Allegiant (16 page)

The metal stairs leading down to the pavement screech with each of my footsteps. I have to tilt my head back to look at the airplane, which is bigger than I expected it to be, and silver-white. Just below the wing is a huge cylinder with spinning blades inside it. I imagine the blades sucking me in and spitting me out the other side, and shudder a little.

“How can something that big stay in the sky?” Uriah says from behind me.

I shake my head. I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it. I follow Zoe up another set of stairs, this one connected to a hole in the side of the plane. My hand shakes when I grab the railing, and I look over my shoulder one last time, to check if Tobias caught up to us. He isn’t there. I haven’t seen him since the genetic test.

I duck when I go through the hole, though it’s taller than my head. Inside the airplane are rows and rows of seats covered in ripped, fraying blue fabric. I choose one near the front, next to a window. A metal bar pushes against my spine. It feels like a chair skeleton with barely any flesh to support it.

Cara sits behind me, and Peter and Caleb move toward the back of the plane and sit near each other, next to the window. I didn’t know they were friends. It seems fitting, given how despicable they both are.

“How old is this thing?” I ask Zoe, who stands near the front.

“Pretty old,” she says. “But we’ve completely redone the important stuff. It’s a nice size for what we need.”

“What do you use it for?”

“Surveillance missions, mostly. We like to keep an eye on what’s happening in the fringe, in case it threatens what’s happening in here.” Zoe pauses. “The fringe is a large, sort of chaotic place between Chicago and the nearest government-regulated metropolitan area, Milwaukee, which is about a three-hour drive from here.”

I would like to ask what exactly
is
happening in the fringe, but Uriah and Christina sit in the seats next to me, and the moment is lost. Uriah puts an armrest down between us and leans over me to look out the window.

“If the Dauntless knew about this, everyone would be getting in line to learn how to drive it,” he says. “Including me.”

“No, they would be strapping themselves to the wings.” Christina pokes his arm. “Don’t you know your own faction?”

Uriah pokes her cheek in response, then turns back to the window again.

“Have either of you seen Tobias lately?” I say.

“No, haven’t seen him,” Christina says. “Everything okay?”

Before I can answer, an older woman with lines around her mouth stands in the aisle between the rows of seats and claps her hands.

“My name is Karen, and I’ll be flying this plane today!” she announces. “It may seem frightening, but remember: The odds of us crashing are actually much lower than the odds of a car crash.”

“So are the odds of survival if we
do
crash,” Uriah mutters, but he’s grinning. His dark eyes are alert, and he looks giddy, like a child. I haven’t seen him this way since Marlene died. He’s handsome again.

Karen disappears into the front of the plane, and Zoe sits across the aisle from Christina, twisting around to call out instructions like “Buckle your seat belts!” and “Don’t stand up until we’ve reached our cruising altitude!” I’m not sure what cruising altitude is, and she doesn’t explain it, in true Zoe fashion. It was almost a miracle that she remembered to explain the fringe earlier.

The plane starts to move backward, and I’m surprised by how smooth it feels, like we’re already floating over the ground. Then it turns and glides over the pavement, which is painted with dozens of lines and symbols. My heart beats faster the farther we go away from the compound, and then Karen’s voice speaks through an intercom: “Prepare for takeoff.”

I clench the armrests as the plane lurches into motion. The momentum presses me back against the skeleton chair, and the view out the window turns into a smear of color. Then I feel it—the lift, the rising of the plane, and I see the ground stretching wide beneath us, everything getting smaller by the second. My mouth hangs open and I forget to breathe.

I see the compound, shaped like the picture of a neuron I once saw in my science textbook, and the fence that surrounds it. Around it is a web of concrete roads with buildings sandwiched between them.

And then suddenly, I can’t even see the roads or the buildings anymore, because there is just a sheet of gray and green and brown beneath us, and farther than I can see in any direction is land, land, land.

I don’t know what I expected. To see the place where the world ends, like a giant cliff hanging in the sky?

What I didn’t expect is to know that I have been a person standing in a house that I can’t even see from here. That I have walked a street among hundreds—thousands—of other streets.

What I didn’t expect is to feel so, so small.

