When I published the last chapter I did it too quickly and I forgot something very important. I went back and fixed it, but... I forgot to thank BK2U, without her, you either wouldn't be reading this, or you'd be slogging through a story that hasn't had a Beta. So... thank you, from the bottom of my well used keyboard, to BK2U, for Betaing this chapter, and every other chapter in this story!

I know a lot of people don't like the whole GD/GP part of Allegiant, but as you read this chapter, please remember this story is canon, so… it's in here.

Chapter 4 Disclosure

It's shortly before lunch and I wander aimlessly around the lab looking at it. It reminds me of home and the hours I spent as a kid acting as Mom's assistant, working over summer holidays and during other free time when I would have rather been outside playing. Alan had needed to stop by the lab to check on a batch of serum he's working on. He mentioned several times on the way over here how much he could use some help in the lab; I have a feeling he thinks he is subtly hinting at something.

I feel a soft hand on my arm. Ava is regarding me with a serious look in her eyes. "I remember when this happened to me and thinking this is the oddest question anyone ever asked me." Her smile is remorseful. "So I feel a little funny asking you, but I want to make sure you have the option just as I did. Your funeral is in about ten minutes. Would you like to watch it?"

My funeral. It hits me again: Tori thinks I'm dead. If she finds out I'm alive and I didn't tell her, she's going to kill me. I try not to smile at that thought. My funeral. Will anyone besides Tori even be there to miss me? Will she be standing there all alone mourning a brother who isn't really dead? I open my mouth to say no. I really don't want to see Tori alone in her grief, with nobody there to support her, but then I suddenly think of Danika and Lance. They will be there with Tori — I know they will. I think about the nights the four of us talked in the tattoo shop until Danika, Lance and I were almost late for curfew. Tori also has friends of her own. Surely they will be there for her, too. "Alan, is it okay if I go?"

"You don't have a job here, yet," Alan says casually, but the look he's giving Ava is anything but casual. It's questioning, like he's not sure she knows what she's doing. "So you can come and go whenever you want to, but you should know it isn't an easy thing, going to your own funeral."

"I'll be back," I promise, acknowledging his words with a solemn nod.

Ava takes me to what I think of as the control room, an area full of people whose job it is to keep track of what is going on in my city. The city they call Chicago. There is a circle of TVs in an almost lounge-like area, set up for people to be able to watch when they are on breaks or off work. Ava finds a screen that is unoccupied; no one has settled around it yet to watch my city with a bizarre mixture of entertainment and curiosity while they eat their lunches. "Kay," Ava calls out to someone watching the screens that face away from the outer circle. "This is George Wu, he was pulled out last night from Dauntless. Can you put his funeral on the main screen?"

I see a dark blonde head nod briefly; the image on the screen quickly flips from Candor initiation, where a girl is hooked up to a lie detector and is answering questions, to the Pit. I have never seen the Pit so full of people. I never would have expected to see this many people show up for any funeral, except maybe a faction leader's, let alone a funeral for some boy who had just transferred. I scan the crowds looking for Tori. I realize quickly that she is standing near the front, with two of her friends next to her. I'm surprised that Hana isn't one of them.

"Tori is having some… problems with your death," Ava admits. "She had to be sedated last night after she trashed her apartment. At least that's what we've been able to gather from what we can see and overhear. There are no cameras in people's apartments or homes, so it's pretty much conjecture on our part."

I nod wordlessly, unable to speak. I find Danika and Lance where I hoped they would be, near Tori. I thought my friends being near her would help her to realize she isn't alone, but when Danika puts a hand on Tori's arm and looks like she's about to hug her, Tori pulls away from her. It's then that I notice a brown bottle in Tori's hand. An amber liquid sloshes from it as she moves.

I look to Ava inquiringly. She seems to know my question without being asked. "Dauntless have a tendency to drink alcohol at funerals. It helps them to forget that when you are busy being brave, often you take chances that you wouldn't ordinarily take, and the next funeral could be yours."

"Why so many people?" I finally find my voice.

"It surprised me the first time, too." Ava gives me a knowing smile. "It isn't logical to have so many people there who never met you and don't know you or your family. Although in your case, more people than you realize know Tori from her job. There are so many deaths — young deaths — in Dauntless that the whole faction just comes together. Everyone is there to support everyone else. Coming from Erudite, you must think it is a little odd, that death shouldn't take up so many resources."

I almost smile at her choice of words. It sounds a lot like Mom. May, a girl from my class, had a grandparent die when we were eight. Mom wouldn't let me go to the funeral. She said I wasn't close enough to May for my presence to help her, so it wasn't a logical use of resources for me to go. "How do you know about Erudite funerals?"

