I don’t know what binds them together. The only common ground they have, as far as I know, is failure. Whatever it is, it seems to be enough.
I feel, as I look at him, that I am finally seeing him as he is, instead of how he is in relation to me. So how well do I really know him, if I have not seen this before?
The sun is beginning to set. The Abnegation sector is far from quiet. The Dauntless and factionless wander the streets, some with bottles in their hands, some with guns in their other hands.
Ahead of me, Zeke pushes Shauna in her wheelchair past the house of Alice Brewster, former Abnegation leader. They don’t see me.
“Do it again!” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“Okay . . .” Zeke starts to jog behind the wheelchair. Then, when he’s almost too far away for me to see, he pushes himself up with the handles so that his feet aren’t touching the ground, and together they fly down the middle of the street, Shauna shrieking, Zeke laughing.
I turn left at the next intersection and start down the cracked sidewalk toward the building where Abnegation had its monthly faction-wide meetings. Though it feels like it has been a long time since I last went there, I still remember where it is. One block south, two blocks west.
The sun inches toward the horizon as I walk. The color drains from the surrounding buildings in the evening light, so that they all appear to be gray.
The face of Abnegation headquarters is just a cement rectangle, like all the other buildings in the Abnegation sector. But when I shove the front door open, familiar wood floors and rows of wooden benches arranged in a square greet me. In the center of the room is a skylight that lets in a square of orange sunlight. It is the room’s only adornment.
I sit on my family’s old bench. I used to sit next to my father, and Caleb, next to my mother. Now I feel like the only one left. The last Prior.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Marcus walks in and sits down across from me, his hands folded in his lap. The sunlight is between us.
He has a large bruise on his jaw from where Tobias hit him, and his hair is freshly buzzed.
“It’s fine,” I say, straightening. “What are you doing here?”
“I saw you come in.” He examines his fingernails carefully. “And I want to have a word with you about the information Jeanine Matthews stole.”
“What if you’re too late? What if I already know what it is?”
Marcus looks up from his fingernails, and his dark eyes narrow. The look is far more poisonous than any Tobias could muster, though he has his father’s eyes. “You can’t possibly.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually. Because I have seen what happens to people when they hear the truth. They look like they have forgotten what they were searching for, and are just wandering around trying to remember.”
A chill makes its way up my spine and spreads down my arms, giving me goose bumps.
“I know that Jeanine decided to murder half a faction to steal it, so it must be incredibly important,” I say. I pause. I know something else, too, but I only just realized it.
Right before I attacked Jeanine, she said, “This is not about you! It’s not about me!”
And this meant what she was doing to me—trying to find a simulation that worked on me. On the Divergent.
“I know it has something to do with the Divergent,” I blurt out. “I know the information is about what’s outside the fence.”
“That is not the same thing as knowing what’s outside the fence.”
“Well, are you going to tell me or are you going to dangle it over my head and make me jump for it?”
“I did not come here for self-indulgent arguing. And no, I am not going to tell you, but not because I don’t want to. It’s because I have no idea how to describe it to you. You have to see it for yourself.”
As he speaks, I notice the sunlight turning more orange than yellow, and casting darker shadows over his face.
“I think Tobias might be right,” I say. “You like to be the only one who knows. You like that I don’t know. It makes you feel important. That’s why you won’t tell me, not because it’s indescribable.”
“That’s not true.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
Marcus stares, and I stare back.
“A week before the simulation attack, the Abnegation leaders decided it was time to reveal the information in the file to everyone. Everyone, in the entire city. The day we intended to reveal it was approximately seven days after the simulation attack. Obviously we were unable to do so.”
“She didn’t want you to reveal what was outside the fence? Why not? How did she even know about it in the first place? I thought you said only the Abnegation leaders knew.”
“We are not from here, Beatrice. We were all placed here, for a specific purpose. A while ago, the Abnegation were forced to enlist the help of Erudite in order to achieve that purpose, but eventually everything went awry because of Jeanine. Because she doesn’t want to do what we are supposed to do. She would rather resort to murder.”
Placed here.
My brain feels like it is buzzing with information. I clutch the edge of the bench beneath me.
“What are we supposed to do?” I say, my voice barely more than a whisper.
“I have told you enough to convince you that I am not a liar. As for the rest, I truly find myself unequal to the task of explaining it to you. I only told you as much as I did because the situation has become dire.”
Dire. Suddenly I understand the problem. The factionless plan to destroy, not only the important figures in Erudite, but all the data they have. They will level everything.
I have never thought that plan was a good idea, but I knew that we could come back from it, because the Erudite still know the relevant information, even if they don’t have their data. But this is something even the most intelligent Erudite do not know; something that, if everything is destroyed, we cannot replicate.
“If I help you, I betray Tobias. I will lose him.” I swallow hard. “So you have to give me a good reason.”
“Aside from the good of everyone in our society?” Marcus wrinkles his nose in disgust. “That isn’t enough for you?”
“Our society is in pieces. So no, it’s not.”
Marcus sighs.
“Your parents died for you, it’s true. But the reason your mother was in Abnegation headquarters the night you were almost executed was not to save you. She didn’t know you were there. She was trying to rescue the file from Jeanine. And when she heard that you were about to die, she rushed to save you, and left the file in Jeanine’s hands.”