Insurgent: Chapters 38–47

There is a part of me that is shouting, too—clamoring for the destruction of every single Erudite and all that they hold dear.

If I participate in the attack, I can’t go after the information Jeanine stole from Abnegation.

Trusting Marcus is stupid. Trying to get past the Dauntless at the fence is stupid. Going against the Dauntless and factionless is stupid. All three combined is ... a different kind of stupid formerly unheard of by humankind.

The words start to spill out, without finesse or sophistication.

I explain that the Dauntless have allied with the factionless, and they plan to destroy all of Erudite, leaving us without one of the two essential factions.

“I also wanted to ask you if we can talk to the Erudite you’re keeping safe here,” I say. “I know they’re hidden, but I need access to them.”

They must be protected from needless slaughter, if not because they are human beings, then because we cannot survive without them.

“The fact is,” Cara continues, “the data network exists, and that is ethically questionable, but I believe it can work to our advantage here.

“We risked our lives by defecting from our faction,” says Cara, “and we will risk them again to save our faction from itself.”

“They’re just prototypes,” Fernando says, “so there’s no need to scrutinize them.”

He never told me that they could be funny, or that they could critique their own faction from the inside.

In the midst of meeting new people and making plans, I forgot that my plan is to walk straight into a battle that could claim my life.

Jeanine can be extraordinarily persuasive to those who aren’t naturally suspicious.

“Insurgent,” he says. “Noun. A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as a belligerent.”

“Sometimes personality has nothing to do with a person’s choice of faction,” I say, thinking of my mother. She left Dauntless not because she was ill-suited for it but because it was safer to be Divergent in Abnegation. And then there’s Tobias, who switched to Dauntless to escape his father. “There are many factors to consider.”

Whatever the Abnegation were about to show everyone before the attack, it was enough to make Jeanine take drastic and terrible measures to stop them.

Cara mutters something about crazy Dauntless stunts, but runs after me, and Fernando, Marcus, and Christina follow.

“My apologies,” I say. I try to adopt the formal speech common to the Erudite.

You are so unwilling to relinquish your comfort that your selfishness drains you of humanity!

I don’t care that he hurt Caleb—I would have done it, too—but that he is simultaneously a man who knows how to hurt people and a man who parades around as the self-effacing leader of Abnegation, suddenly makes me so angry I can’t see straight.

I assume you know a few ways to coerce her into doing what you want. She is not, after all, accustomed to pain,” he says.

But going on alone is its own burden.

And how can I be a better fighter than myself, if she knows the same strategies I know, and is exactly as resourceful and clever as I am?

But even in a simulation, there is no way she is as desperate as I am.

The most sensitive information that exists and it’s hidden on that computer, Tori!

All the risks I took to get here—conspiring with Marcus, asking the Erudite for help, crawling across a ladder three stories up, shooting myself in a simulation—and all the sacrifices I made—my relationship with Tobias, Fernando’s life, my standing among the Dauntless—were for nothing.

Tobias is stubborn and proud, but he is mine—maybe he will listen, maybe there’s a chance that all I did was not in vain

I have to pause and take a breath, because I have not convinced him; I have failed, and this is probably the last thing they will let me say before they arrest me.

“So you must have lied when you told me all those things ... you must have, because I can’t believe your love is really that feeble.”

For the first time the Dauntless’s disregard for age does not seem like an opportunity.

“Someone needs to be able to shoot potential belligerents, and you can’t do it if you’re keeping her from falling down the stairs.”

“If the laboratory recognizes people, maybe it also knows data about everyone, and can present a corresponding simulated environment depending on your faction.”

You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts.

And even she was more complicated than I thought, keeping a secret that she thought was too terrible to reveal, out of a heinously twisted protective instinct.

Tell them that a new political system will soon be formed that will exclude them from representation.

“Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.”

“The faction system that has long supported itself on the backs of discarded human beings will be disbanded at once,” says Evelyn.

But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct.

In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us.

The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.