

He bends over to untie his shoes. “So, have you been ostracized from your little crowd of devotees?”

“No,” I say automatically. Then I add, “Maybe. But they aren’t my devotees.”

“Please. They’re like the Cult of Four.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Jealous? Wish you had a Cult of Psychopaths to call your very own?”

One of his eyebrows twitches up. “If I was a psychopath, I would have killed you in your sleep by now.”

“And added my eyeballs to your eyeball collection, no doubt.”

Peter laughs too, and I realize that I am exchanging jokes and conversation with the initiate who stabbed Edward in the eye and tried to kill my girlfriend—if she’s still that. But then, he’s also the Dauntless who helped us end the attack simulation and saved Tris from a horrible death. I am not sure which actions should weigh more heavily on my mind. Maybe I should forget them all, let him begin again.

“Maybe you should join my little group of hated people,” says Peter. “So far Caleb and I are the only members, but given how easy it is to get on that girl’s bad side, I’m sure our numbers will grow.”

I stiffen. “You’re right, it is easy to get on her bad side. All you have to do is try to get her killed.”

My stomach clenches. I almost got her killed. If she had been standing closer to the explosion, she might be like Uriah, hooked up to tubes in the hospital, her mind quiet.

No wonder she doesn’t know if she wants to stay with me or not.

The ease of a moment ago is gone. I cannot forget what Peter did, because he has not changed. He is still the same person who was willing to kill and maim and destroy to climb to the top of his initiate class. And I can’t forget what I did either. I stand.

Peter leans against the wall and laces his fingers over his stomach. “I’m just saying, if she decides someone is worthless, everyone follows suit. That’s a strange talent, for someone who used to be just another boring Stiff, isn’t it? And maybe too much power for one person to have, right?”

“Her talent isn’t for controlling other people’s opinions,” I say, “it’s for usually being right about people.”

He closes his eyes. “Whatever you say, Four.”

All my limbs feel brittle with tension. I leave the dormitory and the maps with their red circles, though I’m not sure where else to go.

To me, Tris has always seemed magnetic in a way I could not describe, and that she was not aware of. I have never feared or hated her for it, the way Peter does, but then, I have always been in a position of strength myself, not threatened by her. Now that I have lost that position, I can feel the tug toward resentment, as strong and sure as a hand around my arm.

I find myself in the atrium garden again, and this time, light glows behind the windows. The flowers look beautiful and savage in the daylight, like vicious creatures suspended in time, motionless.

Cara jogs into the atrium, her hair askew and floating over her forehead. “There you are. It is frighteningly easy to lose people in this place.”

“What is it?”

“Well—are you all right, Four?”

I bite down on my lip so hard I feel a pinch. “I’m fine. What is it?”

“We’re having a meeting, and your presence is required.”

“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”

“GDs and GD sympathizers who don’t want to let the Bureau get away with certain things,” she says, and then she cocks her head to the side. “But better planners than the last ones you fell in with.”