“Why did you do it?” I say. “You want me dead. You were willing to do it yourself! What changed?”
He presses his lips together and doesn’t look away, not for a long time. Then he opens his mouth, hesitates, and finally says, “I can’t be in anyone’s debt. Okay? The idea that I owed you something made me sick. I would wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was going to vomit. Indebted to a Stiff? It’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And I couldn’t have it.”
“What are you talking about? You owed me something?”
He rolls his eyes. “The Amity compound. Someone shot me—the bullet was at head level; it would have hit me right between the eyes. And you shoved me out of the way. We were even before that—I almost killed you during initiation, you almost killed me during the attack simulation; we’re square, right? But after that . . .”
“You’re insane,” says Tobias. “That’s not the way the world works . . . with everyone keeping score.”
“It’s not?” Peter raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what world you live in, but in mine, people only do things for you for one of two reasons. The first is if they want something in return. And the second is if they feel like they owe you something.”
“Those aren’t the only reasons people do things for you,” I say. “Sometimes they do them because they love you. Well, maybe not you, but . . .”
Peter snorts. “That’s exactly the kind of garbage I expect a delusional Stiff to say.”
“I guess we just have to make sure you owe us,” says Tobias. “Or you’ll go running to whoever offers you the best deal.”
“Yeah,” Peter says. “That’s pretty much how it is.”
I shake my head. I can’t imagine living the way he does—always keeping track of who gave me what and what I should give them in return, incapable of love or loyalty or forgiveness, a one-eyed man with a knife in hand, looking for someone else’s eye to poke out. That isn’t life. It’s some paler version of life. I wonder where he learned it from.
“So when can we get out of here, you think?” Peter says.
“Couple hours,” says Tobias. “We should go to the Abnegation sector. That’s where the factionless and the Dauntless who aren’t wired for simulations will be by now.”
“Fantastic,” says Peter.
Tobias puts his arm around me. I press my cheek into his shoulder, and close my eyes so I don’t have to look at Peter. I know there is a lot to say, though I’m not sure exactly what it is, but we can’t say it here, or now.
As we walk the streets I once called home, conversations sputter and die, and eyes cling to my face and body. As far as they knew—and I’m sure they knew, because Jeanine knows how to spread news—I died less than six hours ago. I notice that some of the factionless I pass are marked with patches of blue dye. They are simulation-ready.
Now that we’re here, and safe, I realize that there are cuts all over the bottoms of my feet from running over rough pavement and bits of glass from broken windows. Every step stings. I focus on that instead of all the stares.
“Tris?” someone calls out ahead of us. I lift my head, and see Uriah and Christina on the sidewalk, comparing revolvers. Uriah drops his gun in the grass and sprints toward me. Christina follows him, but at a slower pace.
Uriah reaches for me, but Tobias sets a hand on his shoulder to stop him. I feel a surge of gratitude. I don’t think I can handle Uriah’s embrace, or his questions, or his surprise, right now.
“She’s been through a lot,” Tobias says. “She just needs to sleep. She’ll be down the street—number thirty-seven. Come visit tomorrow.”
Uriah frowns at me. The Dauntless don’t usually understand restraint, and Uriah has only ever known the Dauntless. But he must respect Tobias’s assessment of me, because he nods and says, “Okay. Tomorrow.”
Christina reaches out as I pass her and squeezes my shoulder lightly. I try to stand up straighter, but my muscles feel like a cage, holding my shoulders hunched. The eyes follow me down the street, pinching the back of my neck. I am relieved when Tobias leads us up the front walk of the gray house that belonged to Marcus Eaton.
I don’t know by what strength Tobias marches through the doorway. For him this house must contain echoes of screaming parents and belt snaps and hours spent in small, dark closets, yet he doesn’t look troubled as he leads Peter and me into the kitchen. If anything he stands taller. But maybe that is Tobias—when he’s supposed to be weak, he’s strong.
