Hello, readers. Yes, it's been six years. A lot has changed then
At the sight of him, I sprint across the room to get closer until I am kneeling down and touching him. I plaster my lips to his and for a moment they melt as one. If I had my way, I could be with him like this forever but I only have a few minutes and besides, there are important things I should tell him.
When we separate, I look down to see a bandage on his left leg. If someone shot him, I deserve a explanation. First from Tobias.
"What happened to your leg?" I ask him, shifting my position so that I'm sitting next to him.
"Four," he says in gritted teeth. "I swore that he would have shot me in the head if he didn't hesitate."
Hesitated. Tobias hates Eric and vice versa but last night would have given Tobias the chance to kill him. It's clear why he didn't. Tobias is afraid of what my reaction would be since he would figure I might arrive in Candor with my parents.
"Can you walk?" I ask him.
"With a limp," he answers with a wryly smile.
"Listen, I spoke with Jack Kang," I say. "He is going to allow us to leave the Merciless Mart tonight."
"He let you off easy," he notes. "Everyone is given that blasted truth serum when they come here. So, what location do you have in mind, Stiff?"
I think. Mother has the outside of the city in mind and I trust her that there are people that she trusts out there. I'm not sure about Eric though. He might regard it with his Erudite skepticism.
"Mother said that there are people outside the farms of Amity that will take us in," I answer.
He raises his left eyebrow incredulously. "Outside Amity. Isn't the area around Amity supposed to be dangerous?"
"That is what they taught us," I point out. "My mother wouldn't knowingly put us in danger."
Eric considers this for a moment before nodding. "Fair point. Besides, it's not like I'd want to stay behind considering that everything is going downhill."
"You wouldn't be safe here anyway," I say. "Especially for you."
"Considering that most of Dauntless want my blood, it's a understatement," he says. "Most of them are idiots who go by what they see in front of them. Not terribly bright."
When my minutes are up, I leave the holding room. Tobias was nowhere to be seen. He probably guessed that I ask about the gunshot wound and was trying to delay the inevitable. Tobias would try to justify shooting him and I know he would say, "Better then shooting him in the head."
Tobias would have assumed that he would be avenging Amar if he killed Eric but he didn't. He didn't have proof anyway that Eric even killed Amar. He just wants it to be him all because of some grudge.
I have to tell mother my plan. She wouldn't hesitate to take Eric with us since she wants to leave the city before Evelyn starts for whatever she has planned. As for father, well, he wouldn't be pleased.
Unless he is not coming with us in preference to helping others here. Knowing my father he would do that.
During lunch, I told mom and dad in code about Eric coming with us to the city. I didn't get their response until we were alone in one of the dormitories that were vacant for the time being.
"You want to tag along someone who had a part in the death in the thousands of those from Abnegation?" father asks me, his eyebrow raised incredulously.
"Both of us had no choice in the matter," I point out to him. "Jeanine blackmailed him into participating after he voiced his opposition to the idea. He didn't want a part in it, the same as me."
"We'll take him with us," mother said. "We will be able to accommodate a fifth person."
"Natalie –" father started.
"If we leave him behind, the Dauntless might decide to take care of him," mother pointed out to him. "They are not like Candor when it comes to justice."
It would make sense that mother would think that the Dauntless wouldn't treat Eric as fairly in court like Candor since she was Dauntless herself once. I have learned from Eric about how the Dauntless do trials and I've agreed with him that they were malarkey.
The Dauntless leaders stand before the accused, each one has a gun but only one is loaded with one single bullet. They ask the defendant to name his crimes before shooting him. The bad part is, it's biased and not impartial like a Candor trial.
Even if Eric was tried before Candor, it won't spare him even.
"She's right," I inform father. "Dauntless would do anything to make sure that Candor doesn't try Eric. Getting him out of the city will give him a better chance of avoiding a Kangaroo Court."
I spent the rest of the day in the dormitory, mainly to avoid Christina. The more I'm around her, the more likely I'll crack under the pressure of the truth.
I know I'm being a coward but I just don't want to lose another friend do to my own doing via different circumstances.
When the sun is setting and the sky is a dark violet with the orange sunlight gleaming on the glass of the buildings, Caleb, mother, and I get out of the back door of the Merciless Mart; carrying our few possessions.
"Is Eric coming?" I ask mother. Jack did say that he will let him leave with us.
"Soon," mother tries to assure me with a smile as Caleb looks over our shoulders.
"Speaking of the devil," he says.
I turn around to see him walking out of the door, walking with a slight limp. Yet, it seems that standing on that leg doesn't faze him.
I run to him, wrapping my arms around him. He wraps his arms around me and my heart races when his lips touch my forehead.
