Tobias POV
By the time everyone's asleep, I start heading out. Amity doesn't really care if I'm here or not, making it a lot easier to escape. I quietly run out of the Headquarters. I pass a few buildings and find the crops. I crawl between the crops, making it even more difficult for people to find me.
I hide with the crops, waiting for the gleam of the small train car. I have high doubts that the Erudite would take it. If the Erudite were running the train, they would have taken it to the Amity compound to look for them. When I see the lights, I start making a run for it. As the car passes me, I start to run. I use the handle to swing myself in.
Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car. The factionless.
The wind whistles through the car. Everyone is on their feet and armed. A factionless man with an eye patch has a gun pointed at me. Since they're factionless, they must be following my mother. "My name is Tobias Eaton," I say.
The effect of the name on the people in the car is immediate and bewildering: they lower their weapons. They exchange meaningful looks.
"Eaton? Really?" the man with the eye patch says, eyebrows raised. He clears his throat. "Fine, you can come. But when we get to the city, you've got to come with us." I want that anyways. My name really is powerful here.
Then he smiles a little. "We know someone who's been looking for you, Tobias Eaton." Evelyn.
I go sit at the edge of the car with my feet dangling over the edge. As I watch buildings pass, I think of Tris and her safety. Did they kill her? I cringe at the thought. I will do anything to stop the Erudite and help Tris.
They eventually tell me it's time to get off. I knew already though. I jump off when they tell me to and follow them. The buildings I walk by are all in place. The one with the broken bricks. The one with a fallen streetlight leaning against it. They're all buildings I've passed by whenever I missed the bus to school.
They lead me to the factionless storehouse, and the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community are together inside it.
"Come on," the man with the eye patch says, bending his finger to beckon us toward him. "She's back here."
Stares and silence greet me as I follow him deeper into the building that is supposed to be abandoned.
I mindlessly wind a loose thread from my shirt around my finger, backward and forward, over and over.
He stops at a metal door and pounds on it with his fist. The door opens, and a severe-looking woman with a lazy eye stands in the doorway. Her steady eye scans me. "A stray?" she asks.
"Not hardly, Therese." He jabs his thumb over his shoulder at me. "This is Tobias Eaton." You'd think that she would recognize me, being Evelyn's son and all.
She stares at me for a few seconds, which feels like hours, then nods. "He certainly is. Hold on."
My hands feel sweaty right now. I can probably back out now, but it would be a cowardly and stupid decision. Besides, I need to stop the Erudite, and the sooner I do it, the faster Tris will be free. Who knows what's going in her mind right now?
The door opens again, and Therese steps back to let us in. We walk into an old boiler room with machinery that emerges from the darkness so suddenly I almost hit it with my knees and elbows. Therese leads me through the maze of metal to the back of the room, where several bulbs dangle from the ceiling over a table.
A middle-aged woman stands behind the table. She has curly black hair and olive skin. Evelyn.
"Evelyn." My voice shakes even in my own ears.
"Hello." She walks around the table, surveying him. "You look older."
"Yes, well. The passage of time tends to do that to a person," I retort.
She smiles. "So you've finally come—" She wants me to join the factionless with her.
"Not for the reason you think," I interrupt her. "I want to form an alliance. The Amity may be willing to fight back against the Erudite if they at least stand a chance." She knows that I'm important back in Abnegation too, so I can authorize it.
She ponders over the thought for a while. I almost lose my patience and throw something against the wall. But the thought of failing stops me. A lot of lives depend on this.
After what seems forever, she says, "We will, of course, agree to an alliance … under a certain set of conditions. A guaranteed—and equal—place in whatever government forms after Erudite is destroyed, and full control over Erudite data after the attack."
"What would we receive under those terms," I ask her. "Our much-needed manpower, in order to take Erudite headquarters, and an equal place in government, with us."
