She tugs at the hem of her shirt, then clasps her hands in front of her. She seems nervous.
“The Dauntless have allied with the factionless,” she says. “They intend to attack Erudite in two days’ time. Their battle will be waged not against the Erudite-Dauntless army but against Erudite innocents and the knowledge they have worked so hard to acquire.”
She looks down, breathes deeply, and continues: “I know that we recognize no leader, so I have no right to address you as if that is what I am,” she says. “But I am hoping that you will forgive me, just this once, for asking if we can reconsider our previous decision to remain uninvolved.”
There are murmurs. They are nothing like Dauntless murmurs—they are gentler, like birds launching from branches.
“Our relationship with Erudite notwithstanding, we know better than any faction how essential their role in this society is,” she says. “They must be protected from needless slaughter, if not because they are human beings, then because we cannot survive without them. I propose that we enter the city as nonviolent, impartial peacekeepers in order to curb in whatever way possible the extreme violence that will undoubtedly occur. Please discuss this.”
Rain dusts the glass panels above our heads. Johanna sits on a tree root to wait, but the Amity do not burst into conversation as they did the last time I was here. Whispers, almost indistinguishable from the rain, turn to normal speech, and I hear some voices lift above others, almost yelling, but not quite.
Every lifted voice sends a jolt through me. I’ve sat through plenty of arguments in my life, mostly in the last two months, but none of them ever scared me like this. The Amity aren’t supposed to argue.
I decide not to wait any longer. I walk along the edge of the meeting area, squeezing past the Amity who are on their feet and hopping over hands and outstretched legs. Some of them stare at me—I may be wearing a red shirt, but the tattoos along my collarbone are clear as ever, even from a distance.
I pause near the row of Erudite. Cara stands when I get close, her arms folded.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“I came to tell Johanna what was going on,” I say. “And to ask you for help.”
“Me?” she says. “Why—”
“Not you,” I say. I try to forget what she said about my nose, but it’s hard. “All of you. I have a plan to save some of your faction’s data, but I need your help.”
“Actually,” Christina says, appearing at my left shoulder, “we have a plan.”
Cara looks from me to Christina and back to me again.
“You want to help Erudite?” she says. “I’m confused.”
“You wanted to help Dauntless,” I say. “You think you’re the only one who doesn’t just blindly do what your faction tells you to?”
“It is in keeping with your pattern of behavior,” says Cara. “Shooting people who get in your way is a Dauntless trait, after all.”
I feel a pinch at the back of my throat. She looks so much like her brother, down to the crease between her eyebrows and the dark streaks in her otherwise blond hair.
“Cara,” says Christina. “Will you help us, or not?”
Cara sighs. “Obviously I will. I’m sure the others will, too. Meet us in the Erudite dormitory at the end of the meeting, and tell us the plan.”
The meeting lasts for another hour. By then the rain has stopped, though water still sprinkles the wall and ceiling panels. Christina and I have been sitting against one of the walls, playing a game in which each of us tries to pin down the other’s thumb. She always wins.
Finally Johanna and the others who emerged as discussion leaders stand in a line on the tree roots. Johanna’s hair now hangs over her lowered face. She is supposed to tell us the outcome of the conversation, but she just stands with her arms folded, her fingers tapping against her elbow.
“What’s going on?” Christina says.
Finally Johanna looks up.
“Obviously it was difficult to find agreement,” she says. “But the majority of you wish to uphold our policy of uninvolvement.”
It does not matter to me whether the Amity decide to go into the city or not. But I had begun to hope they were not all cowards, and to me, this decision sounds very much like cowardice. I sink back against the window.
“It is not my wish to encourage division in this community, which has given so much to me,” says Johanna. “But my conscience forces me to go against this decision. Anyone else whose conscience drives them toward the city is welcome to come with me.”
At first I, like everyone else, am not sure what she’s saying. Johanna tilts her head so that her scar is again visible, and adds, “I understand if this means I can’t be a part of Amity anymore.” She sniffs. “But please know that if I have to leave you, I leave you with love, rather than malice.”
Johanna bows in the general direction of the crowd, tucks her hair behind her ears, and walks toward the exit. A few of the Amity scramble to their feet, then a few more, and soon the entire crowd is on their feet, and some of them—not many, but some—are walking out behind her.
“That,” says Christina, “is not what I was expecting.”
CHAPTER FORTY
THE ERUDITE DORMITORY is one of the larger sleeping rooms in Amity headquarters. There are twelve beds total: a row of eight crammed together along the far wall, and two pressed together on each side, leaving a huge space in the middle of the room. A large table occupies that space, covered with tools and scraps of metal and gears and old computer parts and wires.
Christina and I just finished explaining our plan, which sounded a lot dumber with more than a dozen Erudite staring us down as we talked.
“Your plan is flawed,” Cara says. She is the first to respond.
“That’s why we came to you,” I say. “So you could tell us how to fix it.”
“Well, first of all, this important data you want to rescue,” she says. “Putting it on a disc is a ridiculous idea. Discs just end up breaking or in the wrong person’s hands, like all other physical objects. I suggest you make use of the data network.”
“The . . . what?”
She glances at the other Erudite. One of the others—a brown-skinned young man in glasses—says, “Go on. Tell them. There’s no reason to keep secrets anymore.”
Cara looks back at me. “Many of the computers in the Erudite compound are set up to access data from the computers in other factions. That’s how it was so easy for Jeanine to run the attack simulation from a Dauntless computer instead of an Erudite one.”
“What?” says Christina. “You mean you can just take a stroll through every faction’s data whenever you want?”
“You can’t ‘take a stroll’ through data,” the young man says. “That’s illogical.”