“We can’t fly too high or too close to the city because we don’t want to draw attention, so we’ll observe from a great distance. Coming up on the left side of the plane is some of the destruction caused by the Purity War, before the rebels resorted to biological warfare instead of explosives,” Zoe says.

I have to blink tears from my eyes before I can see it, what looks at first to be a group of dark buildings. Upon further examination, I realize that the buildings aren’t supposed to be dark—they’re charred beyond recognition. Some of them are flattened. The pavement between them is broken in pieces like a cracked eggshell.

It resembles certain parts of the city, but at the same time, it doesn’t. The city’s destruction could have been caused by people. This had to have been caused by something else, something bigger.

“And now you’ll get a brief look at Chicago!” Zoe says. “You’ll see that some of the lake was drained so that we could build the fence, but we left as much of it intact as possible.”

At her words I see the two-pronged Hub as small as a toy in the distance, the jagged line of our city interrupting the sea of concrete. And beyond it, a brown expanse—the marsh—and just past that . . . blue.

Once I slid down a zip line from the Hancock building and imagined what the marsh looked like full of water, blue-gray and gleaming under the sun. And now that I can see farther than I have ever seen, I know that far beyond our city’s limits, it is just like what I imagined, the lake in the distance glinting with streaks of light, marked with the texture of waves.

The plane is silent around me except for the steady roar of the engine.

“Whoa,” says Uriah.

“Shh,” Christina replies.

“How big is it compared to the rest of the world?” Peter says from across the plane. He sounds like he’s choking on each word. “Our city, I mean. In terms of land area. What percentage?”

“Chicago takes up about two hundred twenty-seven square miles,” says Zoe. “The land area of the planet is a little less than two hundred million square miles. The percentage is . . . so small as to be negligible.”

She delivers the facts calmly, as if they mean nothing to her. But they hit me square in the stomach, and I feel squeezed, like something is crushing me into myself. So much space. I wonder what it’s like in the places beyond ours; I wonder how people live there.

I look out the window again, taking slow, deep breaths into a body too tense to move. And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents’ God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel.

So small as to be negligible.

It’s strange, but there’s something in that thought that makes me feel almost . . . free.

That evening, when everyone else is at dinner, I sit on the window ledge in the dormitory and turn on the screen David gave me. My hands tremble as I open the file labeled “Journal.”

The first entry reads:

David keeps asking me to write down what I experienced. I think he expects it to be horrifying, maybe even wants it to be. I guess parts of it were, but they were bad for everyone, so it’s not like I’m special.

I grew up in a single-family home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I never knew much about who was inside the territory outside the city (which everyone around here calls “the fringe”), just that I wasn’t supposed to go there. My mom was in law enforcement; she was explosive and impossible to please. My dad was a teacher; he was pliable and supportive and useless. One day they got into it in the living room and things got out of hand, and he grabbed her and she shot him. That night she was burying his body in the backyard while I assembled a good portion of my possessions and left through the front door. I never saw her again.

Where I grew up, tragedy is all over the place. Most of my friends’ parents drank themselves stupid or yelled too much or had stopped loving each other a long time ago, and that was just the way of things, no big deal. So when I left I’m sure I was just another item on a long list of awful things that had happened in our neighborhood in the past year.

I knew that if I went anyplace official, like to another city, the government types would just make me go home to my mom, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to look at her without seeing the streak of blood my dad’s head left on the living room carpet, so I didn’t go anyplace official. I went to the fringe, where a whole bunch of people are living in a little colony made of tarp and aluminum in some of the postwar wreckage, living on scraps and burning old papers for warmth because the government can’t provide, since they’re spending all their resources trying to put us back together again, and have been for over a century after the war ripped us apart. Or they won’t provide. I don’t know.

One day I saw a grown man beating up one of the kids in the fringe, and I hit him over the head with a plank to get him to stop and he died, right there in the street. I was only thirteen. I ran. I got snatched by some guy in a van, some guy who looked like police. But he didn’t take me to the side of the road to shoot me and he didn’t take me to jail; he just took me to this secure area and tested my genes and told me all about the city experiments and how my genes were cleaner than other people’s. He even showed me a map of my genes on a screen to prove it.

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.