Tori, Harrison, and Evelyn stand in the kitchen. The sight overwhelms me. I lean my shoulder into the wall and squeeze my eyes shut. The outline of the execution table is printed on my eyelids. I open my eyes. I try to breathe. They are talking but I can’t hear what they’re saying. Why is Evelyn here, in Marcus’s house? Where is Marcus?
Evelyn puts one arm around Tobias and touches his face with the other, pressing her cheek to his. She says something to him. He smiles at her when he pulls away. Mother and son, reconciled. I am not sure it’s wise.
Tobias turns me around and, keeping one hand on my arm and one on my waist, to avoid my shoulder wound, presses me toward the staircase. We climb the steps together.
Upstairs are his parents’ old bedroom and his old bedroom, with a bathroom between them, and that’s it. He takes me into his bedroom, and I stand for a moment, looking around at the room where he spent most of his life.
He keeps his hand on my arm. He has been touching me in some way since we left the stairwell of that building, like he thinks I might break apart if he doesn’t hold me together.
“Marcus didn’t go into this room after I left, I’m pretty sure,” says Tobias. “Because nothing was moved when I came back here.”
Members of Abnegation don’t own many decorations, since they are viewed as self-indulgent, but what few things we were allowed, he has. A stack of school papers. A small bookshelf. And, strangely, a sculpture made of blue glass on his dresser.
“My mother smuggled that to me when I was young. Told me to hide it,” he says. “The day of the ceremony, I put it on my dresser before I left. So he would see it. A small act of defiance.”
I nod. It is strange to be in a place that carries one single memory so completely. This room is sixteen-year-old Tobias, about to choose Dauntless to escape his father.
“Let’s take care of your feet,” he says. But he doesn’t move, just shifts his fingers to the inside of my elbow.
“Okay,” I say.
We walk into the adjoined bathroom, and I sit on the edge of the tub. He sits next to me, a hand on my knee as he turns on the faucet and plugs the drain. Water spills into the tub, covering my toenails. My blood turns the water pink.
He crouches in the tub and puts my foot in his lap, dabbing at the deeper cuts with a washcloth. I don’t feel it. Even when he smears soap lather over them, I don’t feel anything. The bathwater turns gray.
I pick up the bar of soap and turn it in my hands until my skin is coated with white lather. I reach for him and run my fingers over his hands, careful to get the lines in his palms and the spaces between his fingers. It feels good to do something, to clean something, and to have my hands on him again.
We get water all over the bathroom floor as we both splash it on ourselves to get the soap off. The water makes me cold, but I shiver and I don’t care. He gets a towel and starts to dry my hands.
“I don’t . . .” I sound like I am being strangled. “My family is all dead, or traitors; how can I . . .”
I am not making any sense. The sobs take over my body, my mind, everything. He gathers me to him, and bathwater soaks my legs. His hold is tight. I listen to his heartbeat and, after a while, find a way to let the rhythm calm me.
“I’ll be your family now,” he says.
“I love you,” I say.
I said that once, before I went to Erudite headquarters, but he was asleep then. I don’t know why I didn’t say it when he could hear it. Maybe I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion. Or afraid that I did not know what it was to love someone. But now I think the scary thing was not saying it before it was almost too late. Not saying it before it was almost too late for me.
I am his, and he is mine, and it has been that way all along.
He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response.
He frowns at me. “Say it again.”
“Tobias,” I say, “I love you.”
His skin is slippery with water and he smells like sweat and my shirt sticks to his arms when he slides them around me. He presses his face to my neck and kisses me right above the collarbone, kisses my cheek, kisses my lips.
“I love you, too,” he says.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
HE LIES NEXT to me as I fall asleep. I expect to have nightmares, but I must be too tired, because my mind stays empty. When I open my eyes next, he’s gone, but there’s a stack of clothes on the bed beside me.
I get up and walk into the bathroom and I feel raw, like my skin was scraped clean and every breath of air stings it a little, but stable. I don’t turn on the lights in the bathroom because I know they will be pale and bright, just like the lights in the Erudite compound. I shower in the dark, barely able to tell soap from conditioner, and tell myself that I will emerge new and strong, that the water will heal me.
