Allegiant (21 page)

A long-legged creature with a brown, spare body picks its way across the street ahead of us, almost as tall as the headlights. Nita eases on the brakes so she doesn’t hit it. Its ears twitch, and its dark, round eyes watch us with careful curiosity, like a child.

“Sort of beautiful, aren’t they?” she says. “Before I came here I’d never seen a deer.”

I nod. It is elegant, but hesitant, halting.

Nita presses the horn with her fingertips, and the deer moves out of the way. We accelerate again, then reach a wide, open road suspended across the railroad tracks I once walked down to reach the compound. I see its lights up ahead, the one bright spot in this dark wasteland.

And we are traveling northeast, away from it.

It is a long time before I see electric light again. When I do, it is along a narrow, patchy street. The bulbs dangle from a cord strung along the old streetlights.

“We stop here.” Nita jerks the wheel, pulling the truck into an alley between two brick buildings. She takes the keys from the ignition and looks at me. “Check in the glove box. I asked them to give us weapons.”

I open the compartment in front of me. Sitting on top of some old wrappers are two knives.

“How are you with a knife?” she says.

The Dauntless taught initiates how to throw knives even before the changes to initiation that Max made before I joined them. I never liked it, because it seemed like a way to encourage the Dauntless flair for theatrics, rather than a useful skill.

“I’m all right,” I say with a smirk. “I never thought that skill would actually be worth anything, though.”

“I guess the Dauntless are good for something after all . . .
Four
,” she says, smiling a little. She takes the larger of the two knives, and I take the smaller one.

I am tense, turning the handle in my fingers as we walk down the alley. Above me the windows flicker with a different kind of light—flames, from candles or lanterns. At one point, when I glance up, I see a curtain of hair and dark eye sockets staring back at me.

“People live here,” I say.

“This is the very edge of the fringe,” Nita says. “It’s about a two-hour drive from Milwaukee, which is a metropolitan area north of here. Yeah, people live here. These days people don’t venture too far away from cities, even if they want to live outside the government’s influence, like the people here.”

“Why do they want to live outside the government’s influence?” I know what living outside the government is like, by watching the factionless. They were always hungry, always cold in the winter and hot in the summer, always struggling to survive. It’s not an easy life to choose—you have to have a good reason for it.

“Because they’re genetically damaged,” Nita says, glancing at me. “Genetically damaged people are technically—legally—equal to genetically pure people, but only on paper, so to speak. In reality they’re poorer, more likely to be convicted of crimes, less likely to be hired for good jobs . . . you name it, it’s a problem, and has been since the Purity War, over a century ago. For the people who live in the fringe, it seemed more appealing to opt out of society completely rather than to try to correct the problem from within, like I intend to do.”

I think of the fragment of glass tattooed on her skin. I wonder when she got it—I wonder what put that dangerous look in her eyes, what put such drama in her speech, what made her become a revolutionary.

“How do you plan on doing that?”

She sets her jaw and says, “By taking away some of the Bureau’s power.”

The alley opens up to a wide street. Some people prowl along the edges, but others walk right in the middle, in lurching groups, bottles swinging from their hands. Everyone I see is young—not many adults in the fringe, I guess.

I hear shouting up ahead, and glass shattering on the pavement. A crowd there stands in a circle around two punching, kicking figures.

I start toward them, but Nita grabs my arm and drags me toward one of the buildings.

“Not the time to be a hero,” she says.

We approach the door to the building on the corner. A large man stands beside it, spinning a knife in his palm. When we walk up the steps, he stops the knife and tosses it into his other hand, which is gnarled with scars.

His size, his deftness with the weapon, his scarred and dusty appearance—they are all supposed to intimidate me. But his eyes are like that deer’s eyes, large and wary and curious.

“We’re here to see Rafi,” she says. “We’re from the compound.”

“You can go in, but your knives stay here,” the man says. His voice is higher, lighter than I expected. He could be a gentle man, maybe, if this were a different kind of place. As it is, I see that he isn’t gentle, doesn’t even know what that means.

