Chicago. It's so strange to have a name for the place that was always just home to me. It makes the city smaller in my mind.
"So you guys have been doing this for a long time," I say.
"Quite some time, yes. The Bureau is different from most government agencies, because of the focused nature of our work and our contained, relatively remote location. We pass on knowledge and purpose to our children, instead of relying on appointments or hiring. I've been training for what I'm doing now for my entire life."
Through the abundant windows I see a strange vehicle-it's shaped like a bird, with two wing structures and a pointed nose, but it has wheels, like a car.
"Is that for air travel?" I say, pointing at it.
"Yes." She smiles. "It's an airplane. We might be able to take you up in one sometime, if it doesn't seem too daunting for you."
I don't react to the play on words. I can't quite forget how she recognized me on sight.
David is standing near one of the doors up ahead. He raises his hand in a wave when he sees us.
"Hello, Tris," he says. "Thank you for bringing her, Zoe."
"You're welcome, sir," Zoe says. "I'll leave you to it, then. Lots of work to do."
She smiles at me, then walks away. I don't want her to leave-now that she's gone, I'm left with David and the memory of how I yelled at him yesterday. He doesn't say anything about it, just scans his badge in the door sensor to open it.
The room beyond it is an office with no windows. A young man, maybe Tobias's age, sits at one desk, and another one, across the room, is empty. The young man looks up when we come in, taps something on his computer screen, and stands.
"Hello, sir," he says. "Can I help you?"
"Matthew. Where's your supervisor?" David says.
"He's foraging for food in the cafeteria," Matthew says.
"Well, maybe you can help me, then. I'll need Natalie Wright's file loaded on a portable screen. Can you do that?"
Wright? I think. Was that my mother's real last name?
"Of course," Matthew says, and he sits again. He types something on his computer and pulls up a series of documents that I'm not close enough to see clearly. "Okay, it just has to transfer.
"You must be Natalie's daughter, Beatrice." He props his chin on his hand and looks at me critically. His eyes are so dark they look black, and they slant a little at the edges. He does not look impressed or surprised to see me. "You don't look much like her."
"Tris," I say automatically. But I find it comforting that he doesn't know my nickname-that must mean he doesn't spend all his time staring at the screens like our lives in the city are entertainment. "And yeah, I know."
David pulls a chair over, letting it screech on the tile, and pats it.
"Sit. I'll give you a screen with all Natalie's files on it so that you and your brother can read them yourselves, but while they're loading I might as well tell you the story."
I sit on the edge of the chair, and he sits behind the desk of Matthew's supervisor, turning a half-empty coffee cup in circles on the metal.
"Let me start by saying that your mother was a fantastic discovery. We located her almost by accident inside the damaged world, and her genes were nearly perfect." David beams. "We took her out of a bad situation and brought her here. She spent several years here, but then we encountered a crisis within your city's walls, and she volunteered to be placed inside to resolve it. I'm sure you know all about that, though."
For a few seconds all I can do is blink at him. My mother came from outside this place? Where?
It hits me, again, that she walked these halls, watched the city on the screens in the control room. Had she sat in this chair? Had her feet touched these tiles? Suddenly I feel like there are invisible marks of my mother everywhere, on every wall and doorknob and pillar.
I grip the edge of the seat and try to organize my thoughts enough to ask a question.
"No, I don't know," I say. "What crisis?"
"The Erudite representative had just begun to kill the Divergent, of course," he says. "His name was Nor-Norman?"
"Norton," says Matthew. "Jeanine's predecessor. Seems he passed on the idea of killing off the Divergent to her, right before his heart attack."
"Thank you. Anyway, we sent Natalie in to investigate the situation and to stop the deaths. We never dreamed she would be in there for so long, of course, but she was useful-we had never thought about having an insider before, and she was able to do many things that were invaluable to us. As well as building a life for herself, which obviously includes you."
I frown. "But the Divergent were still being killed when I was an initiate."