Before I leave the bathroom, I pinch my cheeks hard to bring blood to the surface of my skin. It’s stupid, but I don’t want to look weak and exhausted in front of everyone.
When I walk back into Tobias’s room, Uriah is sprawled across the bed facedown; Christina is holding the blue sculpture above Tobias’s desk, examining it; and Lynn is poised above Uriah with a pillow, a wicked grin creeping across her face.
Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a pillow hurt, Lynn?”
“My exceptional strength,” she says. “Did you get smacked, Tris? One of your cheeks is bright red.”
I must not have pinched the other one hard enough. “No, it’s just . . . my morning glow.”
I try the joke out on my tongue like it’s a new language. Christina laughs, maybe a little harder than my comment warrants, but I appreciate the effort. Uriah bounces on the bed a few times when he moves to the edge.
“So, the thing we’re all not talking about,” he says. He gestures to me. “You almost died, a sadistic pansycake saved you, and now we’re all waging some serious war with the factionless as allies.”
“Pansycake?” says Christina.
“Dauntless slang.” Lynn smirks. “Supposed to be a huge insult, only no one uses it anymore.”
“Because it’s so offensive,” says Uriah, nodding.
“No. Because it’s so stupid no Dauntless with any sense would speak it, let alone think it. Pansycake. What are you, twelve?”
“And a half,” he says.
I get the feeling their banter is for my benefit, so that I don’t have to say anything; I can just laugh. And I do, enough to warm the stone that has formed in my stomach.
“There’s food downstairs,” says Christina. “Tobias made scrambled eggs, which, as it turns out, is a disgusting food.”
“Hey,” I say. “I like scrambled eggs.”
“Must be a Stiff breakfast, then.” She grabs my arm. “C’mon.”
Together we go down the stairs, our footsteps thundering as they never would have been allowed to in my parents’ house. My father used to scold me for running down the stairs. “Do not call attention to yourself,” he said. “It is not courteous to the people around you.”
I hear voices in the living room—a chorus of them, in fact, joined by occasional bursts of laughter and a faint melody plucked on an instrument, a banjo or a guitar. It is not what I expect in an Abnegation house, where everything is always quiet, no matter how many people are gathered within. The voices and the laughter and the music breathe life into the sullen walls. I feel even warmer.
I stand in the doorway to the living room. Five people are crowded onto the three-person couch, playing a card game I recognize from Candor headquarters. A man sits in the armchair with a woman balanced on his lap, and someone else perches on the arm, a can of soup in hand. Tobias sits on the floor, his back against the coffee table. Every part of his posture suggests ease—one leg bent, the other straight, an arm slung across his knee, his head tilted to listen. I have never seen him look so comfortable without a gun. I didn’t think it was possible.
I get the same sinking feeling in my stomach that I always get when I know I’ve been lied to, but I don’t know who it was that lied to me this time, or about what, exactly. But this is not what I was taught to expect of factionlessness. I was taught that it was worse than death.
I stand there for just a few seconds before people realize that I’m there. Their conversation peters out. I wipe my palms off on the hem of my shirt. Too many eyes, and too much silence.
Evelyn clears her throat. “Everyone, this is Tris Prior. I believe you may have heard a lot about her yesterday.”
“And Christina, Uriah, and Lynn,” supplies Tobias. I’m grateful for his attempt to divert everyone’s attention from me, but it doesn’t work.
I stand glued to the door frame for a few seconds, and then one of the factionless men—older, his wrinkled skin patterned with tattoos—speaks up.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
Some of the others laugh, and I try a smile. It emerges crooked and small.
“Supposed to be,” I say.
“We don’t like to give Jeanine Matthews what she wants, though,” Tobias says. He gets up and hands me a can of peas—but it isn’t full of peas; it’s full of scrambled eggs. The aluminum warms my fingers.
