Page 111 of The Sixth Fraction

For a few seconds I’m not sure what woke me, and then I hear pounding on my apartment door.

I throw back the quilt that’s covering me and stumble over to the door, still half asleep, pins and needles prickling in the hand that always finds its way above my head when I sleep. I open my door and find Lynn standing on my doorstep.

I raise an eyebrow. Initiates really aren’t supposed to know where I live, but Uriah does, and I assume he’s the one who told her where to find me. She looks pale and scared.

She says, “They found a body in the chasm, and Al’s not in the dormitory.”

I stuff my feet into my boots and follow her down the hallway, not bothering to put on real clothes or lock my door behind me. The early-morning air is cool on my bare arms; it gives me goose bumps, or maybe that’s the anticipation of what I’m going to find at the bottom of the Pit.

I’m afraid it’ll be the same as two years ago: Amar, a Divergent dead on the ground.

By the time we reach the bottom of the Pit, a crowd has gathered, and a group of Dauntless is hoisting the body out of the water. They stand in a short line, hands on the rope, heaving in unison as the first of them sets the rhythm. Whatever body they’re lifting is a big one.

Finally they pull it over the edge, all of them gathering close to lower it to the ground. All I can see, at first, is the water spreading out from where the body rests. Then one of them steps back, and I see his face.

Even like this—skin whitened and thickened by hours in the water, eyes empty as marbles—it’s obvious that this is Al. He’s bigger than most people, and young. So young.

Which means I failed.

I failed first with Christina, when I couldn’t control Peter, couldn’t stop him from attacking her. And now I’ve failed much, much worse.

I hear someone near me choke on a sob—Marlene, maybe, because all the other early-rising initiates ran out of the dining hall when the body was being lifted. Suddenly I can’t stand to be here.

I walk away.

A couple hours later I step out of the simulation room to find Hana standing there, waiting for me. I’m sweaty from spending way too long trapped in a wooden box of my mind’s devising, my heart still racing. Of all the fears I have, claustrophobia makes me the least rational—I just want out when I’m in that box, and it’s hard to think of anything else.

Hana looks me over, and I wonder what she sees. Most of the time I feel like an adult. I’m tall now, and strong, and a full member of my faction. A teacher, and someone who knows what no one else does: how to run the simulation room. But sometimes I feel like a kid. The way Hana looks at me now makes me feel that way.

“As I said,” she says to me, like we were in the middle of a conversation, even though we weren’t. “Everyone needs someone to worry about them.”

“Thank you,” I say stiffly, “but there’s no need.”

It would be nice to have this kind of parent. The kind that worries about you, and nags you, and scolds you for putting your feet up on the coffee table. I wouldn’t have to wonder if my mother almost burned down a building, or if she was the leader of a group of factionless radicals that got a boy killed. I wouldn’t have to keep my name a secret so no one knows I’m the council leader’s son. I’d be able to go home after something horrible happens, instead of here.

“That initiate’s death wasn’t your fault,” she says to me. “So there’s no need for you to be here paying penance.”

“I know it wasn’t.”

“No, you don’t.” Hana steps closer to me. She’s wearing a black scarf, silk, tied around her throat, and her late husband’s earrings in her ears. Everything about her looks careful and sedate, like she’s going to an Abnegation funeral instead of a Dauntless one.

Al’s funeral should be starting any minute now.

“Every year, someone dies like this,” she says softly. “It’s a reminder that we don’t really know what’s going on with people, even if we think we do. Other people are mysteries to us, which is one of the wonderful things about getting to know them. But it also results in this.” She waves a hand carelessly. “This confusion.”

I wish I could tell her what I really think, what I’ve been thinking since I saw that white corpse face that used to be Al’s: that this, like Amar’s death, was not an act of self-destruction. That it can’t possibly be a coincidence that Al was Divergent, and Jeanine Matthews accessed his simulation log, and now he’s dead. But if I tried to tell Hana that, she’d think I was paranoid. Why would Jeanine Matthews come all the way here to look at an initiate’s simulation? Why would she care enough to kill some nobody Candor transfer who was probably going to get cut soon anyway?

I can’t explain it. So I don’t try.

She looks at the simulated flames dancing in the center of the room, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“You like to keep a wall between you and other people,” she says. “I know. It’s why you keep calling me ‘ma’am’ even though you’ve been my son’s best friend for two years.”

She gives me a sidelong look.

“But it’s not enough. You chose the simulation room because it allows you to get closer to people without letting them get close to you. Intimacy without vulnerability. That’s what this place is, to you.”

Simulations get to the heart of people. And that’s what you want to see.