Even though I myself have discarded any kind of softness as useless, I find myself thinking that something important is lost if this man has been forced to deny his own nature.

“Not a chance,” Nita says.

“Nita, is that you?” says a voice from inside. It is expressive, musical. The man to whom it belongs is short, with a wide smile. He comes to the doorway. “Didn’t I tell you to just let them in? Come in, come in.”

“Hi, Rafi,” she says, her relief obvious. “Four, this is Rafi. He’s an important man in the fringe.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rafi says, and he beckons for us to follow him.

Inside is a large, open room lit by rows of candles and lanterns. There is wooden furniture strewn everywhere, all the tables empty but one.

A woman sits in the back of the room, and Rafi slides into the chair beside her. Though they don’t look the same—she has red hair and a generous frame; his features are dark and his body, spare as wire—they have the same sort of look, like two stones hewn by the same chisel.

“Weapons on the table,” Rafi says.

This time, Nita obeys, putting her knife on the edge of the table right in front of her. She sits. I do the same. Across from us, the woman surrenders a gun.

“Who’s this?” the woman says, jerking her head toward me.

“This is my associate,” Nita says. “Four.”

“What kind of a name is ‘Four’?” She doesn’t ask with a sneer, the way people have often asked me that question.

“The kind you get inside the city experiment,” Nita says. “For having only four fears.”

It occurs to me that she might have introduced me by that name just to have an opportunity to share where I’m from. Does it give her some kind of leverage? Does it make me more trustworthy to these people?

“Interesting.” The woman taps the table with her index finger. “Well,
Four
, my name is Mary.”

“Mary and Rafi lead the Midwest branch of a GD rebel group,” Nita says.

“Calling it a ‘group’ makes us sound like old ladies playing cards,” Rafi says smoothly. “We’re more of an uprising. Our reach stretches across the country—there’s a group for every metropolitan area that exists, and regional overseers for the Midwest, South, and East.”

“Is there a West?” I say.

“Not anymore,” Nita says quietly. “The terrain was too difficult to navigate and the cities too spread out for it to be sensible to live there after the war. Now it’s wild country.”

“So it’s true what they say,” Mary says, her eyes catching the light like slivers of glass as she looks at me. “The people in the city experiments really don’t know what’s outside.”

“Of course it’s true, why would they?” Nita says.

Fatigue, a weight behind my eyes, creeps up on me suddenly. I have been a part of too many uprisings in my short life. The factionless, and now this GD one, apparently.

“Not to cut the pleasantries short,” Mary says, “but we shouldn’t spend much time here. We can’t keep people out for long before they come sniffing around.”

“Right,” Nita says. She looks at me. “Four, can you make sure nothing’s happening outside? I need to talk to Mary and Rafi privately for a little while.”

If we were alone, I would ask why I can’t be here when she talks to them, or why she bothered to bring me in when I could have stood guard outside the whole time. I guess I haven’t actually agreed to help her yet, and she must have wanted them to meet me for some reason. So I just get up, taking my knife with me, and walk to the door where Rafi’s guard watches the street.

The fight across the street has died down. A lone figure lies on the pavement. For a moment I think it’s still moving, but then I realize that’s because someone is rifling through its pockets. It’s not a figure—it’s a body.

“Dead?” I say, and the word is just an exhale.

“Yep. If you can’t defend yourself here, you won’t last a night.”

“Why do people come here, then?” I frown. “Why don’t they just go back to the cities?”

He’s quiet for so long that I think he must not have heard my question. I watch the thief turn the dead person’s pockets inside out and abandon the body, slipping into one of the nearby buildings. Finally, Rafi’s guard speaks:

“Here, there’s a chance that if you die, someone will care. Like Rafi, or one of the other leaders,” the guard says. “In the cities, if you get killed, definitely no one will give a damn, not if you’re a GD. The worst crime I’ve ever seen a GP get charged with for killing a GD was ‘manslaughter.’ Bullshit.”

“Manslaughter?”

