How It All Goes Down
- That night, Tobias finds something under his pillow: the tooth fairy came.
- No, it was just Nita, the "causing trouble with your girlfriend" fairy. She wants Tobias to meet her outside the hotel at eleven.
- Tobias zips down there, and Nita shows him the giant family trees that have tracked all the families that live in the city.
- Nita's showing Tobias this to prove that his so-called genetic damage doesn't define him. It's all part of her test to see if she can trust him or not. She decides that she can.
- Nita's tired of being "damaged" and "expendable," so she wants to change things.
- Nita and Tobias decide to sneak out of the Bureau through a secret tunnel. Nita is packing some flair, and she pins the jazzy buttons to her vest and…
- Oh wait, she's packing a flare, which she uses to light up the escape tunnel.
- Nita and Tobias find a car and drive out into the wilderness, where Tobias sees a deer for the first time.
- Nita takes Tobias to the edge of the fringe (no, Joshua Jackson isn't living out there).
- The fringe is where all the genetically damaged live, as if they've been exiled to fenced-in ghettos.
- Tobias meets Nita's friends/partners-in-crime Mary and Rafi, who tell Tobias that people move out to the fringe for "the freedom to be seen as a whole man instead of a damaged one" (23.134)—even though, to us, it seems that so many people get killed out there that they end up being seen as dead men instead of live ones.
- On the drive back to the Bureau, Nita tells Tobias that she wants to reveal the truth, which is that the government isn't actually making everyone's lives better; it's making everything worse.
- That night, Tobias decides to be honest with Tris and tell her what went down in the fringes.