He shakes his head. “It’s…incredible. Terrible, evil…but incredible.”

  I see movement on one of the screens and see my brother, Marcus, and Peter standing on the first floor of the building. Surrounding them are Dauntless soldiers, all in black, all carrying weapons.

  “Tobias,” I say tersely. “Now!”

  He runs to the computer screen and taps it a few times with his finger. I can’t look at what he’s doing. All I can see is my brother. He holds the gun I gave him straight out from his body, like he’s ready to use it. I bite my lip. Don’t shoot. Tobias presses the screen a few more times, typing in letters that make no sense to me. Don’t shoot.

  I see a flash of light—a spark, from one of the guns—and gasp. My brother and Marcus and Peter crouch on the ground with their arms over their heads. After a moment they all stir, so I know they’re still alive, and the Dauntless soldiers advance. A cluster of black around my brother.

  “Tobias,” I say.

  He presses the screen again, and everyone on the first floor goes still.

  Their arms drop to their sides.

  And then the Dauntless move. Their heads turn from side to side, and they drop their guns, and their mouths move like they’re shouting, and they shove each other, and some of them sink to their knees, holding their heads and rocking back and forth, back and forth.

  All the tension in my chest unravels, and I sit down, heaving a sigh.

  Tobias crouches next to the computer and pulls the side of the case off.

  “I have to get the data,” he says, “or they’ll just start the simulation again.”

  I watch the frenzy on the screen. It is the same frenzy that must be happening on the streets. I scan the screens, one by one, looking for one that shows the Abnegation sector of the city. There is only one—it’s at the far end of the room, on the bottom. The Dauntless on that screen are firing at one another, shoving one another, screaming—chaos. Black-clothed men and women drop to the ground. People sprint in every direction.

  “Got it,” says Tobias, holding up the computer’s hard drive. It is a piece of metal about the size of his palm. He offers it to me, and I shove it in my back pocket.

  “We have to leave,” I say, getting to my feet. I point at the screen on the right.

  “Yes, we do.” He wraps his arm across my shoulders. “Come on.”

  We walk together down the hallway and around the corner. The elevator reminds me of my father. I can’t stop myself from looking for his body.

  It is on the floor next to the elevator, surrounded by the bodies of several guards. A strangled scream escapes me. I turn away. Bile leaps into my throat and I throw up against the wall.

  For a second I feel like everything inside me is breaking, and I crouch by a body, breathing through my mouth so I don’t smell the blood. I clamp my hand over my mouth to contain a sob. Five more seconds. Five seconds of weakness and then I get up. One, two. Three, four.

  Five.

  I am not really aware of my surroundings. There is an elevator and a glass room and a rush of cold air. There is a shouting crowd of Dauntless soldiers dressed in black. I search for Caleb’s face, but it is nowhere, nowhere until we leave the glass building and step out into sunlight.

  Caleb runs to me when I walk through the doors, and I fall against him. He holds me tightly.

  “Dad?” he says.

  I just shake my head.

  “Well,” he says, almost choking on the word, “he would have wanted it that way.”

  Over Caleb’s shoulder, I see Tobias stop in the middle of a footstep. His entire body goes rigid as his eyes focus on Marcus. In the rush to destroy the simulation, I forgot to warn him.

  Marcus walks up to Tobias and wraps his arms around his son. Tobias stays frozen, his arms at his sides and his face blank. I watch his Adam’s apple bob up and down and his eyes lift to the ceiling.

  “Son,” sighs Marcus.

  Tobias winces.

  “Hey,” I say, pulling away from Caleb. I remember the belt stinging on my wrist in Tobias’s fear landscape and slip into the space between them, pushing Marcus back. “Hey. Get away from him.”

  I feel Tobias’s breaths against my neck; they come in sharp bursts.

  “Stay away,” I hiss.

  “Beatrice, what are you doing?” asks Caleb.

  “Tris,” Tobias says.

