Page 122 of The Sixth Fraction

Natalie looks at her daughter for a few seconds. Then she nods. “All right. Then tell me what you know.”

I laugh. It’s my mother’s laugh, short and bitter. My father hated it, when she did it. And then when I did it, even if it wasn’t directed at him. Sometimes I think he must have missed her, to hate the things that reminded him of her so much.

“All I know about you, Natalie, is that you, alongside quite a few other people in this faction, perpetuated the lie that my mother was dead,” I say. “So forgive me if I’m not eager to confide in you.”

I’m aware, suddenly, that I’m not talking to Evelyn. I’m talking to Tris’s mother, and just before I got here I was thinking about how to show her respect. Guess that’s out the window, now.

Natalie isn’t Evelyn, though. She doesn’t spit right back at me. Instead she considers me for a while, the corners of her mouth tugging down. She looks . . . sad.

“You’re right,” she says softly.

She carries the teapot over to the table and sets the three cups on it. Then she reaches into the back of one of the cupboards and takes out a jar full of lumps of sugar. She puts one in the cup closest to me, and another in the cup closest to Tris.

“I have excuses for my behavior, but I won’t insult you by offering them to you now.” She pours tea in each cup. I stare into the one nearest me as the tea breaks apart the sugar. “Instead I’ll tell you what I know: a small group of radical factionless are planning something extreme, something that will attempt to dismantle the faction system as we know it. I believe your mother is at the head of it. But I also believe—and this will be news to you, Beatrice—it’s just a part of a greater conspiracy.”

She sits in the chair between Tris and me, backed up right against the oven, and folds her hands in her lap.

“I think Erudite might be planting people in other factions,” she says. “That’s why I asked you to talk to your brother about the aptitude test results and faction transfers. I thought if I could prove there was a higher than normal proportion of people with Erudite aptitude transferring to other factions, I could narrow down who those plants might be.”

Tris’s eyes find mine, wide with shock. I feel it, too, and I also feel foolish for it. We were both raised to believe the faction system worked, even if it didn’t always work perfectly. But participation in that system depends on sincerity. On choosing, if not where you truly belong, then where you wish you belonged. The idea that someone could maintain their loyalty to their old faction while joining a new one . . . it compromises the integrity of the whole system.

But what integrity? I didn’t choose Dauntless because I had the aptitude for it. I chose it to escape my father, and I chose it to hurt him, and I chose it because I thought it would take away my fear of him. How was that any more true to the system’s purpose than an Erudite loyalist spy in Dauntless?

“The day I followed Eric, from Erudite to Dauntless headquarters, like I told you,” Tris says, nodding to her mother and then to me. “Before he discovered me, I overheard a conversation. I could only hear one side of it, but he was demanding a name, and he said time was running out. That there was a hard deadline.”

“A name.” I stare down into the teacup, and walk myself back through that day. I left Tris at my apartment building after kissing her cheek. I went back to the Pit and toasted to Amar. I spoke to Tori about Tris, went back to the simulation room to delete her information from the system, and . . .

Discovered that Jeanine Matthews had accessed Al’s records. And mine.

“Al.” I look up at Tris. “My initiate, the one who died. Someone watched his simulations the day before they found his body. When I asked the system who it was, it showed me Jeanine Matthews.”

“Jeanine Matthews, in the sim room?” Natalie says.

I’m startled by her phrasing. The sim room. Casual, like a Dauntless would talk about it. She frowns.

“I suppose it’s possible. Every faction representative has limited administrative access to every faction computer, for emergencies. Using that access, she would be able to go deeper into the computer’s system than anyone else, even the computer’s technician.” She gives me a pointed look. “Which I assume is what you are.”

“It is.”

“But how would she get in there without attracting attention?”

“There’s a fire door that leads to a service hallway, but it opens up right into the lobby of the Pire. It’s possible she disguised herself, but it was crowded in there that night. I don’t know why she would risk that when she could easily have snuck in some other time.”

“Could someone have been impersonating her?” Tris says. “Tricked the computer into thinking she was the one accessing it?”

Natalie sips her tea, gazing into middle distance. “The computers identify the unique pattern of receivers in a person’s brain—like a fingerprint but far more complicated.”

I look at Tris right as she looks at me, her eyes wide. Neither of us is used to hearing an Abnegation woman talk about science like this.

Natalie doesn’t seem to notice. “But it’s possible to fake a fingerprint. So it might be possible to convince the Dauntless computer that Jeanine Matthews was the one accessing it. But . . . I doubt they could do so without her help.”

“So you think it was . . . who?” Tris frowns. “A former Erudite, maybe? A transfer?”

“I think if it wasn’t Jeanine herself, it was one of them, yes.”

I say, “I don’t understand why. What’s the ultimate goal here?”

Natalie tips back in her chair, just enough to rest her shoulders against the stove behind her. It’s a strange, childish move for a woman in sedate Abnegation clothes.