He sighs, and touches his forehead to mine.
“You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. Stay here. Let yourself mend.”
He kisses me, and I feel like I am crumbling again, beginning with the deepest parts of me. He thinks I will be here, but I will be working against him, working with the father he despises. This lie—this lie is the worst I have ever told. I will never be able to take it back.
When we part, I am afraid he will hear my breaths shake, so I turn toward the window.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“OH YEAH. YOU totally look like a banjo-strumming softie,” says Christina.
“Really?”
“No. Not at all, actually. Just . . . let me fix it, okay?”
She rummages in her bag for a few seconds and pulls out a small box. In it are different-sized tubes and containers that I recognize as makeup, but wouldn’t know what to do with.
We are in my parents’ house. It was the only place I could think of to go to get ready. Christina has no reservations about poking around—she already discovered two textbooks wedged between the dresser and the wall, evidence of Caleb’s Erudite leanings.
“Let me get this straight. So you left the Dauntless compound to get ready for war . . . and took your makeup bag with you?”
“Yep. Figured it would be harder for anyone to shoot me if they saw how devastatingly attractive I was,” she says, arching an eyebrow. “Hold still.”
She takes the cap off a black tube about the size of one of my fingers, revealing a red stick. Lipstick, obviously. She touches it to my mouth and dabs it until my lips are covered in color. I can see it when I purse them.
“Has anyone ever talked to you about the miracle of eyebrow tweezing?” she says, holding up a pair of tweezers.
“Get those away from me.”
“Fine.” She sighs. “I would take out the blush, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the right color for you.”
“Shocking, considering we’re so similar in skin tone.”
“Ha-ha,” she says.
By the time we leave, I have red lips and curled eyelashes, and I’m wearing a bright red dress. And there’s a knife strapped to the inside of my knee. This all makes perfect sense.
“Where’s Marcus, Destroyer of Lives, going to meet us?” Christina says. She wears Amity yellow instead of red, and it glows against her skin.
I laugh. “Behind Abnegation headquarters.”
We walk down the sidewalk in the dark. All the others should be eating dinner now—I made sure of that—but in case we run into someone, we wear black jackets to conceal most of our Amity clothing. I hop over a crack in the cement out of habit.
“Where are you two going?” Peter’s voice says. I look over my shoulder. He’s standing on the sidewalk behind us. I wonder how long he’s been there.
“Why aren’t you with your attack group, eating dinner?” I say.
“I don’t have one.” He taps the arm I shot. “I’m injured.”
“Yeah right, you are!” says Christina.
“Well, I don’t want to go to battle with a bunch of factionless,” he says, his green eyes glinting. “So I’m going to stay here.”
“Like a coward,” says Christina, her lip curled in disgust. “Let everyone else clean up the mess for you.”
“Yep!” he says with a kind of malicious cheer. He claps his hands. “Have fun dying.”
He crosses the street, whistling, and walks in the other direction.
“Well, we distracted him,” she says. “He didn’t ask where we were going again.”
“Yeah. Good.” I clear my throat. “So, this plan. It’s kind of stupid, right?”
“It’s not . . . stupid.”
“Oh, come on. Trusting Marcus is stupid. Trying to get past the Dauntless at the fence is stupid. Going against the Dauntless and factionless is stupid. All three combined is . . . a different kind of stupid formerly unheard of by humankind.”
“Unfortunately it’s also the best plan we have,” she points out. “If we want everyone to know the truth.”
I trusted Christina to take up this mission when I thought I would die, so it seemed stupid not to trust her now. I was worried she wouldn’t want to come with me, but I forgot where Christina came from: Candor, where the pursuit of truth is more important than anything else. She may be Dauntless now, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s that we never leave our old factions behind.
“So this is where you grew up. Did you like it here?” She frowns. “I guess you couldn’t have, if you wanted to leave.”
The sun inches toward the horizon as we walk. I never used to like evening light because it made everything in the Abnegation sector look more monochromatic than it already is, but now I find the unchanging gray comforting.
“I liked some things and hated some things,” I say. “And there were some things I didn’t know I had until I lost them.”
We reach Abnegation headquarters, and its face is just a cement square like everything else in the Abnegation sector. I would love to walk into the meeting room and breathe the smell of old wood, but we don’t have time. We slip into the alley next to the building and walk to the back, where Marcus told me he would be waiting.
A powder-blue pickup truck waits there, its engine running. Marcus is behind the wheel. I let Christina walk ahead of me so that she can be the one to slide into the middle. I don’t want to sit close to him if I can help it. I feel like hating him while I work with him lessens my betrayal of Tobias somehow.
You have no other choice, I tell myself. There is no other way.
With that in mind, I pull the door shut and look for a seat belt to buckle. I find only the frayed end of a seat belt and a broken buckle.
“Where did you find this piece of junk?” says Christina.
“I stole it from the factionless. They fix them up. It wasn’t easy to get it to start. Better ditch those jackets, girls.”
I ball up our jackets and toss them out the half-open window. Marcus shifts the truck into drive, and it groans. I half expect it to stay still when he presses the gas pedal, but it moves.
From what I remember, it takes about an hour to drive from the Abnegation sector to Amity headquarters, and the trip requires a skilled driver. Marcus pulls onto one of the main thoroughfares and pushes his foot into the gas pedal. We lurch forward, narrowly avoiding a gaping hole in the road. I grab the dashboard to steady myself.
“Relax, Beatrice,” says Marcus. “I’ve driven a car before.”
“I’ve done a lot of things before, but that doesn’t mean I’m any good at them!”
Marcus smiles and jerks the truck to the left so that we don’t hit a fallen stoplight. Christina whoops as we bump over another piece of debris, like she’s having the time of her life.
“A different kind of stupid, right?” she says, her voice loud enough to be heard over the rush of wind through the cab.
I clutch the seat beneath me and try not to think of what I ate for dinner.
When we reach the fence, we see the Dauntless standing in our headlight beams, blocking the gate. Their blue armbands stand out against the rest of their clothing. I try to keep my expression pleasant. I will not be able to fool them into thinking I’m Amity with a scowl on my face.