  Marcus gives me a scandalized look that seems false to me—his eyes are too wide and his mouth is too open. If I could find a way to smack that look off his face, I would.

  “Not all those Erudite articles were full of lies,” I say, narrowing my eyes at Marcus.

  “What are you talking about?” Marcus says quietly. “I don’t know what you’ve been told, Beatrice, but—”

  “The only reason I haven’t shot you yet is because he’s the one who should get to do it,” I say. “Stay away from him or I’ll decide I no longer care.”

  Tobias’s hands slip around my arms and squeeze. Marcus’s eyes stay on mine for a few seconds, and I can’t help but see them as black pits, like they were in Tobias’s fear landscape. Then he looks away.

  “We have to go,” Tobias says unsteadily. “The train should be here any second.”

  We walk over unyielding ground toward the train tracks. Tobias’s jaw is clenched and he stares straight ahead. I feel a twinge of regret. Maybe I should have let him deal with his father on his own.

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he replies, taking my hand. His fingers are still shaking.

  “If we take the train in the opposite direction, out of the city instead of in, we can get to Amity headquarters,” I say. “That’s where the others went.”

  “What about Candor?” my brother asks. “What do you think they’ll do?”

  I don’t know how Candor will respond to the attack. They wouldn’t side with the Erudite—they would never do something that underhanded. But they may not fight the Erudite either.

  We stand next to the tracks for a few minutes before the train comes. Eventually Tobias picks me up, because I am dead on my feet, and I lean my head into his shoulder, taking deep breaths of his skin. Since he saved me from the attack, I have associated his smell with safety, so as long as I focus on it, I feel safe now.

  The truth is, I will not feel safe as long as Peter and Marcus are with us. I try not to look at them, but I feel their presence like I would feel a blanket over my face. The cruelty of fate is that I must travel with the people I hate when the people I love are dead behind me.

  Dead, or waking as murderers. Where are Christina and Tori now? Wandering the streets, plagued with guilt for what they’ve done? Or turning guns on the people who forced them to do it? Or are they already dead too? I wish I knew.

  At the same time, I hope I never find out. If she is still alive, Christina will find Will’s body. And if she sees me again, her Candor-trained eyes will see that I am the one who killed him, I know it. I know it and the guilt strangles me and crushes me, so I have to forget it. I make myself forget it.

  The train comes, and Tobias sets me down so I can jump on. I jog a few steps next to the car and then throw my body to the side, landing on my left arm. I wiggle my body inside and sit against the wall. Caleb sits across from me, and Tobias sits next to me, forming a barrier between my body and Marcus and Peter. My enemies. His enemies.

  The train turns, and I see the city behind us. It will get smaller and smaller until we see where the tracks end, the forests and fields I last saw when I was too young to appreciate them. The kindness of Amity will comfort us for a while, though we can’t stay there forever. Soon the Erudite and the corrupt Dauntless leaders will look for us, and we will have to move on.

  Tobias pulls me against him. We bend our knees and our heads so that we are enclosed together in a room of our own making, unable to see those who trouble us, our breath mixing on the way in and on the way out.

  “My parents,” I say. “They died today.”

  Even though I said it, and even though I know it’s true, it doesn’t feel real.

  “They died for me,” I say. That feels important.

  “They loved you,” he replies. “To them there was no better way to show you.”

  I nod, and my eyes follow the line of his jaw.

  “You nearly died today,” he says. “I almost shot you. Why didn’t you shoot me, Tris?”

  “I couldn’t do that,” I say. “It would have been like shooting myself.”

  He looks pained and leans closer to me, so his lips brush mine when he speaks.

  “I have something to tell you,” he says.

  I run my fingers along the tendons in his hand and look back at him.

  “I might be in love with you.” He smiles a little. “I’m waiting until I’m sure to tell you, though.”

  “That’s sensible of you,” I say, smiling too. “We should find some paper so you can make a list or a chart or something.”

  I feel his laughter against my side, his nose sliding along my jaw, his lips pressing behind my ear.

