mostly keep the sound off, though. Hard to listen to that much chatter all day."
I nod. "What is that she's touching?"
"Some kind of sculpture, I don't know." The woman shrugs. "She stares at it a lot, though."
I recognize it from somewhere— from Tobias's room, where I slept after my almost-execution in Erudite headquarters. It's made of blue glass, an abstract shape that looks like falling water frozen in time.
I touch my fingertips to my chin as I search my memory. He told me that Evelyn gave it to him when he was young, and instructed him to hide it from his father, who wouldn't approve of a useless-but-beautiful object, Abnegation that he was. I didn't think much of it at the time, but it must mean something to her, if she carried it all the way from the Abnegation sector to Erudite headquarters to keep on her bedside table. Maybe it was her way of rebelling against the faction system.
On the screen, Evelyn balances her chin on her hand and stares at the sculpture for a moment. Then she gets up and shakes out her hands and leaves the room.
No, I don't think the sculpture is a sign of rebellion. I think it's just a reminder of Tobias. Somehow I never realized that when Tobias charged out of the city with me, he wasn't just a rebel defying his leader—he was a son abandoning his mother. And she is grieving over it.
Is he?
Fraught with difficulty as their relationship has been, those ties never really break. They can't possibly.
Zoe touches my shoulder. "You wanted to ask me something?"
I nod and turn away from the screens. Zoe was young in the photograph where she stood next to my mother, but she was still there, so I figure she must know something. I would have asked David, but as the leader of the Bureau, he is difficult to find.
"I wanted to know about my parents," I say. "I'm reading her journal, and I guess I'm having a hard time figuring out how they even met, or why they joined Abnegation together."
Zoe nods slowly. "I'll tell you what I know. Mind walking with me to the labs? I need to leave a message with Matthew."
She holds her hands behind her back, resting them at the bottom of her spine. I am still holding the screen David gave me. It's marked all over with my fingerprints, and warm from my constant touch. I understand why Evelyn keeps touching that sculpture—it's the last piece of her son she has, just like this is the last piece of my mother that I have. I feel closer to her when it's with me.
I think that's why I can't give it to Caleb, even though he has a right to see it. I'm not sure I can let go of it yet.
"They met in a class," Zoe says. "Your father, though a very smart man, never quite got the knack of psychology, and the teacher—an Erudite, unsurprisingly—was very hard on him for it. So your mother offered to help him after school, and he told his parents he was doing some kind of school project. They did this for several weeks, and then started to meet in secret—I think one of their favorite places was the fountain south of Millennium Park. Buckingham Fountain? Right by the
marsh?"
I imagine my mother and father sitting beside a fountain, under the spray of water, their feet skimming the concrete bottom. I know the fountain Zoe is referring to hasn't been operational for a long time, so the spraying water was never there, but the picture is prettier that way.
"The Choosing Ceremony was approaching, and your father was eager to leave Erudite because he saw something terrible—"
"What? What did he see?"
"Well, your father was a good friend of Jeanine Matthews," says Zoe. "He saw her performing an experiment on a factionless man in exchange for something—food, or clothing, something like that. Anyway, she was testing the fear-inducing serum that was later incorporated into Dauntless initiation— long ago, the fear simulations weren't generated by a person's individual fears, you see, just general fears like heights or spiders or something—and Norton, then the representative of Erudite, was there, letting it go on for far longer than it should have. The factionless man was never quite right again. And that was the last straw for your father."
She pauses in front of the door to the labs to open it with her ID badge. We walk into the