been awhile, I know, but I'm still writing! please R&R!

I step into the building, which is quiet, except for a faint electronic hum, and it's very dark. When I cross the threshold, though, a soft blue light springs up around the small structure and a wall full of computers whirs to life.

"It responded to the movement," Tris breathes, close behind my shoulder, as I pause inside the doorway. "That's amazing."

"Inez..." I start softly.

"I'll stay out here," she agrees, before I can even finish the thought.

"What? I mean, look at this place - why would you want to do that?" Fernando says in disbelief, though I notice he himself has not come in yet.

"In case the door closes and we can't open it," Tris answers matter-of-factly. Fernando is quiet, for a change.

I would like to say he's growing on me, but he isn't.

"Okay. Let's take it easy, here. Don't touch anything yet - just look, first."

We move in carefully, and the door does, in fact, close behind us. Tris touches the pad next to it, and it promptly opens again, but Inez stays where she is, anyway.

The room seems somewhat smaller than it should be, judging from the overall size of the building. There's a wall of monitors and several computers, a filing cabinet, which proves to be locked when I pull on the handles, and a desk. I run my fingernail across the surface of the desk - I'm not sure what it's made of. It seems to be as hard as metal, but it's not any kind of metal I've ever seen before.

Tris is looking along the walls and finds a door. I nod to her, and she opens it and goes in. She'll be fine - she can handle herself.

Not long after, I'm looking through the desk drawers when I hear a muffled exclamation. "Tobias, I think you'd better come in here," Tris calls sharply.

I turn hurriedly away from the desk, noticing out of the corner of my eye that Fernando has taken off his mask and is staring intently at the computers. "Don't touch them yet," I warn him, as I move to find Tris, "and put your mask back on."

"Uh huh," he responds, and I'm not even sure he heard me.

The second room is clearly living quarters. There's a bed - an unmade bed, at that - and a couch, with a large screen along one wall. Another door on the other side of the room is open, and I can see a dining table and some chairs, and what looks like a kitchen along the far wall.

"In here," Tris says, waving at me to come into the dining room.

I'm across the bedroom in three long strides, reaching for her hand, and she tugs on me urgently. She leads me into a bathroom, with dark smudges on the floor leading to some kind of bathing area. "Look," Tris says, pulling a curtain aside. There's a corpse on the tiled floor inside.

"Been dead a long time, I think," Tris murmurs, as we stare at the body. "But pretty well preserved." The skull still has some leathery-looking skin and wispy brown hair clinging to it. He - I'm pretty sure it's a "he" - is wearing coveralls, and there's a faded stain across the front.

"Gunshot, maybe" I grunt, and Tris nods in agreement. She takes a deep breath and leans in to search the body. There's a square of plastic clipped onto a pocket, and she finds a key in another pocket. There's nothing else. Tris pulls off the plastic and peers at it, handing me the key.

"Department of Homeland Security. His name was Bruce Parsons," she says softly. "It even has his picture." She runs her fingernail across the bottom, frowning.

"What?"

"There's some kind of small metal disk embedded here, in the badge," she says. "What do you think it's for?"

"I don't know," I shrug, holding up the small key, "but I bet I know what this is for."

"I want to look around in here a little more," she says, and I nod, pulling her close and stroking her back with my fingertips.

"Not here," she says, pushing at my chest, "in front of him."

I snort and glance briefly at the dead man. "I wonder who killed him?" I muse quietly, before I turn away.

"I have a bad feeling about that," Tris answers, and I look back at her.

"The ghost in the machine?"

"Yeah," she nods. "Not a nice person."

"No," I agree, "but we already knew that. I'm going to go see if the key opens the filing cabinet."

"Okay," she takes the pack off her back. "I'm going to take some things in the bedroom that look important. And I think there's another bedroom on the other side of the kitchen."

"Just be careful."

She nods absently as she runs her fingers along the mirror over the sink. She makes a huff of satisfaction when it swings outward, revealing shelves full of bottles. I leave as she begins sweeping them into her bag.

