Awe?
“Do you know what it means?” I say.
“I heard about it when I was young,” she says in a reverent whisper.
Definitely awe.
“Like it was a fantasy story,” she says. “‘There are people with special powers among us!’ Like that.”
“Well, it’s not a fantasy, and it’s not that big a deal,” I say. “It’s like the fear landscape simulation—you were aware while you were in it, and you could manipulate it. Except for me, it’s like that in every simulation.”
“But Tris,” she says, setting her hand on my elbow. “That’s impossible.”
In the center of the room, Niles has his hands up and is trying to silence the crowd, but there are too many whispers—some hostile, some terrified, and some awed, like Christina’s. Finally Niles stands and yells, “If you don’t quiet down, you will be asked to leave!”
At last everyone quiets down. Niles sits.
“Now,” he says. “When you say ‘resistant to simulations,’ what do you mean?”
“Usually, it means we’re aware during simulations,” says Tobias. He seems to have an easier time with the truth serum when he answers factual questions instead of emotional ones. He doesn’t sound like he’s under the truth serum at all now, though his slumped posture and wandering eyes indicate otherwise. “But the attack simulation was different, using a different kind of simulation serum, one with long-range transmitters. Evidently the long-range transmitters didn’t work on the Divergent at all, because I awoke in my own mind that morning.”
“You say you weren’t under the simulation at first. Can you explain what you mean by that?”
“I mean that I was discovered and brought to Jeanine, and she injected a version of the simulation serum that specifically targeted the Divergent. I was aware during that simulation, but it didn’t do much good.”
“The video footage from the Dauntless headquarters shows you running the simulation,” Niles says darkly. “How, exactly, do you explain that?”
“When a simulation is running, your eyes still see and process the actual world, but your brain no longer comprehends them. On some level, though, your brain still knows what you’re seeing and where you are. The nature of this new simulation was that it recorded my emotional responses to outside stimuli,” Tobias says, closing his eyes for a few seconds, “and responded by altering the appearance of that stimuli. The simulation made my enemies into friends, my friends into enemies. I thought I was shutting the simulation down. Really I was receiving instructions about how to keep it running.”
Christina nods along to his words. I feel calmer when I see that most of the crowd is doing the same thing. This is the benefit of the truth serum, I realize. Tobias’s testimony is irrefutable this way.
“We have seen footage of what ultimately happened to you in the control room,” says Niles, “but it is confusing. Please describe it to us.”
“Someone entered the room, and I thought it was a Dauntless soldier, trying to stop me from destroying the simulation. I was fighting her, and . . .” Tobias scowls, struggling. “. . . and then she stopped, and I got confused. Even if I had been awake, I would have been confused. Why would she surrender? Why didn’t she just kill me?”
His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks.
“I still don’t understand,” he says softly, “how she knew that it would work.”
Lives in my fingertips.
“I think my conflicted emotions confused the simulation,” he says. “And then I heard her voice. Somehow, that enabled me to fight the simulation.”
My eyes burn. I have tried not to think of that moment, when I thought he was lost to me and that I would soon be dead, when all I wanted was to feel his heartbeat. I try not to think of it now; I blink the tears from my eyes.
“I recognized her, finally,” he says. “We went back into the control room and stopped the simulation.”
“What is the name of this person?”
“Tris,” he says. “Beatrice Prior, I mean.”
“Did you know her before this happened?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know her?”
“I was her instructor,” he says. “Now we’re together.”
“I have a final question,” Niles says. “Among the Candor, before a person is accepted into our community, they have to completely expose themselves. Given the dire circumstances we are in, we require the same of you. So, Tobias Eaton: what are your deepest regrets?”
I look him over, from his beat-up sneakers to his long fingers to his straight eyebrows.
“I regret . . .” Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. “I regret my choice.”
“What choice?”
“Dauntless,” he says. “I was born for Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But then I met her, and . . . I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision.”
Her.
For a moment, it’s like I’m looking at a different person, sitting in Tobias’s skin, one whose life is not as simple as I thought. He wanted to leave Dauntless, but he stayed because of me. He never told me that.
“Choosing Dauntless in order to escape my father was an act of cowardice,” he says. “I regret that cowardice. It means I am not worthy of my faction. I will always regret it.”
I expect the Dauntless to let out indignant shouts, maybe to charge the chair and beat him to a pulp. They are capable of far more erratic things than that. But they don’t. They stand in stony silence, with stony faces, staring at the young man who did not betray them, but never truly felt that he belonged to them.
For a moment we are all silent. I don’t know who starts the whisper; it seems to originate from nothing, to come from no one. But someone whispers, “Thank you for your honesty,” and the rest of the room repeats it.
“Thank you for your honesty,” they whisper.
I don’t join in.
I am the only thing that kept him in the faction he wanted to leave. I am not worth that.
Maybe he deserves to know.
Niles stands in the center of the room with a needle in hand. The lights above him make it shine. All around me, the Dauntless and the Candor wait for me to step forward and spill my entire life before them.
The thought occurs to me again: Maybe I can fight the serum. But I don’t know if I should try. It might be better for the people I love if I come clean.
I walk stiffly to the center of the room as Tobias leaves it. As we pass each other, he takes my hand and squeezes my fingers. Then he’s gone, and it’s just me and Niles and the needle. I wipe the side of my neck with the antiseptic, but when he reaches out with the needle, I pull back.
“I would rather do it myself,” I say, holding out my hand. I will never let someone else inject me again, not after letting Eric inject me with attack simulation serum after my final test. I can’t change the contents of the syringe just by doing it myself, but at least this way, I am the instrument of my own destruction.
“Do you know how?” he says, raising a bushy eyebrow.