"What else do you call someone who repeatedly goes through his own fear landscape?"
"I don't know . . . determined." I pause. "Brave."
"Yeah, sure. But also a little bit crazy, right? I mean, most Dauntless would rather leap into the chasm than keep going through their fear landscapes. There's bravery and then there's masochism, and the line got a little hazy with him."
"I'm familiar with the line," I say.
"I know." Amar grins. "Anyway, all I'm saying is, any time you mash two different people against each other, you'll get problems, but I can see that what you guys have is worthwhile, that's all."
I wrinkle my nose. "Mash people against each other, really?"
Amar presses his palms together and twists them back and forth, to illustrate. I laugh, but I can't ignore the achy feeling in my chest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
TOBIAS
I WALK TO the cluster of chairs closest to the windows in the control room and bring up the footage from different cameras throughout the city, one by one, searching for my parents. I find Evelyn first—she is in the lobby of Erudite headquarters, talking in a close huddle with Therese and a factionless man, her second and third in command now that I am gone. I turn up the volume on the microphone, but I still can't hear anything but muttering.
Through the windows along the back of the control room, I see the same empty night sky as the one above the city, interrupted only by small blue and red lights marking the runways for airplanes. It's strange to think we have that in common when everything else is so different here.
By now the people in the control room know that I was the one who disabled the security system the night before the attack, though I wasn't the one who slipped one of their night shift workers peace serum so that I could do it—that was Nita. But for the most part, they ignore me, as long as I stay away from their desks.
On another screen, I scroll through the footage again, looking for Marcus or Johanna, anything that can show me what's happening with the Allegiant. Every part of the city shows up on the screen, the bridge near the Merciless Mart and the Pire and the main thoroughfare of the Abnegation sector, the Hub and the Ferris wheel and the Amity fields, now worked by all the factions. But none of the cameras shows me anything.
"You've been coming here a lot," Cara says as she approaches. "Are you afraid of the rest of the compound? Or of
something else?"
She's right, I have been coming to the control room a lot. It's just something to pass the time as I wait for my sentence from Tris, as I wait for our plan to strike the Bureau to come together, as I wait for something, anything.
"No," I say. "I'm just keeping an eye on my parents."
"The parents you hate?" She stands next to me, her arms folded. "Yes, I can see why you would want to spend every waking hour staring at people you want nothing to do with. It makes perfect sense."
"They're dangerous," I say. "More dangerous because no one else knows how dangerous they are but me."
"And what are you going to do from here, if they do something terrible? Send a smoke signal?"
I glare at her.
"Fine, fine." She puts up her hands in surrender. "I'm just trying to remind you that you aren't in their world anymore, you're in this one. That's all."
"Point taken."
I never thought of the Erudite as being particularly perceptive about relationships, or emotions, but Cara's discerning eyes see all kinds of things. My fear. My search for a distraction in my past. It's almost alarming.
I scroll past one of the camera angles and then pause, and scroll back. The scene is dark, because of the hour, but I see people alighting like a flock of birds around a building I don't recognize, their movements synchronized.
"They're doing it," Cara says, excited. "The Allegiant are actually attacking."
"Hey!" I shout to one of the women at the control room desks. The older one, who always gives me a nasty look when I show up, lifts her head. "Camera twenty-four! Hurry!"
She taps her screen, and everyone milling around the surveillance area gathers around her. People passing by in the hallway stop to see what's happening, and I turn to Cara.