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But I killed a man just like my mother did. David says it’s okay because I didn’t mean to, and because he was about to kill that little kid. But I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t mean to kill my dad, either, so what difference does that make, meaning or not meaning to do something? Accident or on purpose, the result is the same, and that’s one fewer life than there should be in the world.
That’s what I experienced, I guess. And to hear David talk about it, it’s like it all happened because a long, long time ago people tried to mess with human nature and ended up making it worse.
I guess that makes sense. Or I’d like it to.
My teeth dig into my lower lip. Here in the Bureau compound, people are sitting in the cafeteria right now, eating and drinking and laughing. In the city, they’re probably doing the same thing. Ordinary life surrounds me, and I am alone with these revelations.
I clutch the screen to my chest. My mother was from here. This place is both my ancient and my recent history. I can feel her in the walls, in the air. I can feel her settled inside me, never to leave again. Death could not erase her; she is permanent.
The cold from the glass seeps through my shirt, and I shiver. Uriah and Christina walk through the door to the dormitory, laughing about something. Uriah’s clear eyes and steady footsteps fill me with a sense of relief, and my eyes well up with tears all of a sudden. He and Christina both look alarmed, and they lean against the windows on either side of me.
“You okay?” she says.
I nod and blink the tears away. “Where have you guys been today?”
“After the plane ride we went and watched the screens in the control room for a while,” Uriah says. “It’s really weird to see what they’re up to now that we’re gone. Just more of the same—Evelyn’s a jerk, so are all her lackeys, and so on—but it was like getting a news report.”
“I don’t think I’d like to look at those,” I say. “Too . . . creepy and invasive.”
Uriah shrugs. “I don’t know, if they want to watch me scratch my butt or eat dinner, I feel like that says more about them than about me.”
I laugh. “How often are you scratching your butt, exactly?”
He jostles me with his elbow.
“Not to derail the conversation from butts, which we can all agree is incredibly important—” Christina smiles a little. “But I’m with you, Tris. Just watching those screens made me feel awful, like I was doing something sneaky. I think I’ll be staying away from now on.”
She points to the screen in my lap, where the light still glows around my mother’s words. “What’s that?”
“As it turns out,” I say, “my mother was from here. Well, she was from the world outside, but then she came here, and when she was fifteen, she was placed in Chicago as a Dauntless.”
Christina says, “Your mother was from here?”
I nod. “Yeah. Insane. Even weirder, she wrote this journal and left it with them. That’s what I was reading before you came in.”
“Wow,” Christina says softly. “That’s good, right? I mean, that you get to learn more about her.”
“Yeah, it’s good. And no, I’m not still upset, you can stop looking at me like that.” The look of concern that had been building on Uriah’s face disappears.
I sigh. “I just keep thinking . . . that in some way I belong here. Like maybe this place can be home.”
Christina pinches her eyebrows together.
“Maybe,” she says, and I feel like she doesn’t believe it, but it’s nice of her to say it anyway.
“I don’t know,” Uriah says, and he sounds serious now. “I’m not sure anywhere will feel like home again. Not even if we went back.”
Maybe that’s true. Maybe we’re strangers no matter where we go, whether it’s to the world outside the Bureau, or here in the Bureau, or back in the experiment. Everything has changed, and it won’t stop changing anytime soon.
Or maybe we’ll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go—which is the way I carry my mother now.
Caleb walks into the dormitory. There’s a stain on his shirt that looks like sauce, but he doesn’t seem to notice it—he has the look in his eye that I now recognize as intellectual fascination, and for a moment I wonder what he’s been reading, or watching, to make him look that way.
“Hi,” he says, and he almost makes a move toward me, but he must see my revulsion, because he stops in the middle of a step.
I cover the screen with my palm, though he can’t see it from across the room, and stare at him, unable—or unwilling—to say anything in reply.
“You think you’ll ever speak to me again?” he says sadly, his mouth turning down at the corners.
“If she does, I’ll die of shock,” Christina says coldly.
I look away. The truth is, sometimes I want to just forget about everything that’s happened and return to the way we were before either of us chose a faction. Even if he was always correcting me, reminding me to be selfless, it was better than this—this feeling that I need to protect even my mother’s journal from him, so that he can’t poison it like he’s done to everything else. I get up and slip it under my pillow.
“Come on,” Uriah says to me. “Want to go with us to get some dessert?”
“You didn’t already have some?”
“So what if I did?” Uriah rolls his eyes and puts his arm across my shoulders, steering me toward the door.
Together the three of us walk toward the cafeteria, leaving my brother behind.
CHAPTER TWENTY
TOBIAS
“WASN’T SURE IF you would come,” Nita says to me.
When she turns to lead me wherever we’re going, I see that her loose shirt is low in the back, and there’s a tattoo on her spine, but I can’t make out what it is.
“You get tattoos too, here?” I say.
“Some people do,” she says. “The one on my back is of broken glass.” She pauses, the kind of pause you take when you’re deciding whether or not to share something personal. “I got it because it suggests damage. It’s . . . sort of a joke.”
There’s that word again, “damage,” the one that’s been sinking and surfacing, sinking and surfacing in my mind since the genetic test. If it’s a joke, it’s not a funny one even for Nita—she spits out the explanation like it tastes bitter to her.
