Insurgent (Divergent #2)(25)
Author: Veronica Roth

Tobias Eaton is a powerful name.

Niles waits for silence, then continues. “So you are a faction transfer, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“You transferred from Abnegation to Dauntless?”

“Yes,” snaps Tobias. “Isn’t that obvious?”

I bite my lip. He should calm down; he is giving away too much. The more reluctant he is to answer a question, the more determined Niles will be to hear the answer.

“One of the purposes of this interrogation is to determine your loyalties,” says Niles, “so I must ask: Why did you transfer?”

Tobias glares at Niles, and keeps his mouth shut. Seconds pass in complete silence. The longer he tries to resist the serum, the harder it seems to be for him: color fills his cheeks, and he breathes faster, heavier. My chest aches for him. The details of his childhood should stay inside him, if that’s where he wants them to be. Candor is cruel for forcing them from him, for taking away his freedom.

“This is horrible,” I say hotly to Christina. “Wrong.”

“What?” she says. “It’s a simple question.”

I shake my head. “You don’t understand.”

Christina smiles a little at me. “You really care about him.”

I am too busy watching Tobias to respond.

Niles says, “I’ll ask again. It is important that we understand the extent of your loyalty to your chosen faction. So why did you transfer to Dauntless, Tobias?”

“To protect myself,” says Tobias. “I transferred to protect myself.”

“Protect yourself from what?”

“From my father.”

All the conversations in the room stop, and the silence they leave in their wake is worse than the muttering was. I expect Niles to keep probing, but he doesn’t.

“Thank you for your honesty,” Niles says. The Candor repeat the phrase under their breath. All around me are the words “Thank you for your honesty” at different volumes and pitches, and my anger begins to dissolve. The whispered words seem to welcome Tobias, to embrace and then discard his darkest secret.

It’s not cruelty, maybe, but a desire to understand, that motivates them. That doesn’t make me any less afraid of going under truth serum.

“Is your allegiance with your current faction, Tobias?” Niles says.

“My allegiance lies with anyone who does not support the attack on Abnegation,” he says.

“Speaking of which,” Niles says, “I think we should focus on what happened that day. What do you remember about being under the simulation?”

“I was not under the simulation, at first,” says Tobias. “It didn’t work.”

Niles laughs a little. “What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

“One of the defining characteristics of the Divergent is that their minds are resistant to simulations,” says Tobias. “And I am Divergent. So no, it didn’t work.”

More mutters. Christina nudges me with her elbow.

“Are you too?” she says, close to my ear so she can stay quiet. “Is that why you were awake?”

I look at her. I have spent the past few months afraid of the word “Divergent,” terrified that anyone would discover what I am. But I won’t be able to hide it anymore. I nod.

It’s like her eyes swell to fill their sockets; that’s how big they get. I have trouble identifying her expression. Is it shock? Fear?

Awe?

“Do you know what it means?” I say.

“I heard about it when I was young,” she says in a reverent whisper.

Definitely awe.

“Like it was a fantasy story,” she says. “‘There are people with special powers among us!’ Like that.”

“Well, it’s not a fantasy, and it’s not that big a deal,” I say. “It’s like the fear landscape simulation—you were aware while you were in it, and you could manipulate it. Except for me, it’s like that in every simulation.”

“But Tris,” she says, setting her hand on my elbow. “That’s impossible.”

In the center of the room, Niles has his hands up and is trying to silence the crowd, but there are too many whispers—some hostile, some terrified, and some awed, like Christina’s. Finally Niles stands and yells, “If you don’t quiet down, you will be asked to leave!”

At last everyone quiets down. Niles sits.

“Now,” he says. “When you say ‘resistant to simulations,’ what do you mean?”

“Usually, it means we’re aware during simulations,” says Tobias. He seems to have an easier time with the truth serum when he answers factual questions instead of emotional ones. He doesn’t sound like he’s under the truth serum at all now, though his slumped posture and wandering eyes indicate otherwise. “But the attack simulation was different, using a different kind of simulation serum, one with long-range transmitters. Evidently the long-range transmitters didn’t work on the Divergent at all, because I awoke in my own mind that morning.”

“You say you weren’t under the simulation at first. Can you explain what you mean by that?”

“I mean that I was discovered and brought to Jeanine, and she injected a version of the simulation serum that specifically targeted the Divergent. I was aware during that simulation, but it didn’t do much good.”

“The video footage from the Dauntless headquarters shows you running the simulation,” Niles says darkly. “How, exactly, do you explain that?”

“When a simulation is running, your eyes still see and process the actual world, but your brain no longer comprehends them. On some level, though, your brain still knows what you’re seeing and where you are. The nature of this new simulation was that it recorded my emotional responses to outside stimuli,” Tobias says, closing his eyes for a few seconds, “and responded by altering the appearance of that stimuli. The simulation made my enemies into friends, my friends into enemies. I thought I was shutting the simulation down. Really I was receiving instructions about how to keep it running.”

Christina nods along to his words. I feel calmer when I see that most of the crowd is doing the same thing. This is the benefit of the truth serum, I realize. Tobias’s testimony is irrefutable this way.

“We have seen footage of what ultimately happened to you in the control room,” says Niles, “but it is confusing. Please describe it to us.”

“Someone entered the room, and I thought it was a Dauntless soldier, trying to stop me from destroying the simulation. I was fighting her, and . . .” Tobias scowls, struggling. “. . . and then she stopped, and I got confused. Even if I had been awake, I would have been confused. Why would she surrender? Why didn’t she just kill me?”