Page 66 of The Sixth Fraction

“They’ve already buddied up,” I say. “They’re going for Erudite and Amity, so we won’t even run into each other.”

“Okay.” She nods a few times. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Two weeks until the contest.

A week later Colin comes up to me at lunch, a dart gun in hand.

“All right, you’re coming with me,” he says.

“Uh,” I say. “For what, exactly?”

“No matter how much you train with Christina, you’re going to be scrutinized by the Foxes on the self-defense front,” he says. “You need a skill. And I think this could be it.”

I consider the dart gun in his hand. Gretchen did tell me to compensate for what I lack in strength.

We go to the roof of the Rookery, where one of the factionless set up a row of three targets made of paper, with cardboard behind them. They’re mostly used to play games in the off-hours when people don’t have work to do.

“Thank you for thinking of this,” I say to him.

“Thank me if you’re any good at it.”

I take the gun from him. It’s not sophisticated, just a gun-shaped device made of scraps of plastic melted together, with a trigger and a loading mechanism. The darts themselves are too heavy and dull to resemble Dauntless needles or real bullets. But it’s the best thing the factionless have for training.

“You first,” I say, handing the gun back to him.

“Before I chose Dauntless, I read about this.” Colin squares off with the target and holds up the dart gun. “The guide said to start from the ground—with your feet as the base of a pyramid. Staggered, not parallel.”

I look at his feet, one in front of the other like he’s about to throw a punch.

“Then look at the front sight—not that there’s a sight on this thing.” He squints a little. “Then breathe in—and out, but only halfway. Then fire.”

He squeezes the trigger, and nothing happens.

“Ah, crap.” There’s a small lever right behind where the dart is loaded. “Forgot about the hammer.”

He pulls it back, and takes his position again. This time, when he fires, the dart releases. It hits the target inside the second-smallest ring, and Colin spins on one foot, celebratory. Then he hands me the gun, along with another dart.

I sigh. I stand right where he was, my feet staggered, both arms up. I fire, and the dart goes wide of the target, barely clipping the paper. Colin pulls it out of the wall and jogs back to me.

“You rushed through it,” he says. “You have to slow down and focus. Come on, one more time.”

“You can take the boy out of the Erudite but you can’t take the Erudite out of the boy.”

“No factions,” he reminds me.

“Yeah, right.” But I take the dart from him and reload the gun.

As I lift it again, I think of the meditation I had to do every morning as an Abnegation initiate. How impossible it felt to clear my mind when all I could think about was how cold the ground was or how hungry I was or how badly I didn’t want to be meditating. Eleanor’s voice whispers to me in the courtyard: Be present.

It sounded ridiculous at the time. How can someone stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future, stop thinking entirely? But I focus on the red circle at the center of the target, and then on the front sight of the gun. I breathe in, and all I feel is cold air hitting my nose. I breathe out, and fire.

The dart hits the innermost circle of the target, just an inch from the bull’s-eye.

Colin whoops, raising his arms in triumph.

“She’s a natural!” he calls out, though there’s no one else up here.

I stare at the dart, a smile creeping across my face. In all the time I’ve been here, trying out new skills, I’ve never discovered something that I’m good at—something real, not a game. I’m either just barely scraping by or I’m only keeping up. But this . . . it felt easy.