Duplicity [p.h]

chapter twelve || he's the enemy

And if it worked? I didn't care for Max, as much as I appreciated his approval. I didn't care for the person standing behind me, waiting for me to lead them into an ambush on innocent people. And I didn't care for Eric like that, I suppose. He was a friend. He was the rail I held onto as I teased death, dangling above a chasm. I did care for him, in that way, and if he was caught—

"You alright?"

Eric nudged my foot with his giant boot, much like he had underneath the table at meetings (a comparison I instantly regretted making).

"Why wouldn't I be?"

He pulled his arms taught against his chest, broadening up as he rose from his comfortable lean on the wall with his gun strapped to his belt. "Your mind is running a million miles an hour right now. Not in the calculating way you like to do so much, this is— I don't know. It's like you're thinking of all the ways this could go wrong, or something."

I fought to keep my gaze steady when all they wanted to do was bulge out of my skull at how accurately he could read me. "What makes you say that?"

"Am I right?"

"Answer my question first."

"So difficult," Eric grumbled, scratching the back of his neck. "You always frown like that when you think too much about at once."

My hand shot to my mouth. I didn't realize I was frowning.

"So that's how you time the sparring sessions so perfectly."

Eric chuckled. "Bag breakers? Hell yeah. All in the body language."

We fell into silence as soon as his voice faded out into the night, and I was grateful he refrained from pressing me about my dilemma. Miraculous, really, that he hadn't figured me out yet.

"Do you ever think," I blurted, before I could stop myself, "that this is... a little bit wrong? Just—" I stammered, covering for the blaspheme I knew was about to vomit out in the near future, "just a little?"

Eric cocked his eyebrow up. Was he considering it? Or was he finally catching onto my ruse?

"I mean, why are we doing this? Because the Divergents pose a threat, right? Have you ever wondered why?"

Eric rolled his eyes. "Don't be stupid. They pose a threat because they're different from us. They would overthrow us."

"Don't call me stupid."

"Sorry."

"It's alright," I sighed. "But I've never understood why being different from us makes them dangerous. It's just because they don't fit in with only one of the factions. It's because they're resistant to the serums. But I think we're really scared of them because we can't control them."

Eric stilled, chewing on my words. "I don't know if that's it."

"But it is, isn't it? They're not like us, and we can't control them, so we drive them to live and die in the streets, wearing clothes that don't match and surviving only until the charity runs out, if our guns don't get to them first."

"And if we didn't? We could let them live among us," he whispered after an agonizing moment of silence, barely loud enough to me to hear. "We could listen. We could throw every last vial of serum into the incinerator. We could abolish the Factions entirely. But then where would we be? This is all we've ever known. We'd regress, as a society, into something more primal. Less ordered. Is that what you want?"

"What makes you think we would go backwards? Dauntless and Erudite are one now. I'm not so sure we're that different. Any of us."

Eric's eyebrows knotted. "Jax, why are you—"