No. I will not do that; I will not think of him.
“How did you know about this place?” Caleb says. “Did Mom find you?”
I nod. I don’t want to think about Mom, either.
“My shoulder,” I say.
Now that I am safe, the adrenaline that propelled me here is fading, and the pain is getting worse. I sink to my knees. Water drips from my clothes onto the cement floor. A sob rises within me, desperate for release, and I choke it back.
A woman named Tessa who lived down the street from us rolls out a pallet. She was married to a council member, but I don’t see him here. He is probably dead.
Someone else carries a lamp from one corner to the other so we have light. Caleb produces a first-aid kit, and Susan brings me a bottle of water. There is no better place to need help than a room full of members of Abnegation. I glance at Caleb. He’s wearing gray again. Seeing him in the Erudite compound feels like a dream now.
My father comes to me, lifts my arm across his shoulders, and helps me across the room.
“Why are you wet?” Caleb says.
“They tried to drown me,” I say. “Why are you here?”
“I did what you said—what Mom said. I researched the simulation serum and found out that Jeanine was working to develop long-range transmitters for the serum so its signal could stretch farther, which led me to information about Erudite and Dauntless…anyway, I dropped out of initiation when I figured out what was happening. I would have warned you, but it was too late,” he says. “I’m factionless now.”
“No, you aren’t,” my father says sternly. “You’re with us.”
I kneel on the pallet and Caleb cuts a piece of my shirt away from my shoulder with a pair of medical scissors. Caleb peels the square of fabric away, revealing first the Abnegation tattoo on my right shoulder and second, the three birds on my collarbone. Caleb and my father stare at both tattoos with the same look of fascination and shock but say nothing about them.
I lie on my stomach. Caleb squeezes my palm as my father gets the antiseptic from the first aid kit.
“Have you ever taken a bullet out of someone before?” I ask, a shaky laugh in my voice.
“The things I know how to do might surprise you,” he replies.
A lot of things about my parents might surprise me. I think of Mom’s tattoo and bite my lip.
“This will hurt,” he says.
I don’t see the knife go in, but I feel it. Pain spreads through my body and I scream through gritted teeth, crushing Caleb’s hand. Over the screaming, I hear my father ask me to relax my back. Tears run from the corners of my eyes and I do as he tells me. The pain starts again, and I feel the knife moving under my skin, and I am still screaming.
“Got it,” he says. He drops something on the floor with a ding.
Caleb looks at my father and then at me, and then he laughs. I haven’t heard him laugh in so long that the sound makes me cry.
“What’s so funny?” I say, sniffling.
“I never thought I would see us together again,” he says.
My father cleans the skin around my wound with something cold. “Stitching time,” he says.
I nod. He threads the needle like he’s done it a thousand times.
“One,” he says, “two…three.”
I clench my jaw and stay quiet this time. Of all the pain I have suffered today—the pain of getting shot and almost drowning and taking the bullet out again, the pain of finding and losing my mother and Tobias, this is the easiest to bear.
My father finishes stitching my wound, ties off the thread, and covers the stitches with a bandage. Caleb helps me sit up and separates the hems of his two shirts, pulling the long-sleeved one over his head and offering it to me.
My father helps me guide my right arm through the shirt sleeve, and I pull the rest over my head. It is baggy and smells fresh, smells like Caleb.
“So,” my father says quietly. “Where is your mother?”
I look down. I don’t want to deliver this news. I don’t want to have this news to begin with.
“She’s gone,” I say. “She saved me.”
Caleb closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
My father looks momentarily stricken and then recovers himself, averting his glistening eyes and nodding.
“That is good,” he says, sounding strained. “A good death.”
If I speak right now, I will break down, and I can’t afford to do that. So I just nod.
Eric called Al’s suicide brave, and he was wrong. My mother’s death was brave. I remember how calm she was, how determined. It isn’t just brave that she died for me; it is brave that she did it without announcing it, without hesitation, and without appearing to consider another option.
He helps me to my feet. Time to face the rest of the room. My mother told me to save them. Because of that, and because I am Dauntless, it’s my duty to lead now. I have no idea how to bear that burden.
Marcus gets up. A vision of him whipping my arm with a belt rushes into my mind when I see him, and my chest squeezes.
“We are only safe here for so long,” Marcus says eventually. “We need to get out of the city. Our best option is to go to the Amity compound in the hope that they’ll take us in. Do you know anything about the Dauntless strategy, Beatrice? Will they stop fighting at night?”
“It’s not Dauntless strategy,” I say. “This whole thing is masterminded by the Erudite. And it’s not like they’re giving orders.”
“Not giving orders,” my father says. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I say, “ninety percent of the Dauntless are sleepwalking right now. They’re in a simulation and they don’t know what they’re doing. The only reason I’m not just like them is that I’m…” I hesitate on the word. “The mind control doesn’t affect me.”
“Mind control? So they don’t know that they’re killing people right now?” my father asks me, his eyes wide.
“No.”
“That’s…awful.” Marcus shakes his head. His sympathetic tone sounds manufactured to me. “Waking up and realizing what you’ve done…”
The room goes quiet, probably as all the Abnegation imagine themselves in the place of the Dauntless soldiers, and that’s when it occurs to me.
“We have to wake them up,” I say.
“What?” Marcus says.
“If we wake the Dauntless up, they will probably revolt when they realize what’s going on,” I explain. “The Erudite won’t have an army. The Abnegation will stop dying. This will be over.”