Page 31 of The Sixth Fraction

“Your daughter?” Evelyn says, with a nod in my direction, though she doesn’t meet my eyes.

If she’s important to the factionless, she might know who killed Robert. She might know why. Maybe she even did it herself, with that gun I saw her carrying.

I get up, and I’m not ready for the sway of the train car beneath me. I stumble to the side, into my mother, who steadies me.

“She chose Abnegation,” my mother says. “But it wasn’t right for her.”

“What a shock.” Evelyn’s voice is sour and dark. Like pumpernickel bread, or the black coffee a Candor offered me on the bus once, only to laugh at me when I hated it. Too strong for you, Stiff?

“You’ll take her in,” my mother says, and it’s not a question, it’s a command. “You’ll keep her safe. And then I’ll consider your debt to me repaid.”

Evelyn finally looks at me, and I wonder what she sees. Little blond girl with her neat Abnegation bun, her loose Abnegation grays. Small and quiet and nothing special.

“What’s the faction you should have chosen?” she asks me. “Do you even know?”

The answer comes easily. “Dauntless.”

“Like mother, like daughter, I guess.” Evelyn laughs. To my mother, she says, “You’d better get off at the next station.”

Like mother, like daughter.

My mother—my sharp-voiced mother who sees more than she lets on, who keeps secrets, who knows how to jump on trains . . . was Dauntless?

It’s not shock I feel when I look at her next, but the sensation of fitting a puzzle piece into its place. This explains what I’ve been seeing. What she’s finally let me see.

My mother sets the bag she carried onto the train down at her feet.

“Some supplies for you,” she says.

The train is pulling up to the station. It slows as it approaches, but it’s still moving too fast, my last few minutes with my mother disappearing. She throws her arms around me and holds me so tightly I can’t breathe; then she jumps out of the train without warning. I lean out to see if she landed safely, and spot her shadow figure running along the platform, her stride easy and comfortable.

Then the train goes around a bend, and she’s gone.

I turn back to Evelyn.

“Guess we’ll find out what you’re made of, Beatrice,” she says.

“Don’t call me that,” I say, and I’m not sure what gives me the audacity. Maybe it’s my anger at the people who killed my friend and upended my life, or maybe it’s the bitterness in Evelyn’s voice— it gives me permission to be bitter, too.

“Pick another name, then,” she says.

I have to leave “Beatrice” behind. I know that with a certainty I can’t explain. “Beatrice” is the person who had never lost anyone. “Beatrice” didn’t know the truth about her father, or about the faction she chose.

I know exactly what kind of person I want to be now: the kind who gets answers to all of her questions.

“Tris,” I say. “Call me Tris.”

3

Stray

Chapter 13

Caleb

The second stage of Erudite initiation is another labyrinth. And the second labyrinth is made of mirrors.

Well, not all of it. Just this part.