"You only know about the ones who died," David says. "Not about the ones who didn't die. Some of them are here, in this compound. I believe you met Amar earlier? He's one of them. Some of the rescued Divergent needed some distance from your experiment-it was too hard for them to watch the people they had once known and loved going about their lives, so they were trained to integrate into life outside the Bureau. But yes, she did important work, your mother."
She also told quite a few lies, and very few truths. I wonder if my father knew who she was, where she was really from. He was an Abnegation leader, after all, and as such, one of the keepers of the truth. I have a sudden, horrifying thought: What if she only married him because she was supposed to, as part of her mission in the city? What if their entire relationship was a sham?
"So she wasn't really born Dauntless," I say as I sort through the lies that must have been.
"When she first entered the city, it was as a Dauntless, because she already had tattoos and that would have been hard to explain to the natives. She was sixteen, but we said she was fifteen so she would have some time to adjust. Our intention was for her to . . ." He lifts a shoulder. "Well, you should read her file. I can't do a sixteen-year-old perspective justice."
As if on cue, Matthew opens a desk drawer and takes out a small, flat piece of glass. He taps it with one fingertip, and an image appears on it. It's one of the documents he just had open on his computer. He offers the tablet to me. It's sturdier than I expected it to be, hard and strong.
"Don't worry, it's practically indestructible," David says. "I'm sure you want to return to your friends. Matthew, would you please walk Miss Prior back to the hotel? I have some things to take care of."
"And I don't?" Matthew says. Then he winks. "Kidding, sir. I'll take her."
"Thank you," I say to David, before he walks out.
"Of course," he says. "Let me know if you have any questions."
"Ready?" Matthew says.
He's tall, maybe the same height as Caleb, and his black hair is artfully tousled in the front, like he spent a lot of time making it look like he'd just rolled out of bed that way. Under his dark blue uniform he wears a plain black T-shirt and a black string around his throat. It shifts over his Adam's apple when he swallows.
I walk with him out of the small office and down the hallway again. The crowd that was here before has thinned. They must have settled in to work, or breakfast. There are whole lives being lived in this place, sleeping and eating and working, bearing children and raising families and dying. This is a place my mother called home, once.
"I wonder when you're going to freak out," he says. "After finding out all this stuff at once."
"I'm not going to freak out," I say, feeling defensive. I already did, I think, but I'm not going to admit to that.
Matthew shrugs. "I would. But fair enough."
I see a sign that says HOTEL ENTRANCE up ahead. I clutch the screen to my chest, eager to get back to the dormitory and tell Tobias about my mother.
"Listen, one of the things my supervisor and I do is genetic testing," Matthew says. "I was wondering if you and that other guy-Marcus Eaton's son?-would mind coming in so that I can test your genes."
"Why?"
"Curiosity." He shrugs. "We haven't gotten to test the genes of someone in such a late generation of the experiment before, and you and Tobias seem to be somewhat . . . odd, in your manifestations of certain things."
I raise my eyebrows.
"You, for example, have displayed extraordinary serum resistance-most of the Divergent aren't as capable of resisting serums as you are," Matthew says. "And Tobias can resist simulations, but he doesn't display some of the characteristics we've come to expect of the Divergent. I can explain in more detail later."
I hesitate, not sure if I want to see my genes, or Tobias's genes, or to compare them, like it matters. But Matthew's expression seems eager, almost childlike, and I understand curiosity.
"I'll ask him if he's up for it," I say. "But I would be willing. When?"
"This morning okay?" he says. "I can come get you in an hour or so. You can't get into the labs without me anyway."
I nod. I feel excited, suddenly, to learn more about my genes, which feels like the same thing as reading my mother's journal: I will get pieces of her back.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
TOBIAS
IT'S STRANGE TO see people you don't know well in the morning, with sleepy eyes and pillow creases in their cheeks; to know that Christina is cheerful in the morning, and Peter wakes up with his hair perfectly flat, but Cara communicates only through a series of grunts, inching her way, limb by limb, toward coffee.