Page 33 of The Sixth Fraction

He hopes she’s all right.

“What do they do here, for discipline?” Caleb asks Fernando.

“Depends on how old you are,” Fernando says. “But mostly it’s Situational Reexamining.” At Caleb’s blank stare, he goes on: “It’s just a retelling, verbal or written, of the infraction with analysis of the undesirable behavior and its motivations, and a reflection on how the situation can be avoided or altered moving forward. When you’re older you have to cite sources; it’s really annoying.”

“All my sources were about response inhibition,” Anna chimes in. “Or that one study about cleaning—”

“ ‘Correlation or Causation? A Study of the Effects of Tidiness on Mental Clarity’!” Fernando says, laughing. “I cited that one, too, only—did you ever look at the subject pool? It was so narrow!”

And with that, the tour begins again, with Anna leading the way to the research laboratories and Fernando holding forth about the importance of studies that include research from all five factions instead of just Erudite.

Caleb falls into step next to Felicity—who asked everyone to call her Fell, instead. She’s chewing on her lower lip.

“Do you think they’re right, that the Penalty is bad for you?” she says. “I always thought it encouraged self-reflection, but . . . maybe I’m wrong.”

“I don’t know,” Caleb says, but it’s only because he can’t bear to make it worse for her. He knows exactly what he thinks about the Penalty of Silence.

They reach the research laboratories and splinter off from each other to explore. The floors and walls of this part of Erudite headquarters are covered in pale blue tile, and the laboratories themselves are shiny and white, with glass walls so he can see all the way to the end of the hallway. He gravitates toward one with a huge scan of a brain on one wall. As he watches it through the glass, sections of the brain light up red and yellow and blue as the subject of the scan reacts to some stimulus. Caleb stands in the doorway of the laboratory to watch it.

Cara is sitting at one of the tables, taking notes on her portable screen as she watches the scan. She notices Caleb standing by the door.

“You can come in, you know,” she says. “It’s not secret research we’re doing in here.”

Caleb moves closer, standing at Cara’s shoulder. “What is it a scan of?”

“This is someone taking a new version of the aptitude test,” Cara says. “We’re always working to encode directions alongside the simulation’s imagery—some people spend a long time wandering around before they realize they have to go through the maze. It would be nice if they surfaced in the simulation with an innate sense of purpose instead of relying on visual cues to piece together what’s expected of them.”

“Interesting,” Caleb says. “I didn’t know the aptitude test was still being refined.”

“There’s always room for improvement. It doesn’t hurt that Jeanine Matthews loves simulations, so she keeps at least one laboratory studying them. That means those of us who research the brain will always have plenty to do.”

Caleb nods and watches the lights play across different parts of the brain. He used to know the names of all the lobes and what they do. Occipital for vision. Frontal for decision-making. Temporal for short-term memory. He once smuggled a book on what scientists had learned about the brain through injuries, fascinated. He hid it under his bed, wedged between the springs.

He wonders if it’s still there, waiting for his parents to discover it.

“If you’re curious, I can recommend some studies,” Cara says. “There’s an amazing paper on hemispherectomies—that’s when they remove half the brain, and you’d be surprised how well the remaining half compensates!—that probably changed my life.”

“Yeah,” Caleb finds himself saying. “That would be great, thanks.”

Cara beams. Caleb beams back.

When people in Abnegation talked about Erudite, they always made it sound like a cold place, an empty place. But Erudite isn’t cold at all. It’s warm and rich, like a feast for the mind that he can eat whenever he likes.

Erudite is full of wonder.

Chapter 14

Four

I’m standing on top of the Hub, wind whipping my clothes.

North of me, as far as I can see, is a grid of streets like a garden lattice. The marsh is right beside it, a tangle of shallow rivers with grasslands filling the gaps between them. But I’m focused on the dizzying height of this building, our tallest building and my worst nightmare.

I’ve been afraid of heights since I was a kid and my mother took me up here to see the city from above. She assumed I would grow out of it, but I never did. There’s tingling in my face, my hands, and my legs won’t quite obey me. Familiar sensations.

The thing nobody tells you about terror is that it becomes ordinary after a while.

I force myself to walk to the ledge. Five steps, and I’m on the edge of it, my toes sticking out over the building’s steel-and-glass side. The wind blows my black shirt away from my body and sticks my jeans to my legs. I look down at the distant pavement, and my stomach lurches.