Caleb’s face twists for a moment, then he nods and touches my shoulder. “Are you hungry? Want me to get you something?”
“Yes, please,” I say. “I’ll be back in a little while, okay? I have to talk to Tobias.”
“All right.” Caleb squeezes my arm and walks off, probably to get in the miles-long cafeteria line. Tobias and I stand yards away from each other for a few seconds.
He approaches me slowly.
“You okay?” he says.
“I might throw up if I have to answer that one more time,” I say. “I don’t have a bullet in my head, do I? So I’m good.”
“Your jaw is so swollen you look like you have a wad of food in your cheek, and you just stabbed Eric,” he says, frowning. “I’m not allowed to ask if you’re okay?”
I sigh. I should tell him about Marcus, but I don’t want to do it here, with so many people around. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
His arm jerks like he was thinking of touching me but decided against it. Then he reconsiders and slides his arm around me, pulling me to him.
Suddenly I think maybe I’ll let someone else take all the risks, maybe I’ll just start acting selfishly so that I can stay close to Tobias without hurting him. All I want is to bury my face in his neck and forget anything else exists.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to come get you,” he whispers into my hair.
I sigh and touch his back with just my fingertips. I could stand here until I go unconscious from exhaustion, but I shouldn’t; I can’t. I pull back and say, “I need to talk to you. Can we go somewhere quiet?”
He nods, and we leave the cafeteria. One of the Dauntless we pass yells, “Oh, look! It’s Tobias Eaton!”
I had almost forgotten about the interrogation, and the name it revealed to all of Dauntless.
Another one yells, “I saw your daddy here earlier, Eaton! Are you gonna go hide?”
Tobias straightens and stiffens, like someone is training a gun at his chest instead of jeering at him.
“Yeah, are you gonna hide, coward?”
A few people around us laugh. I grab Tobias’s arm and steer him toward the elevators before he can react. He looked like he was about to punch someone. Or worse.
“I was going to tell you—he came with Caleb,” I say. “He and Peter escaped Amity—”
“What were you waiting for, then?” he says, but not harshly. His voice sounds somehow detached from him, like it is floating between us.
“It’s not the kind of news you deliver in a cafeteria,” I say.
“Fair enough,” he says.
We wait in silence for the elevator, Tobias chewing on his lip and staring into space. He does that all the way to the eighteenth floor, which is empty. There, the silence wraps around me like Caleb’s embrace did, calming me. I sit down on one of the benches on the edge of the interrogation room, and Tobias pulls Niles’s chair over to sit in front of me.
“Didn’t there used to be two of these?” he says, frowning at the chair.
“Yeah,” I say. “I, uh . . . it got thrown out the window.”
“Strange,” he says. He sits. “So what did you want to talk about? Or was that about Marcus?”
“No, that wasn’t it. Are you . . . all right?” I say cautiously.
“I don’t have a bullet in my head, do I?” he says, staring at his hands. “So I’m fine. I’d like to talk about something else.”
“I want to talk about simulations,” I say. “But first, something else—your mother thought Jeanine would go after the factionless next. Obviously she was wrong—and I’m not sure why. It’s not like the Candor are battle ready or anything—”
“Well, think about it,” he says. “Think it through, like the Erudite.”
I give him a look.
“What?” he says. “If you can’t, the rest of us have no hope.”
“Fine,” I say. “Um . . . it had to be because Dauntless and Candor were the most logical targets. Because . . . the factionless are in multiple places, whereas we’re all in the same place.”
“Right,” he says. “Also, when Jeanine attacked Abnegation, she got all the Abnegation data. My mother told me that the Abnegation had documented the factionless Divergent populations, which means that after the attack, Jeanine must have found out that the proportion of Divergent among the factionless is higher than among the Candor. That makes them an illogical target.”
“All right. Then tell me about the serum again,” I say. “It has a few parts, right?”
“Two,” he says, nodding. “The transmitter and the liquid that induces the simulation. The transmitter communicates information to the brain from the computer, and vice versa, and the liquid alters the brain to put it in a simulation state.”
I nod. “And the transmitter only works for one simulation, right? What happens to it after that?”
“It dissolves,” he says. “As far as I know, the Erudite haven’t been able to develop a transmitter that lasts for more than one simulation, although the attack simulation lasted far longer than any simulation I’ve seen before.”
The words “as far as I know” stick in my mind. Jeanine has spent most of her adult life developing the serums. If she’s still hunting down the Divergent, she’s probably still obsessed with creating more advanced versions of the technology.
“What’s this about, Tris?” he says.
“Have you seen this yet?” I say, pointing at the bandage covering my shoulder.
“Not up close,” he says. “Uriah and I were hauling wounded Erudite up to the fourth floor all morning.”
I peel away the edge of the bandage, revealing the puncture wound—no longer bleeding, thankfully—and the patch of blue dye that doesn’t seem to be fading. Then I reach into my pocket and take out the needle that was buried in my arm.
“When they attacked, they weren’t trying to kill us. They were shooting us with these,” I say.
His hand touches the dyed skin around the puncture wound. I didn’t notice it before because it was happening right in front of me, but he looks different than he used to, during initiation. He’s let his facial hair grow in a little, and his hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it—dense enough to show me that it is brown, not black.
He takes the needle from me and taps the metal disc at the end of it. “This is probably hollow. It must have contained whatever that blue stuff in your arm is. What happened after you were shot?”
“They tossed these gas-spewing cylinders into the room, and everyone went unconscious. That is, everyone but Uriah and me and the other Divergent.”
Tobias doesn’t seem surprised. I narrow my eyes.
“Did you know that Uriah was Divergent?”
He shrugs. “Of course. I ran his simulations, too.”
“And you never told me?”
“Privileged information,” he says. “Dangerous information.”
I feel a flare of anger—how many things is he going to keep from me?—and try to stifle it. Of course he couldn’t tell me Uriah was Divergent. He was just respecting Uriah’s privacy. It makes sense.