Page 28 of The Sixth Fraction

“Think about it,” my mother says. “Think about what you really want.”

I feel like I’m made of stone. Too heavy to move. Too hard to bend.

What I want doesn’t exist.

Chapter 12

Beatrice

That night it’s warm, so all the windows are open, but the air is so still they may as well be closed. I listen to Mary’s snores, hoping they’ll lull me to sleep, but there’s no point.

The moon is high when I finally give up, put on my slippers, and walk into the courtyard.

Here, we leave all our doors unlocked. Abnegation asks you to control yourself instead of trying to control you. That used to feel like freedom.

I pace back and forth in the courtyard, turning the same thoughts over and over. That I can make Abnegation work. That I can pretend. That I don’t want to be factionless; that I can’t be; that it’s the worst thing I can imagine.

Moonlight plays across the leaves of the lettuce in the garden. I watch it for a moment before I turn to pace in the other direction. Standing just inside the doorway is Susan Black. Her hands are clasped in front of her.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks me, and I stare at her.

She just broke her vow of silence. Susan. And for what? To talk to me?

“A vow isn’t as important as a friend in need,” she says, with a half shrug.

I stand across from her, so we can keep our voices down. It’s almost like looking in a mirror. She’s a little taller than I am, her hair a little darker, but our nightgowns and slippers are identical, our eyes the same bright blue. We look more like each other than either of us looks like our respective brothers; when we were younger, people thought we were twins, so I thought of her as family. I still do.

“Can I tell you something?” Susan says. “Something no one else knows?”

“Of course.”

“Robert was planning on choosing Amity. He told me after the aptitude test.” Her eyes sparkle with tears. “When he came back afterward, he was crying. He wanted an Abnegation result. He wanted the test to tell him something new about himself. But . . . does it really do that?”

The corners of her mouth twitch into a brief smile.

“No,” I say. My test certainly did, but not in the way she thinks. “It doesn’t.”

“I was mad at him. I barely spoke to him the day of the ceremony. He told me he loved me, and I didn’t say it back.”

“He knew, Susan.” I want to reach out to her, but I’m not sure how. So I just insist, again. “Of course he knew that you loved him.”

“Yeah. I hope so.” Susan touches one of the flowers growing nearby. It’s yellow and delicate. “I wonder why they shot him—why they shot anyone, I mean. Is that what the councilors were trying to figure out, when they called you in? If you saw something?”

No, I think. They didn’t seem interested in Robert’s death at all, did they? It’s like my mother said: The council thinks the people who attacked the Choosing Ceremony are just a group of upstarts, the kind to randomly fire into a crowd. And maybe they’re right—but what if they’re not?

What if Robert’s death was just the start of something bigger?

“Would it help you to know?” I say. “To know who did it, and why, I mean?”

Susan lets go of the flower.

“I’m not sure.” She gives me that small smile again. “People always think they need answers when someone dies. And maybe that’s just a way of avoiding grief. But . . . maybe it would change my dreams.”

“Your dreams?”

“I dream about what happened every night,” she says. “I don’t believe in restless spirits, Beatrice. But I do believe in restless minds.”

I laugh a little. “Yeah. So do I.”