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