I decide to move fast. I lurch toward the opposite windowsill just as the ladder slips off. My hands catch the sill and concrete scrapes my fingertips as they bear my body weight. Several voices behind me scream.
I grit my teeth as I pull myself up, my right shoulder shrieking with pain. I kick at the brick building, hoping it will give me traction, but it doesn’t help. I scream into my teeth as I pull myself up and over the windowsill, half my body in the building and the other half still dangling. Thankfully Christina didn’t let the ladder drop too far. None of the Candor shoot me.
I pull myself into the Erudite room across the alley. It is a bathroom. I collapse to the floor on my left shoulder, and try to breathe through the pain. Sweat trickles down my forehead.
An Erudite woman comes out of a stall, and I scramble to my feet, draw the stunner, and point it at her, all without thinking.
She freezes, her arms up, toilet paper stuck to her shoe.
“Don’t shoot!” Her eyes bulge from her head.
I remember, then, that I am dressed like the Erudite. I set the stunner on the edge of a sink.
“My apologies,” I say. I try to adopt the formal speech common to the Erudite. “I am slightly edgy, with everything that’s occurring. We are reentering in order to retrieve some of our test results from . . . Laboratory 4-A.”
“Oh,” the woman says. “That seems rather unwise.”
“The data is of the utmost importance,” I say, trying to sound as arrogant as some of the Erudite I’ve met. “I would rather not leave it to get riddled with bullets.”
“It’s hardly my place to prevent you from trying to recover it,” she says. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to wash my hands and take cover.”
“Sounds good,” I say. I decide not to tell her she has toilet paper on her shoe.
I turn back to the window. Across the alley, Christina and Fernando are trying to lift the ladder back onto the windowsill. Though my arms and hands ache, I lean out the window and grab the other end of the ladder, lifting it back onto the windowsill. Then I hold it in place as Christina crawls across.
This time the ladder is more stable, and Christina makes it across the gap without trouble. She takes my place holding it as I shove the trash can in front of the door so no one else can come in. I then run my fingers under cool water to soothe them.
“This is pretty smart, Tris,” she says.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“It’s just . . .” She pauses. “You had aptitude for Erudite, didn’t you?”
“Does it matter?” I say too sharply. “The factions are destroyed, and it was all stupid to begin with.”
I have never said anything like that before. I have never even thought it. But I’m surprised to find that I believe it—surprised to find that I agree with Tobias.
“I wasn’t trying to insult you,” says Christina. “Having aptitude for Erudite isn’t a bad thing. Especially right now.”
“Sorry. I’m just . . . tense. That’s all.”
Marcus comes through the window and drops to the tile floor. Cara is surprisingly nimble—she moves over the rungs like she’s plucking banjo strings, touching each one only briefly before she moves to the next one.
Fernando will be last, and he will be in the same position I was in, with the ladder secured from only one side. I move closer to the window so I can tell him to stop if I see the ladder slip.
Fernando, who I didn’t think would have trouble, moves more awkwardly than anyone else. He has probably spent his entire life behind a computer or a book. He shuffles forward, his face bright red, and holds the rungs so tightly that his hands turn blotchy and purple.
Halfway across the alley, I see something slip out of his pocket. It is his spectacles.
I scream, “Fernan—”
But I am too late.
The spectacles fall, hit the edge of the ladder, and topple to the pavement.
In a wave, the Candor below twist and fire upward. Fernando yells, and collapses against the ladder. One bullet hit his leg. I didn’t see where the others went, but I know when I see blood drip between the rungs of the ladder that it was not a good place.
Fernando stares at Christina, his face ashen. Christina surges forward, through the window, about to reach for him.
“Don’t be an idiot!” he says, his voice weak. “Leave me.”
It is the last thing he says.
Chapter Forty-Three
CHRISTINA STEPS BACK into the room. We are all still.
“I don’t mean to be insensitive,” says Marcus, “but we have to go before the Dauntless and factionless enter this building. If they haven’t already.”
I hear tapping against the window and jerk my head to the side, for a split second believing that it is Fernando, trying to get in. But it’s just rain.
We follow Cara out of the bathroom. She is our leader now. She knows Erudite headquarters best. Christina follows, then Marcus, then me. We leave the bathroom, and we are in an Erudite hallway like every other Erudite hallway: pale, bright, sterile.
But this hallway is more active than I have ever seen it. People in Erudite blue sprint back and forth, in groups and alone, shouting things at each other like, “They’re at the front doors! Go as high as you can!” and “They’ve disabled the elevators! Run for the stairs!” It’s only there, in the midst of chaos, that I realize I forgot the stunner in the bathroom. I am unarmed again.
Dauntless traitors also run past us, though they are less frantic than the Erudite. I wonder what Johanna, the Amity, and the Abnegation are doing in this chaos. Are they tending to the wounded? Or are they standing between Dauntless guns and Erudite innocents, taking bullets for the sake of peace?
I shudder. Cara leads us to a back staircase, and we join a group of terrified Erudite as we run up one, two, three flights of stairs. Then Cara shoves her shoulder into a door next to the landing, holding her gun close to her chest.
I recognize this floor.
It is my floor.
My thoughts become sluggish. I almost died here. I craved death here.
I slow down and fall behind. I can’t break out of the daze, though people keep rushing past me, and Marcus shouts something at me, but his voice is muffled. Christina doubles back and grabs me, dragging me toward Control-A.
Inside the control room, I see rows of computers but I don’t really see them; there is a film covering my eyes. I try to blink it away. Marcus sits at one of the computers, and Cara sits at another. They will send all the data from the Erudite computers to the other faction computers.
Behind me, the door opens.
And I hear Caleb say, “What are you doing here?”
His voice wakes me. I turn and stare right at his gun.
His eyes are my mother’s eyes—a dull green, almost gray, though his blue shirt makes their color appear more potent.
“Caleb,” I say. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m here to stop whatever you’re doing!” His voice trembles. The gun wavers in his hands.
“We’re here to save the Erudite data that the factionless want to destroy,” I say. “I don’t think you want to stop us.”
“That’s not true,” he says. He jerks his head toward Marcus. “Why would you bring him if you weren’t trying to find something else? Something more important to him than all the Erudite data combined?”