Page 110 of The Sixth Fraction

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I realize I know them. Sitting on top of a big crate, hunched over her knees, is Sly. With her is Gretchen and one of the Foxes I don’t know.

“Tris!” Sly smiles at me. “I was kind of hoping you’d get arrested. You could have added to the graffiti in my old cell.”

“Didn’t you leave as an Erudite?” Gretchen asks me. “I thought Sleepy was the Dauntless one.”

“I did,” I say. “I . . . had something else to take care of in Dauntless.”

“Something that required your shoes?” Sly says, looking at my bare feet.

“You know Erudite footwear is only good for walking around a library, Sly,” Gretchen says. And to me: “Good thing you got on this train—it’s going to stop so we can unload this crate.”

She slaps the wooden crate beneath Sly.

“What’s in there?” I ask.

Sly shrugs. “Some kind of equipment. We’re taking it to the Makers.”

The Makers Guild builds things—from simple furniture, like bed frames and chairs, to complex machinery, like water filtration systems and solar panels. They operate out of the Museum.

“Did Christina make it back all right?” I ask.

“Who’s Christina?” The other Fox—a man, a little older than Sly, if his silver hair is any indication—is picking at his cuticles.

I sigh. “Eye Patch.”

“Oh, yeah, she was very prompt,” Sly says. “Apparently she spent her entire hour in some kind of courtyard garden and no one even spoke to her.”

I smile. Christina and I gave each other tips for how to bide time in our factions of origin without being noticed. I’d told Christina to find the courtyard garden Robert used to tend, knowing the initiates wouldn’t be there during the day.

The train is already starting to slow. The Museum isn’t that far from Dauntless headquarters, after all. But I haven’t been on a train that’s actually stopped before. The brakes squeal so loudly we all clap our hands over our ears at the same time. The car shudders hard enough that I stumble into the crate, and Sly braces me.

We coast slowly toward the platform and then stop.

“Help us out?” Sly asks, but I’m already taking position at one corner of the crate, ready to help them carry it.

Sly counts down, and then we all lift. It’s heavy, but the real problem is how cumbersome the crate is as we navigate the gap between the train and the platform and then try to carry it down the stairs. I end up having to lift it over my head, since the boy next to me is taller than I am. By the time we reach the street, I’m sweaty and panting.

It’s easier after that. We walk toward the Museum on flat, empty streets. Dauntless patrols don’t usually come to this part of the city, close to the marsh, where the busted trains in the old train yard are like the skeletons of ancient giants.

When we reach the train yard, we have to weave between the old train cars to reach the tunnel that will take us inside the Museum.

“Careful of the flowers!” Sly calls out, nodding to the white flowers near the entrance. “They’ll get you.”

I bite back a curse as I trip over an old train track. “Queen Anne’s lace will ‘get’ me?”

“Oh, that’s not Queen Anne’s lace; it’s hemlock. Very poisonous,” Sly says. Then she makes a joke about waking up the ghosts that haunt this place, and the others are too busy chuckling at it to notice as something small and shiny falls out of the crate. I watch it bounce on the ground and roll toward the weeds at the edge of the tracks.

I’m relieved to set the crate down inside the Museum, and even more relieved to change back into my own clothes, which are right where I left them. The warmth of the kitchen and the smell of something savory and rich beckons me toward the table in the lobby, but I don’t go there just yet.

Instead I go back out to the tracks, where I saw the shiny object roll. I pick it up and hold it up to the moonlight.

I can’t be sure—I haven’t ever seen one in real life—but I think it’s a bullet.

Whatever hope was ballooning inside me after I saw Eric with the gun . . . deflates.

Chapter 40

Four