"I transferred from Erudite myself."

Nate, the last leader to watch my fear simulation, steps up onto a box placed near the railing by the chasm. "Funerals always take place at the chasm," Ava tells me before Nate starts to speak.

I don't know what I thought I'd hear for my cause of death. It didn't really dawn on me until right now that when the people here told me I was dead, they really meant everyone back home thinks that I am dead.

Suicide. The one death they could have given me that I don't think Tori will ever believe. She knows how happy I was in Dauntless.

Tori knows I was falling in love. That I was seeing someone, even if we tried to make sure no one realized it.

Tori knows I would never leave her like that.

I don't hear much of what Nate has to say as I focus on Lance, Danika and Tori. When it is over, Lance joins in yelling my name, and he raises his brown bottle to the sky. Danika does, too, but she doesn't yell. It looks like she is fighting back sobs.

Tori does nothing. Just stands there with clenched fists. Then I watch a single word form on her lips, and it's not my name: "Murder." Tori believes I am dead.

But I'm right: my sister knows that I wouldn't kill myself.

I try to go back to the lab after the crowd in the chasm disperses, but my mind and my heart just aren't in it. I find myself back at Alan's apartment. I keep thinking about Tori, about how… angry she looked. How positively livid she seemed. Something...

"This is why I didn't want you to go to your own funeral," an aggravated Alan interrupts my thoughts.

I look at him, blinking in confusion. I didn't know he had rejoined me back in his apartment. How long has he been standing there?

"That bad?" he asks sympathetically as he sits down.

I rest my elbows on the table and my hands on my forehead. "Worse. My sister is…"

"Ahh…" He lets the word trail off, and we sit in a comfortable silence for a while.

"It's not fair. Why are they stuck there? Why can't she know I'm alive and come here and be with me?" I lift my head and stare at Alan. Daring him to explain this to me.

"Let me talk to David," he says slowly. "It might be best if we finish explaining all of this to you."

"Are you ready for this? Are you ready for all of this?" Alan asks me. He holds a tablet in his hand.

"I'm ready," I assure him.

David is a very busy man; it took Alan over a week to speak to him about teaching me about what happened. It took another couple of weeks for him to decide how to tell me the history he's always known but which I have never learned.

"I hope you're right," he mutters under his breath. The room we are in is round, with a chandelier hanging brilliantly from the center. The walls are covered in glowing bronze sheets. He moves over to the wall and I realize there are names written all over it. I move closer so I can see them, too. It startles me when I start seeing names I know. Alan's long finger traces along a section of wall and suddenly his eyes light up. "This might make it easier." His finger has stopped on one name.

Mine.

"You were born Erudite. What do your parents do?"

"Mom is part of Norton's Top Ten," I begin. A small smile creeps onto Alan's face. "Dad is a genetic engineer. He works with Amity on creating better strains of crops, usually, but he also works with fertilizers and things like that when he is between projects."

"Excellent." The smile almost stretches off Alan's face. "This isn't going to be so hard to explain after all. This room contains the names and faction information of everyone who is part of the Chicago experiment. He shows me Mom's name. There are two "E"s carved next to it, and Dad's name has two "E"s carved by it. Then he traces the line by Mom's name to Grandmother's, and I blink in shock. Next to Grandmother and Grandfather is "DE".

"Your Dad's mom is a 'DE', too," Alan explains.

I look at Tori's name. "ED" and mine, "ED*"

I touch Tori's name and look up at Alan. "Erudite, Dauntless."

"Exactly."

"Why does mine have a dot and hers doesn't?"

"We'll get there soon. Let's go to the next room where we can sit down." The next room is full of books and tables, like the study lounges back in Erudite. He points to the table and we both move to it and sit down. He sets the tablet down next to him. "Tell me, what is the purpose of genetic engineering?"

"To create more desirable offspring. For example, Dad is working to develop a strain of corn that is more resistant to Diplodia ear rot."

"How long has he been working on it?" Alan asks, leaning forward in his chair.

"I don't know for sure. He's been working on it as long as I can remember — at least twelve years, I guess. I mean, that's not all he does; obviously he works on it, and then once it's planted he has to wait to see if it worked, then he works on it again. But he can only plant it certain times of the year, and of course there are years when he thinks he has it because nothing happens, but then the next year the weather conditions are different and it's worse than ever."

