I almost laugh. My great act of heroism, the only important thing I have ever done, and they think I was working for the Erudite when I did it.
“The simulation didn’t end,” I say. “We stopped it, you—”
Jack holds up his hand. “I am not interested in what you have to say right now. The truth will come out when you are both interrogated under the influence of truth serum.”
Christina told me about truth serum once. She said the most difficult part of Candor initiation was being given truth serum and answering personal questions in front of everyone in the faction. I don’t need to search myself for my deepest, darkest secrets to know that truth serum is the last thing I want in my body.
“Truth serum?” I shake my head. “No. No way.”
“There’s something you have to hide?” Jack says, lifting both eyebrows.
I want to tell him that anyone with an ounce of dignity wants to keep some things to herself, but I don’t want to arouse his suspicions. So I shake my head.
“All right, then.” He checks his watch. “It is now noon. The interrogation will be at seven. Don’t bother preparing for it. You can’t withhold information while under the influence of truth serum.”
He turns on his heel and walks out of the room.
“What a pleasant man,” says Tobias.
A group of armed Dauntless escort me to the bathroom in the early afternoon. I take my time, letting my hands turn red in the hot-faucet water and staring at my reflection. When I was in Abnegation and wasn’t allowed to look into mirrors, I used to think that a lot could change in a person’s appearance in three months. But it only took a few days to change me this time.
I look older. Maybe it’s the short hair or maybe it’s just that I wear all that has happened like a mask. Either way, I always thought I would be happy when I stopped looking like a child. But all I feel is a lump in my throat. I am no longer the daughter my parents knew. They will never know me as I am now.
I turn away from the mirror and shove the door to the hallway open with the heels of my hands.
When the Dauntless drop me off at the holding room, I linger by the door. Tobias looks like he did when I first met him—black T-shirt, short hair, stern expression. The sight of him used to fill me with nervous excitement. I remember when I grabbed his hand outside the training room, just for a few seconds, and when we sat together on the rocks next to the chasm, and I feel a pang of longing for how things used to be.
“Hungry?” he says. He offers me a sandwich from the plate next to him.
I take it and sit down, leaning my head on his shoulder. All that’s left for us to do is wait, so that’s what we do. We eat until the food is gone. We sit until we get uncomfortable. Then we lie down next to each other on the floor, shoulders touching, staring at the same patch of white ceiling.
“What are you afraid of saying?” he says.
“Any of it. All of it. I don’t want to relive anything.”
He nods. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. There’s no clock in the room, so I can’t count down the minutes until the interrogation. Time might as well not exist in this place, except I feel it pressing against me as seven o’clock inevitably draws closer, pushing me into the floor tiles.
Maybe time would not feel as heavy if I didn’t have this guilt—the guilt of knowing the truth and stuffing it down where no one can see it, not even Tobias. Maybe I should not be so afraid of saying anything, because honesty will make me feel lighter.
I must fall asleep eventually, because I jerk awake at the sound of the door opening. A few Dauntless walk in as we get to our feet, and one of them says my name. Christina shoves her way past the others and throws her arms around me. Her fingers dig into the wound in my shoulder, and I cry out.
“Got shot,” I say. “Shoulder. Ow.”
“Oh God!” She releases me. “Sorry, Tris.”
She doesn’t look like the Christina I remember. Her hair is shorter, like a boy’s, and her skin is grayish instead of a warm brown. She smiles at me, but the smile doesn’t travel to her eyes, which still look tired. I try to smile back, but I’m too nervous. Christina will be there at my interrogation. She will hear what I did to Will. She will never forgive me.
Unless I fight the serum, swallow the truth—if I can.
But is that really what I want? To let it fester inside me forever?
“You okay? I heard you were here so I asked to escort you,” she says as we leave the holding room. “I know you didn’t do it. You’re not a traitor.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “And thank you. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m . . .” Her voice trails off, and she bites her lip. “Did anyone tell you . . . I mean, maybe now isn’t the time, but . . .”
“What? What is it?”
“Um . . . Will died in the attack,” she says.
She gives me a worried look, and an expectant one. Expecting what?
Oh. I am not supposed to know that Will is dead. I could pretend to be emotional, but I probably wouldn’t do it convincingly. It’s best to admit that I already knew. But I don’t know how to explain that without telling her everything.
I feel suddenly sick. Am I really evaluating how best to deceive my friend?
“I know,” I say. “I saw him on the monitors when I was in the control room. I’m sorry, Christina.”
“Oh.” She nods. “Well, I’m . . . glad you already knew. I really didn’t want to break the news to you in a hallway.”
A short laugh. A flash of a smile. Neither of them like they used to be.
We file into an elevator. I can feel Tobias staring at me—he knows I didn’t see Will in the monitors, and he didn’t know that Will was dead. I stare straight ahead and pretend his eyes aren’t setting me on fire.
“Don’t worry about the truth serum,” she says. “It’s easy. You barely know what’s happening when you’re under. It’s only when you resurface that you even know what you said. I went under when I was a kid. It’s pretty commonplace in Candor.”
The other Dauntless in the elevator give each other looks. In normal circumstances, someone would probably reprimand her for discussing her old faction, but these are not normal circumstances. At no other time in Christina’s life will she escort her best friend, now a suspected traitor, to a public interrogation.
“Is everyone else all right?” I say. “Uriah, Lynn, Marlene?”
“All here,” she says. “Except Uriah’s brother, Zeke, who is with the other Dauntless.”
“What?” Zeke, who secured my straps on the zip line, a traitor?
The elevator stops on the top floor, and the others file out.
“I know,” she says. “No one saw it coming.”
She takes my arm and tugs me toward the doors. We walk down a black-marble hallway—it must be easy to get lost in Candor headquarters, since everything looks the same. We walk down another hallway and through a set of double doors.
From the outside, the Merciless Mart is a squat block with a narrow raised portion in its center. From the inside, that raised portion is a hollow three-story room with empty spaces in the walls instead of windows. I see the darkening sky above me, starless.