"Then we are agreed," I say. I shake her hand
"We should convene in a week's time," she says. "In neutral territory. Most of the Abnegation have graciously agreed to let us stay in their sector of the city to plan as they clean up the aftermath of the attack."
"Most of them," I say.
Evelyn's expression turns flat. "I'm afraid your father still commands the loyalty of many of them, and he advised them to avoid us when he came to visit a few days ago." She smiles bitterly. "And they agreed, just as they did when he persuaded them to exile me."
"They exiled you?" I ask. "I thought you left."
"No, the Abnegation were inclined toward forgiveness and reconciliation, as you might expect. But your father has a lot of influence over the Abnegation, and he always has. I decided to leave rather than face the indignity of public exile."
She was exiled this entire time? She didn't just leave me?
"I'll see you in a week, Tobias." She didn't say it out loud, but she's telling me to leave.
The man with the eye patch leads me out and doesn't say anything, which is probably for the best since I'm at lost of words.
Tris POV
I wake up to the bright lights from the hallways when Peter opens my cell's door. "Let's go, Stiff."
I hastily wipe the tears off of my face before standing up and walking out of the room.
Despite the length and emptiness of the hallway, our footsteps don't echo much. I feel like someone put their hands over my ears and I only just noticed it. I try to keep track of the hallways we walk down, but I lose count after a while. We reach the end of one and turn left, into a dim room that reminds me of an aquarium. One of the walls is made of one-way glass—reflective on my side, but I'm sure it's transparent on the other side.
A large machine stands on the other side, with a man-sized tray coming out of it. I recognize it from my Faction History textbook, the unit on Erudite and medicine. An MRI machine. It will take pictures of my brain.
Something sparks inside me. It's been so long since I felt it that I barely recognize it at first. Curiosity.
A voice—Jeanine's voice—speaks over an intercom.
"Lie down, Beatrice."
I look at the man-sized tray that will slide me into the machine.
"No."
She sighs. "If you don't do it yourself, we have ways of making you."
Peter is standing behind me. He's much stronger than me. I imagine his hands on me, wrestling me toward the tray, shoving me against the metal, pulling the straps that dangle from the tray across my body, too tightly.
"Let's make a deal," I say. "If I cooperate, I get to see the scan."
"You will cooperate whether you want to or not."
I hold up a finger. "That's not true."
I look at the mirror. It's not so difficult to pretend that I'm speaking to Jeanine when I speak to my own reflection. My hair is blond like hers; we are both pale and stern-looking. The thought is so disturbing to me that I lose my train of thought for a few seconds, and instead stand with my finger in the air in silence.
I am pale-skinned, pale-haired, and cold. I am curious about the pictures of my brain. I am like Jeanine. And I can either despise it, attack it, eradicate it … or I can use it.
"That's not true," I repeat. "No matter how many restraints you use, you can't keep me as still as I need to be for the pictures to be clear." I clear my throat. "I want to see the scans. You're going to kill me anyway, so does it really matter how much I know about my own brain before you do?"
Silence.
"Why do you want to see them so badly?" she says.
"Surely you, of all people, understand. I have equal aptitude for Erudite as I do for Dauntless and Abnegation, after all."
"All right. You can see them. Lie down."
I walk over to the tray and lie down. The metal feels like ice. The tray slides back, and I am inside the machine. I stare up at whiteness. When I was young, I thought that was what heaven would be like, all white light and nothing else. Now I know that can't be true, because white light is menacing.
I hear thumping, and I close my eyes as I remember one of the obstacles in my fear landscape, the fists pounding against my windows and the sightless men trying to kidnap me. I pretend the pounding is a heartbeat, a drumbeat. The river crashing against the walls of the chasm in the Dauntless compound. Feet stamping at the end-of-initiation ceremony. Feet pounding on the staircase after the Choosing Ceremony.
I don't know how much time has passed when the thumping stops and the tray slides back. I sit up and rub my neck with my fingertips.
