Allegiant

My mother. What is my mother doing next to these people?

Something—grief, pain, longing—squeezes my chest.

“There is a lot to explain,” Zoe says. “But this isn’t really the best place to do it. We’d like to take you to our headquarters. It’s a short drive from here.”

Still holding up his gun, Tobias touches my wrist with his free hand, guiding the photograph closer to his face. “That’s your mother?” he asks me.

“It’s Mom?” Caleb says. He pushes past Tobias to see the picture over my shoulder.

“Yes,” I say to both of them.

“Think we should trust them?” Tobias says to me in a low voice.

Zoe doesn’t look like a liar, and she doesn’t sound like one either. And if she knows who I am, and knew how to find us here, it’s probably because she has some form of access to the city, which means she is probably telling the truth about being with the group that Edith Prior came from. And then there’s Amar, who is watching every movement Tobias makes.

“We came out here because we wanted to find these people,” I say. “We have to trust someone, don’t we? Or else we’re just walking around in a wasteland, possibly starving to death.”

Tobias releases my wrist and lowers his gun. I do the same. The others follow suit slowly, with Christina putting hers down last.

“Wherever we go, we have to be free to leave at any time,” Christina says. “Okay?”

Zoe places her hand on her chest, right over her heart. “You have my word.”

I hope, for all our sakes, that her word is worth having.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_46e0476f-3364-5683-a439-3b54389eef36)

TOBIAS

I STAND ON the edge of the truck bed, holding the structure that supports the cloth cover. I want this new reality to be a simulation that I could manipulate if I could only make sense of it. But it’s not, and I can’t make sense of it.

Amar is alive.

“Adapt!” was one of his favorite commands during my initiation. Sometimes he yelled it so often that I would dream it; it woke me like an alarm clock, requiring more of me than I could provide. Adapt. Adapt faster, adapt better, adapt to things that no man should have to.

Like this: leaving a wholly formed world and discovering another one.

Or this: discovering that your dead friend is actually alive and driving the truck you’re riding in.

Tris sits behind me, on the bench that wraps around the truck bed, the creased photo in her hands. Her fingers hover over her mother’s face, almost touching it but not quite. Christina sits on one side of her, and Caleb is on the other. She must be letting him stay just to see the photograph; her entire body recoils from him, pressing into Christina’s side.

“That’s your mom?” Christina says.

Tris and Caleb both nod.

“She’s so young there. Pretty, too,” Christina adds.

“Yes she is. Was, I mean.”

I expect Tris to sound sad as she replies, like she’s aching at the memory of her mother’s fading beauty. Instead her voice is nervous, her lips pursed in anticipation. I hope that she isn’t brewing false hope.

“Let me see it,” Caleb says, stretching his hand out to his sister.

Silently, and without really looking at him, she passes him the photograph.

I turn back to the world we are driving away from—the end of the train tracks. The huge expanses of field. And in the distance, the Hub, barely visible in the haze that covers the city’s skyline. It’s a strange feeling, seeing it from this place, like I can still touch it if I stretch my hand far enough, though I have traveled so far away from it.

Peter moves toward the edge of the truck bed next to me, holding the canvas to steady himself. The train tracks curve away from us now, and I can’t see the fields anymore. The walls on either side of us gradually disappear as the land flattens out, and I see buildings everywhere, some small, like the Abnegation houses, and some wide, like city buildings turned on their sides.

Trees, overgrown and huge, grow beyond the cement fixtures intended to keep them enclosed, their roots sprawling over the pavement. Perched on the edge of one rooftop is a row of black birds like the ones tattooed on Tris’s collarbone. As the truck passes, they squawk and scatter into the air.

This is a wild world.

Just like that, it is too much for me to bear, and I have to back up and sit on one of the benches. I cradle my head in my hands, keeping my eyes shut so I can’t take in any new information. I feel Tris’s strong arm across my back, pulling me sideways into her narrow frame. My hands are numb.

“Just focus on what’s right here, right now,” Cara says from across the truck. “Like how the truck is moving. It’ll help.”

I try it. I think about how hard the bench is beneath me and how the truck always vibrates, even on flat ground, buzzing in my bones. I detect its tiny movements left and right, forward and back, and absorb each bounce as it rolls over the rails. I focus until everything goes dark around us, and I don’t feel the passage of time or the panic of discovery, I feel only our movement over the earth.

“You should probably look around now,” Tris says, and she sounds weak.

Christina and Uriah stand where I stood, peering around the edge of the canvas wall. I look over their shoulders to see what we’re driving toward. There is a tall fence stretching wide across the landscape, which looks empty compared to the densely packed buildings I saw before I sat down. The fence has vertical black bars with pointed ends that bend outward, as if to skewer anyone who might try to climb over it.

A few feet past it is another fence, this one chain-link, like the one around the city, with barbed wire looped over the top. I hear a loud buzz coming from the second fence, an electric charge. People walk the space between them, carrying guns that look a little like our paintball guns, but far more lethal, powerful pieces of machinery.

A sign on the first fence reads BUREAU OF GENETIC WELFARE.

I hear Amar’s voice, speaking to the armed guards, but I don’t know what he’s saying. A gate in the first fence opens to admit us, and then a gate in the second. Beyond the two fences is . . . order.

As far as I can see, there are low buildings separated by trimmed grass and fledgling trees. The roads that connect them are well maintained and well marked, with arrows pointing to various destinations: GREENHOUSES, straight ahead; SECURITY OUTPOST, left; OFFICERS’ RESIDENCES, right; COMPOUND MAIN, straight ahead.

I get up and lean around the truck to see the compound, half my body hanging over the road. The Bureau of Genetic Welfare isn’t tall, but it’s still huge, wider than I can see, a mammoth of glass and steel and concrete. Behind the compound are a few tall towers with bulges at the top—I don’t know why, but I think of the control room when I see them, and wonder if that’s what they are.

Aside from the guards between the fences, there are few people outside. Those who are stop to watch us, but we drive away so quickly I don’t see their expressions.

The truck stops before a set of double doors, and Peter is the first to jump down. The rest of us spill out on the pavement behind him, and we are shoulder to shoulder, standing so close I can hear how fast everyone is breathing. In the city we were divided by faction, by age, by history, but here all those divisions fall away. We are all we have.

“Here we go,” mutters Tris, as Zoe and Amar approach.

Here we go, I say to myself.

“Welcome to the compound,” says Zoe. “This building used to be O’Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country. Now it’s the headquarters of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare—or just the Bureau, as we call it around here. It’s an agency of the United States government.”

I feel my face going slack. I know all the words she’s saying—except I’m not sure what an “airport” or “united states” is—but they don’t make sense to me all together. I’m not the only one who looks confused—Peter raises both eyebrows as if asking a question.

“Sorry,” she says. “I keep forgetting how little you all know.”

“I believe it’s your fault if we don’t know anything, not ours,” Peter points out.