  “Maybe I’m already sure,” he says, “and I just don’t want to frighten you.”

  I laugh a little. “Then you should know better.”

  “Fine,” he says. “Then I love you.”

  I kiss him as the train slides into unlit, uncertain land. I kiss him for as long as I want, for longer than I should, given that my brother sits three feet away from me.

  I reach into my pocket and take out the hard drive that contains the simulation data. I turn it in my hands, letting it catch the fading light and reflect it. Marcus’s eyes cling greedily to the movement. Not safe, I think. Not quite.

  I clutch the hard drive to my chest, lean my head on Tobias’s shoulder, and try to sleep.

  Abnegation and Dauntless are both broken, their members scattered. We are like the factionless now. I do not know what life will be like, separated from a faction—it feels disengaged, like a leaf divided from the tree that gives it sustenance. We are creatures of loss; we have left everything behind. I have no home, no path, and no certainty. I am no longer Tris, the selfless, or Tris, the brave.

  I suppose that now, I must become more than either.

  EXCERPT FROM INSURGENT

  Read on for a sneak peek at Insurgent

  CHAPTER ONE

  I wake with his name in my mouth.

  Will.

  Before I open my eyes, I watch him crumple to the pavement again. Dead.

  My doing.

  Tobias crouches in front of me, his hand on my left shoulder. The train car bumps over the rails, and Marcus, Peter, and Caleb stand by the doorway. I take a deep breath and hold it in an attempt to relieve some of the pressure that is building in my chest.

  An hour ago, nothing that happened felt real to me. Now it does.

  I breathe out, and the pressure is still there.

  “Tris, come on,” Tobias says, his eyes searching mine. “We have to jump.”

  It is too dark to see where we are, but if we are getting off, we are probably close to the fence. Tobias helps me to my feet and guides me toward the doorway.

  The others jump off one by one: Peter first, then Marcus, then Caleb. I take Tobias’s hand. The wind picks up as we stand at the edge of the car opening, like a hand pushing me back, toward safety.

  But we launch ourselves into darkness and land hard on the ground. The impact hurts the bullet wound in my shoulder. I bite my lip to keep from crying out, and search for my brother.

  “Okay?” I say when I see him sitting in the grass a few feet away, rubbing his knee.

  He nods. I hear him sniff like he’s fending off tears, and I have to turn away.

  We landed in the grass near the fence, several yards away from the worn path that the Amity trucks travel to deliver food to the city, and the gate that lets them out—the gate that is currently shut, locking us in. The fence towers over us, too high and flexible to climb over, too sturdy to knock down.

  “There are supposed to be Dauntless guards here,” says Marcus. “Where are they?”

  “They were probably under the simulation,” Tobias says, “and are now . . .” He pauses. “Who knows where, doing who knows what.”

  We stopped the simulation—the weight of the hard drive in my back pocket reminds me—but we didn’t pause to see the aftermath. What happened to our friends, our peers, our leaders, our factions? There is no way to know.

  Tobias approaches a small metal box on the right side of the gate and opens it, revealing a keypad.

  “Let’s hope the Erudite didn’t think to change this combination,” he says as he types in a series of numbers. He stops at the eighth one, and the gate clicks open.

  “How did you know that?” says Caleb. His voice sounds thick with emotion, so thick I am surprised it does not choke him on the way out.

  “I worked in the Dauntless control room, monitoring the security system. We only change the codes twice a year,” Tobias says.

  “How lucky,” says Caleb. He gives Tobias a wary look.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Tobias says. “I only worked there because I wanted to make sure I could get out.”

  I shiver. The way he talks about getting out—it’s like he thinks we’re trapped. I never thought about it that way before, and now that seems foolish.

  We walk in a small pack, Peter cradling his bloody arm to his chest—the arm that I shot—and Marcus with his hand on Peter’s shoulder, keeping him stable. Caleb wipes his cheeks every few seconds, and I know he’s crying but I don’t know how to comfort him, or why I am not crying myself.