The door opens, revealing Peter in the hallway. He beckons to me. "Come on. You can go see the scans now."
I hop down from the tray and walk toward him. When we're in the hallway, he shakes his head at me.
"What?"
"I don't know how you manage to always get what you want."
"Yeah, because I wanted to get myself into a cell in Erudite headquarters. I wanted to be executed."
I sound cavalier, like executions are something I face on a regular basis. But forming my lips around the word "executed" makes me shudder. I pretend I'm cold, squeezing my arms with my hands.
He doesn't say anything. He types in a series of numbers on a keypad outside the next door, and it opens. I enter the room on the other side of the mirror. It's full of screens and light, reflecting off the glass in the Erudites' spectacles. Across the room, another door clicks shut.
There is an empty chair behind one of the screens, still turning. Someone just left.
Peter stands too close behind me—ready to grab me if I decide to attack anyone. But I won't attack anyone. How far could I get if I did? Down one hallway, or two? And then I would be lost. I couldn't get out of here even if there weren't guards stopping me from leaving.
"Put them up there," says Jeanine, pointing toward the large screen on the left wall. One of the Erudite scientists taps his own computer screen, and an image appears on the left wall. An image of my brain.
I don't know what I'm looking at, exactly. I know what a brain looks like, and generally what each region of it does, but I don't know how mine compares to others. Jeanine taps her chin and stares for what feels like a long time.
Finally she says, "Someone instruct Ms. Prior as to what the prefrontal cortex does."
"It's the region of the brain behind the forehead, so to speak," one of the scientists says. She doesn't look much older than I am, and wears large round glasses that make her eyes look bigger. "It's responsible for organizing your thoughts and actions to attain your goals."
"Correct," Jeanine says. "Now someone tell me what they observe about Ms. Prior's lateral prefrontal cortex."
"It's large," another scientist—this one a man with thinning hair—says.
"Specificity," says Jeanine. Like she's chastising him.
I am in a classroom, I realize, because every room with more than one Erudite in it is a classroom. And among them,
Jeanine is their most valued teacher. They all stare at her with wide eyes and eager, open mouths, waiting to impress her.
"It's much larger than average," the man with thinning hair corrects himself.
"Better." Jeanine tilts her head. "In fact, it is one of the largest lateral prefrontal cortexes I've ever seen. Yet the orbitofrontal cortex is remarkably small. What do these two facts indicate?"
"The orbitofrontal cortex is the reward center of the brain. Those who exhibit reward-seeking behavior have a large orbitofrontal cortex," someone says. "That means that Ms. Prior engages in very little reward-seeking behavior."
"Not just that." Jeanine smiles a little. Blue light from the screens makes her cheekbones and forehead brighter but casts shadows in her eye sockets. "It does not merely indicate something about her behavior, but about her desires. She is not reward motivated. Yet she is extremely good at directing her thoughts and actions toward her goals. This explains both her tendency toward harmful-but-selfless behavior and, perhaps, her ability to wriggle out of simulations. How does this change our approach to the new simulation serum?"
"It should suppress some, but not all, of the activity in the prefrontal cortex," the scientist with the round glasses says.
"Precisely," says Jeanine. She finally looks at me, her eyes gleaming with delight. "Then that is how we will proceed.
Did this satisfy my end of our agreement, Ms. Prior?"
My mouth is dry, so it's difficult to swallow.
And what happens if they suppress the activity in my prefrontal cortex—if they damage my ability to make decisions?
What if this serum works, and I become a slave to the simulations like everyone else? What if I forget reality entirely?
I did not know that my entire personality, my entire being, could be discarded as the byproduct of my anatomy. What if I really am just someone with a large prefrontal cortex … and nothing more?
"Yes," I say. "It did."
Tris' part is almost exactly like the book, so it belongs to Veronica Roth (as you know). Thanks for reviewing, Stuff (guest). It really is strange saying that. Anyways, I hope you liked the last chapter.
Please review! :)