"Hey Fernando," I say as I glance at him, still staring at the computers, now wiggling his fingers over the keyboard. "You should really put the mask back on."

"Yeah, okay," he says as I head for the filing cabinet.

The key does, indeed, open it, but I'm disappointed to find it is mostly empty, except for paper and pens and other supplies. They don't look any different from the kinds of things we had in Abnegation or Dauntless. The bottom drawer, however, has a metal slide that's been pulled forward about eight inches, and when I open it all the way, I find there are about a dozen files behind it. I grunt with satisfaction and start pulling them out. I flip one open - it says "Albuquerque, NM" on the tab - but then quickly decide to just take them all to look at later. I'm stuffing them into my pack when Fernando lets out a yell.

"Holy shit, Four," he shouts. "Check this out!"

I grab the pack and move over to the monitors, uttering a soft expletive of my own as I get close enough to see what's on the screens.

"I just touched one of the keys, and all this came up," he says excitedly.

It's our city. All of our city.

There on the screens are the rubble-filled streets, the fields at Amity, the wall, and inside the buildings, in every faction. There are even some shots from inside Dauntless, where I thought we had destroyed all the cameras. There are, in fact, a number of monitors that are dark or just filled with static, but there's one showing the control room, another with wide view of the pit, and a view of what is now Tori's room. I stare at the image of the control room, where Leo crosses in and out of the picture.

"Is that..."

"It's a view from one of the computer screens in the control room," Fernando says calmly. His words leave me cold.

"They were in our computer systems."

"Well, of course they were," Fernando scoffs. "They built those systems. They built everything so they could watch their little experiment."

"No one is watching now."

"No," he agrees thoughtfully. "No one is watching now. Not here, anyway. Maybe not anywhere."

"How is this all possible?" I say, gesturing around the room. "That all of this still works? It looks like no one's been in here for a long time - I'd guess Bruce has been dead at least a decade."

Fernando looks at me sharply. "Bruce? Who is Bruce?"

"There's a dead body in the next room. Tris found it."

Fernando looks upset.

"No need to worry - as I said, he's very dead. Nothing to be scared of." But Fernando is still pale and his eyes are darting around the room. "Whoever did it is long gone."

"Did it?" Fernando looks at me, eyes wide.

"Yeah, looks like he was shot, and dragged into a shower. What, scared of ghosts?" I know it's wrong to needle him, but I can't help myself.

"No," he mutters, looking back at the screens. "No. It's not the dead ones that scare me."

I don't disagree with him for once.

He points at one of the monitors. "That," he notes, "is not anything I've seen before."

I follow his finger to a screen showing a large structure surrounded by a high chain-link fence. It's an unfamiliar shape - a low, line of concrete pokes out of the ground in front of a squat tower, with a larger, spherical piece on top, almost like a cap. There's smoke or steam coming out of it.

"What is it?"

"Don't know," Fernando says, never taking his eyes off the screen. "Let's see if it will let us zoom in." He clicks a key on the keyboard, and then rolls his finger on an embedded ball. And the image swoops in closer.

"There," I say more loudly than I meant to, "there's a sign on the fence, to your left."

He rolls left and focuses in on the sign. Finally, the screen sharpens, and we can see what it says: "Braidwood 3 Traveling Wave Generating Plant. Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted."

We stare at the image.

"It's the power source," Fernando finally says.

"Yeah," I answer.

Fernando shakes himself and starts tapping keys.

"What are you doing?" I say quickly.

"Seeing if I can access any files about it," he comments.

Before I can say anything else, the screen bleats angrily at Fernando.

"What?" I grab his shoulders. "What is it?"

"It's asking me for authorization," he says calmly, shaking me off and continuing to tap the keys. "Shouldn't be a problem. I know some tricks."

"Stop!" I shout at Fernando. "Whatever you're doing, stop it now!"

But it's too late. The blue lights suddenly shift to a pulsing, angry red, and then gas starts to billow out of a grill in the ceiling.

"Tris!" I scream. "Mask!"