“Hungry?” he says. He offers me a sandwich from the plate next to him.
I take it and sit down, leaning my head on his shoulder. All that’s left for us to do is wait, so that’s what we do. We eat until the food is gone. We sit until we get uncomfortable. Then we lie down next to each other on the floor, shoulders touching, staring at the same patch of white ceiling.
“What are you afraid of saying?” he says.
“Any of it. All of it. I don’t want to relive anything.”
He nods. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. There’s no clock in the room, so I can’t count down the minutes until the interrogation. Time might as well not exist in this place, except I feel it pressing against me as seven o’clock inevitably draws closer, pushing me into the floor tiles.
Maybe time would not feel as heavy if I didn’t have this guilt—the guilt of knowing the truth and stuffing it down where no one can see it, not even Tobias. Maybe I should not be so afraid of saying anything, because honesty will make me feel lighter.
I must fall asleep eventually, because I jerk awake at the sound of the door opening. A few Dauntless walk in as we get to our feet, and one of them says my name. Christina shoves her way past the others and throws her arms around me. Her fingers dig into the wound in my shoulder, and I cry out.
“Got shot,” I say. “Shoulder. Ow.”
“Oh God!” She releases me. “Sorry, Tris.”
She doesn’t look like the Christina I remember. Her hair is shorter, like a boy’s, and her skin is grayish instead of a warm brown. She smiles at me, but the smile doesn’t travel to her eyes, which still look tired. I try to smile back, but I’m too nervous. Christina will be there at my interrogation. She will hear what I did to Will. She will never forgive me.
Unless I fight the serum, swallow the truth—if I can.
But is that really what I want? To let it fester inside me forever?
“You okay? I heard you were here so I asked to escort you,” she says as we leave the holding room. “I know you didn’t do it. You’re not a traitor.”
“I’m fine,” I say. “And thank you. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m . . .” Her voice trails off, and she bites her lip. “Did anyone tell you . . . I mean, maybe now isn’t the time, but . . .”
“What? What is it?”
“Um . . . Will died in the attack,” she says.
She gives me a worried look, and an expectant one. Expecting what?
Oh. I am not supposed to know that Will is dead. I could pretend to be emotional, but I probably wouldn’t do it convincingly. It’s best to admit that I already knew. But I don’t know how to explain that without telling her everything.
I feel suddenly sick. Am I really evaluating how best to deceive my friend?
“I know,” I say. “I saw him on the monitors when I was in the control room. I’m sorry, Christina.”
“Oh.” She nods. “Well, I’m . . . glad you already knew. I really didn’t want to break the news to you in a hallway.”
A short laugh. A flash of a smile. Neither of them like they used to be.
We file into an elevator. I can feel Tobias staring at me—he knows I didn’t see Will in the monitors, and he didn’t know that Will was dead. I stare straight ahead and pretend his eyes aren’t setting me on fire.
“Don’t worry about the truth serum,” she says. “It’s easy. You barely know what’s happening when you’re under. It’s only when you resurface that you even know what you said. I went under when I was a kid. It’s pretty commonplace in Candor.”
The other Dauntless in the elevator give each other looks. In normal circumstances, someone would probably reprimand her for discussing her old faction, but these are not normal circumstances. At no other time in Christina’s life will she escort her best friend, now a suspected traitor, to a public interrogation.
“Is everyone else all right?” I say. “Uriah, Lynn, Marlene?”
“All here,” she says. “Except Uriah’s brother, Zeke, who is with the other Dauntless.”
“What?” Zeke, who secured my straps on the zip line, a traitor?
The elevator stops on the top floor, and the others file out.
“I know,” she says. “No one saw it coming.”
She takes my arm and tugs me toward the doors. We walk down a black-marble hallway—it must be easy to get lost in Candor headquarters, since everything looks the same. We walk down another hallway and through a set of double doors.
From the outside, the Merciless Mart is a squat block with a narrow raised portion in its center. From the inside, that raised portion is a hollow three-story room with empty spaces in the walls instead of windows. I see the darkening sky above me, starless.
Here the marble floors are white, with a black Candor symbol in the center of the room, and the walls are lit with rows of dim yellow lights, so the whole room glows. Every voice echoes.
Most of Candor and the remnants of Dauntless are already gathered. Some of them sit on the tiered benches that wrap around the edge of the room, but there isn’t enough space for everyone, so the rest are crowded around the Candor symbol. In the center of the symbol, between the unbalanced scales, are two empty chairs.
Tobias reaches for my hand. I lace my fingers in his.
Our Dauntless guards lead us to the center of the room, where we are greeted with, at best, murmurs, and at worst, jeers. I spot Jack Kang in the front row of the tiered benches.
An old, dark-skinned man steps forward, a black box in his hands.
“My name is Niles,” he says. “I will be your questioner. You—” He points at Tobias. “You will be going first. So if you will please step forward . . .”
Tobias squeezes my hand, and then releases it, and I stand with Christina at the edge of the Candor symbol. The air in the room is warm—moist, summer air, sunset air—but I feel cold.
Niles opens the black box. It contains two needles, one for Tobias and one for me. He also takes an antiseptic wipe from his pocket and offers it to Tobias. We didn’t bother with that kind of thing in Dauntless.
“The injection site is in your neck,” Niles says.
All I hear, as Tobias applies antiseptic to his skin, is the wind. Niles steps forward and plunges the needle into Tobias’s neck, squeezing the cloudy, bluish liquid into his veins. The last time I saw someone inject Tobias with something, it was Jeanine, putting him under a new simulation, one that was effective even on the Divergent—or so she believed. I thought, then, that he was lost to me forever.