Page 112 of The Sixth Fraction

“But you’re always vulnerable, Four,” she says. “Because you care about people. And that’s a good thing. So come down and care in front of your initiates. I promise it’s healthier than what you’re doing right now.”

I feel like there’s something stuck in my throat. I nod.

“I’ll be right down,” I say. “I just have to . . . delete that last log.”

She doesn’t ask me why. She squeezes my shoulder. Then she leaves me alone.

You’re always vulnerable, Four. It’s probably not what she wanted me to get stuck on, out of everything she said, but it itches at the back of my mind anyway. I wait until I can’t hear her footsteps anymore before I put my hands in the flames.

I just need to make sure.

“Jeanine Matthews was here last night, accessing simulation logs that weren’t her own,” I say. “Show me all the simulations she saw.”

I close myself into the simulation room, and Al’s kitchen unfurls in front of me like a flower, opening. Single bulb overhead. Shadowed corners. His mother in black and white.

“I’ve seen this one,” I say. “Did she watch any others?”

The Candor kitchen disintegrates, leaving me in darkness. Then a familiar landscape fills the space in front of me: the undulating grasses of the marsh, its shallow waters glinting in the sun. And on either side of me, the strict lines of the city streets. I’m standing on top of the Hub, the wind buffeting me from all sides.

This is my simulation.

Fear makes me shudder, and for once, it’s not related to the height. I close my eyes and let it move through me.

I forgot to delete this one from the system. Uriah came to get me, told me there was trouble in the training room, and I never came back here to scrub this record from the system. So Jeanine Matthews watched me do this—watched me walk to the edge of the building and let myself fall off. Which will present her with two plausible explanations: Either I’m so comfortable with the thought of my own death that I can embrace it even in a fear simulation, or I was aware that I wouldn’t really die, because I knew I was in a simulation.

She’s either going to think I’m ready to end my own life . . . or I’m Divergent.

“No others?” I ask, bracing myself to see Tris’s simulation playing out before my eyes. But nothing changes. My simulation is the last thing Jeanine Matthews saw.

Standing at the edge of the chasm where Al died, I feel a pang of longing for Abnegation funerals. Making the memorial stone with your own hands. The whole community crowding into your house, filling your kitchen with food. It’s a nice, quiet ritual.

Nothing like this—people making grand speeches about Al going to face the next big adventure, like he didn’t spend all his time here scared out of his mind. Adventure seems like the last thing he’d want out of an afterlife. And then everyone is chanting, and drinking, and I know what happens next: a big party.

I’m not interested in that part, so I toast Al’s memory with Hana, Zeke, Uriah, and Shauna, and then I walk back to my apartment. I take my time. It’s a warm night. Windy. A gust sends pebbles dancing across the street. I might sleep with my windows open, just to hear it whistle between the buildings.

I open my apartment door—unlocked, since I haven’t been back to lock it since I ran out this morning—and stop.

Tris is standing in my apartment.

She’s looking at the stack of books on my desk. They’re nothing special, just an operational manual for the Dauntless computer, a mystery novel with the cover falling off, an old Abnegation hymnal, a book about ancient art that I used to inspire the tattoo on my back. But she looks curious anyway, in the instant before she hears me come in.

She jerks to attention.

“Hi,” she says. “The door was open.”

“Don’t tell me they haven’t taught you how to pick locks.”

“Working on it, actually. I’m not good at it yet.”

I lean into the door frame. “What are you good at, then? By their standards, I mean.”

She shrugs. “I’m good at pretending to be Dauntless.”

She gestures to the clothes she’s wearing. Black pants—I think of her bare legs the day before, the shock of seeing so much of her pale skin. A black T-shirt. Black jacket. Black boots. Her hair is pulled back, and there’s something smudged around her eyes that makes their color look even brighter.

“Yeah,” I say. “I can see that.”

“I can turn into a Stiff girl, too,” she says, and I watch as she adjusts her posture, ever so slightly. Shoulders rounding in, head ducking, eyes low. Demure as every girl I was ever taught to find appealing.