hear; I'm listening to the thump of my heart. He taps the screen again, and the picture of my DNA disappears, so the screen is blank, just glass. He leaves, instructing us to visit his lab if we want more information, and Tris, Nita, and I stand in the room in silence.
"It's not that big a deal," Tris says firmly. "Okay?"
"You don't get to tell me it's not a big deal!" I say, louder than I mean to be.
Nita busies herself at the counter, making sure the containers there are lined up, though they haven't moved since we first came in.
"Yeah, I do!" Tris exclaims. "You're the same person you were five minutes ago and four months ago and eighteen years ago! This doesn't change anything about you."
I hear something in her words that's right, but it's hard to believe her right now.
"So you're telling me this affects nothing," I say. "The truth affects nothing."
"What truth?" she says. "These people tell you there's something wrong with your genes, and you just believe it?"
"It was right there." I gesture to the screen. "You saw it."
"I also see you," she says fiercely, her hand closing around my arm. "And I know who you are."
I shake my head. I still can't look at her, can't look at anything in particular. "I . . . need to take a walk. I'll see you later."
"Tobias, wait—"
I walk out, and some of the pressure inside me releases as soon as I'm not in that room anymore. I walk down the cramped hallway that presses against me like an exhale, and into the sunlit halls beyond it. The sky is bright blue now. I hear footsteps behind me, but they're too heavy to belong to Tris.
"Hey." Nita twists her foot, making it squeak against the tile. "No pressure, but I'd like to talk to you about all this . . . genetic-damage stuff. If you're interested, meet me here tonight at nine. And . . . no offense to your girl or anything, but you might not want to bring her."
"Why?" I say.
"She's a GP—genetically pure. So she can't understand that—well, it's hard to explain. Just trust me, okay? She's better off staying away for a little while."
"Okay."
"Okay." Nita nods. "Gotta go."
I watch her run back toward the gene therapy room, and then I keep walking. 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.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TRIS
I DON'T GO after him, because I don't know what to say.
When I found out I was Divergent, I thought of it as a secret power that no one else possessed, something that made me different, better, stronger. Now, after comparing my DNA to Tobias's on a computer screen, I realize that "Divergent" doesn't mean as much as I thought it did. It's just a word for a particular sequence in my DNA, like a word for all people with brown eyes or blond hair.
I lean my head into my hands. But these people still think it means something—they still think it means I'm healed in a way that Tobias is not. And they want me to just trust that, believe it.
Well, I don't. And I'm not sure why Tobias does—why he's so eager to believe that he is damaged.
I don't want to think about it anymore. I leave the gene therapy room just as Nita is walking back to it.
"What did you say to him?" I say.
She's pretty. Tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, her skin rich with
color.
"I just made sure he knew where he was going," she says. "It's a confusing place."
"It certainly is." I start toward— well, I don't know where I'm going, but it's away from Nita, the pretty girl who talks to my boyfriend when I'm not there. Then again, it's not like it was a long conversation.
I spot Zoe at the end of the hallway, and she waves me toward her. She looks more relaxed now than she did earlier this morning, her forehead smooth instead of creased, her hair loose over her shoulders. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jumpsuit.
"I just told the others," she says. "We've scheduled a plane ride in two hours for those who want to go. Are you up for it?"
Fear and excitement squirm together in my stomach, just like they did before I was strapped in on