"Are you coming, father?" I hear Caleb ask the moment Eric and I separate.
I look to see father standing at the doorway, his expression unreadable.
"I want to but it would be selfish to leave when people need help," father answers.
Mother approaches him. "Things will get worse in a few days if Evelyn carries out her plan."
"I plan on avoiding Erudite when that time comes," father assures.
I can't feel a sense of foreboding as I watch my parents embrace, as it will be the last time they'll touch each other. No, I don't want to go there. Not after everything that has happened in the past few weeks.
I try to swallow back that same foreboding as I hug my father goodbye. No, this will not be the last time I see him alive.
Caleb, Eric, mother, and I weave through the dark alleyways. Making sure that no one sees us.
We take the train to the Amity sector. Caleb balked of course. Swallowing as he gazed at the oncoming train. "We all have to go on that?" he asked, his eyes wide.
"It's our only way out of the city, Caleb," mother tells him. "Just follow my lead."
I was more concerned with Eric and mother than Caleb. Eric because Tobias shot him in the leg, so it wouldn't be easy. That Eric would have a harder time than he usually would. Mother probably hasn't been riding the trains since the days of her youth, so she's probably rusty.
However, mother seems to have no problem catching up the train and jumping onto it. Not hesitating to pull Caleb in. Eric doesn't appear as if he's going to allow his bad leg stop him, for he manages to jump onto the train.
"When we leave the city, you might get that leg checked," mother points out as Eric and I settle into a corner in the moving train. "It's not good to put strain on a day-old injury."
"Injuries mean nothing when one has to get out," Eric points out. "I'd rather be bleeding to death while trying to run then being held prisoner with treated wounds."
I lean my head against his arm as I watch the city pass by. Last time when Eric and I came to Amity, it was to do Jeanine's bidding whether we liked it or not. Amity or not, Johanna might not be as receptive to Eric and I like she would be with Caleb and I. Even if I escaped with Tobias and Irene.
Two Erudite aligned Dauntless are stationed at the gates when we get there, but let us in without asking any questions.
"Let me take the lead," mother tells Eric when we pass the gates to the Amity farms. "Even if one values peace of all else, one wouldn't be cooperative to someone they deemed complicit in taking half their faction for Jeanine's ambitions."
It feels eerie being here, knowing the last time I was here, the Divergent in Amity were taken against their will. Ahead of us, the trucks are pulling towards the buildings ahead. The farmers returning from the field after a day of work before the winter.
Or what is left of them.
Mother leads into the barn where Johanna's office is. Walking past the stalls housing the horses and up the steps.
Johanna is sitting at her desk, looking out of one of the windows before she turns her attention to us. "Natalie," she greets, before her eyes drift to Eric and I. "Something must have happened in Erudite if Eric is with you and your children."
She must have paid attention. Saw that I ran with Tobias and Irene, with Eric having no choice but to pursue us in a bid to maintain his cover.
"It's just so happens that I ripped apart the leash that Jeanine was pulling me with," Eric says.
"Well," mother begins, looking at her hands. "This is going to be an unusual request, Johanna, but the four of us plan to venture past here. To go past the outer limits."
"Past Amity?"
"Truth is, I wasn't born here," mother begins.
She launches in a story about her life leading up to her arrival and what she has been doing for the past years, getting Divergents out of the city. Caleb looks at her, almost as if he's hungry for more information. It feels overwhelming to have everything that was speculated confirmed. She had spent her life here, getting people like me and Eric out of the city. Towards the place where she thinks is safe.
"The weeks before the Erudite attack on Abnegation, the council made the decision that they were going to deliver the truth to the city and it's inhabitants. The truth why we were here, the purpose of the city. Marcus was even volunteering to bypass the simulation lock for the Box to release the message. There were fears that the Erudite were eavesdropping on our computer correspondences through their data network, for they launched the attack before we could make the contents of the Box public."
"Marcus did tell me that Jeanine attacked to steal something that Abnegation possessed," Johanna replied, "though he refused to tell me the contents. Said it was about trust."
"Jeanine's attack has put everyone on edge, not that I would blame him," she said. Of course, mother still doesn't seem to believe the Erudite report about Marcus. I don't know if father told her about our argument on Visiting Day. "However, it would be selfish to withhold it in times like these. Especially to those who feel like such information would help them understand why we came to the circumstances we did."
Johanna smiles, "No wiser words than that were spoken, Natalie."
"What happens when we reach the Outer Limits?" Caleb asks as the four of us sit in the bed of the trunk which Johanna is driving. "What are going to do about the Dauntless patrolling there?"
"I believed Jeanine pulled them from the Outer Limits and the Factionless Sector," Eric said. "She believed that their presence in Erudite was more important."
Which makes our exit easier. Much smoother than what it would have been.