“It’s a metaphor,” says Christina. She frowns. “Right?”
“A metaphor, or simply a figure of speech?” he says, also frowning. “Or is a metaphor a definite category beneath the heading of ‘figure of speech’?”
“Fernando,” says Cara. “Focus.”
He nods.
“The fact is,” Cara continues, “the data network exists, and that is ethically questionable, but I believe it can work to our advantage here. Just as the computers can access data from other factions, they can send data to other factions. If we sent the data you wished to rescue to every other faction, destroying it all would be impossible.”
“When you say ‘we,’” I say, “are you implying that—”
“That we would be going with you?” she says. “Obviously not all of us would go, but some of us must. How do you expect to navigate Erudite headquarters on your own?”
“You do realize that if you come with us, you might get shot,” says Christina. She smiles. “And no hiding behind us because you don’t want to break your glasses, or whatever.”
Cara removes her glasses and snaps them in half at the bridge.
“We risked our lives by defecting from our faction,” says Cara, “and we will risk them again to save our faction from itself.”
“Also,” pipes up a small voice behind Cara. A girl no older than ten or eleven peers around Cara’s elbow. Her black hair is short, like mine, and a halo of frizz surrounds her head. “We have useful gadgets.”
Christina and I exchange a look.
I say, “What kinds of gadgets?”
“They’re just prototypes,” Fernando says, “so there’s no need to scrutinize them.”
“Scrutiny’s not really our thing,” says Christina.
“Then how do you make things better?” the little girl asks.
“We don’t, really,” Christina says, sighing. “They kind of just keep getting worse.”
The little girl nods. “Entropy.”
“What?”
“Entropy,” she chirps. “It’s the theory that all matter in the universe is gradually moving toward the same temperature. Also known as ‘heat death.’”
“Elia,” Cara says, “that is a gross oversimplification.”
Elia sticks out her tongue at Cara. I can’t help but laugh. I have never seen one of the Erudite stick out her tongue before. But then again, I haven’t interacted with many young Erudite. Only Jeanine and the people who work for her. Including my brother.
Fernando crouches next to one of the beds and takes out a box. He digs inside it for a few seconds, then picks up a small, round disc. It is made of a pale metal that I saw often in Erudite headquarters but have never seen anywhere else. He carries it toward me on his palm. When I reach for it, he jerks it away from me.
“Careful!” he says. “I brought this from headquarters. It’s not something we invented here. Were you there when they attacked Candor?”
“Yes,” I say. “Right there.”
“Remember when the glass shattered?”
“Were you there?” I say, narrowing my eyes.
“No. They recorded it and showed the footage at Erudite headquarters,” he says. “Well, it looked like the glass shattered because they shot at it, but that’s not really true. One of the Dauntless soldiers tossed one of these near the windows. It emits a signal that you can’t hear, but that will cause glass to shatter.”
“Okay,” I say. “And how will that be useful to us?”
“You may find that it’s rather distracting for people when all their windows shatter at once,” he says with a small smile. “Especially in Erudite headquarters, where there are a lot of windows.”
“Right,” I say.
“What else have you got?” says Christina.
“The Amity will like this,” Cara says. “Where is it? Ah. Here.”
She picks up a black box made of plastic, small enough for her to wrap her fingers around it. At the top of the box are two pieces of metal that look like teeth. She flips a switch at the bottom of the box, and a thread of blue light stretches across the gap between the teeth.
“Fernando,” says Cara. “Want to demonstrate?”
“Are you joking?” he says, his eyes wide. “I’m never doing that again. You’re dangerous with that thing.”
Cara grins at him, and explains, “If I touched you with this stunner right now, it would be extremely painful, and then it would disable you. Fernando found that out the hard way yesterday. I made it so that the Amity would have a way of defending themselves without shooting anyone.”
“That’s . . .” I frown. “Understanding of you.”
“Well, technology is supposed to make life better,” she says. “No matter what you believe, there’s a technology out there for you.”
What did my mother say, in that simulation? “I worry that your father’s blustering about Erudite has been to your detriment.” What if she was right, even if she was just a part of a simulation? My father taught me to see Erudite a particular way. He never taught me that they made no judgments about what people believed, but designed things for them within the confines of those beliefs. He never told me that they could be funny, or that they could critique their own faction from the inside.
Cara lunges toward Fernando with the stunner, laughing when he jumps back.
He never told me that an Erudite could offer to help me even after I killed her brother.
The attack will begin in the afternoon, before it is too dark to see the blue armbands that mark some of the Dauntless as traitors. As soon as our plans are finalized, we walk through the orchard to the clearing where the trucks are kept. When I emerge from the trees, I see that Johanna Reyes is perched on the hood of one of the trucks, the keys dangling from her fingers.
Behind her waits a small convoy of vehicles packed with Amity—but not just Amity, because Abnegation, with their severe hairstyles and still mouths, are among them. Robert, Susan’s older brother, is with them.
Johanna hops down from the hood. In the back of the truck she was just sitting on is a stack of crates marked APPLES and FLOUR and CORN. It’s a good thing we only have to fit two people in the back.
“Hello, Johanna,” says Marcus.
“Marcus,” she says. “I hope you don’t mind if we accompany you to the city.”
“Of course not,” he says. “Lead the way.”
Johanna gives Marcus the keys and climbs into the bed of one of the other trucks. Christina starts toward the truck cab, and I go for the truck bed, with Fernando behind me.
“You don’t want to sit up front?” says Christina. “And you call yourself a Dauntless. . . .”
“I went for the part of the truck in which I was least likely to vomit,” I say.