  Instead I take the lead, Tobias silent at my side, and though he does not touch me, he steadies me.

  Pinpricks of light are the first sign that we are nearing Amity headquarters. Then squares of light that turn into glowing windows. A cluster of wooden and glass buildings.

  Before we can reach them, we have to walk through an orchard. My feet sink into the ground, and above me, the branches grow into one another, forming a kind of tunnel. Dark fruit hangs among the leaves, ready to drop. The sharp, sweet smell of rotting apples mixes with the scent of wet earth in my nose.

  When we get close, Marcus leaves Peter’s side and walks in front. “I know where to go,” he says.

  He leads us past the first building to the second one on the left. All the buildings except the greenhouses are made of the same dark wood, unpainted, rough. I hear laughter through an open window. The contrast between the laughter and the stone stillness within me is jarring.

  Marcus opens one of the doors. I would be shocked by the lack of security if we were not at Amity headquarters. They often straddle the line between trust and stupidity.

  In this building the only sound is of our squeaking shoes. I don’t hear Caleb crying anymore, but then, he was quiet about it before.

  Marcus stops before an open room, where Johanna Reyes, representative of Amity, sits, staring out the window. I recognize her because it is hard to forget Johanna’s face, whether you’ve seen her once or a thousand times. A scar stretches in a thick line from just above her right eyebrow to her lip, rendering her blind in one eye and giving her a lisp when she talks. I have only heard her speak once, but I remember. She would have been a beautiful woman if not for that scar.

  “Oh, thank God,” she says when she sees Marcus. She walks toward him with her arms open. Instead of embracing him, she just touches his shoulders, like she remembers the Abnegation’s distaste for casual physical contact.

  “The other members of your party got here a few hours ago, but they weren’t sure if you had made it,” she says. She is referring to the group of Abnegation who were with my father and Marcus in the safe house. I didn’t even think to worry about them.

  She looks over Marcus’s shoulder, first at Tobias and Caleb, then at me, then at Peter.

  “Oh my,” she says, her eyes lingering on the blood soaking Peter’s shirt. “I’ll send for a doctor. I can grant you all permission to stay the night, but tomorrow, our community must decide together. And”—she eyes Tobias and me—“they will likely not be enthusiastic about a Dauntless presence in our compound. I of course ask you to turn over any weapons you might have.”

  I wonder, suddenly, how she knows that I am Dauntless. I am still wearing a gray shirt. My father’s shirt.

  At that moment, his smell, which is an even mixture of soap and sweat, wafts upward, and it fills my nose, fills my entire head with him. I clench my hands so hard into fists that my fingernails cut into my skin. Not here. Not here.

  Tobias hands over his gun, but when I reach behind me to take out my own concealed weapon, he grabs my hand, guiding it away from my back. Then he laces his fingers with mine to cover up what he just did.

  I know it’s smart to keep one of our guns. But it would have been a relief to hand it over.

  “My name is Johanna Reyes,” she says, extending her hand to me, and then Tobias. A Dauntless greeting. I am impressed by her awareness of the customs of other factions. I always forget how considerate the Amity are until I see it for myself.

  “This is T—” Marcus starts, but Tobias interrupts him.

  “My name is Four,” he says. “This is Tris, Caleb, and Peter.”

  A few days ago, “Tobias” was a name only I knew, among the Dauntless; it was the piece of himself that he gave me. Outside Dauntless headquarters, I remember why he hid that name from the world. It binds him to Marcus.

  “Welcome to the Amity compound.” Johanna’s eyes fix on my face, and she smiles crookedly. “Let us take care of you.”

  We do let them. An Amity nurse gives me a salve—developed by Erudite to speed healing—to put on my shoulder, and then escorts Peter to the hospital ward to mend his arm. Johanna takes us to the cafeteria, where we find some of the Abnegation who were in the safe house with Caleb and my father. Susan is there, and some of our old neighbors, and rows of wooden tables as long as the room itself. They greet us—especially Marcus—with held-in tears and suppressed smiles.