Page 132 of The Sixth Fraction

“Oh, I’d rather not,” I say.

“I think, when a faction representative makes a request of you, Four . . .” Eric says, “you should think of it as an order.”

I look at him, and then back at Jeanine. Both of them are perfectly still. Silent.

This has to have been their plan all along. Trap me here, find some way to pressure me into going through a fear simulation for them. When Jeanine Matthews—or whoever was impersonating her in the system—accessed Al’s records, they also accessed mine.

I swallow hard, and nod. Jeanine puts her hand in the flames.

“Let’s see if the system update worked, then,” she says, and I taste acid in the back of my throat.

I walk into the simulation room, my twisted sanctuary, like I’m walking to the gallows. Jeanine Matthews settles herself on the stone bench that’s usually mine, but Eric, Cara, and Caleb remain standing beside her. Max stays in the antechamber; I assume he has no interest in evaluating the system update.

I stand in the middle of the floor and pray. I do that sometimes. It’s a habit from Abnegation I can’t shake, maybe, or maybe I just have to believe there’s something bigger than all of this out there. But now I throw one out there for whoever might be listening. Please don’t let it be Marcus. Please, please, please.

I open my eyes, and I’m lying in my childhood bed.

That’s what I get for having hope.

Fear simulations aren’t usually memories, even for people who have been through hell. But every now and then, a memory gets lodged in your subconscious like a piece of apple skin between your teeth. When that happens, a person tends to just do whatever they did in the memory, over and over again, no matter how many times they go through the simulation. I’ve watched people come back again and again, trying to change the past. Sometimes they manage it, over time.

But it hasn’t been that long since this happened to me.

All around me, on the mattress, are my little sins. Bits of things I found in the city, treasures I wanted to keep. Motherboard scraps, an old key, a microscope slide that I think shows a segment of onion. A dried flower from my mother’s funeral. A wooden figurine in the shape of a dog.

I can hear Marcus’s footsteps in the hallway. He won’t knock on my door; he never does. He’ll just open it.

The only thing I can do, to convince Jeanine and Eric and the others that I’m not Divergent, is to relive this memory exactly as it happened.

My dread is so thick I choke on it.

I scramble to put all the objects in the trunk my mother gave me, the one that locks. She told my father it was just for spare blankets when he objected to me owning something he perceived as extraneous. But it was for me, so I could have something to myself.

I lock up the trunk and slide it under my bed. I’m about to get the chair out from where it’s wedged under the doorknob when I remember the blue glass sculpture my mother gave me before she died. I lunge for it, and put it under my pillow.

He tries the knob right as I pull the chair out from under it. When he opens the door, his eyes go right to the chair in my hands.

“You were trying to keep me out,” he says.

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t raise you to be a liar.” His voice is so calm. But I’m not fooled. Not after so many years of this. “Why did you want to keep me out?”

“I—” I choke on the word. I’ve got nothing to say for myself, so I just put the chair back where it belongs, under my desk. My room is plain, just like it’s supposed to be. White walls, bare surfaces. One small, cloudy window.

“I asked you a question.”

“Nothing, sir,” I say.

“Another lie.” He moves closer, and I back up, instinctively. In this memory I’m smaller than he is. Skinnier. I didn’t feel that young at the time, but this body feels young, now. Now that I know what it’s like to be taller than this, and stronger.

He doesn’t reach for me. Instead he looks at the pillow on my bed. At the sliver of blue glass I didn’t manage to hide from him.

He grabs the sculpture, and holds it up to the light. It’s a small, fragile thing. Something my mother got while she was delivering something to Amity. She said they had big ovens there where they heated glass to blow it into new shapes. They could make it undulate like water. She brought me this one because she liked how it was a solid that looked liquid—an impossibility, and a trick.

“What is this?”

His voice is even softer now. Even though I know what’s coming, and I know that I survived this, I can’t stop myself from shaking.