Allegiant (Divergent #3)(33)

Nita pushes another door open with her shoulder, and we walk into a storage room. Dull metal drawers cover the walls, labeled with paper numbers, the ink worn off with time. In the center of the room is a lab table with a computer and a microscope, and a young man with slicked-back blond hair.

"Tobias, Tris, this is my friend Reggie," Nita says. "He's also a GD."

"Nice to meet you," Reggie says with a smile. He shakes Tris's hand, then mine, his grip firm.

"Let's show them the slides first," Nita says.

Reggie taps the computer screen and beckons us closer. "Not gonna bite."

Tris and I exchange a glance, then stand behind Reggie at the table to see the screen. Pictures start flashing on it, one after another. They're in grayscale and look grainy and distorted-they must be very old. It takes me only a few seconds to realize that they are photographs of suffering: narrow, pinched children with huge eyes, ditches full of bodies, huge mounds of burning papers.

The photographs move so fast, like book pages fluttering in the breeze, that I get only impressions of horrors. Then I turn my face away, unable to look any longer. I feel a deep silence grow inside me.

At first, when I look at Tris, her expression is like still water-like the images we just saw caused no ripples. But then her mouth quivers, and she presses her lips together to disguise it.

"Look at these weapons." Reggie brings up a photograph with a man in uniform holding a gun and points. "That kind of gun is incredibly old. The guns used in the Purity War were much more advanced. Even the Bureau would agree with that. It's gotta be from a really old conflict. Which must have been waged by genetically pure people, since genetic manipulation didn't exist back then."

"How do you hide a war?" I say.

"People are isolated, starving," Nita says quietly. "They know only what they're taught, they see only the information that's made available to them. And who controls all that? The government."

"Okay." Tris's head bobs, and she's talking too fast, nervous. "So they're lying about your-our history. That doesn't mean they're the enemy, it just means they're a group of grossly misinformed people trying to . . . better the world. In an ill-advised way."

Nita and Reggie glance at each other.


 

 

 

"That's the thing," Nita says. "They're hurting people."

She puts her hand on the counter and leans into it, leans toward us, and again I see the revolutionary building strength inside her, taking over the parts of her that are young woman and GD and laboratory worker.

"When the Abnegation wanted to reveal the great truth of their world sooner than they were supposed to," she says slowly, "and Jeanine wanted to stifle them . . . the Bureau was all too happy to provide her with an incredibly advanced simulation serum-the attack simulation that enslaved the minds of the Dauntless, that resulted in the destruction of Abnegation."

I take a moment to let that sink in.

"That can't be true," I say. "Jeanine told me that the highest proportion of Divergent-the genetically pure-in any faction was in Abnegation. You just said the Bureau values the genetically pure enough to send someone in to save them; why would they help Jeanine kill them?"

"Jeanine was wrong," Tris says distantly. "Evelyn said so. The highest proportion of Divergent was among the factionless, not Abnegation."

I turn to Nita.

"I still don't see why they would risk that many Divergent," I say. "I need evidence."

"Why do you think we came here?" Nita switches on another set of lights that illuminate the drawers, and paces along the left wall. "It took me a long time to get clearance to go in here," she says. "Even longer to acquire the knowledge to understand what I saw. I had help from one of the GPs, actually. A sympathizer."

Her hand hovers over one of the low drawers. From it she takes a vial of orange liquid.

"Look familiar?" she asks me.

I try to remember the shot they gave me before the attack simulation began, right before the final round of Tris's initiation. Max did it, inserted the needle into the side of my neck as I had done myself dozens of times. Right before he did the glass vial caught the light, and it was orange, just like whatever Nita is holding.

"The colors match," I say. "So?"

Nita carries the vial to the microscope. Reggie takes a slide from a tray near the computer and, using a dropper, puts two drops of the orange liquid in its center, then seals the liquid in place with a second slide. As he places it on the microscope, his fingers are careful but certain; they are the movements of someone who has performed the same action hundreds of times.

Reggie taps the computer screen a few times, opening a program called "MicroScan."

"This information is free and available to anyone who knows how to use this equipment and has the system password, which the GP sympathizer graciously gave me," Nita says. "So in other words, it's not all that hard to access, but no one would think to examine it very closely. And GDs don't have system passwords, so it's not like we would have known about it. This storage room is for obsolete experiments-failures, or outdated developments, or useless things." 

She looks through the microscope, using a knob on the side to focus the lens.

"Go ahead," she says.

Reggie presses a button on the computer, and paragraphs of text appear under the "MicroScan" bar at the top of the screen. He points to a paragraph in the middle of the page, and I read it.

"'Simulation Serum v4.2. Coordinates a large number of targets. Transmits signals over long distances. Hallucinogen from original formula not included-simulated reality is predetermined by program master.'"

That's it.

That's the attack simulation serum.

"Now why would the Bureau have this unless they had developed it?" Nita says. "They were the ones who put the serums into the experiments, but they usually left the serums alone, let the city residents develop them further. If Jeanine was the one who developed it, they wouldn't have stolen it from her. If it's here, it's because they made it."

I stare at the illuminated slide in the microscope, at the orange droplet swimming in the eyepiece, and release a shaky breath.

Tris says, breathless, "Why?"

"Abnegation was about to reveal the truth to everyone inside the city. And you've seen what's happened now that the city knows the truth: Evelyn is effectively a dictator, the factionless are squashing the faction members, and I'm sure the factions will rise up against them sooner or later. Many people will die. Telling the truth risks the safety of the experiment, no question," Nita says. "So a few months ago, when the Abnegation were on the verge of causing that destruction and instability by revealing Edith Prior's video to your city, the Bureau probably thought, better that the Abnegation should suffer a great loss-even at the expense of several Divergent-than the whole city suffer a great loss. Better to end the lives of the Abnegation than to risk the experiment. So they reached out to someone who they knew would agree with them. Jeanine Matthews."

Her words surround me and bury themselves inside me.

I set my hands on the lab table, letting it cool my palms, and look at my distorted reflection in the brushed metal. I may have hated my father for most of my life, but I never hated his faction. Abnegation's quiet, their community, their routine, always seemed good to me. And now most of those kind, giving people are dead. Murdered, at the hands of the Dauntless, at the urging of Jeanine, with the power of the Bureau to back her.

Tris's mother and father were among them.

Tris stands so still, her hands dangling limply, turning red with the flush of her blood.

"This is the problem with their blind commitment to these experiments," Nita says next to us, as if sliding the words into the empty spaces of our minds. "The Bureau values the experiments above GD lives. It's obvious. And now, things could get even worse."

"Worse?" I say. "Worse than killing most of the Abnegation? How?"

"The government has been threatening to shut down the experiments for almost a year now," Nita says. "The experiments keep falling apart because the communities can't live in peace, and David keeps finding ways to restore peace just in the nick of time. And if anything else goes wrong in Chicago, he can do it again. He can reset all the experiments at any time."

"Reset them," I say.

"With the Abnegation memory serum," Reggie says. "Well, really, it's the Bureau's memory serum. Every man, woman, and child will have to begin again."


 

 

 

Nita says tersely, "Their entire lives erased, against their will, for the sake of solving a genetic damage 'problem' that doesn't actually exist. These people have the power to do that. And no one should have that power."

I remember the thought I had, after Johanna told me about the Amity administering the memory serum to Dauntless patrols-that when you take a person's memories, you change who they are.

Suddenly I don't care what Nita's plan is, as long as it means striking the Bureau as hard as we can. What I have learned in the past few days has made me feel like there is nothing about this place worth salvaging.

"What's the plan?" says Tris, her voice flat, almost mechanical.