together, like a faction .
I don’t know what I expected of them, but I am surprised by how normal they seem. They don’t fight one another or avoid one another. Some of them tell jokes, others speak to each other quietly. Gradually, though, they all seem to realize that we aren’t supposed to be there.
“Come on,” Edward says, bending his finger to beckon us toward him. “She’s back here.”
Stares and silence greet us as we follow Edward deeper into the building that is supposed to be abandoned. Finally I can’t contain my questions any longer.
“What’s going on here? Why are you all together like this?”
“You thought they—we—were all split up,” Edward says over his shoulder. “Well, they were, for a while. Too hungry to do much of anything except look for food. But then the Stiffs started giving them food, clothes, tools, everything. And they got stronger, and waited. They were like that when I found them, and they welcomed me.”
We walk into a dark hallway. I feel at home, in the dark and the quiet that are like the tunnels in Dauntless headquarters. Tobias, however, winds a loose thread from his shirt around his finger, backward and forward, over and over. He knows who we’re meeting, but I still have no idea. How is it I know this little about the boy who says he loves me—the boy whose real name is powerful enough to keep us alive in a train car full of enemies?
Edward stops at a metal door and pounds on it with his fist.
“Wait, you said they were waiting?” says Caleb. “What were they waiting for , exactly?”
“For the world to fall apart,” Edward says. “And now it has.”
The door opens, and a severe-looking woman with a lazy eye stands in the doorway. Her steady eye scans the four of us.
“Strays?” she says.
“Not hardly, Therese.” He jabs his thumb over his shoulder, at Tobias. “This one’s Tobias Eaton.”
Therese stares at Tobias for a few seconds, then nods. “He certainly is. Hold on.”
She shuts the door again. Tobias swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“You know who she’s going to get, don’t you,” says Caleb to Tobias.
“Caleb,” Tobias says. “Please shut up.”
To my surprise, my brother suppresses his Erudite curiosity.
The door opens again, and Therese steps back to let us in. We walk into an old boiler room with machinery that emerges from the darkness so suddenly I hit it with my knees and elbows. Therese leads us through the maze of metal to the back of the room, where several bulbs dangle from the ceiling over a table.
A middle-aged woman stands behind the table. She has curly black hair and olive skin. Her features are stern, so angular they almost make her unattractive, but not quite.
Tobias clutches my hand. At that moment I realize that he and the woman have the same nose—hooked, a little too big on her face but the right size on his. They also have the same strong jaw, distinct chin, spare upper lip, stick-out ears. Only her eyes are different—instead of blue, they are so dark they look black.
“Evelyn,” he says, his voice shaking a little.
Evelyn was the name of Marcus’s wife and Tobias’s mother. My grip on Tobias’s hand loosens. Just days ago I was remembering her funeral. Her funeral . And now she stands in front of me, her eyes colder than the eyes of any Abnegation woman I’ve ever seen.
“Hello.” She walks around the table, surveying him. “You look older.”
“Yes, well. The passage of time tends to do that to a person.”
He already knew she was alive. How long ago did he find out?
She smiles. “So you’ve finally come—”
“Not for the reason you think,” he interrupts her. “We were running from Erudite, and the only chance of escape we had required me to tell your poorly armed lackeys my name.”
She must have made him angry somehow. But I can’t help but think that if I discovered my mother was alive after thinking she was dead for so long, I would never speak to her