of the corners of his eyes when he smiles, taking the dimple from his cheek.
"I was thinking we should give her a gun," Amar says. He glances at me. "We don't normally give potential future council members weapons, because they have no clue how to use them, but it's pretty clear that you do."
"It's really all right," I say. "I don't need—"
"No, you're probably a better shot than most of them," George says. "We could use another Dauntless on board with us. Let me go get one."
A few minutes later I am armed and walking with Amar to the truck. He and I get in the far back, George and a woman named Ann get in the middle, and two older security officers named Jack and Violet get in the front. The back of the truck is covered with a hard black material. The back doors look opaque and black from the outside, but from the inside they're transparent, so we can see where we're going. I am nestled between Amar and stacks of equipment that block our view of the front of the truck. George peers over the equipment and grins when the truck starts, but other than that, it's just Amar and me.
I watch the compound disappear behind us. We drive through the gardens and outbuildings that surround it, and peeking out from behind the edge of the compound are the airplanes, white and stationary. We reach the fence, and the gates open for us. I hear Jack speaking to the soldier at the outer fence, telling him our plans and the contents of the vehicle —a series of words I don't understand —before we can be released into the
wild.
I ask, "What's the purpose of this patrol? Beyond showing me how things work, I mean."
"We've always kept an eye on the fringe, which is the nearest genetically damaged area outside the compound. Mostly just research, studying how the genetically damaged behave," Amar says. "But after the attack, David and the council decided we needed more extensive surveillance set up there so we can prevent an attack from happening again."
We drive past the same kind of ruins I saw when we left the city—the buildings collapsing under their own weight, and the plants roaming wild over the land, breaking through concrete.
I don't know Amar, and I don't exactly trust him, but I have to ask:
"So you believe it all? All the stuff about genetic damage being the cause of . . . this?"
All his old friends in the experiment were GDs. Can he possibly believe that they're damaged, that there's something wrong with them?
"You don't?" Amar says. "The way I see it, the earth has been around for a long, long time. Longer than we can imagine. And before the Purity War, no one had ever done this, right?" He waves his hand to indicate the world outside.
"I don't know," I say. "I find it hard to believe that they didn't."
"Such a grim view of human nature you have," he says.
I don't respond.
He continues, "Anyway, if something like that had happened in our history, the Bureau would know about it."
That strikes me as naive, for someone who once lived in my city and saw, at least on the screens, how many secrets we kept from one another. Evelyn tried to control people by controlling weapons, but Jeanine was more ambitious—she knew that when you control information, or manipulate it, you don't need force to keep people under your thumb. They stay there willingly.
That is what the Bureau—and the entire government, probably—is doing: conditioning people to be happy under its thumb.
We ride in silence for a while, with just the sound of jiggling equipment and the engine to accompany us. At first I look at every building we pass, wondering what it once housed, and then they start to blend together for me. How many different kinds of ruin do you have to see before you resign yourself to calling it all "ruin"?
"We're almost at the fringe," George calls from the middle of the truck. "We're going to stop here and advance on foot. Everyone take some equipment and set it up—except Amar, who should just look after Tris. Tris, you're welcome to get out and have a look, but stay with Amar."
I feel like all my nerves are too close to the surface, and the slightest touch will make them fire. The fringe is where my mother retreated after witnessing a murder—it is where the Bureau found her and