Pyre

Chapter 24

TOBIAS POV

I find Tris in the infirmary, looking as haggard as I feel. Judging by the stern expression sharpening her eyes and how assertively she walks over to me, she isn't injured. Aside from the bruise on her jaw and the burns around her wrists, that is.

"We need to talk," she says.

We certainly do. I lead her out of the infirmary, just realizing that she lost her jacket when I set my hand on her shoulder. Her Abnegation tattoo is ice to the touch.

The Pit is calmer now that the casualties have been processed into the infirmary. Even as massive as the infirmary is to accommodate the day-to-day Dauntless injuries, it couldn't hold all of the wounded, so some of them were transferred to Erudite.

Tris fidgets with the hem of her shirt. There are sunken bags underneath her eyes.

I don't know where to start.

"Did you hear about Uriah?" she croaks.

My hands are haunted with a slippery feeling. Shifting on my feet uncomfortably, I swallow past the ache and answer, "I saw it."

She nods. "He's alive for now. But that doesn't mean anything."

I pinch the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes. Uriah may have survived, but how will he cope with a missing limb? He is an outgoing person, a Dauntless soldier. Losing a leg threatens to ruin lives in a place like this; if he doesn't handle it like Shauna has, he could spiral into a place none of us can pull him up from.

"We'll help him through it," I try to convince myself. "All of us."

Tris runs her fingers over the raw ring on her wrist, wincing. "I didn't leave Dauntless of my own free will, if that's what you are thinking."

I shake my head. "I didn't." Her past should not automatically incriminate her, and I was right to trust her this time.

"Jessica helped a couple of the factionless traitors escape. They jumped Christina and I."

My eyebrows draw in as I place the name. "Initiate Jessica?"

"The one and only."

I look off into the Pit as if she will be there. "That is my first order of business tomorrow," I promise lowly. The Dauntless don't take betrayal lightly, so Jessica will get her due prison sentence.

"They took me to Evelyn," Tris sighs, crossing her arms. "She figured she could threaten me to get to you. So you would call the army off."

At the reminder of my mother, my rage is recalled. I thought her atrocities couldn't get worse, and now she kidnapped my wife.

"Doesn't surprise me. You wouldn't believe her other defenses," I scoff. "She used the suicide bombers again. She used children, Tris."

Her eyes soften with empathy when she hears the sting in my voice. I reach out and brush my fingers across her jaw.

"Did she do this to you?"

She nods, lowering her eyes.

"Even in her last moments of reign, she managed to make it about hurting me," I say resentfully. But how hypocritical of her to be the abuser; I am old enough to remember her with similar bruising.

With a hand on my chest, Tris frowns. "She wanted you to bend to her will, and nothing more," she says. "She wanted you as an accomplice to further her regime, not as a son. And she couldn't change the person you are no matter how brutally she treated you."

The gesture reminds me too much of when my mother—my real mother—gave me a glass statue, telling me that it seems useless but could stir something in my heart. That same glass that resembles falling water now weighs down my pocket. And I know I have to tell Tris.