Allegiant: Chapters 12–22

“The Dauntless serum gives hallucinated realities, Candor’s gives the truth, Amity’s gives peace, Erudite’s gives death—” At this, Tris visibly shudders, but Johanna continues as if it didn’t happen. “And Abnegation’s resets memory.”

The colors and shapes and words and pictures are so garish, so abundant, that they are mesmerizing.

Adapt. Adapt faster, adapt better, adapt to things that no man should have to. Like this: leaving a wholly formed world and discovering another one.

You will see a lot of things you don’t understand, but it may be best to get some preliminary explanations before you start asking me about them.

I also don’t understand the hunger in Tris’s eyes, devouring everything around us as if it alone can sustain her.

Everything I hear is muffled and distorted.

“She keeps saying things like they’re obvious when they are not, in fact, obvious.”

“She provided only as much information as you needed to meet the goals of our experiments,” says David. “And in many cases, that meant oversimplifying, omitting, and even outright falsehood.

There had been studies that indicated that violent tendencies could be partially traced to a person’s genes—a gene called ‘the murder gene’ was the first of these, but there were quite a few more, genetic predispositions toward cowardice, dishonesty, low intelligence—all the qualities, in other words, that ultimately contribute to a broken society.

Those things seem too nebulous to have a concrete location in a person’s body.

It takes several generations for any kind of genetic manipulation to manifest, but people were selected from the general population in large numbers, according to their backgrounds or behavior, and they were given the option to give a gift to our future generations, a genetic alteration that would make their descendants just a little bit better.

And he’s right to say that every faction loses something when it gains a virtue: the Dauntless, brave but cruel; the Erudite, intelligent but vain; the Amity, peaceful but passive; the Candor, honest but inconsiderate; the Abnegation, selfless but stifling.

The Purity War caused a level of destruction formerly unheard of on American soil, eliminating almost half of the country’s population.

Then I realize that the red lights were people—people, disappearing, their lights going out. I stare at the screen, unable to wrap my mind around such a substantial loss.

Your city is one of those experiments for genetic healing, and by far the most successful one, because of the behavioral modification portion.

We didn’t expect the leader of Erudite to start hunting them down—or for the Abnegation to even tell her what they were—and contrary to what Edith Prior said, we never really intended for you to send a Divergent army out to us.

I didn’t realize how much Cara had already cleaved to the idea of being an Allegiant, loyal to the faction system, loyal to our founders.

Tobias, they were watching us. Everything that happened, everything we did. They didn’t intervene, they just invaded our privacy.

His cryptic warnings, hissed between his teeth. I never realized he was warning me about cameras—it just never occurred to me before.

What if my parents’ God, their whole belief system, is just something concocted by a bunch of scientists to keep us under control?

“People can’t really be trusted to lie consistently.”

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?

This is not just a piece of Tris’s mother, recovered; it’s one of the first and last honest glimpses Tris will ever get of who Natalie Prior was.

“Usually I don’t advocate giving him anything,” I say. “But in this case ... this doesn’t really just belong to you.”

The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing.

The phrase “a little genetic test” strikes me as an oxymoron.

“I swear it’s just going to read your genes. That’s all it does. Nita can vouch for it.”

I add the aptitude test to a mental list of things that were once so important to me, cast aside because it was just a ruse to get these people the information or result they wanted.

I can’t believe that awareness during simulations, something that made me feel powerful and unique, something Jeanine and the Erudite killed people for, is actually just a sign of genetic healing to these people.

“As you can see, he has the right genetic components for simulation awareness, but he doesn’t have the same ‘healed’ genes that Tris does.”

I don’t know where I’m going, exactly, just that when I walk, the frenzy of information I’ve learned in the past day stops moving quite so fast, stops shouting quite so loud inside my head.

And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents’ God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel.

“I was interested in the legal precedent for giving consent on behalf of one’s descendants,” Caleb says. “I think it’s an extrapolation of giving consent for one’s children under eighteen, but it seems a little odd.”

The division is based on knowledge, based on qualifications—but as I learned from the factionless, a system that relies on a group of uneducated people to do its dirty work without giving them a way to rise is hardly fair.

Marcus is not wearing his mask, but Evelyn is wearing hers. She sounds so genuine she almost convinces me.

“The fact remains,” says Evelyn, almost sweetly, “that you have committed egregious crimes against this city.

I can only see their relationship from her eyes, and I’m not sure she’s the most accurate source of information about it.

“It’s a little rudimentary, but this book helped to teach me what it is to be human,” he says.

He makes the acquisition of knowledge feel like a secret, beautiful thing, and an ancient thing.

It’s not quite a lie, because the people in the Bureau do believe that healed genes will fix certain things, that if we integrate into the general population and pass our genes on, the world will be a better place.