Page 47 of The Sixth Fraction

“This is why we need Erudite,” I say, from the ground. “Without you I never would have realized I needed to be faster.”

Colin grins at me, and I realize I’ve never said anything like that to him before. I’ve just been spending so much time around him and Rory that I seem to be absorbing their senses of humor. I feel two urges at once: one, to apologize and take it back, the way my upbringing told me to; the other, to thank him for teaching me to loosen my tongue.

I came here to find the truth. I didn’t expect to find anything else.

He helps me to my feet, and I watch the city slide past me for a moment before asking him, “So . . . when is the Foxes’ contest?”

“A few weeks from now. Uh, you thinking of trying?”

“Maybe.” I glance at him.

His eyes are soft the same way my father’s were whenever he felt bad for me. The same way he looked at me right after Robert’s death.

“Is that so surprising?”

“It’s just . . . you have to get into shape,” he says. “You need good endurance and enough strength to lift heavy things. And you need self-defense skills in case you get caught in a bad situation.”

“So?”

“So, you’re . . . small. And weak.” Colin shrugs. “It takes six weeks to build strength, at least.”

I look out at the city again.

I’m not that weak, I think, but it doesn’t feel true.

Spying on the Foxes didn’t work. In retrospect it seems silly that I assumed they would give up sensitive information in one of their morning meetings, over coffee, like So about that plan to overthrow the faction system, or Remember that time we stole a gun from a Dauntless wall guard? I’m clearly not going to find out what I need to know by listening in.

So I’ll just have to become one of them.

We get off the train—always easier for me than getting on—close to Dauntless headquarters, according to the map I’ve now memorized. My chest aches, and I recognize the feeling as longing. I’m so close, now, to what I should have chosen.

Jove gathers us together on the platform. The sun is still setting, so everything is orange-tinted and warm.

“I told you to wear your grubbiest clothes for a reason,” she says. “We’re about to go to the water-treatment center. That’s where we maintain the city’s clean water. The factions pay us in paper goods—which we can’t produce on our own—to do it. But we don’t like to let the factions know that we’re doing as well as we are, because they’d probably use it as an excuse to pay us less.”

Everyone else is nodding along with her words like this is obvious to them. But I can’t imagine my father taking faction chits away from the factionless just because they look well-fed and well-dressed.

I see another problem, though. Something Jove isn’t saying: that if the factions are on the lookout for a fringe group among the factionless, and they see us looking well-adjusted and organized, they might suspect us of being the radicals who attacked the Choosing Ceremony.

And maybe some of us are. I have no way of knowing—not yet.

“Keep quiet and keep to yourselves,” Jove says. “It’s important you learn about all the things we have to do in this city, but you don’t need to talk to sentries while you do it.”

We walk a few blocks, weaving our way down cracked streets and between tall, dark buildings. Most of them are overgrown with vines and trees, the natural world reasserting itself. The empty frames where windows used to be look like eye sockets.

This is the Dauntless part of town, and it shows. No one has bothered to patch up the pavement or clear the street of debris; they’ve left it all as a kind of obstacle course that we’re now navigating.

“Heading west,” Colin mutters beside me. We’ve all been assessing directions constantly as we try to memorize the city map. “Toward the river.”

“The river” is a misnomer; there’s no water flowing through the deep channels that border the occupied part of our city. Instead there are patches of wet and clusters of trees and bushes growing below street level. I can smell the marsh on the air when the wind blows.

Up ahead, the street dips beneath an overpass. I know we’re close to the water-treatment center because I see sentries under the overhang, with bright iridescent strips on their sleeves so they’re visible in the dark.

Our pace slows. We don’t look at each other or speak.

“What’s your business?” one of the sentries asks, when we’re close.

“Here for a shift at the treatment center,” Jove says.