The truck passes the ruins of a once thriving civilization and it stops at the danger signs.
"This is it," Johanna says. "The outer limit of the Dauntless patrols."
"Has anyone gone past it?" Caleb asks. "I mean, anyone curious to see what was out there would propel them to."
"Yes, but not often," Eric answers. "Sometimes someone like me would have to reset their memory so they can forget what they saw. Most of the times, the Amity did it themselves."
"Oh, the Abnegation memory serum?" Caleb asks. "I read…some things on it in Erudite. Was quite the migraine afterwards."
I have a feeling that there is something he wants to say. Something that he's afraid would offend mother. Even if he believes half the Erudite reports, he seems hesitant to let mother know he does. I wonder what report it was that he wanted to quote. Probably a old one, one that I have never heard of before.
Johanna drives us past a few miles away from the Dauntless patrols, farther into other side of a invisible border that marks the divide between our city and the outside world.
The outside world, where even in the early evening, stands out in stark contrast to the city we grew up in.
The world beyond ours is full of roads and dark buildings and collapsing power lines.
There is no life in it, as far as I can see; no movement, no sound but the wind and my own footsteps.
It's like the landscape is an interrupted sentence, one side dangling in the air, unfinished, and the other, a completely different subject. On our side of that sentence is empty land, grass and stretches of road. On the other side are two concrete walls with half a dozen sets of train tracks between them. Up ahead, there is a concrete bridge built across the walls, and framing the tracks are buildings, wood and brick and glass, their windows dark, trees growing around them, so wild their branches have grown together.
A worn sign on the right says 90, with the word INTERSTATE above it.
We get out of the trucks at the divide between our world and theirs. Johanna says a brief good-bye, turns around, and drives back to the direction of Amity. I watch them go. I can't imagine coming this far and then turning back, but she has a faction to run.
"Follow me," mother says. She must have gone through here before, or else she wouldn't be this confident in what she was doing. "We're following the train tracks."
The tracks are not like the ones in the city. They are polished and sleek, and instead of boards running perpendicular to their path, there are sheets of textured metal. Up ahead I see one of the trains that runs along them, abandoned near the wall. It is metal-plated on the top and front, like a mirror, with tinted windows all along the side. When we draw closer, I see rows of benches inside it with maroon cushions on them. People must not jump on and off these trains.
Eric limps as he walks the tracks with mother and I. Some times grabbing my arm to maintain balance. Caleb walks near a wall, trying to keep himself steady. No one talks much, except to point out something new, a sign or a building or a hint of what this world was like, when there were people in it.
The concrete walls alone hold my attention—they are covered with strange pictures of people with skin so smooth they hardly look like people anymore, or colorful bottles with shampoo or conditioner or vitamins or unfamiliar substances inside them, words I don't understand, "vodka" and "Coca-Cola" and "energy drink." The colors and shapes and words and pictures are so garish, so abundant, that they are mesmerizing.
Mother stops, holding out her hand and we stop in response. It does not take me long to hear why. Beneath the sounds of our breaths, is a quiet rumble, inconsistent in its intensity. It sounds like an engine.
If it weren't for the lack of caution in her, I would have pulled out my fake gun with the neurosim bullets, and Eric probably would have pulled out his gun. Whoever is coming, mother must know them.
Something appears around the bend up ahead. A black truck, but larger than any truck I've ever seen, large enough to hold more than a dozen people in its covered bed. The truck bumps over the tracks and comes to a stop twenty feet away from us. I can see the man driving it—he has dark skin and long hair that is in a knot at the back of his head.
"Four owes me a apology in the far chance he comes here," Eric mutters.
It doesn't take me long to figure it out. Amar, their initiate instructor, whose apparent death which he blamed Eric for, is actually alive. Even if Tobias admitted that out of his hatred he wanted to believe Eric did the things he did, he never seemed to grow past that mentality. Given how quick he is to still believe the worst in Eric, like that prejudice still rules.
A woman gets out of the front seat. She looks to be around mother's and Johanna's age, her skin patterned with dense freckles and her hair so dark it's almost black. She hops to the ground and mother approaches her.
"It's been a long time, Zoe," she greets warmly. Almost as if they were friends. Maybe they were before mother arrived here.
"I was wondering whether I would actually see you in person," Zoe replies. As the two hug, I watch as a third figure tentatively gets out of a truck.
When he gets closer, it's the "who" that causes my eyes to grow wide and feel the blood drain from the surface of my skin.
As if I was seeing someone who returned from the dead.
"Uriah?"
To be continued….
Yeah, it's been a long time this story came to a end. For those who have been patiently waiting, thank you. Even if I'm refreshing the storyline of the series, I hope to post the next installment soon.