“It means the crime is deemed an accident,” Rafi’s smooth, lilting voice says behind me. “Or at least not as severe as, say, first-degree murder.
Officially
, of course, we’re all to be treated the same, yes? But that is rarely put into practice.”

He stands beside me, his arms folded. I see, when I look at him, a king surveying his own kingdom, which he believes is beautiful. I look out at the street, at the broken pavement and the limp body with its turned-out pockets and the windows flickering with firelight, and I know the beauty he sees is just freedom—freedom to be seen as a whole man instead of a damaged one.

I saw that freedom, once, when Evelyn beckoned to me from among the factionless, called me out of my faction to become a more complete person. But it was a lie.

“You’re from Chicago?” Rafi says to me.

I nod, still looking at the dark street.

“And now that you are out? How does the world seem to you?” he says.

“Mostly the same,” I say. “People are just divided by different things, fighting different wars.”

Nita’s footsteps creak on the floorboards inside, and when I turn she is standing right behind me, her hands buried in her pockets.

“Thanks for arranging this,” Nita says, nodding to Rafi. “It’s time for us to go.”

We make our way down the street again, and when I turn to look at Rafi, he has his hand up, waving good-bye.

As we walk back to the truck, I hear screams again, but this time they are the screams of a child. I walk past snuffling, whimpering sounds and think of when I was younger, crouched in my bedroom, wiping my nose on one of my sleeves. My mother used to scrub the cuffs with a sponge before throwing them in the wash. She never said anything about it.

When I get into the truck, I already feel numb to this place and its pain, and I am ready to get back to the dream of the compound, the warmth and the light and the feeling of safety.

“I’m having trouble understanding why this place is preferable to city life,” I say.

“I’ve only been to a city that wasn’t an experiment once,” Nita says. “There’s electricity, but it’s on a ration system—each family only gets so many hours a day. Same with water. And there’s a lot of crime, which is blamed on genetic damage. There are police, too, but they can only do so much.”

“So the Bureau compound,” I say. “It’s easily the best place to live, then.”

“In terms of resources, yes,” Nita says. “But the same social system that exists in the cities also exists in the compound; it’s just a little harder to see.”

I watch the fringe disappear in the rearview mirror, distinct from the abandoned buildings around it only by that string of electric lights draped over the narrow street.

We drive past dark houses with boarded-up windows, and I try to imagine them clean and polished, as they must have been at some point in the past. They have fenced-in yards that must have once been trim and green, windows that must once have glowed in the evenings. I imagine that the lives lived here were peaceful ones, quiet ones.

“What did you come out here to talk to them about, exactly?” I say.

“I came out here to solidify our plans,” Nita says. I notice, in the glow of the dashboard light, that there are a few cuts on her lower lip, like she has spent too much time biting it. “And I wanted them to meet you, to put a face on the people inside the faction experiments. Mary used to be suspicious that people like you were actually colluding with the government, which of course isn’t true. Rafi, though . . . he was the first person to give me proof that the Bureau, the government, was lying to us about our history.”

She pauses after she says it, like that will help me to feel the weight of it, but I don’t need time or silence or space to believe her. I have been lied to by my government for my entire life.

“The Bureau talks about this golden age of humanity before the genetic manipulations in which everyone was genetically pure and everything was peaceful,” Nita says. “But Rafi showed me old photographs of
war
.”

I wait a beat. “So?”

“So?” Nita demands, incredulous. “If genetically pure people caused war and total devastation in the past at the same magnitude that genetically damaged people supposedly do now, then what’s the basis for thinking that we need to spend so many resources and so much time working to correct genetic damage? What’s the use of the experiments at all, except to convince the right people that the government is doing something to make all our lives better, even though it’s not?”

The truth changes everything—isn’t that why Tris was so desperate to get the Edith Prior video shown that she allied herself with my father to do it? She knew that the truth, whatever it was, would change our struggle, would shift our priorities forever. And here, now, a lie has changed the struggle, a lie has shifted priorities forever. Instead of working against the poverty or crime that have run rampant over this country, these people have chosen to work against genetic damage.