"Exactly." Alan leans back very satisfied with my answer. "It takes generations to see the effect of genetic engineering. A few centuries ago, the government started mapping genes and trying to figure out if it was nature or nurture that decides how people act. They discovered there are certain genes that seem to have an effect on people's behavior. One of those genes is called the murder gene."

I stifle a gasp. It's pretty easy to guess what someone with the murder gene would be prone to do. "And the people with it?"

"Were found to be more prone to acts of violence. Some people tried to downplay it by calling it the 'warrior gene', but it doesn't matter what you call it; the people who had it were more likely to kill, and kill violently, than people who didn't. They did studies in prison communities…"

I stop him, like I so often do when he gives me a new piece of information.

"Prison?"

Alan gives a small laugh. "Sorry, forgot that was another one you probably wouldn't know. Prisons are entire buildings full of cells to house criminals."

"There were so many criminals you had to have a whole building, not just a couple of floors of mostly empty rooms?" I'm amazed.

Alan shakes his head at me. "George, I hate to tell you, but there are still entire compounds with multiple buildings that are used just to house people who break the law." He shakes his head sadly. "Only these days, they are mainly full of GDs who have perpetrated crimes against GPs."

"GDs? GPs?" I parrot back. I've heard the term before, but I still have no idea of what he is talking about.

"Stands for Genetically Damaged and Genetically Pure. We'll come back to that later. Where was I?" His brows create a "V" as he tries to remember.

"They did studies in prison communities…"

He nods his thanks so he doesn't lose his train of thought. "In these studies, they found there were some gene mutations in monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, that were found in the violent population and not in the non-violent population. Anyway, we started there, fixing the gene so that the people prone to violent acts could be stopped and everyone would be safer."

"Did it work?" I think about Natalie's comment that I shouldn't buy into the idea that anyone is damaged, but what Alan is saying makes sense. If there is a gene that is damaged and makes people violent, isn't that person damaged?

"After some time, it did work. Then we moved on to the idea that maybe we could make people more honest, more selfless, friendlier…"

With a smile I finish for him with the two factions I lived in. "Smarter, braver."

"Exactly. You have the right idea. Only… they started with too large of a population, and didn't control the experiment and the variables well enough. And this went terribly wrong. We ended up discovering that as you improve some traits you lose others. You lose motivation, compassion, and self-preservation, to name a few. They realized it wasn't a success. Criminal activity, which had been reduced when we repaired genes like the murder gene, suddenly was out of control. And it always came from the people descended from the group that we thought had been improved." Alan shakes his head. "It was decided that something had to be done about it. That we had to return people back to their normal state, but before we could really get started on that, the unthinkable happened. They found out what was planned, and a war started." Alan touches his tablet several times opening up to a map of what I have been told is the United States, the country that I didn't even know I lived in two weeks ago. "We call it The Purity War, and it decimated our population. The darker the red, the more people in that location. This is the country before The Purity War." The map shows every shade of red from pale pink to crimson.

The area that has been pointed out to me as Chicago, my city, is a deep crimson.

"This is the effect of The Purity War." Alan touches the screen and everything starts to change. I concentrate on Chicago and watch the color fade like a body being drained of its blood.

It stops when Chicago is almost white. I look at the rest of the country. There is nothing darker than a pale pink in the East, and the Western part of the country is solid white, like no one lives there anymore. I look up at Alan in shock.

"After centuries of peace," Alan tells me softly, "We almost totally destroyed ourselves."

My mind is ready to explode by the time Alan finishes telling me about the volunteers after the war who agreed to have their damaged genes repaired. "We didn't want to make the same mistake, so we took some large towns and rebuilt them with fences."

"And you locked them up in there to see what would happen." Part of me is appalled to realize this is why I am where I am.

"And we're starting to see success from it." Alan smiles at me. "We're finding more and more people like you who are Divergent."

"Divergent?" I repeat the meaningless word.

"People who show signs of healing are called Divergent. That's why your name has the dot next to it and Tori's doesn't."

"How did you know?"

"Your simulations tell us. If you are aware of what is going on during the simulations, your genes are healed."

"And you pull us out?"

"Not usually." Alan shakes his head at me. "Usually we leave people there, so they can pass on their genes. If you look at some of the families in there, you'll find dots being passed on. You appear to be the first person in your family with healed genes. I would guess that Tori's are close and that her children probably will be. But we couldn't leave you in there because someone has learned about the Divergent and is killing them."

"And because of my fear simulations."

Alan agrees solemnly. "They figured out what you are, and if we hadn't pulled you out that night, there's a good chance you would really have been discovered dead the day after initiation was over."

Thank you for reading. Please leave a reveiw and let me know what you think of it.